Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“It’s not your dog,” she said steadily.

The farmer’s red face turned purple.

“Not our dog, eh! Not our dog! And ’oos dog is it, then, I should like to know?”

“It’s God’s dog,” the girl replied unflinchingly.

She had a beautiful voice, very soft and sweet in tone, but full of power. It vibrated through the room now, charged with the intensity of her feelings and held her listeners:

“All animals are His. He created them. They are not ours. They are only lent to us in trust, and it is _my_ business to interfere, as it is everybody’s business to interfere when they are ill-treated and mis-used.”

No one spoke for a moment. The farmer sat back, open-mouthed.

“’Pon my word,” he stuttered after a minute. “’Pon my word,” and could get no further.

They all turned instinctively to Eric to see what view he would take, and Eva, too, looked at him appealingly. Surely he would take her side against the others!

“Eric?” she said questioningly. He coloured hotly. He was annoyed at her making a scene like this about nothing.

“Don’t be stupid, Eva,” he said shortly. “Go on with your supper. Of course Bates has a right to do as he thinks best. Personally, I think it would be a good thing if he did give the brute a thrashing and stopped his howling.”

“Eric!” she exclaimed again, but this time her tone was one of sheer amazement and bewilderment, and sitting in her place she stared across at him as if he were some new strange monster suddenly presented to her eyes. And indeed, this was the fact. She saw, for the first time, the real Eric. This was not the man she had married this morning, surely? This was not the man whose eyes had been wont to fill with sympathetic tears whenever she had wept. A feeling of extreme loneliness came over her. He was one in spirit with these coarse-faced, brutal farmers, who had tortured their four-footed servant for seven years and thrashed him when he had cried to them for help.

She was alone amongst them all.

She had no husband. That man opposite her, who had just let fall those words, was not the one she had loved and adored and married. By his speech he seemed to have let loose an icy river which was flowing now wide and deep as the Polar sea between them.

“Don’t sit staring at me,” Eric said impatiently. “Go on with your supper, for Heaven’s sake.”

Eva’s lips set. She pushed her plate from her and rose.

“Thank you, I have finished,” she merely said, but there was such a cutting disdain in her voice, such a thin, frosty edge to her tone, that it seemed to those at the table a shower of ice had fallen suddenly upon them. She stood for a moment looking down on the circle, at the flushed, bloated faces, at the burly lounging forms of these men who could sit there stuffing themselves to their protruding eyes; well-warmed, well-fed, well-clothed, and knowing that their faithful friend and devoted defender was stretched on the cold stones a few feet away, dying in the agonies of thirst and despair.

She turned and left the room before anyone moved or spoke, and went upstairs to the bedroom.

She opened the door. A fire had been lighted in the grate, and its cheerful red light was playing all over the room. The blinds were pulled down, and thick red curtains drawn across the windows. On the neat dressing-table stood a vase full of dried lavender. The bed in the corner with snowy sheets and counterpane invited to repose. Another little bed, draped in pink dimity, stood near the window.

It was a room in which any weary traveller would have liked to rest.

Eva noticed nothing. She shut the door behind her, then walked over to the window, pulled aside the curtains and let the spring blind fly up with a snap. Then she looked out, and there was the dog! Facing her across a large stone paved yard, fully illuminated by the brilliant moonlight so that she could see every detail. At the extreme end of his chain, his long-nailed paws on the stone flags, the wild-eyed, dishevelled looking creature stood, gazing towards the house where his tormentors lived. The girl’s quick eyes took in his gaunt and bony frame, the rough hair that stood upright down his spine, the open jaw with white foam hanging from it, the neck from which all the hair was gone, rubbed away in his ceaseless efforts to free himself from his chain. Near him were a few bones and untouched scraps. Just out of his reach, however he might strain, was an overturned earthenware saucer. It looked dry, as if it had not contained water for many days.

So little like a dog the creature looked, she could not determine to what breed it belonged, but it seemed to have been something between a mastiff and a wolfhound. Now it was just a huge, wasted wreck, glaring-eyed, demented, that man had made.

And she looked out at it and pitied it and loved it with that boundless love and sympathy for all suffering things, that is the best part of the female nature.

So he had stood in that stone-paved yard, week in week out for seven years--day after day, night after night, of burning sun and intolerable heat, or icy cold and cutting winds. No shelter, not even a kennel, not even a trace of straw. All round him was a ring of shining white on the grey flags which his scratching feet had made in his hopeless efforts to be free; and the physical sufferings were the least of what he had borne. The worst had been the awful monotony of those long, dreary days without hope, without aim or occupation: that emptiness and that sameness that preys on an animal’s brain just as much as on a man’s.

