Chapter IV: The Quest of the Dog

Gilead had often encountered in the _Daily Post_--sandwiched, say, between a heart-moving appeal on behalf of the outcast and houseless, and a last drowning cry for help from a soul almost submerged--a plea for some dog or cat seeking a kind home, and had reflected on the curious variety and varied quality of the petitions which a medium for benevolence was calculated to attract. He hoped that those, thus fondly appealing to charity for their animal beloveds, were in the habit of scrutinizing the lists in which their advertisements appeared, and of justifying their own title to help in one form by vouchsafing it in another. But he believed he had always noticed that an excessive devotion to animals entailed a rather ironic attitude towards the needs of the human family, and it was in no very sympathetic mood, therefore, that he read the first words of the following advertisement, which his secretary one morning pointed out to him:--

“_Will anyone give a kind home to Pilot, a dog. O, please do help! This is genuine. No money-lenders need apply. Address Judy, Marshlock Old Rectory, Shipton-on-Thames._”

“Why do you show me this, Nestle?” he said, looking up.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the secretary. “Have you read to the end?”

Gilead bent to the paper again, and smiled.

“What a very odd advertisement!” he said. “Is it nonsense or innocence, do you think?”

The secretary shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Supposing we ask Miss Halifax’s opinion, Mr Balm?”

Gilead said “certainly,” and leaned back in his chair as the secretary carried the paper to the young lady, who was engaged at her desk over correspondence.

“Do you take that for a hoax, Miss Halifax?”

The beautiful amanuensis read and considered.

“No, Mr Balm,” she said. “This was written, I am sure, by some distressed child, whose people take in the _Daily Post_. If it were a hoax, some covering address would have been given.”

Gilead rose.

“Give me the paper, please,” he said.

She smiled, rather wistfully.

“I knew the very suggestion of a child would win you,” she said.

He looked at her kindly.

“It is your feminine perspicacity that wins me,” he said. “I cannot tell you how it touches me to find us all three in such accord over this business of humanitarianism, and so superior, in its pursuit, to ignoble jealousies and misunderstandings.”

That was a tribute to the secretary, who had never shewn the least resentment over the lady’s inclusion in the inner confidences of his Chief. Nestle stood quiet a moment or two, as Gilead, having spoken, left the room; and then, moving softly, addressed a word to the amanuensis. She waved him away; and he saw at once, to his curious concern, that she was crying.

Gilead, foreseeing a long day and a queer experience, drove to Paddington Station, whence he took a train presently to a distant up-river junction, from which a short branch line carried him leisurely to Shipton-on-Thames. It was a quiet torrid day in late April, hot as the ideal Midsummer, and, after asking his direction, he started on foot across the fields for the Old Rectory, which, it appeared, was situated at no great distance away on the banks of the river. His path was a pleasant one, remote and peaceful, leading him by sweet-smelling pastures and lanes to a waterside hamlet, where a scrap of church-tower, ruined and ivy-grown, and a fragment of antique graveyard at its foot spoke of some ancient benefice long since discontinued or translated. He was looking about in this sleepy retreat for someone to correct his way for him, when a sound of youthful voices breaking out if a leafy road reached his ears, and he saw two children, a boy and a girl, turn a corner and make in his direction. He advanced to meet them.

“Can you tell me the way to the Old Rectory?” he asked.

The boy went on without answering, but, finding that his little companion had stopped embarrassed, swaggered round and came back.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

Gilead repeated his question.

“Well, we’re going there,” said the boy. “You can come with us, if you like.”

He was a meaty youth of some twelve summers, with an imbecile self-satisfied face and porky eyes; but his stylish white flannels and little Oxford-blue blazer with the yellow badge on its pocket spoke him quite the riverside dandy.

Gilead fell into pace with the two, and the little girl kept peeping up at him from the other side of her cavalier. She was the dearest charmer of nine, dressed in a sort of sweet Directory frock with heliotrope sprays; and the shepherd’s straw hat on her head had its mauve ribbon poked full of real daisies.

Presently the boy, shouldering his companion a little apart, spoke something in her ear, and she whispered back “O, Georgy!” and flushed as pink as an apple-blossom.

“Please,” she said, being nudged to the soft impeachment, “Georgy says he believes you must have come about Pilot.”

Gilead smiled, oddly enlightened.

“The dog mentioned in the advertisement?” he said. “Did you put it in?”

