Part 1

MOUFFLOU

FIFTH IMPRESSION

THE CHILDREN’S CLASSICS

Each beautifully illustrated in color and tastefully bound

FRANCESCA AT HINTERWALD By JOHANNA SPYRI

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW By WASHINGTON IRVING

RIP VAN WINKLE By WASHINGTON IRVING

TALES OF WASHINGTON IRVING’S ALHAMBRA By WASHINGTON IRVING Simplified by Leila H. Cheney

THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER By JOHN RUSKIN

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS By JONATHAN SWIFT A Voyage to Lilliput

A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES By ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

HANS ANDERSEN’S FAIRY TALES Selected

THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE By MISS MULOCK

THE ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE By MISS MULOCK

J. COLE By EMMA GELLIBRAND

ALL-TIME TALES Selected. By Homer P. and Elizabeth Lewis

MONI THE GOAT BOY By JOHANNA SPYRI

THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN By GEORGE MACDONALD

THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE By GEORGE MACDONALD

AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND By GEORGE MACDONALD Simplified by Elizabeth Lewis

WONDERLAND STORIES Selected

THE NÜRNBERG STOVE By OUIDA

A DOG OF FLANDERS By OUIDA

MOUFFLOU AND OTHER STORIES By OUIDA

[Illustration: THEY PLAY WITH MOUFFLOU AND THE POODLE PUPPY HALF THE DAY]

MOUFFLOU AND OTHER STORIES

BY LOUISA DE LA RAMÉ (OUIDA)

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY_ MARIA L. KIRK

_AND PEN DRAWINGS BY_ EDMUND H. GARRETT

PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.

CONTENTS

PAGE

MOUFFLOU 9

LAMPBLACK 51

THE AMBITIOUS ROSE-TREE 65

ILLUSTRATIONS

IN COLOR

PAGE

THEY PLAY WITH MOUFFLOU AND THE POODLE PUPPY HALF THE DAY _Frontispiece_

“OLD DEPOSIT IS GOING TO BE A SIGN-POST,” THEY CRIED 57

ONE DAY THE GARDENER APPROACHED AND STOOD AND LOOKED AT HER 70

PEN DRAWINGS

MOUFFLOU ACQUITTED HIMSELF ABLY AS EVER 21

“THEN THE MASTER KNEW BEST,” THOUGHT LAMPBLACK 63

“PRETTY POLL! OH, SUCH A PRETTY POLL!” 84

MOUFFLOU

MOUFFLOU

MOUFFLOU’S masters were some boys and girls. They were very poor, but they were very merry. They lived in an old, dark, tumble-down place, and their father had been dead five years; their mother’s care was all they knew; and Tasso was the eldest of them all, a lad of nearly twenty, and he was so kind, so good, so laborious, so cheerful, and so gentle, that the children all younger than he adored him. Tasso was a gardener. Tasso, however, though the eldest and mainly the bread-winner, was not so much Moufflou’s master as was little Romolo, who was only ten, and a cripple. Romolo, called generally Lolo, had taught Moufflou all he knew, and that all was a very great deal, for nothing cleverer than was Moufflou had ever walked upon four legs.

Why Moufflou?

Well, when the poodle had been given to them by a soldier who was going back to his home in Piedmont, he had been a white woolly creature of a year old, and the children’s mother, who was a Corsican by birth, had said that he was just like a _moufflon_, as they call sheep in Corsica. White and woolly this dog remained, and he became the handsomest and biggest poodle in all the city, and the corruption of Moufflou from Moufflon remained the name by which he was known; it was silly, perhaps, but it suited him and the children, and Moufflou he was.

