The power of the dog

Front matter

i;'P';i:i Pliii'iiiPaaSP!

Class T^Z

BookJRlSI^

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I.— Man and Wipe 7

II.— Painter, not Artist, 27

Chapter I. Man And Wife

SUNNY June afternoon in an ideal English garden. It was not too hot for a chorus of birds to be singing their hearts out to the murmurous accompaniment of an orchestra of humming insects. A sky like that of Italy itself, only that the depths of tender blue seemed nearer. The thick foliage of the surrounding trees was at that exquisite moment, between late spring and full summer, before the thousand delicate shades have become merged into one prevailing tone of luxuriant verdure.

Allaronde was quite a modern house, for all its picturesqueness. But Nature had planted the garden and had made it beautiful for her own pleasure, generations before a successful man had chosen the copse for a building site. Near the house there were close-

trimmed lawns and carpet bedding. There were also 7

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long borders gay with poppies, columbines, tall iris, and countless other flowers. The rose banks were glorious with gold, and crimson, and shell-pink blossoms. Tall syringas, massed with fast-falling bloom, stood up ivory -pale, Ailing the air with dreamy fragrance.

Only a little distance beyond, and Nature reasserted herself in a bosky woodland half-paved with pineneedles. There the bracken that had newly uncurled its tight brown whorls made an incomparable background for the graceful foxgloves, all the statelier for the shade. The syringa itself was not sweeter than the honeysuckles flinging their luxuriant masses round the tree- trunks. That there are many gardens such as this in England is enough to keep us patriotic. They have an appealing charm that is peculiarly their own, and which is unique.

It did not much matter now how Arthur Farrant’s grandfather had become wealthy enough to leave his son a large fortune. Except quite in the country, where the county still holds an enfeebled sway, questions of this kind are not asked as they once were. Two generations of education and idleness left him a satisfactory example of an English gentleman. In the rapid present day it is a long time.

His mother had died when he was born ; but she had been a lady and a beauty, and had left him an

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inheritance of many good qualities. Shortly afterward his father died also.

At twenty-four Arthur Farrant seemed sufficiently enviable. Rich, young, and handsome, he still lived in Allaronde, his father’s house, where, within fourteen miles of the London of which in his own way he was fond, he might live the country life he liked best. He planned for the coming years as we all do till fate intervenes to show us we are powerless.

Three years later he met Philippa Fane. His was one of those natures which are slow to move, but the quiet yet intense passion for this woman speedily altered the whole course of his life. Tired of poverty, Philippa accepted him, finding a certain relief in his very tranquillity from her own stormy emotions. She was judged hardly by the men she had hurt and the women she had outrivalled. That she should love Arthur Farrant those who knew her best pronounced to be impossible. It was said pretty openly that she would throw him over in a moment if better things offered.

She soon had a chance of proving that she was not quite what people thought her. A few weeks before the marriage an accident in the hunting-field condemned the active man of movement to be an invalid for the rest of his daj^s. He might live for years, but he would never stand again.

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Philippa was not heartless, though she did not love him. When the news came, with a few pencilled lines, in which the heart-break showed through the words he strove to make resigned, a new sensation made her imagine that the love, the reality of which she had doubted, had come to her. She too was an orphan, eating- the bitter bread of dependence on uncongenial relations, in spite of her long line of ancestors, her magnificent figure, her dark eyes, her brilliant intellect.

She asked no counsel in her emergency ; there was no wise voice to whisper to her that in obeying a noble-seeming impulse she might be ruining two lives. She acted after reflection that was almost momentary. She hastened to the side of the man who, for the first time in his careless days, was praying blindly for help, and, with a sense of exaltation and triumph that surprised herself, she married him.

He was slow to consent to this sacrifice of her youth, but she argued that she was alone and hated the life she led, and, in the belief that he would not be with her long to hamper her, he yielded to the temptation. He was blamed severely enough, but he had never particularly troubled himself as to the opinion of Society. It was probably one of the reasons why he had been happy. There is nothing more blighting than to take as a watchword for conduct

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the question, “What will the world think?” It is so apt to arrive at entirely erroneous conclusions.

They had not been altogether unhappy through the five years the curious union had lasted. Philippa had born a brave face to the world. If she was disappointed, disillusioned, she did not show it. If the Arthur who seemed almost content with his helplessness was different from the pale bridegroom of their solemn wedding, she did not repine. Sometimes she almost doubted if the placid, uncomplaining invalid really loved her very deeply, after all. He understood her so little, was so absorbed in pursuits of his own, pursuits that seemed in her eyes meanly trivial.

