Fantasy fiction, English; Foxes -- Fiction; Metamorphosis -- Fiction
From this too sanguine dream he was aroused by hearing the gardener
speaking to the dogs, trying to quiet them, for ever since he had come
in with his vixen they had been whining, barking and growling, and all
as he knew because there was a fox within doors and they would kill it.
He started up now, calling to the gardener that he would come down to
the dogs himself to quiet them, and bade the man go indoors again and
leave it to him. All this he said in a dry, compelling kind of voice
which made the fellow do as he was bid, though it was against his will,
for he was curious. Mr. Tebrick went downstairs, and taking his gun from
the rack loaded it and went out into the yard. Now there were two dogs,
one a handsome Irish setter that was his wife's dog (she had brought it
with her from Tangley Hall on her marriage); the other was an old fox
terrier called Nelly that he had had ten years or more.
When he came out into the yard both dogs saluted him by barking and
whining twice as much as they did before, the setter jumping up and down
at the end of his chain in a frenzy, and Nelly shivering, wagging her
tail, and looking first at her master and then at the house door, where
she could smell the fox right enough.
There was a bright moon, so that Mr. Tebrick could see the dogs as
clearly as could be. First he shot his wife's setter dead, and then
looked about him for Nelly to give her the other barrel, but he could
see her nowhere. The bitch was clean gone, till, looking to see how she
had broken her chain, he found her lying hid in the back of her kennel.
But that trick did not save her, for Mr. Tebrick, after trying to pull
her out by her chain and finding it useless--she would not come,--thrust
the muzzle of his gun into the kennel, pressed it into her body and so
shot her. Afterwards, striking a match, he looked in at her to make
certain she was dead. Then, leaving the dogs as they were, chained up,
Mr. Tebrick went indoors again and found the gardener, who had not yet
gone home, gave him a month's wages in lieu of notice and told him he
had a job for him yet--to bury the two dogs and that he should do it
that same night.
But by all this going on with so much strangeness and authority on his
part, as it seemed to them, the servants were much troubled. Hearing the
shots while he was out in the yard his wife's old nurse, or Nanny, ran
up to the bedroom though she had no business there, and so opening the
door saw the poor fox dressed in my lady's little jacket lying back in
the cushions, and in such a reverie of woe that she heard nothing.
Old Nanny, though she was not expecting to find her mistress there,
having been told that she was gone that afternoon to London, knew her
instantly, and cried out:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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