TOMMY’S NEW FRIEND.

The outworks of Mrs. Prior’s heart were stormed successfully by a younger woman, who had thought it worth while to make the attack. Then she proceeded to lay siege to what lay nearer the citadel.

Mrs. Prior was--as everybody in the household, from her husband to the last pert table-maid was ready to protest--a slave to that horrid old dog, Tommy.

Tommy had seen his day, when he was neither a nuisance nor a burden, but an agreeable, helpful companion. That day was past. His old friends had mostly grown away from him, while he was slipping back into that second childhood which is not particularly graceful either in man or beast, and demands forbearance--sacrifice from the young to the old, as in former days the same quality was required from the old to the young. Tommy’s attractions were bygone and forgotten; his friends of other times had lost sight of the old Tommy and become weary of his successor’s dulness and infirmity. Even Jack Prior, who had never spoken an unkind word to an animal in his life, had ceased to ask for the dog’s company.

But Mrs. Prior, who never wearied of anything or anybody, and never forgot where she had once loved, continued staunch and faithful to Tommy, all the more so because others were unfaithful. For the most part she did not see in him the unwieldy, sluggish, snappish brute he appeared to most people, but the gambolsome, good-humoured wisp of grey and black hair all quivering with his passion for exercise and with devotion to his masters and mistresses that he had once been. She felt hurt surprise that so many persons could change to such an extent in their tastes and likings. For her eyes were opened perforce to see that Tommy was in the way. It was a bore to take him for a walk and find that he had grown stupid, and would no longer keep to heel, but strayed and lost himself, and came back limping and panting. It was a hardship to wash him when he struggled, splashed the washer, and showed his few teeth. His begging was no longer a pretty accomplishment, but an intrusive piece of greedy importunity. His warlike or joyous barking--a performance to which he had been at one time encouraged--which had, indeed, been regarded as a brave or gleeful sound when everybody was young and cheerful and not afflicted with irritable nerves--had now become an intolerable trial which the tortured ear could not be expected to bear. His snoring, which had been looked upon as so funny long ago, was a still direr offence. His scratching, which that earlier world had carelessly or magnanimously overlooked, had waxed horribly suggestive.

Then Mrs. Prior’s heart grew sore. Her sense of justice was outraged. How could Tommy know that there was such an alteration in the sentiments of his judges, and why was he to be punished for their fickleness and peevishness? Her tenderness was wounded. The very things which rendered Tommy no longer acceptable to his other cronies appealed irresistibly to her generosity and softness of heart. The blue glassiness creeping over the bright brown eyes, the stiffening of the once active limbs, the thinning and straightening of the erewhile profuse wavy hair, the white appearing round the mouth and about the ears, like the grey in an old man’s beard and on his temples--to think that anybody could cease to care for a dog, even a dog, could begin to dislike, to covertly neglect, to be harsh to him in such circumstances!

There might be another reason for the absurd sensitiveness which Mrs. Prior testified where Tommy’s honour and happiness were concerned, that caused her to watch jealously over his rights, and actually made her resent a slight and injury to him, though she would pass over, as not deserving a thought, the neglect of her own claims. She seemed to recognise a certain similarity between her position and that of Tommy. She was not without a sorrowful fellow-feeling where he was concerned. Bennet Gray could catch words and sentences of long, one-sided conversations which Tommy’s mistress held with him when they were alone. She would remind him of a hundred pleasant old haunts, games, family festivals the two had shared. ‘Do you remember the rabbits in Redcot quarry, and the rats in the barn, Tommy? Have you forgotten that morning when you brought papa’s slippers to him all of your own accord? Surely you can recall the day when you leapt out of the window after you had been shut into the schoolroom to keep you from following little Jack when he was going off to school for the first time? And do not say you have lost sight of the evenings when I showed the girls how to dress you up for their charades? Ah! you are wagging your tail--it is not such a brush now as it once was--but you have not forgotten.’ Did the woman who thought so much of the past, which other people had left behind, deceive herself for a moment into fancying that the dog took part in the retrospection? Anyhow, she would beg him to live till their Jack--hers and his--came home again, and then they would give him a hearty welcome.