They lived in an old quarter of Florence, in that picturesque zigzag which goes round the grand church of Or San Michele, and which is almost more Venetian than Tuscan in its mingling of color, charm, stateliness, popular confusion, and architectural majesty. The tall old houses are weather-beaten into the most delicious hues; the pavement is enchantingly encumbered with peddlers and stalls and all kinds of trades going on in the open air, in that bright, merry, beautiful Italian custom which, alas, alas! is being driven away by new-fangled laws which deem it better for the people to be stuffed up in close, stewing rooms without air, and would fain do away with all the good-tempered politics and the sensible philosophies and the wholesome chatter which the open-street trades and street gossipry encourage, for it is good for the populace to _sfogare_ and in no other way can it do so one-half so innocently. Drive it back into musty shops, and it is driven at once to mutter sedition.... But you want to hear about Moufflou.

Well, Moufflou lived here in that high house with the sign of the lamb in wrought iron, which shows it was once a warehouse of the old guild of the Arte della Lana. They are all old houses here, drawn round about that grand church which I called once, and will call again, like a mighty casket of oxidized silver. A mighty casket indeed, holding the Holy Spirit within it; and with the vermilion and the blue and the orange glowing in its niches and its lunettes like enamels, and its statues of the apostles strong and noble, like the times in which they were created,--St. Peter with his keys, and St. Mark with his open book, and St. George leaning on his sword, and others also, solemn and austere as they, austere though benign, for do they not guard the White Tabernacle of Orcagna within?

The church stands firm as a rock, square as a fortress of stone, and the winds and the waters of the skies may beat about it as they will, they have no power to disturb its sublime repose. Sometimes I think of all the noble things in all our Italy; Or San Michele is the noblest, standing there in its stern magnificence, amidst people’s hurrying feet and noisy laughter, a memory of God.

The little masters of Moufflou lived right in its shadow, where the bridge of stone spans the space between the houses and the church high in mid-air: and little Lolo loved the church with a great love. He loved it in the morning-time, when the sunbeams turned it into dusky gold and jasper; he loved it in the evening-time, when the lights of its altars glimmered in the dark, and the scent of its incense came out in the street; he loved it in the great feasts, when the huge clusters of lilies were borne inside it; he loved it in the solemn nights of winter; the flickering gleam of the dull lamps shone on the robes of an apostle, or the sculpture of a shield, or the glow of a casement-moulding in majolica. He loved it always, and, without knowing why, he called it _la mia chiesa_.

Lolo, being lame and of delicate health, was not enabled to go to school or to work, though he wove the straw covering of wine-flasks and plaited the cane matting with busy fingers. But for the most part he did as he liked, and spent most of his time sitting on the parapet of Or San Michele, watching the venders of earthenware at their trucks, or trotting with his crutch (and he could trot a good many miles when he chose) out with Moufflou down a bit of the Stocking-makers’ Street, along under the arcades of the Uffizi, and so over the Jewellers’ Bridge, and out by byways that he knew into the fields on the hill-side upon the other bank of Arno. Moufflou and he would spend half the day--all the day--out there in daffodil-time; and Lolo would come home with great bundles and sheaves of golden flowers, and he and Moufflou were happy.

His mother never liked to say a harsh word to Lolo, for he was lame through her fault: she had let him fall in his babyhood, and the mischief had been done to his hip never again to be undone. So she never raised her voice to him, though she did often to the others,--to curly-pated Cecco, and pretty black-eyed Dina, and saucy Bice, and sturdy Beppo, and even to the good, manly, hard-working Tasso. Tasso was the mainstay of the whole, though he was but a gardener’s lad, working in the green Cascine at small wages. But all he earned he brought home to his mother; and he alone kept in order the lazy, high-tempered Sandro, and he alone kept in check Bice’s love of finery, and he alone could with shrewdness and care make both ends meet and put _minestra_ always in the pot and bread always in the cupboard.

When his mother thought, as she thought indeed almost ceaselessly, that with a few months he would be of the age to draw his number, and might draw a high one and be taken from her for three years, the poor soul believed her very heart would burst and break; and many a day at twilight she would start out unperceived and creep into the great church and pour her soul forth in supplication before the White Tabernacle.

Yet, pray as she would, no miracle could happen to make Tasso free of military service: if he drew a fatal number, go he must, even though he take all the lives of them to their ruin with him.

