G. asked coldly if a couple would be enough.
I said quite enough, adding that all the ladies’ and gentlemen’s dogs were coming.
G. said, “Oh, them cur-dogs——”
He then asked, with resignation, the hour of “the meet,” and retired.
At the appointed time he was there, with Rachel and Admiral, and two other couples, his principles having succumbed to the temptation of a hunt in June. The fourteen cur-dogs, ranging from griffons, through fox terriers and spaniels, to a deerhound, were there too, with a suitable number of proprietors, and the hare having been given a fair start, the pack was laid on. The run began badly, as the smallest dogs, believing the time had come to indulge their long-nourished detestation of the hounds, flung themselves upon the blameless Rachel and her party, who, for some distance, conscientiously ran the line, with cur-dogs hanging like earrings from their ears. Neither was the hare immune from difficulties. His course had been plotted to pass that old graveyard at Castle Haven whereof mention has been made, and when he arrived at it he found a funeral in progress. He lifted the drag, and tried to conceal his true character. In vain. When he had passed, and he ventured to become once more a hare, he found that there was not a man of the funeral who was not hanging over the graveyard wall, absorbed in the progress of the chase. This had been arranged to conclude at the kennels, and Candy and I, having been skirters throughout, waited at a suitable point to see the finish. First came the hare, very purple in the face, but still uncaught and undefeated, the paraffined remains of the rabbit still bouncing zealously after him. Then I heard the single, recurring note of a hound, and presently Rachel came into view at a leisurely trot; as she passed me, she smiled apologetically—she had a pretty smile that showed her front teeth—and waved her stern. I understood her to say that it was all rot, but she was going through with it. After Rachel, nothing. I was high on the hill-side above the kennels, and I heard a vague row on the road below, from which I gathered that the game had palled on the rest of the pursuers, and they were going home for tea.
I have loved many dogs. All of them have had “bits of my heart to tear,” and have torn it, but of them all, Candy comes first, and will remain so. “Wee Candy is just fearfully neat!” as her faithful friend, Madge Robertson, used to say, with the whole-hearted enthusiasm of a Highlander. Candy was a very small smooth fox terrier, eldest daughter of Muck, with a forehead as high and as full as that of the Chinese God of Wisdom, and eyes that had a more profound and burning soul in them than I have seen in the eyes of any other living thing. I pass over her nose in silence. Her figure was perfection, and her complexion, snow, with one autumn leaf veiling her right eye.
She danced at tea-parties, whirling in a gauze frock, and an Early Victorian straw bonnet trimmed with rosebuds. In this attire she would walk, or rather trip, elegantly, from end to end of a table, appraising what was thereon, and deciding by which cake to take up her position. To see her say her grace, with her little bonneted head in her paws, on her Mother’s knee, had power to make right-minded persons weep (even as one of my sisters-in-law has been seen to shed tears, when, from the top of an omnibus, she chanced to behold her eldest son, walking in boredom, yet in unflawed goodness, with his nurse).
She was the little dog who set the fashion to all her fellows, and her rules were of iron. Chief among these, was, as St. Paul might have said, to abstain from affectionate licking. This, she held, was underbred, and never done by the best dogs. She had a wounding way of carefully sniffing the face or the fingers, and then turning aside; but on some few and high occasions the ordinance has been infringed. Above and beyond all others of her race she had the power of expressing herself. It was she who organised and headed the Reception Committees that welcomed my return after absence, and I have often been told how, when my return was announced to her, she would assemble herself and her comrades in a position that commanded the point of arrival, and would lead the first public salutations and reproaches for past neglect; and, these suitably and histrionically accomplished, no other little dog could disclose so deep yet decorous an ecstasy, her face hidden in my neck, while she uttered faint and tiny groans of love. Portraits, and, still less, photographs, convey little or nothing to most dogs, but I have seen Candy stiffen up and gaze fixedly at a snapshot of a bull-terrier (very white on a dark background) that chanced to be on a level with her eyes, uttering the while small and bead-like growls.
Her unusual brain power was paid for by overstrung nerves, and any loud and sudden sound had power to terrify her. She nearly died from what would now be called shock, after a few hours spent in the inferno of Glasgow streets, in the course of a journey which she and I made to the Highlands. We were going to the Island of Mull, and there we enjoyed ourselves as, I think, only the guests of Highland hosts and hostesses can. Candy, as was invariably the case, immediately took precedence of all other beings.
“Jeanie,” said the Laird to his sister, “you’ve let the fire out.”