A Sheaf of Corn

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11. A Little White Dog



"There!" Elinor cried. "Now, how could you be so careless, Ted?"

"The blessed thing must have jumped of its own accord off the chimney-piece," Ted said. He looked down at his wife on her knees beside him, ruefully collecting the fragments of the broken vase. "I wasn't so much as looking at it, Nell."

"No! If you'd only had the sense to look at it!" Nell sighed. "But you will stand with your heels on the fender, and you push those great shoulders of yours against the chimney-board, and smash go all my ornaments--and a lot you care! However, something had to break to-day, and it might have been worse."

"How do you mean 'had to'?"

"That great awkward Emily threw down a soup-plate last night; and I----"

"No, not you, surely, Nell?"

"It wasn't my fault, of course. I was lifting the hand-glass from my dressing-table as carefully as carefully, and it just dropped out of my hands! 'That is the second,' I said to myself; 'now I wonder what the third will be.'"

"And why did you say anything so silly?"

"Have you actually grown to your enormous age, and not known that when one thing is broken in a house three are broken? Well, you have had an ineffectual sort of education!"

"You don't believe such rotten rubbish?"

"Don't you? When I tell you of the soup-plate, the hand-mirror, and now this vase? You can't call it nonsense, because there it is. A proof before your very eyes. You might as well say it isn't unlucky to see a single crow----"

"I'd sooner see one of the mischievous brutes any day than fifty."

"--That you may expect things to go pleasantly on the day you put on your petticoat the wrong side out----"

"I should expect them to take a comic turn on the day I did that, certainly!"

"What a ribald boy! Now, listen, Ted; be very attentive, and I will tell you a true, true story. You mustn't laugh the tiniest titter--ah, now, Ted! you won't laugh, will you?"

They were very young married people, and were not yet disposed to sit quietly apart and talk to each other. She seized him by the lapels of his coat now, and shook him to attention, while he, looking down upon her with the hardly yet familiar pride of possession in his boyish eyes, swayed his big frame in her grasp, flatteringly yielding to her small efforts.

"Are you going to attend, sir? Well, then--There was once a young man----"

"Who met a small vixen called Nell, and she fell in love with him and made him marry her."

"Ah, now, Ted, do listen!--A young man, and his mother told him never to walk under a ladder."

"And he did, naughty youth, and a bricklayer fell on him, and he died?"

She pleaded with him. "Seriously, Ted; no nonsense!" So he grasped her by the elbows and looked gravely in her face.

"It was mother's cousin Harold--really and truly--not a make-up."

"Hurry up, darling. I'm swallowing every word, and it's most awfully interesting."

"And he didn't believe that kind of thing--just like you, you know--ladders, and crows, and petticoats, and things. And he was going out to the West Indies to an awfully good appointment--hundreds a year! And his mother went for a walk with him on the last day. And they were building a row of houses----"

"Cousin Harold and his mother?"

"No. You know. And his mother said, 'Don't go under the ladder, dear'--and he did."

"Naughty boy! Naughty Cousin Harold!"

"You're laughing! Very well, just wait. To tease her, he would. 'Now, look here,' he said, 'every ladder I come to I mean to go under twice.' And he did. And his mother couldn't stop him, and she cried. And--that's all----"

"All? But where's the point?"

"I didn't say there was a point. You know about mother's Cousin Harold."

"I'm hanged if I do."

"He never, never came back."

"Goodness!"

"He never even got there."

"Break it gently, Nell."

"The ship he went in sank, and no one escaped to tell the dreadful tale."

"And supposing he hadn't walked under ladders, but was alive in the West Indies, what relation would he be to you and to me?"

She was proceeding to tell him in all good faith, but he stopped her. "And now," he said, "I will tell you a tale. But first, as my feelings have been considerably harassed, I will solace myself with a pipe."

She was being taught to fill his pipe, and to light it, and on this occasion was made to take a couple of draws to prove to herself that she had not properly cleaned it with the hairpin, according to instructions given last night. So that the story was long delayed, and when at length it came it did not amount to much.

"There was once an old man who gave a dinner-party."

"That was daddy," Elinor said, from the arm of the chair where she was now sitting with her shoulder against his.

"It was on the occasion of the marriage of his only daughter to a handsome and agreeable young man, the most eligible parti of the neighbourhood."

"That was you and me," Nell explained, contentedly. "Well, you are a vain old boy!"

"No interruptions, please," Ted went on, pulling at his pipe. "Although the occasion was one of rejoicing, there was a melancholy circumstance connected with it which cast a shadow over the otherwise sunshiny--'m--sunshine of the scene."

"You're as bad as a newspaper. Go on softly, or you'll never keep it up. I can't think what's coming."

"The guests sat down thirteen to table----"

"Well, so they did!" Nell recalled. "Now, that is really very clever of you, Ted. I'd quite forgotten. I was horribly frightened then--but I'd as clean as clean forgotten!"

"Well, there you are!" Ted said. "There's your moral."

"Where? Where?"

"Why, here we are, all alive and well and kicking; you and me, your daddy and mummy, your uncles and your cousins and your aunts."

