II
“In quo tam similem videbis Issam
Ut sit tam similis sibi nec ipsa.”Martial.
She was a very little dog with a very large soul, and all her soul looked out of her eyes. No one whom she loved could doubt her love, when once her eyes had assumed their final expression. “I am your friend for life,” they said, “and for death—and perhaps beyond it.”
In the frivolous days of her youth she had snapped at the knickerbockers of a chubby errand boy, and been promptly handed over for punishment. But she broke from the executioner under the indignity of the first stroke, and fled for refuge to her master’s bedroom, from which no efforts could dislodge her. So, making the best of a bad business, he took to his bed too for company’s sake. Judy was deeply touched by this practical sympathy, and it formed, I believe, the historic ground-work of their life-long friendship.
Her pedigree was mixed. Her father was a white English terrier of unimpeachable breed, who lived a sober, self-contained existence, with no friend but the postman, whom he followed conscientiously on all his rounds of delivery. Her mother was the daughter of a “King Charles,” who had been woo’d and won by a fox. Fair and frail, she was careless of the duties of life, and passed her time in eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating—she is sleeping and eating still, the latter with an ever increasing appetite as the time at her disposal grows less.
Judy repudiated in toto her maternal parentage, and reproduced all the best characteristics of her father, combined with a brilliant intelligence, and a far wider appreciation of the sympathies of life. Her minor peculiarities were borrowed from those of a cat. She sat like a cat, pounced like a cat, and washed her face like a cat, using either or both of her paws with a truly feline indifference. She could climb bushes, too, hanging on by her teeth, to the detriment of any unwary fledgling who presumed over confidently upon the limitation of natural gifts.
Judy often came on a visit to Thorpe Hill, where she regularly spent an hour after dinner in digging at the root of a favourite beech tree, with the energy of a dog that is close on a prize. From which I inferred that she was a truffle-terrier in disguise, who would make all our fortunes, and set Matthew to dig in her place till he blasphemed against Judy and the truffles and me. But Matthew didn’t put his heart into his work, or realise the fact that Judy’s credit was at stake. And I always believed in her more than I did in him. Later on she justified my confidence—not, I admit, by a discovery of truffles, but (better still) of a full-grown Roman or Anglo-Saxon, crouching among his household divinities. Judy was complacently proud of him as a very superior find, in spite of Matthew’s sneer, “Tweren’t triffles, I knowed,” and forthwith transferred her attentions to a neighbouring tree, under which, for all I know, others of his family may still be reposing.
It is humbling to admit that she was wholly devoid of tricks, properly so called: partly because no one had troubled to teach her any, and partly, I think, because she accounted it a waste of time to try and acquire them. No one who studied her thoughtful little face could doubt that she held higher and more recondite theories of the responsibilities of life.
It was probably the same reason that led her to pass her days in silence. Few objects she thought were worth the trouble involved of setting in motion the harsh and cumbrous method by which alone a dog converses—certainly not meat and drink, and therefore she declined to ask for them. The prospect of a walk, or the sight of a blackbird deriding her from a twig, formed the only exceptions and proved the rule. Otherwise Judy would have been a canine Trappist. And her reticence was the more remarkable, seeing that her mother passed her time in futile and vociferous talking. Probable Judy regarded her as an object lesson and a warning. She was certainly disdainful of her noise.
But she had two natural gifts: you may call them tricks if you will. She took her meals like a Christian, seated, or rather kneeling, at table beside her master, with her paws doubled under her knees. From this post of vantage she would watch the whole proceedings of dinner with the curiosity of an epicure. But dining on her own account offered little attraction. The position of her paws, it is true, suggested an attitude of devotion and gained for her the reputation of saying grace before meat. But her own diet was strictly limited to morsels of bread and biscuit, which she received with indifference, and apparently without gratitude. It may be that she dined in the night-time, as Amina did with the ghoul. If so, I hope she selected more desirable company.
She had one other peculiarity. I cannot call it an accomplishment, though it found her a number of admirers. After studying you intently with eyes that looked you through and through, as though she were appraising carefully your capacity for friendship, she would raise a delicate fur-capped paw, and lay it gently upon your nose—never anywhere else. It was a favour accorded to no stranger, never indeed till she had known you for months. For it was an oath of allegiance, emblematic as the solemn transfusion of blood, and renewable on occasion, if you cared to elicit it by staring her well out of countenance. Yet it was trying to be reminded of the fact when you were kneeling at prayers in full view of the servants, simply because Judy regarded your attitude and surroundings as a ceremonial specially designed for the re-enactment of her vow.
Being a good friend, Judy was, by consequence, an equally good nurse. The attributes of the two are indeed strangely akin, if the latter be not a natural development of the former. For in sickness, as in sorrow, there are times when a sympathetic silence is a better restorative than more obtrusive remedies. Her master found it so when Judy nursed him for four months at a stretch, sacrificing without a whine the most brilliant summer on record. Cleverer than many a nurse or doctor, she inferred his condition from certain changes of face and expression, unappreciable by their less intuitive faculties. Satisfied by a careful inspection that he was for the moment improving, she would fall back on the pillow with a sigh of satisfaction, till he was restless again, or till the time came—she knew it as well as did the nurse—when he had to be roused for his medicine.
Judy was sorry, I fancy, on her own account when the days of her nursing were ended by her master’s recovery. For she never disguised her real sentiments, whether creditable or the reverse, differing therein from the race of men, at whose feelings and motives one can only hazard a bewildered guess.
Judy taught her master many things: among them how to win the love of her community. Jealousy, it seems, is the family failing. It is idle, she told him, to imagine that a few scraps of half-hearted affection can claim the devotion of a life. Careless, casual attentions may gratify an unexacting dog; they can never win his heart’s love. It is not for pity’s sake, as some will tell you, that the mongrel of the streets is attracted by preference to the vagabond and outcast, who is as lonely as himself; rather, because he feels that here at any rate is a field unoccupied, a mine of sympathy that will royally repay for working.
But let the master of his affection form other and more engrossing ties, and the love that he has given he will infallibly withdraw—not hastily, capriciously, or for the moment, but slowly, deliberately, and for ever—at what cost to himself is happily not ours to fathom.