Landseer's Dogs and Their Stories

by Sarah Tytler

Roy and Reine’s master was a Cavalier, a man in the prime of life, who had seen the loss of a good many things he valued, before the civil war deprived him at last of his already dilapidated old court, and sent him adrift to wander in disguise here and there, and lie in hiding till better days came round, and the King should enjoy his own again. He was a Master Neville of the Alders, himself a scion, and his estate a fragment, of what had been, so far back as the Wars of the Roses, the mighty Neville family, with their vast domains.

When peace yet prevailed in England, and the storm was only brewing in the sky, Master Neville went to court and ruffled it with the best. He was then a young man, and made a picturesque figure in his slashed velvet satin doublet, his long Spanish leather boots, his falling collar, and just such a hat and feather as is to be seen in the picture, shading one of those swarthy oval faces which the peaked beard of the time became, while his dark hair was suffered to grow, and was tied by a ribbon—such as Roy and Reine are represented wearing—till it hung in one long scented curl down his back. He was by no means so destitute of resources as Roy and Reine were, apart from their beauty and their winning ways. He was a bold, dashing, clever enough young fellow, rather accomplished for his day. He could not compose a madrigal like Lovelace, but he could sing it after it was composed. He could fence, dance, fight, even speak when graceful fluent oratory was all that was called for. He could bandy a jest with a court wit, and manage a pageant with a master of the ceremonies.

In those days Master Neville married a court beauty in white satin and pearls, with her yellow hair crisped in curls all round her pink and white face, and brought her down to the Alders. The two did not tarry long there with all their charms and accomplishments; the simplicity and quiet of the country were too much for them, and they were attracted back without fail to London, with its splendid court and ceaseless stir, its water-parties and masks, cabals and intrigues, in which the husband and wife played their parts in such company as that of arrogant, magnificent Buckingham, and fair, frivolous Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle.

But such company was neither safe nor economical for a mere aspiring squire and his sympathetic madam. Many a fine oak and beech at the Alders, and even some of its massive silver plate, paid for the master and mistress’s addiction to town living with its extravagance.

At last there was an enforced retreat to the court, after it had been stripped and impoverished of its most prized treasures, when the nakedness of the land was a constant eye-sore and reproach to its reluctantly returned owners. They had never cultivated the graces of patience and contentment, and they had no gift which could lighten the dreary monotony of what threatened to be a long banishment from their paradise. They might have drifted fast into the evil refuge of bandying reproaches and recriminations, and quarrelling away the dragging hours, as Roy and Reine did not quarrel over their bits of sugar biscuit—only madam was about as pretty, silly, and easily affectionate as the little dogs, with no more exasperating practices of fretting and scolding than they gave way to at times; so that Master Neville, who remained perfectly conscious that he was a being more fully armed and highly endowed, could not find it in his heart to blame her severely, or to wreak on her a revenge for his own misdoings.

Doubtless he had been a little disappointed in her. In the days of his young love, when he had extolled her yellow hair and pink and white cheeks, he could hardly have contemplated mating himself to an intellectual baby, who was never to grow any older—rather she was to him then an embryo goddess, who was shortly to find her wisdom and power. But he had enough justice to admit that the disappointment was not her fault, and he took compensation in a certain amusement which he found in his wife’s simplicity, as in that of Roy and Reine, combined as it was with a due regard for him, and as much admiration and reverence for his superior faculties as really narrow natures are capable of; for be it remembered that essentially narrow natures, which are circumscribed both morally and intellectually, can only compass a languid and limited amount of admiration and reverence.

Master Neville was fairly kind and indulgent to his wife, though men would have said that she had not been of the least service to him—unless it be service to foster conceit, abet prodigality, and raise an idle laugh. But men take a good deal upon them when they place restrictions on the services of any creature that God has made, though man may have done his best to mar it, while out of evil God brings forth good. It might be that the protecting impulse which Madam Neville drew forth in her husband preserved in him the seed of better things, and kept him from being a harder and worse man than he became.

Then a strain of human sadness—all the more ineffable that it sounded strangely foreign to the poor genteel comedy—entered into it. Madam Neville’s children, that she had borne and spoiled in sheer weakness, died one after another. Their mother, who would have been quickly consoled—like a child to whom another toy is substituted for that which has been removed—only that she was soon spent by a little watching and weeping, fell into a rapid consumption before she could throw off her grief, and followed her children.

The world looked on as at the crushing of a butterfly, or the introducing of a tragic pathos into the soulless life of a fairy. But there was a soul in this stunted human fairy, while a butterfly was the ancients’ emblem of immortality; so good Master Arundel comforted himself, as he strove with all his might to introduce a supernatural element which should give a new aspect to the apparently pitiless destruction, and cause it to be, after all, a miracle of divine mercy.