PAGE 7
The Black Poodle
by
My conscience smote me as I went in. I put on an unconscious, easy manner, which was such a dismal failure that it was lucky for me that they were too much engrossed to notice it.
I never before saw a family so stricken down by a domestic misfortune as the group I found in the drawing-room, making a dejected pretence of reading or working. We talked at first–and hollow talk it was–on indifferent subjects, till I could bear it no longer, and plunged boldly into danger.
“I don’t see the dog,” I began, “I suppose you–you found him all right the other evening, colonel?” I wondered, as I spoke, whether they would not notice the break in my voice, but they did not.
“Why, the fact is,” said the colonel, heavily, gnawing his gray moustache, “we’ve not heard anything of him since; he’s–he’s run off!”
“Gone, Mr. Weatherhead; gone without a word!” said Mrs. Currie, plaintively, as if she thought the dog might at least have left an address.
“I wouldn’t have believed it of him,” said the colonel; “it has completely knocked me over. Haven’t been so cut up for years–the ungrateful rascal!”
“O uncle!” pleaded Lilian, “don’t talk like that; perhaps Bingo couldn’t help it–perhaps some one has s-s-shot him!”
“Shot!” cried the colonel, angrily. “By heaven! if I thought there was a villain on earth capable of shooting that poor inoffensive dog, I’d–Why should they shoot him, Lilian? Tell me that! I–I hope you won’t let me hear you talk like that again. You don’t think he’s shot, eh, Weatherhead?”
I said–Heaven forgive me!–that I thought it highly improbable.
“He’s not dead!” cried Mrs. Currie. “If he were dead I should know it somehow–I’m sure I should! But I’m certain he’s alive. Only last night I had such a beautiful dream about him. I thought he came back to us, Mr. Weatherhead, driving up in a hansom-cab, and he was just the same as ever–only he wore blue spectacles, and the shaved part of him was painted a bright red. And I woke up with the joy–so, you know, it’s sure to come true!”
It will be easily understood what torture conversations like these were to me, and how I hated myself as I sympathised and spoke encouraging words concerning the dog’s recovery, when I knew all the time he was lying hid under my garden mould. But I took it as a part of my punishment, and bore it all uncomplainingly; practice even made me an adept in the art of consolation–I believe I really was a great comfort to them.
I had hoped that they would soon get over the first bitterness of their loss, and that Bingo would be first replaced and then forgotten in the usual way; but there seemed no signs of this coming to pass.
The poor colonel was too plainly fretting himself ill about it; he went pottering about forlornly, advertising, searching, and seeing people, but all, of course, to no purpose; and it told upon him. He was more like a man whose only son and heir had been stolen than an Anglo-Indian officer who had lost a poodle. I had to affect the liveliest interest in all his inquiries and expeditions, and to listen to and echo the most extravagant eulogies of the departed; and the wear and tear of so much duplicity made me at last almost as ill as the colonel himself.
I could not help seeing that Lilian was not nearly so much impressed by my elaborate concern as her relatives, and sometimes I detected an incredulous look in her frank brown eyes that made me very uneasy. Little by little, a rift widened between us, until at last in despair I determined to know the worst before the time came when it would be hopeless to speak at all. I chose a Sunday evening as we were walking across the green from church in the golden dusk, and then I ventured to speak to her of my love. She heard me to the end, and was evidently very much agitated. At last she murmured that it could not be, unless–no, it never could be now.