Chapter 14
“He is gone to the things that he loved,” thought Patrasche. He could not understand, but he was full of sorrow and of pity for the art-passion that to him was so incomprehensible and yet so sacred.
The portals of the cathedral were unclosed after the midnight mass. Some heedlessness in the custodians, too eager to go home and feast or sleep, or too drowsy to know whether they turned the keys aright, had left one of the doors unlocked. By that accident the foot-falls Patrasche sought had passed through into the building, leaving the white marks of snow upon the dark stone floor. By that slender white thread, frozen as it fell, he was guided through the intense silence, through the immensity of the vaulted space—guided straight to the gates of the chancel, and, stretched there upon the stones, he found Nello. He crept up and touched the face of the boy. “Did you dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I—a dog?” said that mute caress.
The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close. “Let us lie down and die together,” he murmured. “Men have no need of us, and we are all alone.”
In answer, Patrasche crept closer yet, and laid his head upon the young boy’s breast. The great tears stood in his brown sad eyes, not for himself—for himself he was happy.
They lay close together in the piercing cold. The blasts that blew over the Flemish dikes from the northern seas were like waves of ice, which froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows—now and then a gleam of light came on the ranks of carven figures. Under the Rubens they lay together quite still, and soothed almost into a dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each other through the flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall bulrushes by the water’s side, watching the boats go seaward in the sun.
Suddenly through the darkness a great white radiance streamed through the vastness of the aisles; the moon, that was at her height, had broken through the clouds, the snow had ceased to fall, the light reflected from the snow without was clear as the light of dawn. It fell through the arches full upon the two pictures above, from which the boy on his entrance had flung back the veil: the Elevation and the Descent of the Cross were for one instant visible.
Nello rose to his feet and stretched his arms to them; the tears of a passionate ecstasy glistened on the paleness of his face. “I have seen them at last!” he cried aloud. “O God, it is enough!”
His limbs failed under him, and he sank upon his knees, still gazing upward at the majesty that he adored. For a few brief moments the light illumined the divine visions that had been denied to him so long—light clear and sweet and strong as though it streamed from the throne of Heaven. Then suddenly it passed away: once more a great darkness covered the face of Christ.
The arms of the boy drew close again the body of the dog. “We shall see His face—there,” he murmured; “and He will not part us, I think.” On the morrow, by the chancel of the cathedral, the people of Antwerp found them both. They were both dead: the cold of the night had frozen into stillness alike the young life and the old. When the Christmas morning broke and the priests came to the temple, they saw them lying thus on the stones together. Above the veils were drawn back from the great visions of Rubens, and the fresh rays of the sunrise touched the thorn-crowned head of the Christ.
As the day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man who wept as women weep. “I was cruel to the lad,” he muttered, “and now I would have made amends—yea, to the half of my substance—and he should have been to me as a son.”
There came also, as the day grew apace, a painter who had fame in the world, and who was liberal of hand and of spirit. “I seek one who should have had the prize yesterday had worth won,” he said to the people—”a boy of rare promise and genius. An old wood-cutter on a fallen tree at eventide—that was all his theme. But there was greatness for the future in it. I would fain find him, and take him with me and teach him Art.”
And a little child with curling fair hair, sobbing bitterly as she clung to her father’s arm, cried aloud, “Oh, Nello, come! We have all ready for you. The Christ-child’s hands are full of gifts, and the old piper will play for us; and the mother says thou shalt stay by the hearth and burn nuts with us all the Noël week long—yes, even to the Feast of the Kings! And Patrasche will be so happy! Oh, Nello, wake and come!”
But the young pale face, turned upward to the light of the great Rubens with a smile upon its mouth, answered them all, “It is too late.”
For the sweet, sonorous bells went ringing through the frost, and the sunlight shone upon the plains of snow, and the populace trooped gay and glad through the streets, but Nello and Patrasche no more asked charity at their hands. All they needed now Antwerp gave unbidden. Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been. It had taken the one in the loyalty of love, and the other in the innocence of faith, from a world which for love has no recompense and for faith no fulfilment.
All their lives they had been together, and in their deaths they were not divided: for when they were found the arms of the boy were folded too closely around the dog to be severed without violence, and the people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a special grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest there side by side—forever!
Both Nello and Patrasche left for their heavenly abode. They found a place at the feet of Jesus Christ Who welcomed them with open arms.