One morning Lolo sat as usual on the parapet of the church, Moufflou beside him. It was a brilliant morning in September. The men at the hand-barrows and at the stalls were selling the crockery, the silk handkerchiefs, and the straw hats which form the staple of the commerce that goes on round about Or San Michele,--very blithe, good-natured, gay commerce, for the most part, not got through, however, of course, without bawling and screaming, and shouting and gesticulating, as if the sale of a penny pipkin or a twopenny pie-pan were the occasion for the exchange of many thousands of pounds sterling and cause for the whole world’s commotion. It was about eleven o’clock; the poor petitioners were going in for alms to the house of the fraternity of San Giovanni Battista; the barber at the corner was shaving a big man with a cloth tucked about his chin, and his chair set well out on the pavement; the sellers of the pipkins and pie-pans were screaming till they were hoarse, “_Un soldo l’uno, due soldi tre!_” big bronze bells were booming till they seemed to clang right up to the deep-blue sky; some brethren of the Misericordia went by bearing a black bier; a large sheaf of glowing flowers--dahlias, zinnias, asters, and daturas--was borne through the huge arched door of the church near St. Mark and his open book. Lolo looked on at it all, and so did Moufflou, and a stranger looked at them as he left the church.

“You have a handsome poodle there, my little man,” he said to Lolo, in a foreigner’s too distinct and careful Italian.

“Moufflou is beautiful,” said Lolo, with pride. “You should see him when he is just washed; but we can only wash him on Sundays, because then Tasso is at home.”

“How old is your dog?”

“Three years old.”

“Does he do any tricks?”

“Does he!” said Lolo, with a very derisive laugh: “Why, Moufflou can do anything! He can walk on two legs ever so long; make ready, present, and fire; die; waltz; beg, of course; shut a door; make a wheelbarrow of himself; there is nothing he will not do. Would you like to see him do something?”

“Very much,” said the foreigner.

To Moufflou and to Lolo the street was the same thing as home; this cheery _piazzetta_ by the church, so utterly empty sometimes, and sometimes so noisy and crowded, was but the wider threshold of their home to both the poodle and the child.

So there, under the lofty and stately walls of the old church, Lolo put Moufflou through his exercises. They were second nature to Moufflou, as to most poodles. He had inherited his address at them from clever parents, and, as he had never been frightened or coerced, all his lessons and acquirements were but play to him. He acquitted himself admirably and the crockery-venders came and looked on, and a sacristan came out of the church and smiled, and the barber left his customer’s chin all in a lather while he laughed, for the good folk of the quarter were all proud of Moufflou and never tired of him, and the pleasant, easy-going, good-humored disposition of the Tuscan populace is so far removed from the stupid buckram and whalebone in which the new-fangled democracy wants to imprison it.

The stranger also was much diverted by Moufflon’s talents, and said, half aloud, “How this clever dog would amuse poor Victor! Would you bring your poodle to please a sick child I have at home?” he said, quite aloud, to Lolo, who smiled and answered that he would. Where was the sick child?

“At the Gran Bretagna; not far off,” said the gentleman. “Come this afternoon, and ask for me by this name.”

He dropped his card and a couple of francs into Lolo’s hand, and went his way. Lolo, with Moufflou scampering after him, dashed into his own house, and stumped up the stairs, his crutch making a terrible noise on the stone.

“Mother, mother! see what I have got because Moufflou did his tricks,” he shouted. “And now you can buy those shoes you want so much, and the coffee that you miss so of a morning, and the new linen for Tasso, and the shirts for Sandro.”

For to the mind of Lolo two francs was as two millions--source unfathomable of riches inexhaustible!

With the afternoon he and Moufflou trotted down the arcades of the Uffizi and down the Lung’ Arno to the hotel of the stranger, and, showing the stranger’s card, which Lolo could not read, they were shown at once into a great chamber, all gilding and fresco and velvet furniture.

But Lolo, being a little Florentine, was never troubled by externals, or daunted by mere sofas and chairs; he stood and looked around him with perfect composure; and Moufflou, whose attitude, when he was not romping, was always one of magisterial gravity, sat on his haunches and did the same.