"But supposing one of us wasn't!" Nell remarked sagely. "When you ask your thirteen to dinner and one dies it must be horrid; and I should think your guests might--might bring an action against you."

She was holding the hand he had just put up to meet hers, which was round his neck now, and a thought suddenly struck her. "But the year isn't up yet, Ted," she said.

The dinner had been an epoch in their young lives; they both remembered the date was the eighteenth of October. He pointed to the silver calendar on the chimney-piece, to which the parlour-maid attended. "This is the eighteenth again," Ted said. "There aren't two eighteenths of October in one year."

Elinor was back in memories of the event. "Do you remember Aunt Carrie, and how ill she was? At the very verge of the grave. And how afraid mummy was she should notice there were thirteen? Now, here she is as well as any of us, and going to get married again. Ah! What are you doing, Ted?

"No, Ted! Oh, no, please! My hair will come down!"

"I'm getting another hairpin."

It was such pretty hair, he was always pleased to see it hanging about her ears, as had been its fashion when he had first met her--not so long ago. So he fought her for the hairpin while she ducked her head and threw it backwards, and laughed, and struggled in his grasp; to submit, of course, at last, to yield up the hairpin, to roast it, red hot in the fire, to watch it burn its malodorous passage through his pipe.

That ceremony over, she got him his boots, and would have laced them for him, and kissed them too, if he would have let her, and did grovel at his feet to arrange the roll of his stockings for him.

"You have got nice calves, Ted!" she told him. "I don't think I could love even you if you had sticks of things like Robert Anstey's."

"Oh, Bob's legs'll do all right," Ted said, loyally. He stamped a foot into the second boot, and in doing so ground some of the broken vase beneath his heel. He filliped her cheek, then, smiling into her eyes--

"You and your old woman's superstitions!" he said. "Perhaps you don't know I've a--what d'ye call it?--a portent in my own family--or had when I had a family," he told her, bending again over his boot. "Well, I have, then!"

"And what's a portent, silly? I daresay it's nothing to boast of."

"It's a little--white--DOG!"

He barked the last word at her, loud and sharp, his face suddenly projected into hers. She fell backward and sat on her heels.

"Ted! How horrid of you! What does it do?"

"I haven't the faintest notion."

"Are you making it up?"

"Not I. They all made it up. My father, and my grandfather, and the whole tribe. They stuck it into each other, and tried to stick it into me, that whenever one of us is going to die he sees this beastly little hound."

"Ted!" she was clinging to the calf she admired now, in an agreeable ecstasy of shuddering. "I wish I had a ghost, too."

"You shall have mine, with pleasure."

"But why didn't you tell me before?"

"I clean forgot it till this minute. My father told me about it when I was quite a little chap."

"But is it true, Ted?"

"Of course it isn't."

"And did they really see it?"

"They said they did. You may bet your life they didn't."

When he was ready to walk round the little domain he had inherited from his father, Elinor accompanied him to the gate. "I wouldn't have a little white dog for a ghost!" she said to him, slightingly, as they parted. "Anyone could have as good a ghost as that if they tried!"

"Everyone couldn't have an ancestor who had tortured one to death to spite his wife!" he said.

"You can see a dozen little white dogs any day," she taunted him.

"I saw one more than I wanted yesterday when I was out with my gun," he admitted. "That new little beast of Anstey's ran in front of me into every field and frightened the birds. I hardly had a shot."

"Tell Bob to keep it at home," advised Nell.

"I must," Ted acquiesced, and went.

In the course of the morning Bob Anstey, who always appeared some time during each day, came in. Elinor found him standing up by the chimney-piece, manipulating the silver calendar.

"You're a day too previous in your calculation," he said. "This isn't the eighteenth, but the seventeenth, madame."

"Well, how funny!" Elinor cried. "Now I wonder how Aunt Carrie is! I shall have to tell Ted the year isn't up, after all."

To Anstey that was rather a cryptic utterance, but he asked for no explanation. These two were full of little jokes, of allusions, of reminiscences, interesting to them, in which he had no part, close friends as they were.

"Can you spare Ted to me for an hour or two this afternoon?" he asked.

"She could not," she said, smiling; "she could never spare Ted."

"Then come along with us yourself, madame. I want Ted's opinion of that mare I've got my eye on at Wenderling. Your ladyship's opinion would be of value, too."

"Ted has nothing to ride. Did you hear that his horse had wrenched its shoulder yesterday? A wretch of a little dog ran out of a cottage and got mixed up with Starlight's feet. Ted jerked the horse round to spare the dog--and Starlight is as lame as a tree."

They would bicycle then, he decided. The roads were good. They would get into Wenderling in time for tea, and take it easy, coming home in the dusk. They must remember to take lamps. They would start at three.

She agreed to all arrangements, swaying herself idly in the rocking-chair Ted had bought for her; a pretty slip of a girl with a happy, almost childish face. Anstey little thought as he looked at her how often and often through all his life he would with his mind's eye see her so again!

As he was going through the door she called a laughing reproach to him. "Your abominable dog spoilt my husband's sport yesterday, Mr Anstey. Why do you keep such a wretch?"

