II
He had been staring down into the garden with a gaze half abstracted, half speculative, listening with one ear to Mary, with the other to the stir of the fire, the heavy beat of the clock and the rustlings of Martha the canary.
He watched the snowy expanse of garden, the black gate, the road beyond. A vast wave of pale grey light, the herald of approaching dusk, swept the horizon, the snowy roofs, the streets, and Jeremy felt some contact with the strange air, the mysterious omens that the first snows of the winter spread about the land. He watched as though he were waiting for something to happen.
The creature came up very slowly over the crest of Orange Street. No one else was in sight, no cart, no horse, no weather-beaten wayfarer. At first the dog was only a little black smudge against the snow; then, as he arrived at the Coles' garden-gate, Jeremy could see him very distinctly. He was, it appeared, quite alone; he had been, it was evident, badly beaten by the storm. Intended by nature to be a rough and hairy dog, he now appeared before God and men a shivering battered creature, dripping and wind-tossed, bedraggled and bewildered. And yet, even in that first distant glimpse, Jeremy discerned a fine independence. He was a short stumpy dog, in no way designed for dignified attitudes and patronising superiority; nevertheless, as he now wandered slowly up the street, his nose was in the air and he said to the whole world: “The storm may have done its best to defeat me—it has failed. I am as I was. I ask charity of no man. I know what is due to me.”
It was this that attracted Jeremy; he had himself felt thus after a slippering from his father, or idiotic punishments from the Jampot, and the uninvited consolations of Mary or Helen upon such occasions had been resented with so fierce a bitterness that his reputation for sulkiness had been soundly established with all his circle.
Mary was reading...! “'an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair, knitting, and every now and then leaving off to look at her through a great pair of spec-t-a-c-les spectacles!'”
He touched her arm and whispered:
“I say, Mary, stop a minute—look at that dog down there.”
They both stared down into the garden. The dog had stopped at the gate; it sniffed at the bars, sniffed at the wall beyond, then very slowly but with real dignity continued its way up the road.
“Poor thing,” said Jeremy. “It IS in a mess.” Then to their astonishment the dog turned back and, sauntering down the road again as though it had nothing all day to do but to wander about, and as though it were not wet, shivering and hungry, it once more smelt the gate.