“No, I did,” said the boy, sniggering. “I say, what a lark! Have you really come about him?”

“Supposing I have,” said Gilead; “what then?”

The boy grinned, but did not answer.

“Is this Judy, by any chance?” asked the young man.

“Yes, it is,” said the boy.

“Your sister?”

“Not much. I say, you know!” exclaimed the youth. “Her name’s Brown. My name’s George Wimble. My father’s Captain Wimble. We live at the Court. I only made it up for her, and got old Gask the stationer to send it on.”

“I see,” said Gilead. “What was that about no moneylenders applying?”

“O! I don’t know,” said the boy. “You aren’t one, are you?”

“No, I’m not one.”

“I made it up out of the advertisements,” said Master Wimble. “They always put in that sort of thing. I did it for her.”

“Father said I might,” ventured the little girl, between apology and self-defence. “At leastways he said I might try and find a good home for him.”

“He didn’t mean that way, you bet,” said the boy, glancing slyly up at the stranger.

“No,” said Judy, her small mouth tightening a little. “When he saw it in the newspaper this morning he was simply furiated. He is a very boracic man.”

The boy stifled an explosion.

“Isn’t she funny?” he whispered.

“O! boracic,” said Gilead; and added, in some vague association of ideas, “Is he a doctor?--O! no; a clergyman, I suppose?”

The boy plucked his sleeve.

“He’s neither the one nor the other,” he confided to his private ear. “He’s a radical.” He spoke the word with a weight of social significance. “He stood for Henley in the last by-election, but our man beat him at the post. He doesn’t live here. He’s only taken the house for the summer. He isn’t a gentleman, you know; he’s a radical; but _she’s_ all right.”

The magnificence of the distinction quite silenced Gilead. He walked on while the boy strutted on; but suddenly he was moved very sweetly to feel little confiding fingers thrust into his.

“Please,” said the little girl, who had slipped round to his side, “have you really and truly come about Pilot?”

“Really and truly,” said Gilead, looking down with a smile. “Do you want to part with him?”

“No,” said the child, flushing very pink.

“Perhaps someone else does?” suggested Gilead.

“Yes, father.”

“Shall I see _him_ about it, then?” She did not answer. “What’s wrong with him--the dog, I mean?” asked the young man.

The boy answered for her, with a contemptuous laugh.

“He bit somebody. Anybody would have, _her_.”

Gilead kept a discreet silence.

“Here’s the gate of the Rectory, if you want to see Mr Brown,” said the boy, stopping; and then Gilead saw that the little girl was in floods of tears. He bent down, very concerned.

“If he _has_ to go, Judy,” he whispered, “he shall find a good friend.”

“O! don’t be such a ninny,” said the boy. “What’s a dog anyway? I’m not going to go fishing with you, you know, if you’re going on like this.”

He walked off, whistling. She sniffed once or twice, dried her eyes on her sleeve, and fled after him. Gilead, watching the two a moment, turned through a gate into a leafy drive, which swept round a semi-circle of lawn to the front of a white-latticed creeper-hung house of two storeys, where, ringing the bell, he sent in his card to Mr Brown.

He had not waited a minute in an untidy tobacco-reeking study, into which he had been informally and rather suspiciously shown, when a gentleman came hurrying in with an air of effusive cordiality which took him completely by surprise.

“Mr Balm?” said the gentleman. “This is kind of you--this is more than kind. To come in person to answer my appeal? I had not expected such distinction, such consideration, and it makes me proud. Pray take a chair, sir, and let us discuss this matter.”

Gilead, immensely perplexed, bowed and seated himself. He saw before him a fluffy fiery little man, wearing spectacles like burning glasses, and clad in a blazing rhubarb tweed, with knickerbockers and bright brown shoes. He was snappy in his movements, jerky in his speech, and, in disposition, he alternated, it seemed, between white heats of enthusiasm and dead ashes of depression.

“Your Agency, sir,” he said, “justifies its title to being the most prompt and princely institution of its kind. I am favoured in a visit from its founder.”

“Its representative,” corrected Gilead.

Mr Brown raised his hands and eyes with an air of polite deprecation.

“True,” he said; “we know your humour and respect it, Mr Balm. I say no more. I am completely dumb.”

“Well,” said Gilead, a little chilly: “as to the purpose of my visit, sir, I was led to suppose that the--the form of appeal somewhat lacked your sanction.”