Soon the foreigner he had seen in the forenoon entered and spoke to him, and led him into another chamber, where stretched on a couch was a little wan-faced boy about seven years old; a pretty boy, but so pallid, so wasted, so helpless. This poor little boy was heir to a great name and a great fortune, but all the science in the world could not make him strong enough to run about among the daisies, or able to draw a single breath without pain. A feeble smile lit up his face as he saw Moufflou and Lolo; then a shadow chased it away.

[Illustration: MOUFFLOU ACQUITTED HIMSELF ABLY AS EVER.]

“Little boy is lame like me,” he said, in a tongue Lolo did not understand.

“Yes, but he is a strong little boy, and can move about, as perhaps the suns of his country will make you do,” said the gentleman, who was the poor little boy’s father. “He has brought you his poodle to amuse you. What a handsome dog! is it not?”

“Oh, _bufflins_!” said the poor little fellow, stretching out his wasted hands to Moufflou, who submitted his leonine crest to the caress.

Then Lolo went through the performance, and Moufflou acquitted himself ably as ever; and the little invalid laughed and shouted with his tiny thin voice, and enjoyed it all immensely, and rained cakes and biscuits on both the poodle and its master. Lolo crumped the pastries with willing white teeth, and Moufflou did no less. Then they got up to go, and the sick child on the couch burst into fretful lamentations and outcries.

“I want the dog! I will have the dog!” was all he kept repeating.

But Lolo did not know what he said, and was only sorry to see him so unhappy.

“You shall have the dog to-morrow,” said the gentleman, to pacify his little son; and he hurried Lolo and Moufflou out of the room, and consigned them to a servant, having given Lolo five francs this time.

“Why, Moufflou,” said Lolo, with a chuckle of delight, “if we could find a foreigner every day, we could eat meat at supper, Moufflou, and go to the theatre every evening!”

And he and his crutch clattered home with great eagerness and excitement, and Moufflou trotted on his four frilled feet, the blue bow with which Bice had tied up his curls on the top of his head, fluttering in the wind. But, alas! even his five francs could bring no comfort at home. He found his whole family wailing and mourning in utterly inconsolable distress.

Tasso had drawn his number that morning, and the number was seven, and he must go and be a conscript for three years.

The poor young man stood in the midst of his weeping brothers and sisters, with his mother leaning against his shoulder, and down his own brown cheeks the tears were falling. He must go, and lose his place in the public gardens, and leave his people to starve as they might, and be put in a tomfool’s jacket, and drafted off among cursing and swearing and strange faces, friendless, homeless, miserable! And the mother,--what would become of the mother?

Tasso was the best of lads and the mildest. He was quite happy sweeping up the leaves in the long alleys of the Cascine, or mowing the green lawns under the ilex avenues, and coming home at supper-time among the merry little people and the good woman that he loved. He was quite contented; he wanted nothing, only to be let alone; and they would not let him alone. They would haul him away to put a heavy musket in his hand and a heavy knapsack on his back, and drill him, and curse him, and make him into a human target, a live popinjay.

No one had any heed for Lolo and his five francs, and Moufflou, understanding that some great sorrow had fallen on his friends, sat down and lifted up his voice and howled.

Tasso must go away!--that was all they understood. For three long years they must go without the sight of his face, the aid of his strength, the pleasure of his smile: Tasso must go! When Lolo understood the calamity that had befallen them, he gathered Moufflou up against his breast, and sat down, too, on the floor beside him and cried as if he would never stop crying.

There was no help for it: it was one of those misfortunes which are, as we say in Italian, like a tile tumbled on the head. The tile drops from a height, and the poor head bows under the unseen blow. That is all.

“What is the use of that?” said the mother, passionately, when Lolo showed her his five francs. “It will not buy Tasso’s discharge.”

Lolo felt that his mother was cruel and unjust, and crept to bed with Moufflou. Moufflou always slept on Lolo’s feet.