She did not love him, or, with love’s quick intuition, she would have understood that beneath his outward cheerfulness there were terrible moments. To watch her ride away down the avenue, and to think that he should never again know the delights of a run across country on a soft morning when the scent lay thick ; to hear the guns disturbing the crisp October stillness, and to stifle his longing for the sports in which he had once excelled, — all this was a torture that he bore with a silence that had its heroism. She did her duty. Her absences from home, though frequent, were brief, and she was loyal absent as well as present. Of the many who had flirted

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with Philippa Fane, not one could boast the slightest favor from the cold, stately Mrs. Farrant.

On the whole, Arthur was not unhappy. There were alleviations. To-day his wheeled couch was drawn under a great cedar, and he was propped up on his pillows, a cigar in his mouth, and in his hands a pack of cards. A thoroughbred fox-terrier lay stretched beside him on the grass, waking from time to time to demand a readily granted caress from bis master. Arthur Farrant was very fond of cards. They whiled away some of his dullest hours, and when he had no friend at hand he could amuse himself with patience problems. The strongly built young man, with his big, idle, white hands, his splendid frame, was powerless, as dependent on his servant as an infant.

There was pathos in the picture, perhaps all the more that there was no repining, no ill temper, in the handsome face. Yet Philippa had noted it disdainfully. Smoke in this flower-scented air ! Cards when the pageant of summer was moving slowly past with every rustle of the fresh leaves, with every sleepy note of the cooing wood-pigeons! Why did Arthur never read, never think, never seem troubled by the doubts and perplexities that haunted her?

She did not see how miserable he would have been had he done so, or realize how unbearable he might

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have made her existence. She only wanted from him the sort of intellectual sympathy he could not give, and which it was infinitely more wholesome for her to be denied.

• He had not noticed that she was passing down a path toward the wood that was her favorite walk, but she had stood watching him unseen, and had noted a little incident that came back to her with curious clearness afterward.

One of the cards slipped down on the ground. Ordinarily she would have come forward and picked it up, bat to-day she was in one of her moods of impatience with her husband. At times she Vv^as indignant with his very resignation. “ Hi ! Masher, fetch it, good boy,” she heard him say cheerfully. The little dog trotted off obediently; but when be jumped upon his master’s lap, the queen of hearts was a mangled scrap of cardboard. Masher’s sudden spring sent the rest of the pack flying. The average man would have been put out, but not so Arthur Farrant. He began placidly to play with the malefactor, and to put him through some of the many tricks he had taught him.

Philippa hurried away into the wood with a sense of distaste and weariness she did not even try to repress. Her inner life was not shared by any confidential friend. It was absolutely her own, and

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latterly she had fostered the dangerous habit of perpetual self-questioning and analysis. It is generally a bad sign when we love no company so well as our own. Philippa Farrant, in her wealth, her stately beauty, and her mental solitude, stood on the edge of an abyss of danger. She had no special interests, no warm affections, to compete with the self with which she was forever taking counsel.

There were those who praised Mrs. Farrant as a model wife ; her most determined detractor could not accuse her of any failure in her duty to her husband. There were occasional moments when conscience told another and a variant story. She knew that it was the letter, not the spirit of the law that she mechanically fulfilled. She looked back as to a stranger at the Philippa Fane who for a moment had dreamt of a life of self-oblation and noble devotion to the man who loved her. She was reluctantly conscious that the better impulses of her girlhood came but seldom now. She gave money when she was asked ; never otherwise. She had no sympathy with, no knowledge of, the actual poor close at hand, although she had a rather warm theoretical pity for suffering humanity. She would not have hurt her horses or the splendid tawny collie following her leisurely along the pine-scented path; yet there were times when, by a careless word, she made her husband wince

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cruelly, and as he never betrayed his pain, she scorned him secretly for bluntness of perception. His character was beyond her power to read.

On this June afternoon she said to herself fretfully that fate had been unjust. She had not tasted the best of life. Of what use were her youth, her beauty, her talents? If she could have painted, or written, or made music, and become famous, she would have been happy, she imagined. She had that true feeling for, and comprehension of, art in a multitude of forms, combined, as it occasionally is, with an odd executive ineptitude. She, who could stand before a Raphael and experience such sensations of delight as fall to the lot of very few, could not make a simple sketch. She had even tried to write verses, and failed in a manner that made her hot to recall it ; though why all the world should use prentice hands for the most difficult of the arts is a mystery. She thought she loved literature, yet, unconfessedly, found her chief delight with its Amiels and Marie Bashkirtseffs. She had not much sense of humor, and one of the things that most frequently provoked her with Arthur was his appreciation of little jokes. To stately Philippa genuine fun was a thing well-nigh abhorrent. The subtleties of cynical wit rejoiced her ; for honest laughter she cared little.