“Not at all,” said Mr Brown, with a surprised look. “How could you have gathered that impression when I dictated its terms myself?”

“O! I didn’t know,” said the visitor. “I was misenlightened, no doubt--made the victim very possibly of a trifling hoax.” He smiled. “Then the little lady’s name was an intentional mask?”

“I don’t know, sir, what you mean by a mask,” said Mr Brown with some apparent heat. “It was quoted to illustrate a very genuine sentiment. If you had said a _bait_, I might have admitted the impeachment.”

“A bait, then,” said Gilead--“and a sweet one.”

“I am indebted to you for the term, Mr Balm,” said the gentleman, with a certain dry dignity; “but I can hold it hardly applicable to a personality endowed with such supreme gifts of force and intelligence. I would as soon call the Mother of the Gracchi _sweet_, sir, for my part.”

Gilead felt himself at a loss for words. Could it be possible that the little girl so contradicted her appearance as to be an infant phenomenon of an advanced type?

“Well, sir,” he said, utterly at sea--“a bait of whatever nature you please. In any case, I am to understand, its purpose was to find someone who would be willing to take this discarded pet off your hands?”

Mr Brown rose from his chair.

“Sir--Mr Balm!” he exclaimed.

“To secure a kind home for it,” explained Gilead, “whether because it is old, or because it bites, or--”

Mr Brown seized up a heavy paper-weight, poised it an instant furiously, and replaced it on the desk calmly.

“I think, I am sure,” he said, “that there must be some mistake.”

Gilead, risen also, faced him gravely.

“Would you mind telling me,” he said, “to what you are alluding all this time?”

“I am alluding, sir,” said Mr Brown, with sarcastic emphasis, “to the letter I had the honour of addressing to you yesterday, and the substance of which, I flattered myself, you had come to answer in person. My name is Brown.”

“I am unfortunate,” said Gilead. “I have much correspondence and a poor memory, and a name, however distinctive, is apt to slip me. I devoted, I am afraid, but a cursory examination to this morning’s letters. The penalty is mine.”

Mr Brown bowed stiffly.

“Assuredly not, sir, since, it seems, I have appealed to your munificence in vain.”

“The misfortune, sir,” said Gilead, “is, by your favour, easily amended for both of us.”

His courtesy was so charming, that the indignant gentleman was instantly mollified.

“You are very good,” he said. “Your frankness invites a warmer confidence than that I had already ventured in a sacred cause. You are acquainted, no doubt, with the name of Mrs Craddock Flight?”

Gilead bowed.

“Of all the militant sisterhood,” said Mr Brown, “the bright particular star. It was she, if you remember, who chained herself to the wheel of the Prime Minister’s carriage, just as he was about to enter it to drive to the House of Commons, and so forced him to seek his infamous destination on foot. A woman of extraordinary resource and originality.”

“Extraordinary,” said Gilead. “If I recollect, she was nearly killed by the horses becoming restive before she could be released.”

“She would have been glad to die, sir,” said Brown, “in that glorious situation--a second St Catherine broken on the wheel for her faith.” He looked at his visitor searchingly. “Do not distress me, Mr Balm,” he said, “by affirming that the cause is to be denied its share of the vast resources at your disposal. No, no, you must be with us, sir. It was for that purpose that I wrote to you; it was for that purpose that I identified myself in my letter with a name calculated to shed refulgence on any propaganda to which it should elect to give itself--the name of Mrs Craddock Flight. That name, sir, and that cause lack nothing but the devotion of a sympathetic capitalist to ensure their immortality. It was to that stately name that I questioned the right application of so sugary an epithet as ‘sweet’. Finally, sir, that name--if I may dare the confidence--has pledged itself to become, on a single condition, my priceless possession; to adorn with its widowed lustre my no less widowed insignificance. I confess, sir, that I yearn to bask in that reflected glory--to follow in the tail of its comet-like flight to the new world its radiance is destined to discover to the enraptured vision of posterity.”

“You allude--?” said Gilead.

“I allude,” said Mr Brown, “to a world reconsecrated, through the political enfranchisement of woman, to reason, justice and purity. Everything, you will grant, is wrong as it is. Civilization, as a male imposition, has proved itself a depressing failure. Men, on true premises, labour to false conclusions; women, on false, jump to true. Their unerring moral sensitiveness penetrates all massed and complicated sophistries, and pierces in a flash to the heart of the real. Unbiassed by formulas, untrammelled by dogma, they will blow through our corrupt institutions like a cleansing gale, whirling the dead leaves of discredited systems before them. Woman is not conscientious, so to speak, in the prescriptive sense. She will strip from equity, justice and the moral law the trappings in which they have been too long confounded, and show us nature again, primitive and fearless.”