Chained up in his youthful days, with all the wild longings for the twenty-mile run, the smell of the wildwoods, the finding of mates, fermenting in his blood, with his great canine heart full of that wonderful enthusiastic worship of man that Nature has planted there, longing for love and companionship, for the touch of a kind hand on his head, he had watched the homestead with wistful, hungering eyes. And because, when people approached him, he had tugged so frantically at his chain and pawed the air to show his joy and longing to follow them, he had been thought savage, and when he had cried out in his loneliness, he had been beaten into quietude; but his agony and his sorrow, and his wonder at it all was so great that even those cruel thrashings had not silenced him.

And now, after seven years of this, he was to be shot to-morrow! The girl, looking out at him, understood all he had gone through, and a fierce resentment against his tormentors rose and swelled within her like a great wave. Somehow, she would save him, she determined, and give him a little happiness before he died; give him that love and sympathy his heart had been craving for all those years. She had forgotten herself, forgotten it was her wedding evening--a time so passionately anticipated during her engagement. As for Eric, he seemed to have disappeared from her. Somewhere between the Church and the farmhouse the Eric she loved had vanished. How could she reach that poor, condemned prisoner? If she went down now to the farmhouse door she would be heard unfastening it, even if she could move those solid bars. If she were seen in the yard she would certainly be followed and prevented from getting near the dog. No one else could be persuaded to release him. Everyone was afraid of those gleaming teeth and blood-shot eyes. She would only probably succeed in getting him shot that night instead of to-morrow. And how would they shoot him? Not with one merciful bullet sent direct to the brain; but probably aiming from a distance, they might shoot and wound him a dozen times and then perhaps leave him dying and not dead.

They would certainly kill him in the same clumsy, misunderstanding way they had treated him while alive. Merely to release him in his present condition, wild-looking and supposed to be mad, would be no kindness. If he dashed away he would soon be followed, perhaps stoned by the screaming rabble of the village. No, she must not only release him, she must take him away and with her. He was her dog now. No one wanted him. He was going to be shot. Well, she would not have that. She would take him. Then suddenly she remembered Eric. He would certainly object! and she was married. She had to consult him.

She turned from the window in a sudden panic--she was a prisoner, too. And her gaoler was of the stamp of the men downstairs. How awful this was! She had never meant to marry such a man. Had he shown himself before the ceremony as he had at the supper here, she would never have married him. Her hands turned cold, and her knees shook. She sank down in a chair by the fire. She had never realized the prison side of marriage.

Union with the twin soul she had thought she had found in Eric had not suggested it. But now she saw how the case was. Had she been travelling alone she could have gone to the farmer and paid him his own price for the dog and taken him away with her, openly. It would have been quite simple. But now she knew instinctively Eric would not let her do this and as he was against her as well as all those downstairs, the dog would probably be shot before her eyes and she would be powerless to prevent it because she had given up her single freedom of action, given up the right over her own conduct. And to that man! It was horrible. Her nails sank into her clenched hands. In that moment she longed to be free of that room, free of her marriage as the dog outside longed to be free of his chain. The sex passion is infinitely curious in its nature. Though in some ways so strong, so resistless, yet in others it is so frail a plant that the lightest wind may sweep it away. Eva had given to Eric not only love and admiration, but also the natural joyous passion of awakened girlhood. Now all these were equally dead. She sat there, numb and cold with only one desire--to save the dog and escape.

As she sat trying to think out some plan of action, the door opened and Eric came in. The supper had done him good; his bad temper was forgotten. He came in smiling, and she saw again the old Eric with the “engagement expression.” Suddenly it occurred to her she could win her way by blandishment however her feelings might have changed. For the dog’s sake she must dissemble and act.

She went up to him with arms outstretched.

“Oh, Eric darling, I am so glad you have come. Do do me a favor, and I’ll simply adore you. Do let us buy that poor dog and take him away with us and make up to him for all he has suffered.”

The smile died away from the man’s face. He unclasped her arms from his neck.

“But, my dear child, he’s mad. You can’t take a mad dog about with you. His own people are afraid to go near him.”

“I should think they would be after the way they have treated him,” she answered with burning indignation. “But _I’m_ not afraid of him. He is not mad. He is only crazy with loneliness and thirst. Let me go down and release him, and I’ll be responsible for him.”

Eric stared at her in amazement and with a growing anger fed by jealousy and wounded vanity.

A man’s nerves and state of general self-control are not at their best on such an occasion as this, and in his unbalanced condition it seemed intolerable to him that his bride should not be wholly occupied with himself but should be worrying over a miserable brute of a dog. It did not occur to him that she was only now displaying those qualities that had so much attracted him from the first--that soft, warm heart, that all-embracing love and sympathy that coupled with her physical beauty had made him decide to marry her out of all the women he might have chosen. It did not occur to him either what a priceless possession of adoring love he might have gained for all the rest of his life by yielding to her then and conquering himself; nor how, for ever he would kill his own future by opposition. He was simply intensely angry, jealous and annoyed and blinded by hurt vanity and selfish passion.

“It’s our _duty_ to do something,” she urged. “Come and look at him,” and she drew him, reluctant, to the window.

