It was curious to notice how that unquestioning allegiance and admiration which the missing Schwartz had been used to bestow on Lil was now bestowed by her on the new-comer who answered to the name of Scraper, and how in answer to all her advances and endearments Scraper remained scornful and unreceptive.  One knows a hundred poems and legends in which this form of vengeance is taken upon the cruel fair; in which the proud lady who has scorned the humble and faithful heart lives to be scorned in turn.  Scraper, probably unconscious of his mission as avenger, fulfilled it none the less on that account.

His master, being an Englishman, had the common English reverence for the Sunday, and would not shoot on that day, though by his conscientious abstention he missed, undoubtedly, the best battue the country-side afforded.  We had a brief discussion as to the morality and propriety of the procession, and I pointed out to him that notwithstanding the military element by which it was so strongly marked, it was purely sacerdotal in origin and pious in intent, but he merely replied that as a form of religious exercise for a Sunday it struck him as being jolly rum.  He added shortly afterwards that whether he looked at it or not the coves would do it, and that he therefore felt at liberty to watch them.

Scraper displayed the profoundest interest in the business, and took upon himself the organisation of the whole affair, barking with so much authority, and careering about the cavalry squadron with such untiring energy that he threw Lil’s efforts in that way into the shade, and in the course of a mere half-hour had superseded her.  Then, just as Schwartz had been used, with every evidence of faith, to follow Lil, regarding her as the very mainspring of the military movement, Lil followed Scraper.  Mr. Herbert Spencer has shown that, in spite of the apparent unreasonableness of the fact, humbug and credulity are sworn companions.  The savage mystery man, who knows what a humbug he himself is, is the first to yield allegiance and faith to the abler humbug, who has more tricks or bolder invention than he.  So, Lil’s groundless pretensions of a week ago did not seem in the least to prevent her from being imposed upon by the groundless pretensions of Scraper, much as one might have thought her own career of imposture would have set her upon her guard.  She had caught that very fawning method of appeal for a kind regard which had once distinguished Schwartz, and it was obvious that Scraper could make no claim to which she would not be ready to give adhesion.  It is in the very nature of poetical justice that it satisfies the emotions, and I was not displeased to see affairs take this sudden turn, to view the hard and despiteful heart thus humbled.

It was on a Friday that Schwartz’s chase had ended so disastrously.  It was on the following Sunday that Lil laid down the honours of command at the feet of the new-comer.  It was on the Sunday following, the ninth day clear from the date of the mischance, that the great event of the seven years took place.  My young acquaintance had two or three days free of engagements, and he spent these in watching the preparations for the procession.  He spoke French with a fluency and purity which excited my envy, and he spent most of his spare time among the village people, who talked and thought and dreamed of nothing but the procession.  Wherever he went Scraper accompanied him, and wherever Scraper went Lil was to be seen following in fascinated admiration.

For a whole week the drum had known but little rest.  I never learned the purpose of the proceeding, but every day and all day, from long before daylight till long after dark, somebody marched about the village and rattled unceasingly upon the drum.  It could not possibly have been one man who did it all, for the energies of no one man that ever lived could have been equal to the task.  Most of the time it was far away, and it only made two daily promenades past the hotel, but whenever I listened for it I could hear it, beating the same unweary rataplan.  Then at intervals all day and every day, the big gun boomed and the clarion blared until I used to dream that I was back at Plevna or the Shipka Pass, and could not get my “copy” to London and New York because Monsieur Dorn had filled the Houssy Wood with Cossacks from Janenne.  It may be supposed that all this charivari was but an evil thing for a man as much in need of rest as I was, but I verily believe that the noise and bustle of the preparations, though they robbed me now and then of an hour of morning sleep, were almost as useful to me as the idleness I enjoyed, and the tranquil country air into which I could drive or wander afoot whenever the fancy for perfect quiet came upon me.

At last the great day dawned, and the great event dawned earlier than the day.  At five o’clock the noise of drum and clarion began, and the light of torches flared on the painted fronts of houses-yellow and pink and blue-in the quaint old village street.  A little later a band came by with shattering brass and booming drum, and for an hour or so the whole place was in a ferment.  The cavalry came clattering into the Place, the hoarse voice of Monsieur Dorn barked through the orders which had by this time grown conventional, and his squadron jingled for the last time for seven years through the movements he had taught them at the expense of so much time and lung power.  Then a strange foreboding sort of quiet, an unnatural tranquillity, settled upon everything and continued until near upon the hour of ten.  A long waggon drawn by four oxen excited, by the freight it bore, a momentary curiosity, and brought faces to doors and windows.  The air was keen to-day, and we were at the very season of mid-winter, but in the waggon which the four slow oxen dragged through the streets of Janenne were a dozen lofty shrubs reaching to a height of eight or nine feet at least, the which shrubs were one mass of exotic-looking blossom.  I discovered later on that they were nothing more than a set of young pines with artificial paper flowers attached to every twig, but the effect as they went down the wintry street in their clothing of gold and rose and white with the live green of the fir peeping through the wealth of bloom was quite an astonishment in its way.  These decorated shrubs were set at the church porch, and seemed to fill the whole of that part of the street with colour and light.