She now flung herself down in a naturally easy

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and graceful attitude, upon the short, thymy grass growing in an open glade, and gave herself up to unprofitable dreaming. She wanted to be free, free — that, she supposed, was really the truth and conclusion of the whole matter. It is strange to note the moral effect of a euphonious sentence. Even alone with her heart, Philippa Farrant would not have cared to own that she wished her husband dead. Yet she could desire to be free, well knowing the one way by which that freedom could be decorously accomplished.

Her meditations were one long tissue of discontent. Everything was flat, stale, and unprofitable. The wood-pigeons cooing sleepily, the murmuring insects, these found deep delight in the warm summer-time. Why could she not re-awaken that joy in mere life that had overwhelmed her in the days of her early youth? She would not now remember that those exquisite moments had been set like watersprings in a desert of duU days. Mere freedom looked so enticing in retrospect that she forgot the rest. As she sat upon the short, velvety turf, with a long spray of honeysuckle in her hand, she might have been an embodiment of June herself. The plain, soft muslin dress showed the curves of her round, graceful figure; the great white hat shaded cheeks flushed like the rich roses she was wearing.

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Hers was no longer the charm of extreme youth, but that more dangerous seduction of ripe maturity.

All at once a voice, louder 'and shriller than the wood-pigeons’, startled the lazy air. A thin, high, childish treble sounded clearly from the narrow lane that ran below the palings of Allaronde. Children passed that way often enough, and sometimes sang with a distressing Middlesex accent, but never before had the birds been frightened by the words that hush the Provengal babies to sleep :

Ma mie, ma mignonne. ”

The refrain was repeated two or three times with such increased emphasis that it roused Philippa to curiosity. There was a hole in the thick screen of trees through which she could peep.

A young man and a fantastically dressed little girl were walking along the white, dusty road. He was tall and slight, with a pale face and dark, short, pointed beard, and though dressed rather carelessly in a shabby light suit, his ease and grace of bearing gave him distinction. There was a touch of foreignness apparent even more in the child, who skipped and danced along as if her slim form had no weight in it at all. The man looked tired and abstracted.

At last the singer stopped abruptly. “ Carry me,

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papa. I’m tired. And please listen to my new song.” In another moment the yellow frock was whirled upon a strong shoulder, and two little slender arms were tightly clasped round the father’s neck. Then again rose the song, more triumphantly than ever :

Ma mie, ma mignonne,”

and the great dog awoke and growled gently as the voice and the footsteps died away.

Philippa was not, as a rule, curious. She had seen too much of Society to greet fresh people with any kind of pleasurable anticipation. She was so thoroughly accustomed to be bored that she scarcely cared to trouble herself to perform the social duties Arthur liked to have hospitably and punctually fulfilled. But there was an unusualness about this pair of wayfarers that interested her, and made her remember that yesterday, when her pet aversion, the vicar’s wife, had paid one of her frequent calls, she had told them that a ruinous but picturesque old house called Lettice Close had just been taken by a young artist and his family.

“As a clergyman’s wife, I shall be obliged to call at once,” Mrs. Millington had said at parting; “but I hear this Mr. Adrian Sarel had a French mother, so I shall be very careful. With foreigners, one

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never knows.” Philippa had let her ripple on with her rapid, rather staccato voice, without paying her much attention, but now she remembered a conversation that had then appeared futile enough. She could not settle down, either to her thoughts or to the books she had brought v^ith her as an excuse for idle dreaming. She strolled about restlessly, gathering a careless posy of tall foxgloves and grasses, with some of the opal dog-roses that flowered abundantly wherever the sun reached them.

At last she retraced her steps slowly by the same path . The chair was still under the cedar tree, but there were sounds of cheerful voices, and a young man sat beside her husband. She went indoors, and stood a moment in the broad, cool hall before ringing the bell.

“Dr. Buchanan is here, ma’am,” the respectful butler volunteered as he answered her summons and offered her a letter.

“ Then take tea out at once.”

She opened her letter with very little interest or curiosity. It was written in a formal, clerkly hand, and looked like a bill. Yet, after reading the few lines it contained, she turned very pale and clung to the back of one of the heavy oak chairs for support. The contingency that had seemed impossible in her impatient girlhood had happened, and Philippa Far-

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rant, by the death of an unknown relative without nearer heirs, had come into the possession of something like three thousand a year.

