Palestrina says: "Oh dear, what shall we do? Down-Jock! down, sir! Oh, he has spoilt my dress! Good doggie, mustn't go to church! Go home! go home! Oh, Jock, do get down!—Look, he is following us still, and the church door is always open; he is sure to come in in the middle of the service, and trot up to us in our pew. Do you think Thomas would mind if I were to look as if he didn't belong to us?"
Jock flies back with an old bone in his mouth and deposits it at Palestrina's feet, dares her to touch it, and makes flying snatches at her shoes when she kicks the treasure aside.
"I must take him back," says Palestrina. "It will make me late of course, but I must go and shut him up."
"He won't follow you," I say. "He is quite determined to go to church."
Palestrina lifts the heavy beast in her arms, and in an exuberance of joy Down-Jock makes a doormat of her dress, and rubs his paws affectionately against it and licks her hand.
Of course he escapes presently and runs after us; that is his best and most killing joke. Inwardly one feels he is in a state of hardly-suppressed laughter as he tears down the road again, barking with glee. And then he gets a sober fit, walks demurely in front of us in the narrow field-path, changes his mind suddenly about going to church, stops dead short, and trips us up; thinks after all he ought to go to the morning service as an example to the servants; toddles on again, and stops to say (with the air of extreme old age again assumed) that, after all, he is not up to the exertion, and would have to sit down at the Psalms, so perhaps it really would be better to stay quietly at home. Another stop. A rapid toilet performed by scratching his head with his hind-leg, "just in case I meet any one coming out of church whom I know;" and then Down-Jock meets a boy friend strolling off to the fields, and running up to him, says: "One must conform to conventionalities, but between you and me I never had the remotest intention of going to church."
Down-Jock, in his moments of most restless activity, always reminds me of a servant of ours who has occasional fits of the most intense energy. It begins quite early in the morning, when she gets up some hours before her usual time, and gives a sort of surprise party to the rest of the household. These parties take place two or three times a year, and we do not get over them for weeks afterwards. Every room in the house is visited in turn, and delinquencies of a twelvemonth are laid bare. During the morning cupboards are turned out in a magisterial sort of way, and dusty corners are triumphantly displayed. The most cherished rubbish is freely consigned to the waste-paper baskets, and collections of all sorts are contemptuously swept away. We hastily gather up books and precious oddments, and hurry off with them to my den, where we take refuge till the whirlwind is past. Curtains and tablecloths are shaken with a sort of vindictive energy at the back-door; all windows are flung open, and rugs are rolled up, making a sort of obstacle race in every passage and room. Down-Jock, who never recognizes a superior in any one, is the only member of the party who is not rendered an abject coward. He unrolls rugs, and runs away with dusters, and snaps at the heels of the housemaid in a way that provokes one's wonder at his temerity. My sister and I, having locked away our most cherished possessions, generally contrive to be out of the house as much as possible on one of these tempestuous days. And following the line of reasoning, not of the highest order, which suggests that if one cannot be happy one had better try and be good, Palestrina always visits her old women at the workhouse on these days.
"I wish," she said to me, "that you would walk into the village and meet me on my way home. I don't think anybody is coming up to see you this afternoon, and the house is so uncomfortable when Janet is in one of her whirlwind moods. Come as far as the corner, and go in and sit down at old Pettifer's if you get tired."
"Shadrach Pettifer tells me," I said, "that his affection for you is based on the fact that you are so like his poor old mother. Perhaps while I am waiting at his cottage he may give me further interesting facts about you."
Shadey is an old man with a bent back and curious bright eyes that gleam under a heavy thatch of eyebrow. His wife is the very thinnest old woman that I have ever seen; her cheeks have fallen in and are so very wrinkled that they always remind me of a toy balloon that a child has pricked with a pin. She is always ill and never complaining. Any expression of sympathy seems foreign to her comprehension, and the "Poor thing!" or "I am so sorry," so eagerly accepted by more fortunate folk, is received by her with a certain air of independence. Last winter Mrs. Pettifer was dangerously ill with internal gout, but expressions of condolence were always met with the rather curious reply, "Well, you see, sir, we must have something to bring us to our end." There is a whole world of philosophy in this.