When the procession came at last there was one curious thing about it.  Such a crowd of people-for Janenne took part in it-that there was scarcely anybody left to look at it.  But then the processionists had the pleasure of looking at each other.  The band came first, in blue blouse and clean white trousers.  Then came the soldiery, a motley crew, with Monsieur Dorn at their head, drawn sword in hand, and next to him a personage who might have been translated clean from Astley’s-a gentleman in long hose, with a flower on each shoe, and a hat of red velvet shaped like a bread tray, decorated with prodigious coloured feathers, and a slashed doublet gay with many knots of bright ribbon.  Years and years ago Janenne had a Count and a chateau.  The ruins of the chateau still kept gray guard over the village street; but there is not even a ruin left of the old family.  But in the day when Our Lady of Lorette stayed the local pestilence the existing Count of Janenne was pious enough to ride in the promised procession; and for a century or so the magnate of the village and its neighbourhood was never absent from the demonstration of thanksgiving.  In a while, however, the Counts of Janenne took to wildish ways, and, leaving the home of their ancestors, went away to Paris and led extravagant lives there, gambling and drinking, and squandering their substance in other and even more foolish fashions, and at last there ceased to be estates of Janenne to draw upon, or even Counts of Janenne to draw.  But before things came to this pass the absentee Counts had always sent a representative to join the procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette; and it has come about that the legend has clung in the popular fancy even unto the present day.  Somebody-anybody-gets himself up in theatrical guise, and rides at the head of the military forces, between the first rank and the commander-in-chief, as the representative of that extinct great house.  On this occasion it was a red-cheeked shy young man, cousin to the chambermaid of the Hotel des Postes, a peasant proprietor who farmed, and still farms, some ten or a dozen hectares of sour land on the road to Montcourtois.  The red-cheeked shy young man’s female cousin exchanged a red-cheeked, shame-faced, rustic grin with him as he rode by, and the young man, in imitation of Monsieur Dorn, made his horse caracole, but being less versed in horsemanship than the old gendarme, had to hold on ignominiously by the mane in payment for his own temerity.

Following the military came a long array of little girls in white muslin, with sashes blue or red.  Half a dozen nuns kept watch over them, pacing sombre in white head-dresses and black gowns by the side of all that smiling troop of glad hearts and childish faces.  All the little girls carried bannerets of bright colour, and all went bareheaded, after the manner of the district, where no woman, short of the highest fashion, ever permits herself to wear hat or bonnet, except when going to mass or upon a railway journey.  White childish locks, braided and shining, red locks, brown locks, black locks, with bright faces under all, went streaming by, and then a solemn priest or two headed a rambling host of lads with well-scrubbed cheeks and clean collars, and decent raiment of church-going Sunday black.  Then came a flock of young women in white muslin, very starched and stiff, with blue bows and blue sashes.  In front of these two stalwart wenches bore a flapping banner, inscribed ‘La Jeunesse de Janenne’; and closing up the rank of Janenne’s youth and rustic beauty came half a dozen chosen damsels, big limbed and strong, bearing on their shoulders a huge waxen statue of Our Lady of Lorette, and in her arms a crowned child, she herself being crowned with glittering tinsel, and robed in a glowing and diaphanous stuff, which only half revealed the white satin and spangles of the dress below it.  Then a number of chubby-cheeked little boys in semi-ecclesiastical costume, improvised-no doubt under clerical supervision-by careful hands at home.  Each little boy carried a fuming censer, and it was not difficult to see that they were well pleased with themselves and their office.  After them came the doyen in full ecclesiastical costume, a little tawdry perhaps, for the village is but poor and with the best heart in the world can only imitate the real splendours from afar.  Then following the doyen (who, by the way, marched under a canopy like the roof of an old-fashioned four-post bedstead) came the male choir of the church, chanting a musical service, which harmonised indifferently with the strains of the military band in front.  Then the big gun, drawn by the two big Flemish horses.  Then Jacques, Jules, Andre, Francois, Chariot, Pierre, Joseph, Jean, and all the rest, in sabots, short trousers, and blue blouses, marching bareheaded with reverent air, and with them Julie, and Fifine, and Nana, and Adele, and other feminine relatives, all in their Sunday best, and all devout in mien.  Then, at a little distance-the most astonishing and unlooked-for tail to all this village splendour and devoutness-Schwartz.