The dog stood in the same position at the end of the hateful chain! his eyes glaring, his mouth open, his body shivering. The man and woman looked out at him together. The woman’s eyes saw a fellow creature’s suffering soul, the man saw--a mad dog.

“It’s really nothing whatever to do with us,” he expostulated, “it’s not our business. The people who own him must know how to manage him. Why do you bother yourself about it!”

Eva turned and gazed at him with sheer surprise.

“But Eric, we couldn’t possibly enjoy ourselves and sleep comfortably up here knowing he is there in such misery!”

“Of course, we could, if you were not so silly about it,” he answered.

Eva was silent. Power to reply seemed taken away from her in face of this colossal adamantine hardness. She began to realise that this man she had married was not at all the exceptional individual she had imagined, but just the ordinary usual human being, not actively cruel, but absolutely indifferent and callous, not caring about anything except the satisfaction of his senses and the comfort of his own body.

“Well, if you could, I couldn’t,” she said after a moment. “Let me go down and unchain him and tell the people I’ll buy him. If you don’t want him with us, I’ll send him to my sister to keep for me.”

“To attempt to unchain a dog in that condition is going to your death,” he said shortly, keeping control over himself as well as he could.

“I am sure it’s not so, but even if it were and I feel it’s my duty, I ought to do it. Why, Eric, how many times in the War did you not go forward to almost certain death just because it was your duty?”

Eric coloured furiously.

“That may be, but I’m not going to risk my life now to free a mad dog.”

“I’m not asking you to. I want to free him.”

“And my answer is, you shan’t do anything so damnably foolish.” Swept by a sudden whirl of anger that was utterly beyond him to control, he strode across the room, locked the door, tore out the key and flung it with all his force through the window. It fell tinkling on the stone flags of the yard.

“Now that ends all this damned nonsense,” he said violently, and drew her roughly away from the window which he closed, and pulled the curtain across.

The girl stood as if turned into stone. As the key fell, a cry escaped her. A cry so bitter with hate and loathing that he might well have shuddered if he had noted it. But he did not. He did not realise it was the death-cry of the last shred of love or feeling of allegiance to him that was left in her heart.

The explosion of rage had helped Eric to become normal again. Having now secured, as he supposed, beyond all possibility of doubt, his own way, he became calmer. The brain-storm passed. He came up to where she stood, mute and motionless by the hearth.

“Darling,” he said, attempting to draw her into his arms, “don’t be stupid and spoil all our pleasure. Have you forgotten how we looked forward to being like this alone together?”

She wrenched herself away from him, and there was such a fury of resentment in her eyes that even he fell back from her with a confused sense of having made some fatal error. Women were intended by Nature to rule the world, not men, and that is why any attempt to coerce a woman by man generally fails.

“Don’t touch me,” she said in a voice low and sharp with the intensity of her anger. “You shall never touch me again.”

“You seem to forget you’re my wife,” he said hotly.

“If I am fifty thousand times your wife I will never give myself to you. You can kill me first.”

Eric stepped back and regarded her with dismay. He was face to face now with a force which he could only dimly comprehend. But as the storm had passed from his brain, it had left his intellect fairly clear, and he began to see things were getting serious. Somehow he was making a mess of it. Mechanically he turned away, fumbling in his pocket for his cigarette case. He drew out a cigarette, lighted it and began to smoke. What would be best to do, he wondered. Perhaps, if he said nothing she would calm down again. He rather wished he had not been so hasty. He wished he had put the key in his pocket instead of throwing it out of the window. There was no getting out of the room now for either of them. He regretted he had not been wiser and temporised more.

Presently he threw himself into a chair, and watched her furtively. Her eyes were turned away towards the fire. She stood like a thing turned into stone.

“What are we going to do, then?” he said, half banteringly, when the silence became unbearable. “Sit up all night?”

“As you please,” the girl replied, without turning her head. He wondered what she was thinking about, and debated feverishly with himself what he should do or say. He would have been astonished if he could have known her thoughts. He had not the faintest conception of the character and the will he was dealing with.

The girl stood there,--Herself, sunk utterly in her thought. How to gain her end and carry out the dog’s deliverance was the only thing that occupied her. Eric’s last words had suddenly flashed a light into her brain. For a moment, when the key had whizzed by her and clinked on the stones without, hope had died in her. It seemed so impossible then to ever reach the poor chained one down there in time, but now his words, “sit up all night” showed her suddenly the contrary proposition. If Eric were once asleep and she, alone awake in the room, she could effect her escape from it by the window. Her heart gave a suffocating leap upward as the whole plan unrolled itself like a map before her mental vision. Light and agile as a cat, it would be possible for her to swing herself down by knotted sheets to the yard, loose the prisoner, and with him run through the moon-lighted country, back to that station down the line their train had passed, and catch the first one back to London. It was all most dangerous and difficult, most open to failure, still it was a _possible_ plan--if Eric were asleep.

