It was only the death of a little dog to him who had lost wife and children, house and lands, and position—who had seen the ghastly horrors of battle-fields, and known his King lay down his head on the block.
But at this moment his own powerlessness to save, together with his loneliness, his utter loneliness, if Reine should die likewise, pressed sorely on Master Neville. He saw once more the young bride he had brought to the Alders, while the sound of his children’s pattering feet came again into his ears. He looked back on the thoughtlessness and vanity of his early manhood, on the hours he had wasted, and the opportunities he had lost, never to return. He recalled words he had heard Master Arundel say in the pulpit and out of it. He even remembered what he had witnessed of the conviction of the Puritans, that their God was ever with them to sustain and satisfy.
Master Neville gathered himself up, dug a hole in the ground with his pocket-knife, and buried away Roy. He trudged on his road with Reine. The very next day he heard of the long looked for means of leaving England. He was successful in making his way to the seaport. He sailed and reached Holland, where he found friends and assistance for his destitution, till an adventurous soldier like Monk, chiming in with the reactionary spirit of the hour, restored the King, and gave back to the Cavaliers, who were in exile with him, their country, and what was left of their possessions and careers.
Master Neville dwelt once more at the court, with Dame Hynd reinstated as his housekeeper; but it could not be said of him, as it was recorded of the royal Stewarts and Bourbons, that in their absence from their kingdoms they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He was a more sober-minded and gentler-hearted man for his troubles. One incident which he never forgot was that half-hour in the wood when the ferns were getting sere, and the leaves growing red and yellow—when Reine danced and Roy died, and their master sat and looked on, a broken-down, forlorn man.
ONE of the most successful and popular of Sir Edward Landseer’s delineations is the picture, “Dignity and Impudence.” It is even better known and more widely prized than his exquisitely comical sick dog, that is so sorry for itself, while the keeper is examining its paw; and his deeply pathetic “Last Mourner,” in which the shepherd’s dog keeps solitary watch by its master’s coffin.