“ Too late !” The words fell from her lips aloud. Why had she married Arthur? Why had she not waited? Why had she allowed her mad impulse to be her guide, prompted as it had been partly — nay, now she almost believed wholly — by her weariness of poverty? Here, in the splendid house he had given her— given her, as she knew, absolutely by his will — she rebelled wildly against the tie that bound her. Oh, she longed to leave all this quiet luxury, this dull, comfortable monotony. She would like to go away, to see new worlds, to forget her unattractive past. In a few moments a storm of such intensity had raged in her heart at her own impotence that it seemed to leave her years older.

“Tea is served,” said the butler suddenly, and, like a true woman, she went calmly out and greeted her guest with a smile, just as if all the Furies were not tormenting her soul.

Dr. Harold Buchanan was young, clever, energetic, and good-looking. He had come to Northbent as assistant to a sleepy old practitioner, and in a few months had wrought astonishing changes. His daily visit to Arthur Farrant was one of his pleasures, and was a delight to his patient. He was pop-

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ular everywhere, and even fastidious Philippa admitted that he was a good talker. With his acute gray eyes he instantly noted that Mr. Farrant was not quite herself. He saw that the long white hand, with its load of diamonds, trembled a little as she poured out the tea.

But Arthur observed nothing unusual. The color had returned to her cheeks, and he fondly admired her beauty as she sat there with the background of roses and June sky.

“What a Paradise your place is,” said the young doctor, eating strawberries with boyish enjoyment, “after a long round of stuffy cottages, smelling of cooking.”

“Don’t,” said Philippa, interrupting him. “It is a sin to think of unpleasant things on such a day.”

“Granted; but, you see, it is only the lucky few who have a chance of forgetting them,” said the doctor, filling Farrant’s plate with a fresh supply of fruit.

“ Buchanan has been telling me that the new people who have taken Lettice Close are likely to be acquisitions,” said Arthur, with the unfailing interest in the least scrap of local news that was one of the things which unconfessedly irritated his wife. She thought it undignified of her husband to care to hear exactly how Harold Buchanan’s patients were get-

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ting on. What she stigmatized as gossip was her abhorrence. She was not very logical, for she read the Society papers with unfailing regularity, regardless of the fact that, after all, the difference between London and Northbent news was not very essential. She did not realize how much unostentatious charity came of those talks with Harold Buchanan, or how much the young doctor’s wholesome nature did to keep Arthur cheerful. She fell into the absurd error of always judging other people from her own standpoint, instead of mentally putting herself in their position before doing so.

“JSTew people in Northbent are always charming until they are found out to be exactly like their predecessors. If they are poor, they are discontented; if they are rich, they are dull.”

Harold Buchanan looked at Philippa searchingly for a moment as she said these words. There was a pettishness, or an excitement, in her manner that was new. He had always fancied her languid indifference to be assumed ; this assured him of it.

‘‘ I know very little, of course, about Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Sarel,” he continued; “but I can vouch for it that they are not much like the people who come here as a rule.”

“That is a comfort,” said Philippa carelessly.

“ Why, I am sure we have some very nice neigh-

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bors/’ said Arthur, who was easy to please if people were only good-tempered and sociable.

“ To begin with, Mr. Sarel is half French and an artist, and Mrs. Millington has decided we must all be very careful. Foreigners, you know, are not always quite nice,” and Buchanan imitated the well-known voice of the would-be autocrat of Northbent. “ All the same, I thought him a rather remarkable man. He was brought up as his heir by an uncle who was reputed very wealthy. This de Bresne died, and left his nephew the mere pittance that was all he had not squandered. He had a strong bent for art, and had no alternative but to become a professional artist instead of an amateur, and, having a secure income of nothing a year, married the orphan daughter of a clergyman. She was seventeen and very pretty. That was about ten years ago, and they have two children, a queer little girl with eyes as black as sloes, and a pretty boy of four, who is lame, poor little chap. Oh no, I did not find all this out during my one call. I know a man who knew Sarel in Paris.”

“And can he paint?” asked Arthur, with an immediate vision of giving the struggling artist a commission.

“That is a question I find it difficult to answer. First of all, I am no judge. Secondly, the man was

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so contemptuous of his own work he almost forced me to share his opinion. Too much of the homely sentimental engraving style of business for me. I should have thought him likely to have had more daring, to have attempted more.”

But Philippa had hardly listened to all this. The flush had faded from her cheeks, and she sat silent and evidently absorbed in her own thoughts. She gave her hand to Buchanan carelessly when he rose to go a few minutes later, and sat bathed in the rosy sunset glow without speaking, until his footsteps died away down the hard gravel of the carriage drive. Then she said coldly and slowly, “ Arthur, I have something to tell you.”