There was no serious difficulty in addressing one’s self to Tommy after the introduction had been fairly given. He waited cautiously for that formula; when it had been complied with he was apt to be overwhelmingly affable. He greeted all his friends with loud acclaim every time they crossed his path after the briefest absence. Unfortunately the acclaim had come to be regarded as uncalled-for, uproarious, and aggressive, and was frequently met by indignant rebuffs, ‘Get away, brute.’ ‘Do be quiet, and lie down, Tommy.’ ‘Oh, you tiresome little wretch, can you not hold your tongue? Just look what you’ve done to my velvet and fur.’ The last outcry was from Susie, whose universal pleasantness was not equal to the derangement of the grace of her entrance, and the onslaught on her elegant clothes. Mrs. Prior would wince at the protests as if they had been uttered against herself, would entice Tommy back to his comfortable corner, and secretly pat him to make up for that sudden collapse in his elated bearing which proved the repulse had somehow reached a vulnerable spot in his canine heart. ‘You only wanted to tell them you were glad they had come back, poor old Tommy! But they don’t care for your gladness, my dog. I should not waste it upon them, if I were you. But then you are only a foolish dog, and so are magnanimous, while you don’t quite understand. Never mind, you are your old mistress’s pet: come and welcome her, and she will not drive you off.’

There was another person who did not drive Tommy off, to the vague surprise of everybody, Mrs. Prior included. Miss Gray, that charming, reasonable, highly-informed young woman, instructress of youth, and friend of Jane Prior, displayed--not nervous terror, which some learned and clever people, otherwise invulnerable, have betrayed with regard to dogs and cats--but childish exultation when Tommy condescended to put her down on his list of friends, and began to persecute her with his attentions. ‘Tommy has run to the drawing-room door to meet me--he has, indeed.’ ‘He has leaped up almost to the crown of my head.’ ‘Look--look--he is pulling me in by the hem of my gown, the kind darling. He will take a long walk with me next,’ she told everybody who would listen to her. She applauded his begging more ecstatically than Mrs. Prior herself commended his extraordinary feats in this respect; for Tommy could still sit up for five minutes at a time, as if he had swallowed a ramrod, looking more like the British Grenadier than the genuine article looked. Miss Gray was constantly caught surreptitiously rewarding the performance with choice morsels from her plate.

Tommy was in the habit of exhibiting other engaging attributes in which, to tell the truth, there was more of childlike confidence in his friends’ indulgence than of doglike humility, or of a modest, retiring disposition. He would plant his two shaggy front paws one on each foot of a shivering individual toasting his or her toes on the fender. He would look up with calm affectionate assurance amounting to sublime nonchalance in the writhing face of the unfortunate sufferer--of whose crushed toes, Tommy, with his by no means light weight, was ruthlessly making a soft cushion for the sensitive soles of his own paws. At another time he would have a cunning eye to the footstool with which some luxurious creature was supplementing his or her general well-being. He would pertinaciously watch his opportunity, never forgetting the main chance, for a period of hours. He would deliberately insinuate first one paw and then another on the coveted stool, and try, by an insidious appeal to human feelings, or by bodily pressure in a slow, shoving process, to remove the owner’s feet, and to establish in their place his fat body. At last, if the grudged possessor of the bone of contention unwarily rose for a second, then, quick as thought, the last remnant of Tommy’s alertness was displayed in seizing on the goal of his ambition, which was frequently far too small for his requirements. He had to poise himself upon it uneasily, with all his superfluous bulk quivering for lack of sufficient support, or to stretch himself with his head hanging overboard--so that the blood ought to have rushed to his obstinate head--while his hind legs dangled helplessly in the opposite direction.

Miss Gray could never see that these were scandalous liberties on Tommy’s part. She laughed till the tears came into her eyes, she endured without a murmur--even proudly welcomed excruciating torture when her feet happened to be those on which Tommy threw his solid weight in improvising cushions upon the fender. She promptly resigned her footstool for his use, as if she was only too happy to serve him. She might have been a child with her first pet. Jane, who had her own inclination to hero-worship, and had begun to worship Miss Gray, was forced to own to herself that her new friend, with her natural endowments and college training, could be positively silly on some points--to wit, her behaviour to dogs. It was a proof of that want of absolute perfection in anybody, even in a scholarly woman, which Jane detected with regret. But one thing was certain, and it was a comfort to know it--Miss Gray was not at all in the position of an old cowed dependent and toast-eater, who was lamentably deficient in the attainments she professed to impart, and so was forced to ingratiate herself with the very animals of the family. Bennet Gray was a highly-gifted, elaborately-equipped young woman, independent and responsible in her calling, with an acknowledged position and rights which nobody would dream of invading. Times have changed for the better with the Bennet Grays of society, even within the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Miss Gray’s _penchant_ for Tommy, like her great liking for Tommy’s mistress, was gratuitous and beyond suspicion.