And with an infinite sense of horror and loathing, she realised the best and perhaps the only way to ensure his sleep was to reverse all she had said, to humiliate herself, to act a part, to give herself to him--and let him sleep. She saw his plan now was to sit up and smoke waiting and hoping she would change her mind. Time was passing, and each silver minute of the night brought the prisoner outside nearer to his doom.

She suddenly bent her head down on the mantelpiece. Nothing she would hate so much now as the caress of this man in whose caresses she had once so rejoiced! These moments she had so looked forward to, how horrible, how terrible they were now! His embrace! Surely with that fury of resentment in her heart, she would suffocate in it! But the dog had to be saved, and to accomplish that she would go through any suffering, any degradation. She drew herself together with a supreme effort of will, and turned to the man in the chair.

“Eric, I am so sorry I spoke as I did. Let’s never mind about anything. Let’s forget it. Kiss me.”

He had sprung to his feet at her first word. She was beside him now, looking up at him with her glorious eyes full of light and her face glowing with smiles, though her heart was shuddering within her.

“Darling, my own, I am so sorry too,” Eric was covering her upturned face with kisses. “My dearest, my very own.”

Outside, the dog stood cold and stiff in the damp night air, aching with thirst, his poor, half-crazy eyes turned up to the moonlit sky from which no mercy came. The hours crept by, till the clock in the village struck three. For seven years he had listened to those strokes that marked the passing hours, hours that never brought him nearer to liberty, to the free use of his cramped limbs, to any of the natural joys for which he had been created. He sank wearily down on his haunches. He could no longer cry out; his voice seemed broken in his throat, his tongue was swollen and black. He kept his head turned to the window where he had seen the two figures stand looking at him. Some faint, dull hope had stirred in him that they might be thinking of him, that they might be coming to him to alleviate his misery and his torment of thirst. But no, the window had been shut and had gone dark.

Inside the room the strokes of the clock vibrated through the stillness, and Eva, lying open-eyed and filled with desperate impatience, slid noiselessly out of bed, and with soundless movements and feverish haste began to dress. Eric was asleep. Never in all her life had she prayed for anything so fervently as she did now that he might remain so. With infinite caution she crept about the room, making her toilet to the minutest detail. Within her all her personal self felt humiliated, outraged, seething with fury, but she would not think of herself, only of the work ahead to be done.

Hurry generally means noise. Therefore, filled with burning impatience as she was, she had to move slowly, regulating each movement and each tip-toe step. Once Eric moved and sighed, and she started in terror and stood motionless, but he did not awake, and with a thumping heart and trembling fingers she went on with her preparations. When she was fully dressed to her hat, and with her gloves and purse stowed away in her bodice, together with Eric’s clasp-knife that he had left lying on the table, she approached the unoccupied bed standing in the corner by the window, and inch by inch drew the sheets from it. These alone would have been too short a length for her purpose even when knotted together at their extreme ends, but she took the counterpane as well, and all three end to end she judged would let her nearly to the ground. At their country place at home her father had shown her how to escape in case of fire, and she knew now exactly what to do. She knotted the corner of the sheet tightly round the little wooden post of the bed, and then there was the barrier of the window to be surmounted. She did not dare to draw back the curtains for fear of the rattle of their rings, but she lifted them slowly and silently to one side and then with both hands and infinite care, guided the spring blind up and looked out. Her heart gave a leap of boundless sympathy as she saw the great dog sitting at the end of his tightly-drawn chain, still gazing towards the window--his only hope--as he had been hours ago.

No Juliet felt more eager to join her Romeo than this girl did now to get to the suffering animal and soothe its pain. And of such natures is the Kingdom of Heaven. Such people are those who make this earth a little less like hell. Blind and curtain out of the way, it still remained to open the window without noise. Very, very softly with indrawn breath and shaking heart, she raised it half way, just enough to let her through. Then she paid out her long rope of knotted bedclothes, and looking out, she saw it reached to within about eight feet of the yard. Then, as often before in the fire drill, she crept on to the window sill, twisted her feet well round the dangling cloths and gripped them hard in her little hands. Then down, down she swung her light weight and dropped at length noiselessly to the ground. The captive in the yard rose to his feet and lowered his head, staring at her fixedly, but he gave no sound. Some instinct seemed to tell him that all this strange proceeding had something to do with him.

The girl, once out of the room and away from the sleeping man she had sworn to love and honour and cleave to till death, felt such a rush of joyous elation that it seemed to give her wings. Quite half her work was successfully accomplished. She ran swift and silent as a shadow across the yard.

As he realised she was actually coming to him, the enormous dog tore at his chain, and as he could not advance he reared himself on his hind legs, his front pawing at the air, his eyes almost out of his head, his foaming jaws wide open. It was a fearsome sight, but the girl went on unflinchingly, straight up to the desperate animal. Tall as she was the dog stood as high as herself, and as she reached him his great bony, shaggy paws descended heavily on her shoulders, and she put both her arms out under them and clasped him to her warm, loving breast. And the animal enveloped in that marvelous electricity that flowed out from her, soothed and calmed instantly by that contact with true loving humanity which he had longed for all through his dreary life stood perfectly still, all his raging pulses calmed, all his tormenting pains dying away.

