Opening…

Preface

For the second time, since this book's beginning, the rose of July had flamed into splendid bloom. I drew breath, for my task approached its ending, and looked up from the yellowed newspaper records of a great War waged forty-four years ago.

Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and portents, or the web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all but privileged eyes.... Now I saw, looming on the eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a man's clenched fist in a gauntleted glove of mail.

For days previously the frames of the open windows that look across the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in answer to the incessant thud-thudding of big naval guns at sea. One opal dawn showed the grim shapes of super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and a school of submarines. Night fell, and sea, land, and sky alternately whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the searchlights. Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty Secret Code. Gulls cradled on the glassy waters of the Channel must have been roused by outbursts of full-throated British cheering, and the crash of the Fleet bands striking into the National Anthem, as the sealed orders of the Supreme Admiral were signalled from the Flagship commanding the Southern Fleet. No sound reached us ashore but the hush of the waves, the whisper of the night-wind, and the plaintive ululation of the mousing owls on Muttersmoor. Yet what we saw that night was the awakening of Great Britain to the knowledge that her greatness is not past and gone.

Since then, the menacing cloud in the east has assumed solidity. The mailed fist has fallen, imprinting Ruin on the soil of a neutral country, demolishing the matchless heirlooms of Art and the priceless treasures of Literature, bringing down in gray fragments the glories of Gothic architecture, everywhere destroying the Temple of God and shattering the House of Life. The galleries and cabinets of noble and burgher, the treasure-houses of a nation are plundered.

We have lived to see the War of Nations. We are in it: fighting as our Allies of Belgium, France, and Russia are fighting; for racial name, national existence, social independence, and freedom of bodies and souls. And this being so, I see no cause to blot a line that I have written. For the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1914. The New Spirit of Teutonism had not shown itself in those dead days I have tried to vivify.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was waged sternly and mercilessly, but not in defiance of the Rules that govern the Great Game. Treaties were held as something more sacred than scraps of paper. Blood was lavishly poured out, gold relentlessly wrung from the coffers of a vanquished and impoverished State. Things were done--as in the instances of Bazeilles and Châteaudun that made the world shudder, but not with the sickness of mortal loathing. Kings and nobles made War like noblemen and Kings.

_Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labor reared up stone by stone the German Empire was, unless biographers have lied, haunted and obsessed in his declining days by remorse of conscience and terrors of the soul. "But for me," he is reported to have said, "three great wars would not have been made, nor would eight hundred thousand of my fellow men have died by violence. Now, for all that I have to answer before Almighty God!" ... Could the relentless exponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron have foreseen the imminent, approaching disintegration of his colossal life-work, under the hands of his successors--might he have known what Dead Sea fruit of ashes and bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of Germany, was fated to bring forth--he would have drunk ere death of the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment; he would have seen in the shape of his pupil the grotesque, distorted image of himself._

RICHARD DEHAN.

SOUTH DEVON, November, 1914.

THE MAN OF IRON

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I

When Patrick Carolan Breagh attained the age of six years, the boy being tall enough to view his own topknot of scarlet curls and freckled snub nose in the big shining mirror of his stepmother's toilet-table, without standing on the tin bonnet-box that was kept under the chintz cover, or climbing on a chair,--he was fated to acquire, during one brief half-hour's concealment under a Pembroke table, more knowledge of Life, Death, and the value of Money, than would otherwise have come to him in the course of half a dozen more years.

Upon this unforgetable third of January, his plaid frock had been taken off and, to his infinite delight, replaced by a little pair of blue cloth breeches and a roundabout jacket. Amateurish as to cut, the nether garments displaying so little difference fore and aft that it did not matter in the least which way you faced when you stepped into them, they were yet splendid,--not only in Carolan's eyes. Alan, his junior by three years, bellowed with envy on beholding them; and four-year-old Monica sucked her finger and stared with all her might.

It was plain to Carolan that, having once assumed the manly garments, no boy could be expected to put on those hateful petticoats again. In vain Nurse Povah,--who had been Carolan's foster-mother,--and Miss Josey, the governess, explained to him that the breeches were not completed, and directed his eyes to the mute evidence of pins, chalk-marks, and yellow basting-threads. Their arguments were vain, their entreaties addressed to deaf ears. An attempt to remove the cause of contention by force resulted in Nurse's being butted, though not hard! and Miss Josey kicked with viciousness. In the confusion that ensued, the rebel effected an escape from the scene of combat. And the door of the sitting-room being open, Carolan trotted across the Government cocoanut matting of the landing with the intention of confessing his own misdeeds, since Miss Josey was quite certain to report him at headquarters, had not this often-tested method of blunting the edge of retributory justice failed, through his own fault.