If the saying, ‘Love me, love my dog,’ contains any truth, there is a corresponding saying at least as influential in some instances--‘Love my dog, and I’ll love you.’ Mrs. Prior and Bennet Gray had arrived at such an advanced stage of friendship that the former would, without being asked or led up to the subject, begin three out of every four of their conversations with the prelude--‘Miss Gray, you have heard of my son who has taken a voyage to Australia? Poor boy! he is far from home and among novel surroundings, but I am sure he has not forgotten his mother.’ Then would follow an anecdote of Jack’s youth or maturity. There was an exhaustless stock of similar stories, extending from his childhood, through his school-days, to his present manhood. The tales were an excuse for long lists of his good qualities, tastes, and habits. Neither were the visions which had once been entertained of his future entirely left out. A gallant fight was made for them, though there were signs that the old dreams were fading under the burden of disappointment, doubt, and apprehension, which even the fondest and most faithful heart could not refuse to own.

Miss Gray listened with endless patience, nay, with keenest interest in the shining eyes, which she instinctively cast down, so tell-tale was their light.

These confidences were a strong indication of Mrs. Prior’s deepening regard for her young ally. They were also some relief to the elder woman, since the young man’s name was rarely mentioned in his family. John Prior had turned against his son, and Jane had gone with her father in the dispute. As for Susie and Lambert Crabtree, they were like Gallio; they cared for none of these things. It would not matter to them though her father quarrelled with Jack beyond the possibility of reconciliation. The estate of Redcot was entailed on male heirs, and there was no likelihood of the entails being broken. For anything farther the Priors--father and son--could manage their own affairs, including the discord between them. It was, strictly speaking, no business of the Crabtrees’, especially as Susie had not the slightest intention of quarrelling with either of the disputants. She would show the world that she could be on good terms with both. Did she not like to stand well with everybody?

One day a letter came to Mrs. Prior from her son, full of all the colonial wonders and news about himself which he thought would interest her.

The letter arrived with the morning’s post, and Mr. Prior took it out of the bag at breakfast time. He knew the handwriting before he glanced at the post mark, and he handed the letter to his wife without remark. But his wide nostrils involuntarily expanded and contracted, there was a nervous twitch of his full under-lip, and the furrow between his shaggy, straggling brows was ploughed still deeper.

Mrs. Prior coloured up with mingled pleasure and indignation, and put the letter in her pocket without tearing open the envelope.

‘She cannot open it before me,’ John Prior said to himself; ‘she has not the face to do it. It contains too much that is not fit to be read in my presence. Her precious son is asking her for money or abusing us all round, and her face would betray her. She could not suppress that evidence.’

‘I will not read it before him,’ Mrs. Prior told herself as she drank her tea with her hand shaking so much that she could hardly hold the cup. ‘His own father! and not to ask if the boy is well, or if he writes of coming home--as if he had done anything really wrong--as if he had been a scapegrace like Ned Owen! Jack was only not very diligent over his books and a little extravagant. It was pardonable enough in a lad--hundreds at Oxford do the same. It is too bad in his father.’

Neither did Jane Prior put any question. She did care to hear what her brother was doing, though not to a tithe of the extent that his mother cared. But she was silent on principle, as Jane did many things that had, perhaps, better been trusted to the impulse of the moment than to principle.

Mrs. Prior was not naturally a taciturn woman; she had womanly reserve and prudence, but sympathy was also very dear to her. When it was denied to her from legitimate sources, she was fain to quench her thirst at the irregular spring which had sprung up for her in the desert of her life.

The next time she caught Bennet Gray alone, Mrs. Prior, as if to indemnify herself for the privation she was subjected to, and to revenge herself on those who ought to have cared, and did not care, to hear her letter, poured forth her information. She boasted with innocent mother-boasting of Jack’s exploits. He had been at one of the diggings. He had spent three days in the bush camping out. He had seen no end of opossums. His correspondent enlarged with quickly-roused admiration upon his sensible views and judicious intentions.

Miss Gray was a good listener here also, and did not fail to satisfy the eager speaker. But when Bennet was shut into her room she covered her face with her hands to hide her scarlet cheeks. ‘I could beat myself,’ she groaned, ‘I feel such a hypocrite. What will she think when she knows? Will even Jack be able to forgive me when it all comes to his ears? Shall I ever forgive myself?’

Then she drew from her pocket a thick letter and slit open an outer envelope. The letter enclosed was marvellously like that from which she had just heard various details. Indeed, the cleverest expert would have been puzzled to detect a difference in the handwriting, and the Sydney postmark was the same, though Miss Gray’s letter had come to her under an English cover, addressed by a woman’s hand, and bearing the stamp of one of the midland towns.

Bennet pored over the pages, and seemed to forget her contrition to the extent of being disgracefully triumphant, because they contained projects revealed to her alone.

