"Is it far?"
"Nowt's far to your kind!" said the man, flicking his whip. "An' ye'll meet a bobby or so on the road!"
On he went, and Helmsley without further parley resumed his tramp. Presently, reaching the clump of trees he had seen in the distance, he moved into their refreshing shade. They were broad-branched elms, luxuriantly full of foliage, and the avenue they formed extended for about a quarter of a mile. Cool dells and dingles of mossy green sloped down on one side of the road, breaking into what are sometimes called "coombs" running precipitously towards the sea-coast, and slackening his pace a little he paused, looking through a tangle of shrubs and bracken at the pale suggestion of a glimmer of blue which he realised was the shining of the sunlit ocean. While he thus stood, he fancied he heard a little plaintive whine as of an animal in pain. He listened attentively. The sound was repeated, and, descending the shelving bank a few steps he sought to discover the whereabouts of this piteous cry for help. All at once he spied two bright sparkling eyes and a small silvery grey head perking up at him through the leaves,—the head of a tiny Yorkshire "toy" terrier. It looked at him with eloquent anxiety, and as he approached it, it made an effort to move, but fell back again with a faint moan. Gently he picked it up,—it was a rare and beautiful little creature, but one of its silky forepaws had evidently been caught in some trap, for it was badly mangled and bleeding. Round its neck was a small golden collar, something like a lady's bracelet, bearing the inscription: "I am Charlie. Take care of me!" There was no owner's name or address, and the entreaty "Take care of me!" had certainly not been complied with, or so valuable a pet would not have been left wounded on the highroad. While Helmsley was examining it, it ceased whining, and gently licked his hand. Seeing a trickling stream of water making its way through the moss and ferns close by, he bathed the little dog's wounded paw carefully and tied it up with a strip of material torn from his own coat sleeve.
"So you want to be taken care of, do you, Charlie!" he said, patting the tiny head. "That's what a good many of us want, when we feel hurt and broken by the hard ways of the world!" Charlie blinked a dark eye, cocked a small soft ear, and ventured on another caress of the kind human hand with his warm little tongue. "Well, I won't leave you to starve in the woods, or trust you to the tender mercies of the police,—you shall come along with me! And if I see any advertisement of your loss I'll perhaps take you back to your owner. But in the meantime we'll stay together."
Charlie evidently agreed to this proposition, for when Helmsley tucked him cosily under his arm, he settled down comfortably as though well accustomed to the position. He was certainly nothing of a weight to carry, and his new owner was conscious of a certain pleasure in feeling the warm, silky little body nestling against his breast. He was not quite alone any more,—this little creature was a companion,—a something to talk to, to caress and to protect. He ascended the bank, and regaining the highroad resumed his vagrant way. Noon was now at the full, and the sun's heat seemed to create a silence that was both oppressive and stifling. He walked slowly, and began to feel that perhaps after all he had miscalculated his staying powers, and that the burden of old age would, in the end, take vengeance upon him for running risks of fatigue and exhaustion which, in his case, were wholly unnecessary.
"Yet if I were really poor," he argued with himself, "if I were in very truth a tramp, I should have to do exactly what I am doing now. If one man can stand 'life on the road,' so can another."
And he would not allow his mind to dwell on the fact that a temperament which has become accustomed to every kind of comfort and luxury is seldom fitted to endure privation. On he jogged steadily, and by and by began to be entertained by his own thoughts as pleasantly as a poet or romancist is entertained by the fancies which come and go in the brain with all the vividness of dramatic reality. Yet always he found himself harking back to what he sometimes called the "incurability" of life. Over and over again he asked himself the old eternal question: Why so much Product to end in Waste? Why are thousands of millions of worlds, swarming with life-organisms, created to revolve in space, if there is no other fate for them but final destruction?
"There must be an Afterwards!" he said. "Otherwise Creation would not only be a senseless joke, but a wicked one! Nay, it would almost be a crime. To cause creatures to be born into existence without their own consent, merely to destroy them utterly in a few years and make the fact of their having lived purposeless, would be worse than the dreams of madmen. For what is the use of bringing human creatures into the world to suffer pain, sickness, and sorrow, if mere life-torture is all we can give them, and death is the only end?"
Here his meditations were broken in upon by the sound of a horse's hoofs trotting briskly behind him, and pausing, he saw a neat little cart and pony coming along, driven by a buxom-looking woman with a brown sun-hat tied on in the old-fashioned manner under her chin.
"Would ye like a lift?" she asked. "It's mighty warm walkin'."