"Which dog?" he asked, pulling up, smiling at her.

"Your horrid little white dog."

"I haven't got a little white dog," he said, and laughed, and went away.

After all, Elinor did not share the expedition to Wenderling; for at lunch-time it came on to rain, and Ted would not let her get wet. He was proud of seeing her rough it sometimes; he delighted to take her hunting on days when no other lady was in the field, to see her face, rosy and eager, her bright hair darkened with the wet, the raindrops hanging on her hat. He kept her beside him, standing silent and patient in a certain soppy, sodden spot by the river, waiting for the chance of a wild duck flying homeward above the low-lying mists of the fens. What did not hurt him could not harm her, in her youth and strength and spirit, he thought.

"She has the pluck and the staying power of a man," he was proud to tell Anstey; but was proud, too, now and again, to exercise his new prerogative of taking care of the wife who was such a recent, dear possession. Quite unexpectedly, he would veto some proceeding she proposed.

"I won't have you doing it," he would say with dignity. And she was equally proud to obey.

"Ted says I mustn't," or "Ted says I may." What, in those golden hours, did it matter which?

She walked with him, bareheaded, through the drizzling rain to the house where the bicycles were kept, and felt the tyres with him, and rubbed a spot of rust off the handle bar, and walked beside him again, he pushing the machine, down the drive to the road.

"It's a beastly day," Ted said, with an eye cocked at the low-hanging, steel-coloured clouds. "If Bob wasn't so keen on my seeing this horse, I'd chuck it and stay with you."

"Come home soon," she begged him; and, "You may be sure I shall come as soon as I possibly can," he promised her.

"It wasn't Bob's dog that bothered you the other day," she told him as he stood ready to mount, his foot on the pedal; "Bob hasn't got a little white dog."

"It must have been that brute that ran out from Barker's under Starlight's feet the other day, then," he called, and was off.

Nell stood by the gate and watched him till he joined his friend, and, in spite of the faster falling rain, she watched him still. Before they reached the bend of the road Ted turned his head; she waved a gay hand to him, and he, hesitating for a moment, wheeled round and bicycled back.

"Did you call me, Nell?" he said.

Of course she had not called.

"Bob knew you hadn't, but I thought I heard you call; and then you held up your hand and beckoned me."

"Nonsense! Nothing of the sort!" she laughed. "Be off, Ted. I shall never get you home again if you don't start."

"You'll have me home in a twinkling," he promised. And in a flash was gone.

She turned and ran back, with head bent beneath the downpouring rain, light-hearted, to her home, not knowing, never guessing that on that handsome, smiling, healthy face of her young husband she had looked her last.

For when, a couple of hours later, borne on men's shoulders, he was carried to his home, he was so crushed and mangled out of his likeness as his wife had known him that, even by force, they prevented her from looking upon him.

When time had elapsed--Elinor, for some part of it mercifully numbed or unconscious, could not have told if hours, days or weeks--Bob Anstey, at her request, was brought to her. He had been in waiting, knowing that, sooner or later, that meeting, if they did not die with the pain of it, must be lived through.

He had expected to see her lying helpless and strengthless with hidden face. She was standing up against the darkened windows at the end of the long room furthest from the door. He started, walking slowly, almost as if he was groping his way, among the familiar chairs and tables, in her direction. But when half the space was traversed, and she still stood there, uttering no word, dully watching him, his courage failed, and he stopped short. It was the sight of Ted's chair, his pipes on the bracket beside it, the picture of him, smiling, in the silver frame on the mantelpiece, which unmanned him. He had prayed that he might have strength to support the girl-widow in this interview; and he found himself suddenly giving way before her, sobbing like a child; while Elinor looked on tearlessly from afar, dangling the tassel of the window-blind in her hand.

When at length he somewhat mastered his grief and looked up, she had come quite close to him, but she did not speak.

"I thought you might like to hear," Anstey said, in sorrow-muffled voice; and she nodded her head for him to go on.

"He--talked of you nearly all the way," he began. "He said how----"

She stopped him. "Not that," she said, "not yet. The other--the other!"

By some instinct he knew what she meant. "It was going down the Wenderling Hill," he said, "just as we got into the town. You know that steepish hill? Halfway down was a brewer's waggon. We were going at a good stroke, not saying anything, for the moment. We got up to the waggon. 'There's that infernal white dog again,' he said. And I heard him call loudly, 'Get out of the way, you brute!' He swerved violently on one side, as if the dog were in his path--I don't know how it happened; God knows why it happened!--he was flung right under the wheels. He--thank God, he did not suffer, Nell, or know a moment's terror or regret. He died instantly."

Elinor was silent for long. She sat, with brow clasped tightly in both hands, looking intently upon the carpet at his feet, trying, he thought, to understand, to get into a mind too confused to work receptively what he was saying to her. Presently, still tightly holding her head, but with more of comprehension in her face, she looked up.

"And the dog?" she asked him. "The little white dog?"

"It's a strange thing about the dog," he told her slowly. "There wasn't one!"