Peremptorily called to heel, Lufra came, bringing the ball with him. Frederica took it from him, and cut short the unbridled complaint of the nursemaid by saying in the voice of one who had for years ruled a large household: “That will do! You forget yourself!” She then looked at Master John, and said: “I hope you didn’t hurt yourself when you fell down? Of course, I know you wouldn’t cry because my dog tried to play with you, for I can see that you are quite a big boy, but do, pray, shake hands with him, to show that you didn’t mean to be uncivil when you ran away from him! Sit, Luff, and give a paw!”
Obedient to the pressure of her hand, Lufra did sit, and obligingly waved one of his forelegs. Master John’s loud laments ceased abruptly. He stared in astonishment at Lufra. “Doggie shake hands?” he demanded incredulously.
“To be sure he does!”
“With me!” said Master Frank. “I’m not afraid of him!”
Stung, Master John declared that Doggie did not wish to shake hands with him; and by the time this question of precedence had been settled, and both boys had solemnly clasped Lufra’s paw, Miss Caroline was jealously claiming her right to share the honour. Frederica then gave the ball back to Master Frank, and parted from the family, pursued by a darkling look from their attendant, and by the children’s adjurations to bring Doggie back next day.
She went on her way, unperturbed by the incident, which merely confirmed her in the belief that London children, acquainted only with the lap-dogs cosseted by their mamas, were much to be pitied; and it was not until she had rounded the shrubbery shielding the Ranger’s Lodge that it was suddenly and forcibly borne in upon her that the Pocket Guide had betrayed her: it had made no mention of a small herd of cows, with their attendant milkmaids, which (as she later discovered) were a well-known feature of the park. Not only did they provide urban eyes with a charmingly rural picture, but their attendants, all attired in the conventional garb of milkmaids, dispensed glasses of warm milk to anyone prepared to disimburse the very moderate sum demanded for the privilege of drinking milk fresh from the cow.
Too late did she realize the treachery of the Pocket Guide: Lufra, ranging ahead of her, perceived the herd before she did, and stopped for an instant in his tracks, his ears on the prick, and his bristles rising. The matron of the herd, standing within a few feet of him, lowered her head menacingly; and Lufra, either unable or unwilling to distinguish between the males and the females of the species, uttered a blood-curdling sound, midway between a bark and a growl, and launched himself into battle.
VI
A lesser woman would have fled at this stage, abandoning Lufra to his fate, for the ensuing scene was truly appalling. To the accompaniment of screams from milkmaids, nursemaids, and several elderly ladies, Lufra committed the enormous crime of stampeding a herd of milch-cows. He did not, indeed, repeat the heroic act which had earned him his name, but, finding that the cows fled before him, he scattered them, enjoying the only sport which had so far been offered him in London.
No thought of escaping so much as crossed Frederica’s mind, but by the time she had managed, with the help of the head cowman and two of the Deputy-Ranger’s menials, to catch and to secure the wholly unrepentant hound, she knew that her case was desperate. All about her was a scene of carnage; one of the elderly ladies had succumbed to hysterics; another was demanding that a constable should be instantly sent for; the cowman was calling down curses on her head; and the park’s custodians were declaring their fixed resolve to impound Lufra, pending his certain execution. To make matters worse, the nurse with whose charges Lufra had disported himself came hurrying up, attracted by the commotion, and lost no time in deposing that he had savagely rushed upon the children, frightening the poor little dears out of their wits, stealing their ball, and causing Master John to fall flat on his face grazing his hands and soiling his nankeens.
“Fudge!” said Frederica scornfully.
Neither the cowman nor the park-keepers paid much heed to the nursemaid’s testimony. The cowman was only concerned with his cattle; and the park-keepers, observing the flattened ears and waving tail with which Lufra greeted his youthful friends, did not for a moment suppose him to be savage. They recognized in him all the signs of an overgrown and outrageous mongrel, young enough to be ripe for mischief; and, in other circumstances, they would have taken a lenient view of his misdemeanour. But the rules governing London parks were strict; the hatchet-faced old griffin who was adjuring them to summon a constable, her weaker sister who was still in the throes of nervous spasms, various citizens who declared that such dangerous brutes ought never to be permitted to roam at large, and a bevy of nursemaids unanimous in demanding vengeance on the wild animal which had shattered for ever the nerves of their gently-born charges, prompted them to take an extreme view of the case. Confronted on the one hand with a number of persons bent on reporting the incident to the Deputy-Ranger, and on the other by a delinquent mongrel owned by a Young Person unattended by a footman, or a maid, they saw their duty clear before them: Lufra, the elder of the two awfully told Frederica, must be handed over to them, to be kept in custody until a magistrate should pronounce his fate.
Lufra, misliking both his tone and his purposeful advance, stopped panting, and rose, bristling, and intimating by a warning growl that any attempt to attack Frederica would be undertaken at the park-keeper’s periclass="underline" a warlike display which excited the cowman to demand his summary execution, and caused the park-keeper to order Frederica to “bring that dawg along o’ me!”
Amongst the assembled persons none but the cowman knew better than Frederica how unpardonable was Lufra’s crime. One glance at this individual’s inflamed countenance was enough to convince her that an appeal addressed to him would be waste of breath. Inwardly quaking, she said: “Take care! This dog belongs to the Marquis of Alverstoke! He is extremely valuable, and if anything were to happen to him his lordship would be very angry indeed!”
The younger park-keeper, who had formed his own, not inexpert, opinion of Lufra’s lineage, said bluntly: “Gammon! No Markiss never bought ’im! ’E’d be dear at a grig! ’E’s a mongrel, that’s what ’e is!”
“A mongrel?” exclaimed Frederica. “Let me tell you that he is a pure-bred Barcelona collie, brought to England at — at enormous expense! I am sorry that he should have chased the cows, but — but he was merely trying to herd them! The breed is used for that purpose in Spain, and — and he is not yet accustomed to English cows!”
“Trying to herd them?” gasped the cowman. “I never did, not in all my life! Why, you’re as bad as he is!”
The younger park-keeper had no hesitation in endorsing this verdict. He said that Miss was coming it too strong, adding that while he knew nothing about Barcelona collies he did know a mongrel when he saw one. He also said, sticking to his original point, that, in his opinion, no Markiss never bought such a dog as Lufra.