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.
III
“They sin who tell as love can die.”
Southey.
Retrieved by Judy from a life of shame, her master had become a respectable character, and the year afterwards found work as a carpenter in an adjoining town, which compelled him to migrate from our village.
How to dispose of his dog was the question. His lodgings were situated in a crowded street, through which a continuous stream of the vehicles most dreaded by Judy, bicycles included, was passing literally by night and day. Garden he had none—only a small paved court-yard, tenanted in the main by children and cats, Judy’s natural enemies, while the nearest field was two miles off. It was clearly impossible to transfer her to such surroundings. Her future was settled thus. She was left in his old rooms under special charge of the landlady, and every evening when his day’s work was done, wet or fine, winter or summer, her master walked out to console her for the long hours of his absence.