“Darling, be good now while I release you,” she said in his ear, and gently let him slide to his four feet. Then she knelt down beside him and put her hands to his collar.

The dog understood perfectly she had come to release him. At last, at last he would be free, and he stood patient and still as a statue, only his whole frame quivered and thrilled with joy. He felt her little fingers trying desperately to undo the hateful collar. Eva’s heart beat almost to choke her. Suppose, suppose she failed to get it undone. Seven years had solidified the leather almost into iron; the brass point that pierced the leather was embedded in and had become one almost with it.

Both were welded together under a thick coat of verdigris. Every nail on her fingers was broken before she gave up the hopeless task of unstrapping it. Then, keeping one hand on the dog’s head, she felt in her bosom for the knife.

Because she understood him so perfectly, and that his loneliness and forsaken neglect had been the chief sorrow of his life, she knew just how to manage him. When she failed to undo the collar, he felt his heart die within him and had she moved away from him, his poor desperate brain would have given way. But she kept quite close to him and that told him that all hope was not lost, and nerved him to patience. The collar was loose for the hair had been rubbed and the neck wasted away which had filled it, and there was room for the knife-blade to pass under the leather.

“Hold still, now, don’t move,” she whispered in tense tones, and then sawed with all her strength, outwards on the collar.

It seemed incredibly hard, but the knife was sharp and leather must in the end yield to steel.

After minutes that seemed hours she cut it through, and with one great bound the dog leapt away from chain and collar. Free! Free in the moonlit night! Eva rose to her feet, and he came back to her, lowering his great body down to the earth on his fore-paws, and then springing to his full height to put them on her breast to show his rapture. Elated, joyous, but still in terror of being overtaken, Eva threw one rapid glance over the silent house and up to the window where her long white rope hung gleaming in the moonlight.

Then “Come,” she said to the dog, and close, side by side, they raced out of the yard by the door just behind where he had been chained. A door that was never fastened for he had guarded it so faithfully and securely. Out of the yard and through the wasty farmyard adjoining, then over the low wall surrounding it, and they were out on the slope, tearing away like mad things to the shelter of the wood.

Here they continued to run, down the narrow, mossy path that Eric and she had come by, filled with such different feelings the evening before. Silent now, with all their strength given to speed, but with perfect union of intention, they steadied down to an even trot, the dog modifying his pace to the human being’s. He knew that she had saved him, freed him, and he was now her faithful slave for life. No evil, no danger should come near her. No enemy could lay a finger on her as long as an atom of strength remained in him to defend her. He was hers and she was his till death.

At last they reached the spot where the train had pulled up the previous evening, and Eva, still hounded by the fear of pursuit, after a few minutes’ rest, ran on steadily, taking a little path that passed beneath evergreens near the railway.

The station down the line was thirteen miles distant, yet such is the force of joy and the power of will and determination that the girl felt hardly fatigued when she saw the red and green lights ahead of her; and she walked into the booking office with a light and springing step as the yawning clerk opened it.

The next train to London, the first in the day to carry the mails, left in fifteen minutes. She took her ticket and a dog ticket, and went out on to the platform and sat down. She felt such happiness, such joy in her success, her accomplished plan, that nothing in her life had equalled it, and all sense of pain and tiredness were entirely drowned in it.

The dog was more distressed than she. He fell heavily at her feet as she sat down. He was footsore, his limbs ached and he was oh, so thirsty, but he minded nothing. He was content.

Eva had been afraid to wait to give him water, but she bent over him now, looking anxiously at his swollen, hanging tongue. He did not ask for anything, only looked up at her with great eyes from which the wildness was already dying away; for had he not felt a soft hand on his head and heard a kind voice in his ear?

She rose to seek water for him, and, stiff and sore though he was, he dragged himself to his feet to follow her. He could not bear her to move away from him.

There was a little tap of water standing out from the wall further down the platform, and stooping down, she turned it on and made a little bowl of her two small, pink-palmed hands for him to drink from. At first he seemed hardly able to swallow, nor get the water over his swollen tongue, but she waited patiently, and at last he drank easily and freely as long as she thought good for him. Then they walked back to the seat and she sat down and took his head on her knees and smoothed back the harsh, rough hair and looked deep into his eyes, and they talked together, as lovers do, in looks and silence.

At last the train arrived, and the guard of it came along, swinging his lantern. He stopped when he caught sight of her daintily-dressed figure, and the huge, rough wolfhound at her side. She turned to him, her hand on the carriage door.

“Can I take him in the carriage with me?” she asked.

The guard flashed his light over them.