The next morning Lolo got up before sunrise, and he and Moufflou accompanied Tasso to his work in the Cascine.

Lolo loved his brother, and clung to every moment whilst they could still be together.

“Can nothing keep you, Tasso?” he said, despairingly, as they went down the leafy aisles, whilst the Arno water was growing golden as the sun rose.

Tasso sighed.

“Nothing, dear. Unless Gesú would send me a thousand francs to buy a substitute.”

And he knew he might as well have said, “If one could coin gold ducats out of the sunbeams on Arno water.”

Lolo was very sorrowful as he lay on the grass in the meadow where Tasso was at work, and the poodle lay stretched beside him.

When Lolo went home to dinner (Tasso took his wrapped in a handkerchief) he found his mother very agitated and excited. She was laughing one moment, crying the next. She was passionate and peevish, tender and jocose by turns; there was something forced and feverish about her which the children felt but did not comprehend. She was a woman of not very much intelligence, and she had a secret, and she carried it ill, and knew not what to do with it; but they could not tell that. They only felt a vague sense of disturbance and timidity at her unwonted manner.

The meal over (it was only bean-soup, and that is soon eaten), the mother said sharply to Lolo, “Your aunt Anita wants you this afternoon. She has to go out, and you are needed to stay with the children: be off with you.”

Lolo was an obedient child; he took his hat and jumped up as quickly as his halting hip would let him. He called Moufflou, who was asleep.

“Leave the dog,” said his mother, sharply. “’Nita will not have him messing and carrying mud about her nice clean rooms. She told me so. Leave him, I say.”

“Leave Moufflou!” echoed Lolo, for never in all Moufflou’s life had Lolo parted from him. Leave Moufflou! He stared open-eyed and open-mouthed at his mother. What could have come to her?

“Leave him, I say,” she repeated, more sharply than ever. “Must I speak twice to my own children? Be off with you, and leave the dog, I say.”

And she clutched Moufflou by his long silky mane and dragged him backwards, whilst with the other hand she thrust out of the door Lolo and Bice.

Lolo began to hammer with his crutch at the door thus closed on him; but Bice coaxed and entreated him.

“Poor mother has been so worried about Tasso,” she pleaded. “And what harm can come to Moufflou? And I do think he was tired, Lolo; the Cascine is a long way; and it is quite true that Aunt ’Nita never liked him.”

So by one means and another she coaxed her brother away; and they went almost in silence to where their aunt Anita dwelt, which was across the river, near the dark-red bell-shaped dome of Santa Spirito.

It was true that her aunt had wanted them to mind her room and her babies whilst she was away carrying home some lace to a villa outside the Roman gate, for she was a lace-washer and clear-starcher by trade. There they had to stay in the little dark room with the two babies, with nothing to amuse the time except the clang of the bells of the church of the Holy Spirit, and the voices of the lemonade-sellers shouting in the street below. Aunt Anita did not get back till it was more than dusk, and the two children trotted homeward hand in hand, Lolo’s leg dragging itself painfully along, for without Moufflou’s white figure dancing on before him he felt very tired indeed. It was pitch dark when they got to Or San Michele, and the lamps burned dully.

Lolo stumped up the stairs wearily, with a vague, dull fear at his small heart.

“Moufflou, Moufflou!” he called. Where was Moufflou? Always at the first sound of his crutch the poodle came flying towards him. “Moufflou, Moufflou!” he called all the way up the long, dark twisting stone stair. He pushed open the door, and he called again, “Moufflou, Moufflou!”

But no dog answered to his call.

“Mother, where is Moufflou?” he asked, staring with blinking, dazzled eyes into the oil-lit room where his mother sat knitting. Tasso was not then home from work. His mother went on with her knitting; there was an uneasy look on her face.

“Mother, what have you done with Moufflou, _my_ Moufflou?” said Lolo, with a look that was almost stern on his ten-year-old face.

Then his mother, without looking up and moving her knitting-needles very rapidly, said,--

“Moufflou is sold!”

And little Dina, who was a quick, pert child, cried, with a shrill voice,--