Schwartz himself, but Schwartz so changed, so lean, so woebegone, as hardly to be recognisable, even to the eye of friendship.  Of all his diverse-raging hairs not one to assert itself, but all plastered close with an oily sleekness by a slimy clinging mud, the thin ribs showing plainly, and the hinder part of the poor wretch’s barrel a mere hand-grasp.  His very tail, which had used to look like an irregular much-worn bottle-brush, was thin and sleek like a rat’s, and he tucked it away as if he were ashamed of it.  His feet were clotted with red earth, and he walked as if his head were a burden to him, he hung it so mournfully and carried it so low.

My young English acquaintance, who, like myself, had been watching the procession, had posted himself a little farther down the road, with Scraper near at hand.  Near to him, employing all the ingratiatory insinuating arts she knew, and so absorbed in Scraper that she forgot even to direct the procession, was Lil.  To her, fawning and whining in such an excess of feeble joy as can be rarely known to dogs or man, came the half-starved, half-drowned creature.  I was already halfway to Schwartz’s rescue, with immediate milk, to be followed by soap and water, in my mind, but I stopped to see how Lil would receive the returned companion of old days.  It is scarcely probable that dogs believe in ghosts, and yet it would have been easy to fancy that she saw in him at first some purely supernatural apparition, she recoiled with so obvious a surprise and terror when she first beheld him.  The wretched, propitiatory, humbly-ecstatic Schwartz advanced, but she showed her gleaming teeth, and growled aversion.  He stopped stock-still, and whined a little, and Lil responded furiously.  I took the returned wanderer up in both hands, and carried him into the hotel scullery, and got milk for him.  He lapped it with tears running down his muddy nose; and when I had had him washed and tucked away into an old railway rug, beside a stove in the little room, he lay there winking and blinking, and licked at his own tears with an expression altogether broken-hearted.  I should have liked to have known something of the history of his subterranean wanderings, but that was only to be left to conjecture.  I bade him be of better cheer, and went outside to wait for the return of the procession, and to smoke a cigar in the open air, and an hour later found that Schwartz had again disappeared.  This time, however, he had merely gone home, and though for a day or two he was quite an invalid, he was soon about the streets again, completely rehabilitated.

And now I come to the relation of the one tragic fact which seemed to me to make this simple history worth writing.  I hope that nobody will regard it as an invention, or will suppose that I am trading upon their sympathies on false pretences.

On the day of the young Englishman’s departure I accompanied him to the railway station.  Lil came down in attendance upon Scraper, and barked fiercely at the departing train which bore him away.  Schwartz followed in humble pursuit of Lil, who, so far as I could understand affairs, had never forgiven him for intruding himself in so unpresentable a guise, and claiming acquaintance whilst she was engaged in conversation with a swell like Scraper.  From that hour she had refused to hold the slightest communion with him, showing her teeth and growling in the cruellest way whenever he approached her.  In spite of this, Schwartz seemed to be persuaded that, in the absence of his rival, he still stood a chance, and day after day he followed her with the old fawning humbleness, and day after day she received him with the same anger and disdain.

On a certain Wednesday afternoon the air was wonderfully mild and dry.  It was early in January, but the weather was so fine that I had not even need of an overcoat, as I sat in the sunshine smoking and reading.  I had seen Monsieur Dorn enter the opposite house, taking Lil with him, and Schwartz had settled himself on the doorstep, as usual, to await her exit.  I called him to me, and he crossed over, but soon returned and resumed his place, and sat there waiting still.  After a considerable time the door opened, and Monsieur Dorn and Lil emerged together.  I looked up at that moment, and saw Lil make a savage dart at her too-persistent worshipper.  Monsieur Dorn beat them apart, but Schwartz had attempted no resistance.  He was rather badly bitten, and when I picked him up the tears were running fast down his nose, and he was feebly licking at them, and whining to himself in a way which indicated the extremest weakness of spirit.  I sat down with him, and comforted the poor-hearted creature, and he seemed grateful, for he licked my hand repeatedly, but he did not cease to whine and weep.

By and by I heard, though I did not notice it at the time, the warning whistle of the approaching train.  The station is little more than a stone’s throw from the hotel.  Schwartz made a leap, licked my face, jumped from the bench, and ambled away.  I never saw him alive again, for, on the testimony of the signalman, he ran down to the railway line, stretched himself upon one of the rails, and, in spite of a stone the man threw at him when the train had advanced dangerously near to him, he held his place until the wheels passed over his body.

His remains were buried in his master’s back garden.  I know that he knew full well what he was doing when he stretched himself upon the rail, and I know that his feeble and affectionate heart was broken before he did it.