I have mentioned Dick’s love of sport. Wallace had the same love to a marked extent; indeed, it was the one temptation which proved irresistible, and seduced him once and again from his adherence to his master. It was not that the dog openly resisted or defied orders, but that he showed craft in snatching an opportunity to evade them, in slipping off unperceived, and conducting his hunts in an independent style in the preserves and on the great moor at hand—coming home with a dogged fidelity, and yet with the self-convicted air of a culprit, after his lust for the pursuit of prey was satisfied, to the punishment which he was perfectly aware remained in store for him. Of course, for a dog like Wallace to roam abroad unattended, on such an errand, was to expose both him and his master to certain penalties, and every effort was made, for the dog’s own sake as well as for his master’s credit, to break him of so dangerous a propensity. The attempt was not altogether successful. The ruling passion was so strong in Wallace that it rivalled even his conception of duty. But the consequences of his escapades always fell short of the condign punishment at the hands of incensed proprietors which his master dreaded for the dog, and repentance, forgiveness, amendment followed till the next outbreak.
These outbreaks would probably have decreased in number and died out as Wallace’s spirit of enterprise abated with his advancing age;[B] but I am sorry to say Dick proved an artful decoy and subtle tempter. The two dogs did not venture on a forbidden expedition under the very eye of their master; but the moment his back was turned to go from home, I have been assured that the certainty and celerity with which the conspirators detected his absence was something marvellous. Wallace and Dick set off like the wind—or at least as like the wind as the old dog’s lagging limbs would allow—to the nefarious indulgence of their appetite. Nothing short of chaining up Wallace before his master left could prevent the catastrophe. No efforts of his young mistress—of whom, at the same time, he was exceedingly fond, and whose escort and protector he was generally proud to be—were of the least avail to detain him; she has told me how she would run out to intercept the dogs on the first hint of their decamping, and try to hold them back by main force, but Wallace would wrest himself from her grasp, and trot after Dick, already scampering away in the distance.
Sometimes these hunts lasted as long as three or four days. Naturally, the dogs were unwilling to come back to the disgrace which awaited them, and they could subsist in the meantime on the spoil which they caught and slew. The neighbourhood of the great wide moor and fragment of forest—a broad brown and dark green tract stretching, with a suggestion of wonder and mystery, along the whole expanse of cultivated country—rendered it specially difficult to discover the direction the dogs had taken, running as the birds flew, and making nothing of hedges, ditches, and “dykes” in their progress, after they were fairly out of sight. It was the solving of a puzzle to pursue and apprehend them. Sometimes a wayfarer passed and recognised them, and brought the tidings of their whereabouts to “the farm town.” Sometimes the dogs’ master, when he went to the weekly market in the quaint town I have described, received information from a neighbour which enabled him to track the fugitives. Oftenest they returned of their own accord, spent and sated, brought back by some compulsion of law, some tie of dependence and affection, which was in the end too powerful for their desire to rove, so that they could not become wild dogs again, or desert their aggrieved human friends for a permanence.
Knowing the district as I do, I have great sympathy with Wallace and Dick. Had I possessed Wallace’s capacity of endurance, or Dick’s youthful fleetness of foot and length of wind—had I shared their relish for hares and rabbits, torn limb from limb, and their capacity of thriving on the same—I too should have liked to wander for days among these fresh fields, with their yellowing corn or rich pasture, on which sturdy bullocks or skittish colts were having a pleasant time. I could have dived with good-will into these tree-girdled quarries, and roamed along these high roads, ample enough for two coaches-and-six to drive abreast, and bordered with bands of yellow lady’s bedstraw and azure veronica, and later in the season by miniature forests of nodding harebells; or down these rough by-roads, with their patches of yellow broom and trailing garlands of brambles, to the outlying heather on the verge of the moor, about which great humble bees were always humming. My heart would have hankered, like theirs, for that grand, gaunt old moor of Mendrummond—or, as it is called in local parlance, “Munrummon”—with its pale liverwort and white grass of Parnassus, its bronze stemmed firs and stunted oaks, its lone green glades. One can still feel that here, as among the mountains of old Scotland, there linger vestiges of a virgin world.
As a human being and not a dog, I am not at all clear that I should have returned so faithfully to cutting reproaches and a good beating as Wallace and Dick had the courage to do.
The dogs used to display judiciousness in selecting the cover of night for their reappearance, and they sometimes brought home a mutilated hare or rabbit, as if it were intended for a propitiation. But Wallace at least reported himself, in full view of the result, with manly straightforwardness and resignation. He was accustomed to go beneath his master’s window, and by a deep prolonged “bow-f-f” announce that there he was ready to submit to whatever his master imposed on him.
I regret to own that Dick, on the contrary, stole round the house on tiptoe, and, if he found an open window on the ground floor, crept in and hid himself beneath a convenient sofa or bed, in a short-sighted, childish notion that he might evade the righteous sentence he had provoked.
On the last secret hunt in which the dog-friends engaged, Wallace was so enfeebled by age that the exertion exhausted the little strength left to him, and he was unable to return home. Dick had to face the wrath of his master alone, while he was unable to account for his missing comrade.
Happily the mastiff reached a neighbouring farm-house, where he was recognised—for he was a well-known and valued dog—and where he was hospitably entertained, till word could be sent to his master, who despatched a cart for the disabled sportsman. But fancy the mortification of poor Wallace, once so invulnerable at every point, so renowned a warrior and hunter, to be brought home like a dead donkey, stretched at the bottom of a cart!
Wallace survived his last hunt some time, but the evidence of the decay of his powers became always more unmistakeable. He was a mere bony wreck of what he had been. He subsisted principally on great “diets” of milk freely lavished on him to prolong his days. At last he fell into a habit of stealing away and secreting himself in some solitary spot of the garden or grounds, an ominous inclination which superstitious servants called “looking for his grave,” and that was in reality prompted by the curious pathetic instinct which causes every stricken animal to draw away from the herd, and hide itself from its kind.