For upon entering the large, shabbily furnished room, situated on the second floor of a gaunt, gray stone building known as Block D, Married Officers' Quarters--the room that served Captain Breagh and his second wife as sitting-room, dining-room, smoking-room and boudoir--Carolan became aware that his stepmother, quite unconscious of his intrusion, was dusting the china vases on the mantel-shelf, and was instantly possessed by the conviction that it would be huge fun to hide under the large round table that occupied the middle of the worn Brussels carpet, and bounce out upon the poor lady when she turned, making her say "Owh!"

So the boy noiselessly dived under the deep, hanging, silk-fringed border of the Indian shawl that covered the circular Pembroke table, upon which were ranged, about a central basket of wax fruit and flowers, gilt frames with spotty daguerrotypes, albums of scraps, Books of Beauty containing the loveliest specimens of Early Victorian female aristocracy, and Garlands of Poetry reeking with the sentimental effusions of Eliza Cook and L.E.L., interspersed with certain card-cases and paper-knives of Indian carved ivory and sandal-wood, and other trifles of brass and filigree ware.

The big, shabbily furnished second-floor room had three windows looking out upon the graveled expanse of the Parade-ground, and commanding a view of the flower-bedded patch of sacred green turf, inclosed by posts and chains, that graced the front of the pillared, pedimented, and porticoed building that housed the Officers' Mess. And when the regiment got the route for another garrison town, nearly everything the room contained--from the Pembroke center-table and chintz-covered sofa, to the secrétaire at which Captain Breagh penned his letters, the big leather-covered arm-chair in which he sat, and the Bengal tiger-skin hearthrug,--would be packed,--with the picture of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Vimiera, and the chimney-glass over which it always hung--into wooden cases, with the before-mentioned chimney-glass, curtains and carpets, beds, baths, uniform-cases and a great number of other things; and then after a period of rumbling confusion there would be a new sitting-room looking on another barrack-square, other bedrooms and a fresh nursery,--and Carolan would forget the old ones in something under a week. As a matter of fact, the regiment had been shifted four times since its return from India, when Carolan was little more than a baby, and Monica and Alan and Baba were nowhere at all.

Now either Mrs. Breagh occupied an unconscionable time in dusting the vases and making up the fire for her Captain, who by reason of long service with the regiment in the East was susceptible to chill; or Carolan, with the mental instability shared by the child and the savage, lost interest in his new project and abandoned it. He was squatting silently in his hiding-place when Miss Josey entered; he heard her complaint, noted down two spiteful exaggerations and one malicious falsehood, and witnessed the exhibition of a bulgy ankle in a badly-gartered white cotton stocking surmounting an elastic-sided cloth boot. When the governess withdrew, consoled by Mrs. Breagh's sympathy, Nurse Povah was summoned from the other side of the landing by a tinkle of the hand-bell, and bore stout witness on the culprit's side.

"Did ye see her leg, I'd make so bould as ask, or did ye take her worrud for ut? And--av there was anythin' to show barrin' a flaybite, is ut natheral a boy wud parrut wid his furrst breches widout a kick? Sure, they're the apple av his eye, and the joy av his harrut! And her--wid her talk av bendin' his will and breakin' his temper! is ut like ye wud lay a finger on the Captain's eldest son, to plaze the likes of her?"

"The Captain has said himself--over and over--that a sound thrashing would be a capital thing for Carry," Mrs. Breagh returned.

"He praiches--ay, bedad!--but does he ever practuss?" demanded Nurse, smoothing her apron with stout, matronly hands, and getting very red in the cheeks. "Niver fear but he'd be too wise to bring a curse upon himself by ill-thrating a motherless child!"

"Motherless!" What did the word mean? Carolan wondered, recalling how Nurse would describe some particularly down-hearted person as being as long in the jaw as a motherless calf. And now Mrs. Breagh was saying, in the kind of voice some good people use for the purpose of Scriptural quotation, and which is not in the least like their accents of every day...

"Solomon said, 'He that spareth the rod'--but you Catholics never seem to read the Bible. And I always treat Carolan as if he were my own child--and you know I do! 'Ssh! Here comes the Captain--and I think I hear Baba crying...."

And Nurse, with the honors of war, retired to the nursery on the other side of the landing, as Captain Breagh's hasty footsteps and the jingle of his scabbard were heard on the stone stair. A minute later he entered the room. But during the minute's interval Carolan had had time to ponder, mentally digest and form a conclusion from what he had just heard.

