Landseer's Dogs and Their Stories

by Sarah Tytler

FLORA was a species of dog that had a dash of the bloodhound in her. She was a great, somewhat gaunt creature, standing high on the legs, and with a broad sagacious jowl, as different as possible from Carlo’s fine, supercilious, pensive mouth. Flora, like many of her sex—especially those of them whose personal qualities are not their great distinction, and who have not, therefore, been followed and fawned upon by a crowd of fools—was a dog of strong affections. It was for her capacity in this respect, together with her admirable patience and a kind of broad good sense, that she was valued.

In the picture, Flora is sitting waiting, as she so often sat, expectation and longing in every bristling hair, but without a single demonstration of violence or obstreperous appeal. The door is closed, and it is not for her to batter it, as Flora knows right well, neither will she disturb her friends and owners by intruding her wishes on them in barking and yelping. It is not that she has tried the artillery and found it fail; it is that she is too reasonable, too long-suffering, too unexacting and unselfish to practice with the weapons of a smaller dog in every way.

There she is, a great, not over-comely, and somewhat uncouth dog, but loyal and loving to the heart’s core—as considerate as a dog can be—full of a great trust in and an absolute submission to her master, who is her lord and king, and in her master’s absence to his family and representatives. She is so strong that she can afford to dispense with bullying, and is meek in her strength and mild in her power.

She sits to the artist, full of the anxiety and desire which you can read in a thousand signs—by her wide-apart legs, the one foot slightly raised, as on tiptoe—by the head bent in the attitude of intent listening—by the fixed eyes, a little mournful, as deeply-loving eyes are apt to be—by the hair rising on the crest of the back—by the very squat of the haunches, and the utterly flat and flaccid condition of the great tail laid at rest on the floor; for you will please to observe that Flora, though hearkening with all her ears, does not catch the faintest murmur of sound. It is the dog’s instinct and affection—whatever she has for a mind—that is on the rack, and not her nerves or her senses. She remains perfectly still and silent—a monument of watching and hope, which are not undashed with fear and doubt, almost despair; for the dog is capable of very keen and constant attachment, and she has little knowledge wherewith to lighten the apprehensions and solace the pangs of devotion put on its hardest trial. But should Flora’s hope deferred sink in the end into fathomless despondency, the dog will still contain herself. She will be no burden to anybody. She will not add to the grief of others, who have a better right than she has to mourn. She will wear a decent veil of reserve over her anguish. What is she that she should cry out against destiny? She will go about her usual avocations, and even faintly wag her tail and make a formal show of joy at her friends’ advances, or on any occasion of hilarity. There will be no idle baying at the moon, or wild howling in the dead of night, causing the blood of other watchers to curdle, in Flora’s case; she knows how to suffer and be silent, nay, to put the best face on suffering. Only the old dog’s tread will grow heavier and heavier, in proportion to the increasing heaviness of her heart, as she stalks about her business. She will get ever gaunter, without attracting much notice to her spectral condition, until one day she will be found stretched stark and still on some spot, hallowed by association, where her master was wont to whistle her to his side to start for the day’s sport—where he cleaned his gun on their return, and she, after lapping the cold tea which his care provided for her refreshment, sat and looked on, not too tired to enter with interest and admiration into the operation. Or she will be discovered on the mat by the closed door—opening no more—of his room; dying without complaint, and seeking to cause no trouble in her death, as she had tried to give as little as possible in her life.

Flora was brought up in a middle station of life to that of Prince or of Carlo. She was not the next thing to an outcast, neither was she a pampered dog of high degree. She was one of a litter of puppies that arrived at a country parsonage, when there was no great need of such an addition to the family. Neither was she, nor her mother before her, particularly precious for purity or excellence of breed, though they were members of a race of stout serviceable dogs which could be turned to account in various ways, and could be trained to prove of considerable use, both as setters and retrievers, among the turnips and clover, and in the young plantations. But the perpetual curate who was master of the parsonage was an elderly man, and no great sportsman, and one dog was quite enough for him and his friends.

Flora was sentenced to death along with her brothers and sisters, and if it had not been for Master Harry her history would have been of the briefest. He was not the sole hope of the house, like De Vaux; neither had he any honours beyond an honest name to succeed to. But he was the youngest born of his family. He was growing up in a healthy, hardy, happy boyhood, after the elder members had gone out into the world, and were married and settled in households of their own. Master Harry was the last young bird that kept the parent nest tenanted by more than the old pair. He was the Benjamin of their mature years, and therefore it was difficult to deny him a small request—not that Harry’s father and mother did not strive to do their duty by him, in contradicting and correcting him, as they had dealt by their elder children, in order to bring him up in the way he should go. His mother, who was a tall gaunt woman, as gaunt as Flora became in later days, and yet as active and managing as if she had been one of your little boneless, tireless women, and the apple of whose eye Harry was, especially laboured conscientiously to mortify her own inclinations and hold her youngest son in check. Even in the matter of Flora, though she yielded to let the dog be reared, it was always under protest and with reservations—if the dog proved a thoroughly good dog, and was in every respect well conducted from her puppyhood; if Mrs. Bloomfield saw no reason to change her mind at any point of Flora’s career, and cause the dog to be consigned, after all, to the water-hole in the furze quarry, by common consent—the grave of all the criminal, mangy, forsaken dogs in the parish of Rushbrook.

As the best of dogs, like the best of men, are fallible, Flora may be said to have grown up under a sentence of death, and was only spared by a succession of reprieves from the execution of the warrant. Once or twice she made very narrow escapes, and perhaps her rescue was due to more than Harry’s powers of piteous pleading. She had been gradually, by the pertinacious efforts of her master, introduced into the house, instead of living at the stables with her mother, according to Mrs. Bloomfield’s original decree, and so had established a claim of familiarity on the regard of the stern censor herself.

Two marked instances of Flora’s rubbing shoulders with that eminence above the water-hole in the quarry, which may be compared to the Tarpeian Rock, are on record.

Mrs. Bloomfield, who prided herself on her success in her poultry yard, had to listen at one period to various mysterious and doleful accounts from her cook and boy-of-all-work on the inexplicable disappearance of new-laid eggs and newly-fledged chickens. As there were no disreputable characters about, and neither fox nor hawk in the vicinity, and as the innocence of Flora’s mother was as well established as the incorruptibility of the parsonage servants who brought the reports, a grave suspicion attached from the beginning to Flora as the depredator. But in the absence of positive proof, and in the face of Harry’s indignant denial, the dark suggestion only hovered in the light of a suspicion, and did not settle in the form of a conviction in people’s minds.