“Well, after that, my child,” said the colonel, on her stopping for the moment, overcome with emotion, “what happened next?”
“He made a dash at the cabin table and jumped up on it, and then the poor fellow growled savagely at some one outside. Then—then before I could hold him back he made a most desperate spring and sprung right up through the glass roof on the top of the sky—skylight, and he must have cut himself very very much. Poor, poor doggie! And now you say my poor Ivan is dead, and that I shall never see the dear good faithful creature again. Oh, my father!”
At this point the young girl again broke down.
Nor were her tears a mere passing tribute of grief. For, though dead, Ivan is not forgotten, like some people, the remembrance of whom is as evanescent as the scent of the flowers that hypocritical mourners may ostentatiously scatter upon their graves; his little mistress, little no longer, preserving his memory yet green in her heart of hearts, close to which she wears always a small locket containing likenesses of her father and mother, together with a miniature of Ivan—her father’s preserver—with a tiny lock added from the brave dog’s curly black coat.
Some ultra-sanctimonious persons may feel inclined to cavil with this association on Elsie’s part of “immortal beings,” as they would style her parents, and the recollection she cherishes of a “dead brute,” because, forsooth, they hold that her four-footed favourite had no soul; but were these gentry to broach the subject before her, being a somewhat outspoken young lady from her foreign bringing up, which puts her beyond the pale of boarding-school punctiliousness, she would probably urge that she estimated poor Ivan’s sagacious instinct combined with his courage and noble self-sacrifice, at a far higher level than the paltry apology for a soul that passes current for the genuine article with matter-of-fact religionists of the stamp of her questioner.
But Elsie was “little Elsie” still, at the time of which I am speaking, and too young, perhaps, for such thoughts to occur to her mind, which at the moment was too full of her loss.
The cheering that had followed the last tussle of our men with the black mutineers had now ceased, and all these things happening, you must understand, much more rapidly than I can talk or attempt to chronicle them, the skipper, with Mr Fosset and Garry O’Neil, came hurriedly up on the poop.
Both expressed their unbounded delight at seeing the child was safe and in the care of her father.
Sure, an’ what’s the little colleen cryin’ for? eagerly inquired Garry, his smoke-begrimed face, which bore ample evidence of the desperate struggle in which he had been so gallantly engaged, wearing a look of deep commiseration as he gazed from her father to me, and then again at her. “Faith, I hope she’s not been hurt or frightened?”
“No, thank God!” replied the colonel huskily. “Grieving for her poor dog Ivan, who—”