“Yes, that’ll be all right. The train’s almost empty,” he replied, eyeing the dog. He was not at all anxious to have the grim-looking beast shut up with him in his van.

“Not many people travels at this time of night,” he added inquisitively, looking in at her after she was seated and the dog had dropped onto the floor of the carriage.

Eva made no response, and he turned away mumbling in a dissatisfied tone: “Runaways and eloping couples, thieves and such--them’s wot travels at night.”

Two or three minutes more of this anguished suspense and then the train started, gathered speed and they were away--safe. She leant over the dog with a joyous laugh. Oh, the relief of that moving train! Not Eric nor Bates, nor all the farm hands could overtake them now.

“He talked of eloping couples; that’s just what we are, aren’t we, darling?” And the dog beat his great, waving brush of a tail on the carriage floor for answer. She sat back in a corner, for the first time realising that she was very tired, but the joy at her heart glowed more fiercely every moment as the train rushed on its non-stop run to town. She had done it all; she had succeeded so admirably. She had saved the dog. She did not believe they could be separated now. If Bates sued her for stealing his dog she was ready to pay his full value which the farmer would probably prefer; and Eric? What would he do or say or think when he woke and found himself alone in the room where he had locked himself? Would he climb down the sheets as she had done? She wondered and laughed. But whatever he did he should never approach her again.

Arrived in town she went straight to her sister, a girl of twenty, widowed in the War, who had always strenuously disapproved of Eric. Brushing past the astonished footman in the hall, she ran upstairs and found the beautiful Linda still in bed. She sat up in astonishment as Eva and the great hound burst into the room.

“Linda, I’ve eloped!”

“Well, you _are_ modern! You were only married yesterday!”

“I know,” Eva answered, sitting down in a deep armchair, “but I found I hadn’t married the man I meant to after all, but somebody else that I didn’t like at all.”

“We most of us do that,” returned Linda, swinging two ivory feet out of bed and eyeing the dog:

“What a beautiful dog. What’s he doing here?”

Few would have applied that adjective to the great creature stretched before her. But Linda saw through the devastation man had made to the original beauty given by Nature.

“He is the cause of everything. I eloped with _him_.”

“What do you mean? Tell me everything, now, from the beginning,” and Linda wrapped herself in a rose-hued gown and settled herself to listen. The dog stretched himself out on his side between them and fell asleep, worn out, not so much by the physical exertions as the conflicting emotions of the night.

Eva told all; shortly, incisively. Only once did she give rein to her feelings--when she had to tell how she had bought Eric’s passivity and sleep--she sprang up with her hands clenched into knots.

“If I have a child by him, I’ll kill it before it breathes!” she exclaimed. “What is the good of multiplying callous brutes like that?”

Linda listened attentively to the end. Then she rose and rang the bell.

“You poor thing, you must be quite worn out. What you want is breakfast first and then sleep.”

“But did I do rightly? Do tell me what you think, Lin.”

“Of course I think so, and I think you have made a good exchange. A dog will never disappoint you--never go back on you--never be unkind to you, never be unfaithful to you and a man will--always.”

Eva sighed, leaning back and closing her eyes.

“It’s so good to be back with you, Lin.”

The maid brought in hot coffee, and a huge breakfast tray of delicious edibles, and the girls laughed and talked as they ate, and the dog who had had bones flung to him on the flags, had a pile of delicate curly slices of bacon on a hand-painted porcelain dish. After breakfast Linda insisted on Eva going to bed, and there in that soundless room the girl and dog slept away the morning hours.

In the afternoon Eric came, and Eva went down to see him in the library.

“What does all this mean?” he asked as she closed the door and stood facing him.

“I am not coming back to you. Linda has asked me to stay with her, and I have accepted.”

“But you married me!”

“No, that’s where you make the mistake. I married a dream man, a man of my own imagination, a man who was decent and kind and humane, quite different from you altogether.”

Eric flushed a dull, angry red.

“You consummated the marriage with _me_ anyhow; you won’t deny that, I suppose?” he said.

A look of intense repulsion came over her face.

“For the dog’s sake, I gave myself to you, though I _loathed_ you,” she answered in a low tone, full of repressed vehemence.

“For the dog’s sake,” repeated Eric, growing more and more bewildered and less and less able to solve the problem that woman always presents to man. “How? I don’t understand.”

“You had determined to sit up all night and prevent me going to him; if I had had any chloroform or any drug to put you to sleep I would have given it to you. I had nothing but myself so I gave you that.”

She was standing close to him and looking straight into his eyes. The gaze was relentless and bright as the blade of a sword.

“But your kisses--your wonderful passion--your insistence--” he stammered.

“It was all for his sake. I tell you, I hated and loathed you.”

“It was damned good acting then.”

“It could hardly exceed yours during our engagement,” she flashed back.

“Acting, no, it was prostitution,” he said with a sudden storm of anger, “if what you say now is true.”

“Perhaps; you may call it what you please. I would do anything in the world to save a helpless and suffering animal and be proud of it,” she answered.

