Landseer's Dogs and Their Stories

by Sarah Tytler

The girl’s health was profiting by the change, combined with the friendliness of her entertainers. She was coming out in her natural colours of innocent trustfulness and happiness. My lady was getting as fond of her as if Lady Margaret had been the countess’s daughter.

Lady Margaret was a perpetual wonder to De Vaux, after she was at ease with him, and he could remark how constantly she was occupied, and how fresh and unflagging was her interest in whatever she was engaged with, whether it was reading a new book, or drawing an original design for the countess’s work, or borrowing a hint from the castle schools for her own schools, or learning from Mrs. Woods the hen-wife, or Forbes the gardener, the last plans for prairie chickens and orchises. She was as ardent as a child, and her ardour knew no decrease. She carried about with her a perennial spring of gladness, which was not impaired by her earnestness and seriousness; for she could be very earnest and serious on grave topics, and she was not an ignorant girl—I mean, not ignorant of the sorrowful, terrible verities of life. She had been brought up in a family that took a deep interest in humanity at large, and were early accustomed to see the world as it is, and not to fear to soil their raiment by coming in contact with the draggled garments of others. These people were possessed with a passion of humanity, the fervent conviction that to the pure all things are pure, while to the strong and the good is appointed, under God’s grace, the task of supporting and bringing back the weak and the bad.

De Vaux believed that Lady Margaret’s mind had been too great for her body—not that she was exceptionally clever, only unboundedly sympathetic, unweariedly helpful. But all the drain of the sympathy and help she afforded, in addition to the delicate health she had suffered, did not suffice to take the girlish lightheartedness and mirth out of her, after it was no longer checked by her first reserve.

He was amused watching her in the park one day, when she thought she was alone with Carlo. She had a bit of stick in her hand, which she was throwing away from her with a great show of empressement, to encourage the dog to follow and pick it up. He could guess she was saying, “I should like to see you run for a bit of fun. Good dog. Oh dear! is there no fun in you?—I know there is very little left in your master. I wonder if you can run, except after a hare. If you only would, I think it might shake you up, and put a little spirit in you. Of course I should not expect you to run like my Buzfuz or Berry’s Reiver; but if you would just try a little bit to please me.”

All that she got Carlo to do was to wag his tail as if he were shaking his head. “I believe the brute thinks it would lower his dignity and mine if he were to run,” said De Vaux to himself, impatiently. He could have found it in his heart to rise up from under the tree where he lay, and go and run for her delectation, and to show her that he could run, though he had not exerted his long legs, save at cricket, since they were short legs, and had done their best at football.

“Do you never whistle, Lord De Vaux?” she asked curiously one day. “My brother Berry is a great whistler, and I miss the music. I know it is very homely music, but none seems to me so blythe or so straight from the heart. I wish girls might whistle if they could. I will confess to you I have tried and failed. Berry said it was the feeblest attempt at the magnificent—like a mouse squeaking.”

He did not answer her that he had no heart-hilarity from which to whistle, and that he had sometimes been moved to envy a ploughboy who went whistling joyously past him, only pausing to take off his cap to the young lord on his walk or ride.

The next time De Vaux was in his room, with the door ajar, and was aware that Lady Margaret was going along the corridor, he whistled with all his might, though it took away his breath, so unwonted was the performance; and involuntarily he fell into a solemn and stately measure, like the “Dead March in Saul.” Still, he responded to her suggestion better than Carlo had done, and he made her laugh—though he was happily unconscious of it—at his doleful strain. She called him to herself “the melancholy Jaques,” and said, though he was a product of the age, a specimen of the kind existed in the time of Queen Elizabeth.

But I don’t know that Lady Margaret thought the worse of him, or liked him the less, because of her private wit at his expense; though he—being, like other young men, stupid where young girls are concerned—might have been at that date hurt and offended, and even imagined that she despised him because she made game of him.

One morning, as an excuse for his elegant idleness—of which he began to feel slightly ashamed, when he was forced to see how busy this delicate little girl was, and generally on the behalf of others—he repeated to her the speech he had addressed to his mother, of his wanting a modern crusade to induce him to put on his armor.