‘He does not tell his mother of his inquiries into the price of land and of his going to see different lots, or of his reckoning as to how fast a log house could be run up. What would she say if she were told that it was I who sent her son so far away from her and everybody!’ Miss Gray rose in her excitement, and began to walk up and down the room, and to speak half-aloud, as if she were pleading her cause against an invisible accuser. ‘Oh! dear Mrs. Prior, I could not help it. There was no other way then. I was forced to see, for his sake as well as my own, whether he was in earnest, whether he could give up things--his friends among them. I had not learned to know you, and I did not wish to go where I should never be wanted, and to take what would always be grudged to me. Besides, I saw enough and heard enough, from himself, to be aware that he had other friends--companions rather, idle, rich, and inconsiderate--not generous like him, who were no good, and among whom he would never do good. I had to make myself certain that he could renounce his past, begin anew, and live and work in earnest for himself and me. There was no other way then; it would have been our only chance, and I had to put it before him, because, though I was no older, I had known another side of life. I seemed called on to decide for both.’

She sat down again and studied the letter once more, giving herself up to happier ideas.

‘There is no need now, dear, rash, impulsive Jack,’ she told another than Mrs. Prior in accents of exultation instead of pleading, ‘for exile and toil, on borrowed money too--none in the world, thank God for it, for your sake, and mine, and hers; and oh! surely some day for your poor father’s.’

There was no end to the reflections which that letter produced. The next thing Miss Gray did was to take a packet of thin paper from her desk and contemplate it lovingly--deprecatingly.

‘I shall have to answer as soon as possible, of course, and what a letter I have got to write now that I have received an address! You have been better off than I in that respect, sir. You had Mary Burton’s address to write to in case I quitted Berkshire. That quitting was rather different from anything we had thought of. It was sudden, but it was not at all disagreeable. I had the luxury of the best cab from the station all to myself. I could take my entire luggage, and I had no trouble either about the weight or anything else, for not only was I a first-class passenger, Mr. Joliffe, good man! though he had sometimes treated me cavalierly enough, insisted on being at the station to see me off, as if I could no longer take care of myself. I wonder if anybody ever had half so much to say before in a letter as I have to write to Jack,’ speculated Miss Gray, leaning forward on her crossed arms, and not knowing where to begin, from sheer _embarras de richesses_. ‘He will be surprised until he has no surprise left to feel, though the sky were to topple over on his head. It will be so strange for him to know that I am here, and so curious for him to read my first impressions and he far away, if he is not angry with me for coming. But he can see that when Jane’s letter of inquiry was forwarded to me, the temptation was irresistible, especially when I had nothing else to do, and when I owed something to myself and to the friends I had,’ she meditated pensively, and raising her head with a little air of pride, ‘I mean I was bound to satisfy Mary Burton and her father, that my first step was not to throw myself and all the rest of it away without making a single investigation. So much for your not having been always the wisest of men, poor, dear Jack,’ she broke off with a rueful shake of the head; ‘and for exposing yourself to the necessity of probation by way of punishment. But you were good, true-hearted, uncalculating,’ she told herself more warmly than ever, ‘when you gave me as manly and honest a heart as ever beat. Your mother and I know what it is, and that it could never have led you far astray. You may think, and be quite wrong, that I have never trusted you--that I have stolen a march upon you--and you may be, perhaps, a little vexed and annoyed; but still, because of the other glad news--the clearing away of all our difficulties, the joy that is coming to us--you will condone my worst offences, Jack. You will set sail with the next ship; the long, weary way and the sea, where there are storms and wrecks, will soon be passed, and you will be at home with your mother and me.’

Unquestionably Bennet Gray’s private cogitations bore an alarming resemblance to those of the syren adventuresses of fiction, of whom we wot. But these alluring heroines have not, as a rule, passed through colleges of preceptresses, surmounted stiff examinations, and aspired to university honours. They have in general been the offspring of purported credulous advertisements, or replies to the same in Metropolitan newspapers, and of a confiding willingness to dispense with all references. Neither have the enchantresses been distinguished, as a rule, by their respectful affection for elderly ladies, and foolish fondness for superannuated dogs.

In the end, of the two letters which were all that went from Redcot, addressed to Jack Prior, entrusted to the mercies of the next colonial mail, the one was written by his mother and the other by his sister. Jane thawed enough to be induced to ascertain where Jack was and what he was doing, as a prelude to sending him--not all the news of the neighbourhood--her mother would do that, but a slightly high and dry, though not unkind, missive. Strange to say, Miss Gray did not address a letter to any man--Jack among them. She was not guilty of more than sending what the ‘Polite Letter-writer’ would have called ‘a copious epistle,’ to judge from its bulk, doubtless containing a score of profound maxims and a host of learned saws, to her friend,

‘Miss BURTON, Girls’ Grammar School, W----, S----shire.