There was a pause, and the handsome invalid smiled as if he would fain have won a look from the eyes that were averted.

“ An Eric Davenant, who, it seems, was a relative of mine, has died in Australia. He made a good deal of money there. I have had a letter telling me about it. I inherit it.”

There was something in her voice that thrilled her husband with a dull dread. When she had married him, he had worshipped her for her nobility, her womanly tenderness for a poor, helpless log such as he must be until he died. He merely laughed at those who hinted that beautiful Philippa had mar-

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ried him for his money. He rated himself and his thousands too lowly to consider this possible. Had he been a millionaire, perhaps it might have been so ; but as it was — no. He firmly believed that nothing but love could have dictated such a sacrifice. If at times doubts had depressed his hopeful spirit, he had cheered himself with his blind faith that without love she would not have given herself away. He recalled the letter she had written — the letter that was to be buried with him when he died — all on fire with resolve and tenderness. She had been as ice to aU other men, he knew, and yet

“ How much is it, dearest?” he asked quietly.

“ Three thousand a year.”

Still the same cold voice and downcast eyes. He could not kiss her, could not clasp her in his arms. He could not by any tangible means assure himself that this fair woman was the wife who had sworn tearfully to cherish him “ in sickness and in health.” A lingering nightingale filled the warm air with melody; the scent of the syringa and honeysuckle came through it like incense. The minutes dragged by like hours. The moment that had been imminent ever since their hands were joined had come. In a flash of terrible insight the husband Philippa had hitherto only wronged in thought knew all.

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“You never loved me. My God, that I were in my grave !”

The low, agonized exclamation broke the spell between them, but still Philippa made no sign. She was not mistress of herself enough to tell the supreme falsehood plausibly, and so she went away and left him alone to realize all the sorrow of the present, the mockery of the past, and the dreariness of the future.

Chapter II. Painter, Not Artist

pCRING the momentous hour that changed Arthur Farrant’s whole life, although its apparent effect was brief, the new tenant of Lettice Close was loitering about his weedy garden with a listless step, but with a sparkle in his dark eyes that looked like irritation. The cottage was picturesque, but rather ruinous of aspect, and was not improved by the rough addition of a badly-shaped room on the north side, which had been grudgingly added by a landlord who was really glad to get the house off his hands on any terms, but had done so as cheaply and as hideously as possible.

No place that has trees and grass can be ugly in June, but there was something dispiriting in the aspect of the green paths that ought to have been gravel, the roses choked with bindweed, and the rampant growth of groundsel. There was an absence of color displeasing to the artist’s eye, and he regretted for the hundredth time the impulse that

had led him to yield to his wife’s ardent wish to live 27

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in England. His uncle, Parisian though he was, had sent him to school in his father’s country, but for various causes he had been much abroad, and he neither looked nor was an Englishman.

He had met Isabel Dale in Switzerland when he was on a sketching tour with some student friends, and she, poor child, was breaking her heart as a governess. At eighteen she had been irresistible in her sweet freshness and simplicity, so, rashly and impudently enough, they had married. She was twenty-eight now, but looked much older. She was cumbered with so many cares and anxieties of a pressing and absorbing nature that she had no time to think of her own appearance, and had almost forgotten the days when Adrian used to spend hours in painting her.

She was honest, good, and conscientious to the heart’s core. She loved her husband and her little daughter with a kind of deprecating devotion. Fay was her father’s child, with her quick wit, her clever, caustic, unchildlike remarks. But it was her boy who had the first place — little Randolph, whom his father had all unwittingly lamed for life by letting him fall when quite a baby. There had been something wrong ever since, but the mother forgot the defect when she looked at Handle’s blue eyes and yellow curls. Adrian Sarel was not a coa^sistent

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man. When he had seen how bravely the young mother bore the terrible blow he had inflicted, he had honored and admired his wife as he had never done before. The two-months-old baby was not his rival in her heart, as he had almost thought. She had forgiven him so freely, so immediately, and so fully. But as time went on, he grew more and more proud and fond of the daughter who was so wild and so original.

Handle was quiet, dreamy, and wrapped up in his mother, almost to the exclusion of other affections. He was very timid and silent, and was afraid of his father — 'why he could not have explained — and that fear kept them asunder. He and Fay were indoors now, having their tea, but down by the neglected strawberry beds a little figure with a big hat and basket was busily gathering up the groundsel, though as yet with very small apparent result.