Eric turned away and took a few paces up the long room. She angered him. In a way he longed to strike her for what she said to him, but the memory of last night clung to him and held him. It had been so wonderful, so perfect, her love, real or assumed; she looked now so bright, so true, so undaunted, he longed for her, coveted her more than ever he had done in the past. He could not imagine how they had drifted into this mess. He had tried hard to please her during their engagement and had succeeded. He had won her. How had he lost her so soon? He did not know what to say, nor how to act. And all about this stupid dog; he would kill the beast if he could get hold of it.

“What can we do now?” he said, at last in a tone of bewildered perplexity.

“We must get a divorce. I believe it can be managed somehow. Your wife has eloped, deserted you, refuses to come back, go to a lawyer and see what he can do for you. If those charges are not enough, I have done more for I married a good man, and my wedding night was passed with somebody else, another totally different man. If a lawyer can’t twist that into cause for divorce, he can’t be much of a lawyer. I don’t want to spoil your whole life, so I give you leave to say anything you like about me.”

And before he had realised it, she had opened the door and had gone, and though he stormed and swore and summoned the servants and Linda came down to him, nothing would induce Eva to see him again.

She vanished from him and all he could do was to follow her advice and seek consolation of his lawyers.

About a year later, had anyone passed through the scarlet land of poppies at Cromer, he would have seen two girls sitting among them, looking out to the hazy sea, and a great wolfhound lying between them. He has been christened Joy, and his sparkling eye and glossy coat, his rounded form and waving brush of a tail all speak to the appropriateness of his name.

He and Eva are inseparable and he understands her looks, her tones, her words. He understands _her_ far better than Eric ever had, and at any moment he would lay down his life joyfully for her sake.

“I see that Eric has married again, Eva,” Linda said presently. “So now you are really and truly free. Do you think you will ever marry again, yourself?”

“Not while Joy lives,” Eva answered, her little hand resting on his neck and buried in its thick, glossy black hair. “I would never give him a rival. The next man might want to chain him up in the yard! Then we’d have to run away again, wouldn’t we, Joy?”

And the great dog leapt to his feet and gave a deep, musical bark in answer, bounding backwards and forwards and leaping up to them as the two girls rose and wended their way slowly through the poppies, emblems of peace and forgetfulness, home.

THE JEWEL CASKET

The wind howled miserably round the great London station and pierced the thin, worn clothing of Jim Thorn and Bill Smith as they loitered, hands in pockets, near the mouth of one of the draughty passages.

It was a bitter January evening and neither inside them nor outside them had the men anything to keep them warm.

“It ain’t no sort of use, Bill,” remarked Jim, drearily, after a long silence during which both men had been gazing across the wide space filled with moving figures to where the refreshment buffet threw out its warm and cheery glow speaking of the tempting delights within. “We shan’t get a job here to-night. There’s too many reg’lar porters about.” He was a thin, spare man, with a long white face in which shone two grey eyes of a kindly expression. Once a good gardener, ill-health and ill-luck had brought him to evil days.

“Go on with yer! Who came here after a job?” snarled the other, in every way a contrast to his companion: thick-set and heavy, bull-necked, long-lipped and cruel-eyed. “It’s pinching we’re after and I’ll get something to-night or I’m not Bill Smith.” Lie finished his sentence with an oath. The other made no reply, only sank into a still more slouching position against the wall. The crowd of passengers before them had swelled. There were many coming out from the ticket office following well-filled trucks of luggage. It was not long now to the departure of a favorite express into Kent. Jim Thorn’s gaze drifted about the throng until it lighted on a girl’s figure, one of a newly-arrived party, and there it remained. His eyes followed her about with interest, not because he thought she had anything to “pinch,” but because, in his own instinctive, uneducated way, he loved all pretty things. She was a very pretty young lady in her plain dark clothes and her heavy furs, with a slim tall figure and golden curly hair peeping out from underneath her small black velvet hat. Jim looked at her with pleasure. He quite forgot about the hot coffee he had been dreaming of in watching her dainty movements.

It did not occur to him to envy her furs or her warm clothing, nor to be wrathful with her that she had them, and he had not. His mind was not of the Socialist order. He no more expected her to give him her cloak than he expected himself to give his coat to one who had only waistcoat and trousers. Her cloak was hers and his coat was his, and could he have explained his mental attitude in words, he would have told you that he was jolly glad that the same law and order that enabled the lady to keep her cloak, also gave him the right to keep his coat and not have it torn off his back by one poorer than he. Although the companion of a thief, he was by nature a respecter of property.

Suddenly he felt a great grab on his arm, and Bill bent his large red face close to him.

“Look there!” he whispered excitedly. “The very thing I was looking for. See that party?”

Jim, following with his gaze Bill’s outstretched finger, saw to his dismay that it indicated the very young girl he had been so admiring.

