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          A Dog of Flanders

by Louisa de la Rame' (Ouida), 1909

                  I

    NELLO and Patrasche were left all
alone in the world.

    They were friends in a friendship
closer than brotherhood. Nello was a
little Ardennois--Patrasche was a big
Fleming. They were both of the same
age by length of years, yet one was
still young, and the other was
already old. They had dwelt together
almost all their days: both were
orphaned and destitute, and owed
their lives to the same hand. It had
been the beginning of the tie between
them, their first bond of sympathy;
and it had strengthened day by day,
and had grown with their growth, firm
and indissoluble, until they loved
one another very greatly.

    Their home was a little hut on
the edge of a little village--a
Flemish village a league from
Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of
pasture and corn-lands, with long
lines of poplars and of alders
bending in the breeze on the edge of
the great canal which ran through it.
It had about a score of houses and
homesteads, with shutters of bright
green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red
or black and white, and walls white-
washed until they shone in the sun
like snow. In the centre of the
village stood a windmill, placed on a
little moss-grown slope: it was a
landmark to all the level country
round. It had once been painted
scarlet, sails and all, but that had
been in its infancy, half a century
or more earlier, when it had ground
wheat for the soldiers of Napoleon;
and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned
by wind and weather. It went queerly
by fits and starts, as though
rheumatic and stiff in the joints
from age, but it served the whole
neighborhood, which would have
thought it almost as impious to carry
grain elsewhere as to attend any
other religious service than the mass
that was performed at the altar of
the little old gray church, with its
conical steeple, which stood opposite
to it, and whose single bell rang
morning, noon, and night with that
strange, subdued, hollow sadness
which every bell that hangs in the
Low Countries seems to gain as an
integral part of its melody.

    Within sound of the little
melancholy clock almost from their
birth upward, they had dwelt
together, Nello and Patrasche, in the
little hut on the edge of the
village, with the cathedral spire of
Antwerp rising in the north-east,
beyond the great green plain of
seeding grass and spreading corn that
stretched away from them like a
tideless, changeless sea. It was the
hut of a very old man, of a very poor
man--of old Jehan Daas, who in his
time had been a soldier, and who
remembered the wars that had trampled
the country as oxen tread down the
furrows, and who had brought from his
service nothing except a wound, which
had made him a cripple.

    When old Jehan Daas had reached
his full eighty, his daughter had
died in the Ardennes, hard by
Stavelot, and had left him in legacy
her two-year- old son. The old man
could ill contrive to support
himself, but he took up the
additional burden uncomplainingly,
and it soon became welcome and
precious to him. Little Nello--which
was but a pet diminutive for Nicolas-
-throve with him, and the old man and
the little child lived in the poor
little hut contentedly.

    It was a very humble little mud-
hut indeed, but it was clean and
white as a sea-shell, and stood in a
small plot of garden-ground that
yielded beans and herbs and pumpkins.
They were very poor, terribly poor--
many a day they had nothing at all to
eat. They never by any chance had
enough: to have had enough to eat
would have been to have reached
paradise at once. But the old man was
very gentle and good to the boy, and
the boy was a beautiful, innocent,
truthful, tender-hearted creature;
and they were happy on a crust and a
few leaves of cabbage, and asked no
more of earth or heaven; save indeed
that Patrasche should be always with
them, since without Patrasche where
would they have been?

    For Patrasche was their alpha and
omega; their treasury and granary;
their store of gold and wand of
wealth; their bread-winner and
minister; their only friend and
comforter. Patrasche dead or gone
from them, they must have laid
themselves down and died likewise.
Patrasche was body, brains, hands,
head, and feet to both of them:
Patrasche was their very life, their
very soul. For Jehan Daas was old and
a cripple, and Nello was but a child;
and Patrasche was their dog.

                  II

    A DOG of Flanders--yellow of
hide, large of head and limb, with
wolf-like ears that stood erect, and
legs bowed and feet widened in the
muscular development wrought in his
breed by many generations of hard
service, Patrasche came of a race
which had toiled hard and cruelly
from sire to son in Flanders many a
century--slaves of slaves, dogs of
the people, beasts of the shafts and
the harness, creatures that lived
straining their sinews in the gall of
the cart, and died breaking their
hearts on the flints of the streets.

    Patrasche had been born of
parents who had labored hard all
their days over the sharp-set stones
of the various cities and the long,
shadowless, weary roads of the two
Flanders and of Brabant. He had been
born to no other heritage than those
of pain and of toil. He had been fed
on curses and baptized with blows.
Why not? It was a Christian country,
and Patrasche was but a dog. Before
he was fully grown he had known the
bitter gall of the cart and the
collar. Before he had entered his
thirteenth month he had become the
property of a hardware-dealer, who
was accustomed to wander over the
land north and south, from the blue
sea to the green mountains. They sold
him for a small price, because he was
so young.

    This man was a drunkard and a
brute. The life of Patrasche was a
life of hell. To deal the tortures of
hell on the animal creation is a way
which the Christians have of showing
their belief in it. His purchaser was
a sullen, ill-living, brutal
Brabantois, who heaped his cart full
with pots and pans and flagons and
buckets, and other wares of crockery
and brass and tin, and left Patrasche
to draw the load as best he might,
whilst he himself lounged idly by the
side in fat and sluggish ease,
smoking his black pipe and stopping
at every wineshop or cafe on the
road.

    Happily for Patrasche--or
unhappily-- he was very strong: he
came of an iron race, long born and
bred to such cruel travail; so that
he did not die, but managed to drag
on a wretched existence under the
brutal burdens, the scarifying
lashes, the hunger, the thirst, the
blows, the curses, and the exhaustion
which are the only wages with which
the Flemings repay the most patient
and laborious of all their four-
footed victims. One day, after two
years of this long and deadly agony,
Patrasche was going on as usual along
one of the straight, dusty, unlovely
roads that lead to the city of
Rubens. It was full midsummer, and
very warm. His cart was very heavy,
piled high with goods in metal and in
earthenware. His owner sauntered on
without noticing him otherwise than
by the crack of the whip as it curled
round his quivering loins. The
Brabantois had paused to drink beer
himself at every wayside house, but
he had forbidden Patrasche to stop a
moment for a draught from the canal.
Going along thus, in the full sun, on
a scorching highway, having eaten
nothing for twenty-four hours, and,
which was far worse to him, not
having tasted water for near twelve,
being blind with dust, sore with
blows, and stupefied with the
merciless weight which dragged upon
his loins, Patrasche staggered and
foamed a little at the mouth, and
fell.

    He fell in the middle of the
white, dusty road, in the full glare
of the sun; he was sick unto death,
and motionless. His master gave him
the only medicine in his pharmacy--
kicks and oaths and blows with a
cudgel of oak, which had been often
the only food and drink, the only
wage and reward, ever offered to him.
But Patrasche was beyond the reach of
any torture or of any curses.
Patrasche lay, dead to all
appearances, down in the white powder
of the summer dust. After a while,
finding it useless to assail his ribs
with punishment and his ears with
maledictions, the Brabantois--de