“Hold your tongue, Harry, and don’t contradict your mother.”
Harry was cut short in his argument, and submitted more unresistingly than usual.
“I cannot have the dog about the place for another night,” went on Mrs. Bloomfield, in a high authoritative key. “Hoppus,” naming the gardener, “will take her away quietly, and put an end to her without any unnecessary pain. It must be done, Harry; there is no help for it, and you must bear it like a man. You know I have often told you, when you would insist on keeping pets, that you must be prepared for their coming to grief, and causing you to suffer in your turn.”
“I don’t mind my own sufferings,” muttered Harry indignantly; “but I’ll tell you what, mother, if Flo is to be killed, I—I’ll kill her myself,” he said, with quivering lips and a husky voice, but making a manful fight to keep down his feelings. “I have a right to be let do it. Nobody will care so much that she shall not suffer as I will. And Flo will do anything for me. She will even jump over the quarry when I tell her, and not believe her senses that it can hurt her, because it is I who bid her do it,” he ended, unable to restrain a sob.
Mrs. Bloomfield hesitated, while she was conscious of some troublesome moisture in her eyes. It was true what Harry urged, that he had a right—and she was the last woman to deny a right, if he claimed it—to save Flora from pain, and make her death as inconceivable to her to the last moment as was possible. But could she condemn her boy to such a task? She would consult his father.
The curate, like his wife, shrank from making Harry his dog’s executioner. Harry stood firm. The matter was argued, and the fulfilment of the sentence delayed, till at last it was commuted to a sound whipping, and that Harry consented to relegate to the hands of the gardener. So faithfully did Hoppus discharge his mission, and so susceptible was Flora, from these early days, to reason—whether it was conveyed in kind careful instruction or wholesome chastisement—that from that hour she respected the poultry yard, and always looked another way when she had to pass a nest, or when a chicken crossed her path. So magnanimous did she become in her age, that she has been known to allow a daring young cock, or stolid middle-aged hen, to advance and peck at the bone beside which she lay reposing.
The next perilous crisis through which Flora passed occurred later in time, and in Harry’s absence from home—which proved, nevertheless, a fortunate circumstance. Flora was grown, and had her first litter of puppies, which were taken from her and destroyed. Ill, sad—missing Harry as well as her puppies—the ordinarily quiet, well-behaved dog fretted herself into a very frenzy of destructiveness, under the influence of which she roamed in secret all over the house, gratifying her gnawing and tearing propensities. She got possession of a visitor’s ermine boa, and rent it in fragments. She was found ensconced in a spare bedroom, and established in the bed, the Marseilles quilt of which she had chewed till it was riddled with holes. Finally, she managed to secure a bandbox, containing two maid-servants’ Sunday bonnets, and made short work with the pink ribbons and the artificial flowers.
Mrs. Bloomfield replaced the wholesale wreck; but she could stand such conduct no longer, though she was too well-informed a woman to fall into a panic, under the impression that the dog was mad. In reference to the right in Flora stringently asserted by Harry when he was a mere boy, she could not—now that her son was a big lad—do more than order the dog to be tied up, while she waited word from Harry in answer to her inquiry as to how his protegée was to be disposed of. It happened to be the end of the week, when Harry frequently returned home from his public school to remain over the Sunday. And it had been noticed before that the dog was cognizant of these stated visits, and looked eagerly out for the arrival of her master.
In the season allowed to Flora for cooling down and contrition, while she had the knowledge forced upon her that she could no longer rush to greet Harry with an open face and a clear conscience, but must be sought out by the lad, smarting under a fellow-feeling with her disgrace, Flora became so overpowered by the consequences of her previous self-indulgence of restless grief and longing, that she cast to the winds the silent endurance which had been from her youth a marked feature in the big, brave dog’s character. She refused to eat and sleep, and expressed her poignant regret and repentance, in a mode most unlike herself, by filling the air with her howls and moans.
At the end of two days and nights Flora had howled herself perfectly hoarse, until Mrs. Bloomfield’s—not to say the curate’s—ears and hearts ached with the dog’s husky distress. In sheer self-defence they sent instructions to loose her, but to detain her a prisoner on parole, banished from their presence.