She was silent all the way to the gate, some thought in her mind already
working toward a gracious deed. At the last she said: “The little dog
is fond of you both. Be with him all you can, for I think his beautiful
life is near its end.” After a pause, during which her face was lighted
by a smile, as if from a lovely thought within, she added: “Don't let
Bobby die before my return from London.”
In a week she was back, and in the meantime letters and telegrams had
been flying, and many wheels set in motion in wee Bobby's affairs. When
she returned to the churchyard, very early one morning, no less a person
than the Lord Provost himself was with her. Five years had passed, but
Mr.--no, Sir William--Chambers, Laird of Glenormiston, for he had been
knighted by the Queen, was still Lord Provost of Edinburgh.
Almost immediately Mr. Traill appeared, by appointment, and was made
all but speechless for once in his loquacious life by the honor of being
asked to tell Bobby's story to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. But not even
a tenement child or a London coster could be ill at ease with the Grand
Leddy for very long, and presently the three were in close conference in
the portico. Bobby welcomed them, and then dozed in the sun and visited
with the robin on Auld Jock's grave. Far from being tongue-tied, the
landlord was inspired. What did he not remember, from the pathetic
renunciation, “Bobby isna ma ain dog,” down to the leal Highlander's
last, near tragic reminder to men that in the nameless grave lay his
unforgotten master.
He sketched the scene in Haddo's Hole, where the tenement bairns poured
out as pure a gift of love and mercy and self-sacrifice as had ever
been laid at the foot of a Scottish altar. He told of the search for the
lately ransomed and lost terrier, by the lavish use of oil and candles;
of Bobby's coming down Castle Rock in the fog, battered and bruised for
a month's careful tending by an old Heriot laddie. His feet still showed
the scars of that perilous descent. He himself, remorseful, had gone
with the Biblereader from the Medical Mission in the Cowgate to the
dormer-lighted closet in College Wynd, where Auld Jock had died. Now he
described the classic fireplace of white freestone, with its boxed-in
bed, where the Pentland shepherd lay like some effigy on a bier, with
the wee guardian dog stretched on the flagged hearth below.
“What a subject for a monument!” The Grand Leddy looked across the top
of the slope at the sleeping Skye. “I suppose there is no portrait of
Bobby.”
“Ay, your Leddyship; I have a drawing in the dining rooms, sketched
by Mr. Daniel Maclise. He was here a year or twa ago, just before his
death, doing some commission, and often had his tea in my bit place. I
told him Bobby's story, and he made the sketch for me as a souvenir of
his veesit.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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