“See that little case she has?” pursued his companion in his thick, beery accents. “Mark my words, that a jool case!” His mouth was close to Jim’s ear now. “P’raps dimonds, maybe pearls.” He let fly these imposing words like darts into Jim’s ear.

Jim straightened up and strained his eyes to see what the girl was carrying. It certainly did look most inviting. A little square, rather deep case of some dark wood, clamped carefully on all sides with metal, and with a handle on the top through which the dainty hand of its owner was passed. It looked as if pearls or diamonds might be lying on cotton wool inside, and yet the sentimental Jim felt he did not want that young lady robbed.

“It’s a bit small,” he ventured lamely, in a discouraging tone.

The burly one gave a contemptuous grunt. “Much good _you’d_ be at the game without me,” he answered. “Haven’t you never heard wot’s good comes in small parcels? Don’t you know that small and valuable, easy to sell and light to carry should be the pinchers’ motto? I’m onto that there jool casket, if I dies for it.”

“But you don’t know what’s in it,” argued Jim. “Maybe it’s just a purse with not much in, an’ a ticket, an’ a hanky.”

The other sniffed scornfully, his gaze glued on the girl’s hand as he answered:

“You just watch, as I do, an’ don’t talk so much. I’ve watched and watched that girl till I knows wot’s in that casket as well as I knows wot’s in my pocket. ’Ow do I know? Well, because she’s that careful of it. She looks down at that little box every half-minute and just now, when she set it down for a second and the porter comes by, up she snatches it again and holds it to her, and w’en just now someone wanted to take it off her while she fastened her jacket, she shakes her head and clings on all the time.”

“It’ll take some doing to get it,” replied Jim, with intensifying gloom.

“I can manage it,” returned Bill, swelling out his chest. “You’ll see. I’ll always take trouble for jools, and jools they is. Girls don’t go on like that about anything else.”

“P’raps it’s her young man’s picture,” suggested the sentimental Jim in a last hope of changing his companion’s intention, though the little square box with its clamp did not suggest a portrait-case.

The light from where the men stood was not very good and the dark case sank indistinguishably into the shadow of the girl’s dress. Bill could not see to his satisfaction what shape and look it really had but the girl’s intense solicitude for it carried complete conviction to his mind which was unable to imagine anything being of value except what could be turned into cash.

The conversation came to an end as the crowd of passengers moved toward the barrier. It was time for action and the two thieves mingled with the stream of hurrying humanity and pressed closely up behind the party to which the girl with the jewel-case belonged. She was certainly very careful of it. She held it tightly and firmly to her so that it could not be caught or brushed out of her grasp by any jostling or hustling movement and she constantly glanced down on it as if to assure herself of its safety. The train had not come up and the throng swayed back again, Bill and Jim moving naturally with it, but always quite close to the girl. They were, though thinly and poorly dressed, not ragged, or in their aspect in any way likely to attract attention. Bill, especially, had adapted for the occasion quite a traveling appearance and had a light overcoat on one arm. True it was only a bit of an overcoat, but when skilfully draped on the arm, looked quite well and might have its uses. Their quarry now approached the book-stall to the delight of Bill, but though the girl stopped to look with interest at the books and papers and even purchased one of the latter, she never once set down the little box. The train was now due and the passengers thickly bunched near the barrier to the platform. Once through the barrier the girl would be, as Jim put it to himself, “safe,” for he really did not want to see that box filched from her slender hand, and as Bill put it to himself, “lorst.” He felt desperate and was just inwardly cursing his luck when luck itself favoured him. The girl was standing chatting to the older persons of her group, presumably her parents, when a young man, leading a fat terrier, hurriedly joined the throng round the gates. Bill’s eye fell on the dog, and he instantly moved to the side of the girl farthest from the young man. With a movement of his hand he attracted the dog’s attention, and next moment the chain was wound round the girl’s ankles. The dog-owner pulled at the chain, but to free herself she had to take it from his hand, and to do so, for one moment, she set the box down beside her. In the second, while she stooped over the dog, Bill’s great hand dropped on the box. It was lifted and under his hanging coat, and he and Jim sifted themselves out of the press of passengers now swaying to the gates which had just been opened. Calmly, quietly, with blank faces, Jim and Bill crossed the station to the exit, hearing in their rear a sort of confused clamour which told them the owner of the box had discovered her loss.

No one stopped them, no one looked at them. They slipped through the wind-swept passage, and in a few seconds were out in the street; still without apparent haste, but at a good pace, they turned down a side alley and made a short cut for “home.” As they turned down one silent, dark street, Bill, swelling with satisfaction, opened out on his companion.

“Now you see wot it is. But for me you’d never have got this necklace, or tiary, whichever it is, an’ we might have stayed grubbin’ at ’ome all winter. Now we’ll have a trip abroad for it won’t do to try and sell ’em here. It ain’t safe for pearls and dimonds.”

“We don’t know yet that they is pearls and dimonds,” objected Jim.