“Indeed?” said Gilead. “You surprise me.”

“There will be many surprises when the time comes,” said Mr Brown grandiloquently; and, on the very word, suffered a surprising change of countenance. “Why, why,” he cried, flushing scarlet; “my letter--my letter, sir, in which I expatiated at some length on this very subject. You have not seen it, you say? To what, then, am I to attribute the honour of your visit?”

“To an advertisement, sir,” said Gilead quietly, “about a dog.”

The effect of his words was startling. Mr Brown seemed to burst at the head, like an over-charged bottle of ginger-beer, and thence to spout a volume of incoherent expletives. He then, as if impelled by some uncontrollable emotion, went racing up and down the room, until, the pressure slacking, he gradually slowed, and finally came to a stop opposite his visitor, the steam, so to speak, all out of him.

“I see it all,” he said, in a state of the limpest depression. “By an irony of circumstance scarce credible, the sympathies I sought to engage have been forestalled by my own child in a trivial matter.”

“By a young friend of your child, sir, if I am correctly informed,” said Gilead kindly.

“You mean the boy Wimble?” said Mr Brown bitterly. “No doubt, sir, your information--”

“It was at first hand,” put in the visitor, smiling. “I met the young people outside, and got into talk with them. The boy, he himself confessed to me, composed and inserted the advertisement.”

“The grotesque impertinence of it!” cried Mr Brown, boiling over; “the assurance and the inopportuneness!”

“I understand,” said Gilead, “that you authorized the little lady to find, if possible, a home for the animal?”

“Go on, sir, go on!” said Mr Brown resignedly. “Tell me that I authorized her to hold her father up to ridicule before the world.”

“Nay, sir,” said Gilead, “I am quite at sea in the matter.”

“I will acquaint you, Mr Balm,” said the father dismally, “with the facts of the case--especially as they bear in some measure on a confidence I have already reposed in you. Mrs Craddock Flight, sir, made it a condition of our union that the dog should be destroyed.”

“It was the single condition to which you referred, I assume,” said the visitor. “May I venture to ask what suggested it?”

“The dog had bitten her, sir. They will take these unaccountable aversions. It was during a short visit she lately paid us.”

“Pardon me,” said Gilead, “if I enquire if your little girl is not very attached to the animal?”

“There is no denying,” said Mr Brown, “that Judy is devoted to Pilot, and Pilot to Judy. It was on that account that I was moved to sanction the compromise of a new home, in which compromise, I have not the least doubt, Mrs Flight’s superior reason will acquiesce, particularly when she is informed of the character of the applicant.”

Gilead bowed. “May I see the dog?” he asked.

Mr Brown shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands in a manner of patient repudiation.

“With pleasure,” he said, and evidently without the least. “We will go at once.”

He led the visitor out by a back door, across a fair but neglected lawn, through a space of untended kitchen garden, and so down to the river bank, where, by some water steps and a little boat-house, stood a dog-kennel of considerable dimensions. And straight, on the sound of their approach, there issued from this last, with a rattle of iron links, a magnificent Newfoundland.

Gilead exclaimed.

“But he is superb! I am quite astonished! His value, Mr Brown!”

The master was engaged in releasing swivel from collar. The beautiful dog, fawning and delighted, made up to him endearingly.

“Judy, I am sure,” said Judy’s father in a suppressed voice, “would never dream of making a transaction of her pet. Yes, there’s your little mistress, boy.”

The great dog, released, went bounding joyously and sniffing riverwards. There was a punt out there in mid-stream, and a small meaty boy was upright in it, endeavouring to find soft bottom, for fishing purposes, with one of its poles. A little girl in a flowered hat sat in the stern.

“It seems a harsh necessity,” said the father, in a voice which made Gilead approve him for the first time; “but the cause, sir, the cause is paramount.”

Gilead, quite fascinated, called to the dog--approached him. At that instant there came a shrill cry from the father: “Sit down, Judy, sit down! My God!”

