Part 11

“Je, jevrouw,” a voice cried, in reply.

The next moment a maid came running into the shop.

“Take these people into the kitchen and give them something to eat. Put them by the stove while you prepare it. There is some soup and that smoked ham we had for koffy. Then come here and take my place for a while.”

“Je, jevrouw,” said Yanke, disappearing again, followed by Truide and her children.

Then Koosje sat down again, and began to think.

“I said,” she mused, presently, “that night that the next time I fell over a bundle I’d leave it where I found it. Ah, well! I’m not a barbarian; I couldn’t do that. I never thought, though, it would be Truide.”

“Hi, jevrouw,” was called from the inner room.

“Je, mynheer,” jumping up and going to her customers.

She attended to their wants, and presently bowed them out.

“I never thought it would be Truide,” she repeated to herself, as she closed the door behind the last of the gay uniforms and jingling scabbards. “And Jan is dead--ah, well!”

Then she went into the kitchen, where the miserable children--girls both of them, and pretty had they been clean and less forlornly clad--were playing about the stove.

“So Jan is dead,” began Koosje, seating herself.

“Yes, Jan is dead,” Truide answered.

“And he left you nothing?” Koosje asked.

“We had had nothing for a long time,” Truide replied, in her sad, crushed voice. “We didn’t get on very well; he soon got tired of me.”

“That was a weakness of his,” remarked Koosje, drily.

“We lost five little ones, one after another,” Truide continued. “And Jan was fond of them, and somehow it seemed to sour him. As for me, I was sorry enough at the time, Heaven knows, but it was as well. But Jan said it seemed as if a curse had fallen upon us; he began to wish you back again, and to blame me for having come between you. And then he took to genever, and then to wish for something stronger; so at last every stiver went for absinthe, and once or twice he beat me, and then he died.”

“Just as well,” muttered Koosje, under her breath.

“It is very good of you to have fed and warmed us,” Truide went on, in her faint, complaining tones. “Many a one would have let me starve, and I should have deserved it. It is very good of you and we are grateful; but ‘tis time we were going, Koosje and Mina;” then added, with a shake of her head, “but I don’t know where.”

“Oh, you’d better stay,” said Koosje, hurriedly. “I live in this big house by myself, and I dare say you’ll be more useful in the shop than Yanke--if your tongue is as glib as it used to be, that is. You know some English, too, don’t you?”

“A little,” Truide answered, eagerly.

“And after all,” Koosje said, philosophically, shrugging her shoulders, “you saved me from the beatings and the starvings and the rest. I owe you something for that. Why, if it hadn’t been for you I should have been silly enough to have married him.”

And then she went back to her shop, saying to herself:

“The professor said it was a blessing in disguise; God sends all our trials to work some great purpose. Yes; that was what he said, and he knew most things. Just think if I were trailing about now with those two little ones, with nothing to look back to but a schnapps-drinking husband who beat me! Ah, well, well! things are best as they are. I don’t know that I ought not to be very much obliged to her--and she’ll be very useful in the shop.”

A DOG OF FLANDERS, by Ouida

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.

They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a little Ardennois; Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same age by length of years; yet one was still young, and the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days; both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the beginning of the tie between them,--their first bond of sympathy,--and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly.

Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village--a Flemish village a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it. It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky blue, and roofs rose red or black and white, and walls whitewashed until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown slope; it was a landmark to all the level country round. It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all; but that had been in its infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age; but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with that strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.