"Leave him alone," briefly ordered the Master.But when the nurse, sniffing, passed on, he called Lad over to him. Reluctantly, the dog quitted the door and obeyed the summons.
"Quiet!" ordered the Master, speaking very slowly and distinctly. "You must keep quiet. Quiet! Understand?"
Lad understood. Lad always understood. He must not bark. He must move silently. He must make no unnecessary sound. But, at least, the[Pg 33] Master had not forbidden him to snarl softly and loathingly at that detestable white-clad woman every time she stepped over him.
So there was one grain of comfort.
Gently, the Master called him downstairs and across the living-room, and put him out of the house. For, after all, a shaggy eighty-pound dog is an inconvenience stretched across a sickroom doorsill.
Three minutes later, Lad had made his way through an open window into the cellar and thence upstairs; and was stretched out, head between paws, at the threshold of the Mistress' room.
On his thrice-a-day visits, the doctor was forced to step over him, and was man enough to forbear to curse. Twenty times a day, the nurse stumbled over his massive, inert body, and fumed in impotent rage. The Master, too, came back and forth from the sickroom, with now and then a kindly word for the suffering collie, and again and again put him out of the house.
But always Lad managed, by hook or crook, to be back on guard within a minute or two. And never once did the door of the Mistress' room open that he did not make a strenuous attempt to enter.
Servants, nurse, doctor, and Master repeatedly forgot he was there, and stubbed their toes across his body. Sometimes their feet drove agonizingly into his tender flesh. But never a whimper or[Pg 34] growl did the pain wring from him. "Quiet!" had been the command, and he was obeying.
And so it went on, through the awful days and the infinitely worse nights. Except when he was ordered away by the Master, Lad would not stir from his place at the door. And not even the Master's authority could keep him away from it for five minutes a day.
The dog ate nothing, drank practically nothing, took no exercise; moved not one inch, of his own will, from the doorway. In vain did the glories of Autumn woods call to him. The rabbits would be thick, out yonder in the forest, just now. So would the squirrels-- against which Lad had long since sworn a blood-feud (and one of which it had ever been his futile life ambition to catch).
For him, these things no longer existed. Nothing existed; except his mortal hatred of the unseen Something in that forbidden room--the Something that was seeking to take the Mistress away with It. He yearned unspeakably to be in that room to guard her from her nameless Peril. And they would not let him in--these humans.
Wherefore he lay there, crushing his body close against the door and--waiting.
And, inside the room, Death and the Napoleonic man with the black bag fought their "no-quarter" duel for the life of the still, little
white figure in the great white bed.
One night, the doctor did not go home at all.[Pg 35] Toward dawn the Master lurched out of the room and sat down for a moment on the stairs, his face in his hands. Then and then only, during all that time of watching, did Lad leave the doorsill of his own accord.
Shaky with famine and weariness, he got to his feet, moaning softly, and crept over to the Master; he lay down beside him, his huge
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head athwart the man's knees; his muzzle reaching timidly toward the tight-clenched hands.
Presently the Master went back into the sickroom. And Lad was left alone in the darkness--to wonder and to listen and to wait. With a tired sigh he returned to the door and once more took up his heartsick vigil.
Then--on a golden morning, days later, the doctor came and went with the look of a Conqueror. Even the wooden-faced nurse forgot to grunt in disgust when she stumbled across the dog's body. She almost smiled. And presently the Master came out through the doorway. He stopped at sight of Lad, and turned back into the room. Lad could hear him speak. And he heard a dear, dear voice make answer; very weakly, but no longer in that muffled and foreign tone which had so frightened him. Then came a sentence the dog could understand.
"Come in, old friend," said the Master, opening the door and standing aside for Lad to enter.
At a bound, the collie was in the room. There[Pg 36] lay the Mistress. She was very thin, very white, very feeble. But she was there. The dread Something had lost the battle.
Lad wanted to break forth into a peal of ecstatic barking that would have deafened every one in the room. The Master read the wish and interposed,
"Quiet!"
Lad heard. He controlled the yearning. But it cost him a world of will-power to do it. As sedately as he could force himself to move, he crossed to the bed.
The Mistress was smiling at him. One hand was stretched weakly forth to stroke him. And she was saying almost in a whisper, "Lad! Laddie!"
That was all. But her hand was petting him in the dear way he loved so well. And the Master was telling her all over again how the dog had watched outside her door. Lad listened--not to the man's praise, but to the woman's caressing whisper--and he quivered from head to tail. He fought furiously with himself once again, to choke back the rapturous barking that clamored for utterance. He knew this was no time for noise. Even without the word of warning, he would have known it. For the Mistress was whispering. Even the Master was speaking scarce louder.
But one thing Lad realized: the black danger was past. The Mistress was alive! And the whole house was smiling. That was enough. And the yearn[Pg 37]ing to show, in noise, his own wild relief, was all but irresistible. Then the Master said:
"Run on, Lad. You can come back by-and-by."
And the dog gravely made his way out of the room and out of the house.
The minute he was out-of-doors, he proceeded to go crazy. Nothing but sheer mania could excuse his actions during the rest of that day. They were unworthy of a mongrel puppy. And never before in all his blameless, stately life had Lad so grossly misbehaved as he now proceeded to do. The Mistress was alive. The Horror was past. Reaction set in with a rush. As I have said, Lad went crazy.
Peter Grimm, the Mistress's cynical and temperamental gray cat, was picking its dainty way across the lawn as Lad emerged from the house.
Ordinarily, Lad regarded Peter Grimm with a cold tolerance. But now, he dashed at the cat with a semblance of stark wrath. Like a furry whirlwind he bore down upon the amazed feline. The cat, in dire offense, scratched his nose with a quite unnecessary virulence and fled up a tree, spitting and yowling, tail fluffed out as thick as a man's wrist.
Seeing that Peter Grimm had resorted to unsportsmanly tactics by scrambling whither he could not follow, Lad remembered the need for silence and forbore to bark threats at his escaped victim.[Pg 38] Instead, he galloped to the rear of the house where stood the dairy.
The dairy door was on the latch. With his head Lad butted it open and ran into the stone-floored room. A line of full milk-pans were ranged side by side on a shelf. Rising on his hind-legs and bracing his forepaws on the shelf, Lad seized edges of the deep pans, one after another, between his teeth, and, with a succession of sharp jerks brought them one and all clattering to the floor.
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