There was an answering screech from the river; a splash; the small boy, slipping his hold in a panic, went down among the thwarts, and the punt, leaving its pole sticking in the mud, began to swing downstream. Judy, in anguish of the scene enacting on the banks, thinking to see her pet ravished away before her eyes, had stood up, and, blind with grief, had lost her footing and tumbled overboard. She could not swim; neither of the men could swim; the boy in the punt, nerveless and blubbered, was worse then inept. A dreadful moment of paralysis followed, and then two little arms and a draggled head came above the surface.

[image: images/img_075.jpg caption: “A SOFT, SEAL-LIKE HEAD WAS SEEN DRIVING ACROSS THE SHINING FLOOD.”]

Gilead, in agony, stumbled for the boat-house; the father, sobbing and staring, was already waist-deep in the water. “My little child!” he gasped--“my little child!”--there went by them both a great bound and surge, and swift and unerring a soft seal-like head was seen driving across the shining flood. They stood like things of stone, hardly breathing--and then there came a swirl, a reasoned snap; and the little face, wild and choking, was lifted above the surface. Good Pilot! Loyal and lovely friend! He brought her, crying, to the steps, and there having deposited her, shook himself, and crouched, somewhat appealing, as if he had taken a liberty.

* * * * *

The little girl, well-frightened but unharmed, was asleep upstairs; the greater dog lay blinking on the hearthrug; Gilead, by his host’s particular desire, delayed his departure yet a little.

Very few words had passed between them, and the young man was considering with what manner of blessing he could best terminate a visit, whose prolongation, in view of the subdued and obviously self-tormented figure before him, seemed an impertinence, when a ring at the bell sounded through the silent house, and its master was presented with a telegram. Its perusal appeared to act upon him like an instant and amazing stimulant. He rose, his spectacles seemed to glare, his head to bristle. Patently on the verge of an explosion, he stepped across to Gilead with an exaggerated softness, and laid the paper before him. “Oblige me by reading that,” he said. The young man, wondering, obeyed.

“_Have just seen advertisement. Either the dog must be destroyed or our compact ends. Answer prepaid. Isabella._”

Gilead looked up.

“Yes, from her,” said Mr Brown, still with an icy quietude, in answer to the mute enquiry. And then the burst came--only a little rent at the outset, but rapidly roaring to a breach:--

“Now, isn’t that just like a woman--without reason or justice or decency--mere venomous spite, indifferent to the consequences to others so long as it can injure the object of its resentment. Sympathy? Nonsense! Tell me why, in the University boat-race on this river, nine women out of ten will be Cambridge? Out of pity for its persistent ill-success? Not in the least, sir. Simply because they think the colour the more becoming.” (The breach widened) “Consistency? Bosh! with minds the sport of any chance mood? Veering as the compass--changeable as the weather--you may forecast ’em fair in the morning, and be drenched or frozen by ’em in the afternoon?” (The breach split resoundingly) “Principles? Lunacy! Their one indestructible principle is vanity, and in their wild rush for personal notoriety of any sort, all principles and all decencies may go to the devil” (The breach, with a roar, rent from hem to hem). “From this moment I repudiate the cause,” shouted Mr Brown, glaring and dancing; “from this moment I refuse to identify myself with a sex so utterly deficient in the moral sense. Votes for women! Not unless we wish to see our national character for reason and fair-play thrown by the board! Not unless we wish to see our most cherished institutions of order and justice degraded to the uses of irresponsible malice. Incapable of governing, even themselves--a set of chattering harpies lusting for the blood of heroes!”

He ended with a roar. Gilead rose to his feet.

“The maid is waiting for an answer, sir,” he said; and, indeed, the poor girl stood as if petrified.

“Give me the paper!” yelled Mr Brown. He snatched it from the young man’s ready hand, slung out a pencil from his watch-chain, dabbed at the reply form, fuming and sputtering.

[image: images/img_078.jpg caption: “HE DABBED AT THE REPLY FORM, FUMING AND SPUTTERING.”]

“The dog must die, must he?” he panted ironically. “My child must be sacrificed to a swollen-headed harpy’s caprice! A useful lesson; I thank you, madam”--and he dashed off the following message. (Gilead had the assurance to glance at it, as he handed it to the girl): “_Offer declined. The dog remains with me. Theophilus._”

A minute later, Gilead, being assured of the departure of the telegraph boy, took his own with much satisfaction, leaving Mr Brown fondly stroking the head of the great dog as he lay upon the rug.