It had never previously occurred to him that the stout, dark, beady-eyed, brightly dressed lady whom he had been taught to call Mamma was not really his mother, but he knew it now. It was revealed to him in one lightning-flash of comprehension that this was the reason why her hands felt so like hands of wood whenever they touched him, and why her kiss,--religiously administered night and morning--was a thing he would much sooner have gone without. He knew,--and something inside him was glad to know--that it was not wicked of him not to love her as he loved Nurse, or Monica, or Ponto the brown retriever. And then his heart dropped like a leaden plummet to the pit of his infant stomach. This was to be a day of discoveries. He had discovered that by kicking out lustily it had been possible to resist the forcible removal of his new breeches. He had discovered that "Mamma" was not his real, real mother! Would Daddy turn out to be Monica's and Alan's and Baba's Daddy, and not Carolan's, after all?

A sob rose in his throat, and his hot, dry eyes began to smart and water. But the manly trampling and clanking came nearer. The door opened--his father was in the room. He could only see his shiny Wellington boots, and the bottoms of the red-striped dark blue breeches that were strapped over them. But familiar knowledge built from the boots the handsome manly figure in the light brick-red coat with the Royal blue facings, the China and Punjab war-medals, the crimson sash and the other martial accouterments topped by the stiff leather stock, and the head whose wealth of jet-black curls and luxuriant bushy whiskers might have been the glory of a fashionable hairdresser's window; in combination with the well-cut features, light blue eyes, and fine rosy complexion, as yet scarcely deteriorated by Mess port, whisky punch, and late hours.

Captain Breagh kissed Mrs. Breagh with a hearty smack that made Carolan start in his hiding-place, and said the wind was enough to cut you in two, and that the fire looked tempting; as he laid down his pipeclayed gloves and dress-schako with the gilt grenade and white ball-tuft on the aged and dilapidated sideboard, and permitted his lady to relieve him of his sword. Then he rubbed his hands and thrust them to the blaze enjoyingly, and threw himself into the creaking leathern arm-chair. This, it suddenly occurred to Carolan, would be a favorable moment for emerging from concealment. He had got on all-fours, ready to appear in the character of a bear or tiger, when Mrs. Breagh stopped him by beginning to tell tales. The child was beyond control, she declared--there was no end to his naughtiness. For the sake of his immortal soul, something would have to be done....

"What's he been doing? For my own part,--I wouldn't give a brass farthing for a pup that wouldn't bite, or a boy that wouldn't show fight when he was put to it!" The arm-chair creaked suggestively as the Captain stretched out his legs, and the firelight danced in the polish of his boots, hardly dimmed by the dry gravel of the Parade-ground. "And it's in the blood, that high spirit. Don't suppose I'm bragging that the Breaghs are any great shakes in the way of family!--though the name's as decent a one as you'll meet in a long day's march. But Carolan's a Fermeroy on the mother's side--and they're a hot-headed, high-handed breed," the Captain added, taking the newspaper from the Pembroke table, "and have been ever since the year One--if you take the trouble to look 'em up in Irish History. Not that I've ever read any, but my poor Milly used to say----"

His wife's eyes snapped with irrepressible jealousy at the reference to her predecessor.

"And everything that came from her you took for Gospel, I suppose?"

"Pretty near!" said Captain Breagh, and began to unfold his newspaper.

"I get little enough time for reading things that are useful," said Mrs. Breagh, as the Captain dipped into the crackling sheets. "It was my bounden duty to speak, and I've done it! And if you think you are doing your duty by the child--let alone his mother----"

She broke off, for the Captain bounced in his chair, and dashed down the newspaper.

"Haven't I told you I won't have poor Milly's name dragged into these discussions! She's dead!--and so let her be!"

If a lady can be said to snort, Mrs. Breagh gave utterance to a sound of that nature.

"I'm willing, Alexander, I'm sure! But all things considered, I must say I think it's a pity her ladyship died and left you a widower!"

"And you're right there, begad you are! And how many times have I told you she was merely an Honorable, and not her ladyship!" He left the newspaper sprawling on the hearthrug, and mechanically reaching down his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the corner of the mantelshelf, proceeded to fill the well-browned meerschaum, and when his wife lighted a spill and held it to him as an olive-branch, he thanked her in an absent way. What did the Captain see as he pulled at the gnawed, amber mouthpiece and stared into the red-hot heart of the fire, communing with that other self that dwells within every man?

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II

I think he saw young Alex Breagh, a junior Lieutenant of the Grenadier company of the Royal Ennis Regiment of Infantry, winning his spurs of manhood under Gough and Hardinge and Gilbert on the plain beside the Sutlej, where stands Ferozshahr.

"For I don't pretend to be a hero or anything of that sort, but I've never shirked my share of fighting," said the silent voice within him, and the Captain exhaled a spirt of smoke and mumbled: "I believe you!" And the other Breagh went on:

"Fair play and no favor won us our honors, mind you! though the chance didn't come until later on. True, we helped Sir Harry Smith to pound the Sikhs at Ferozshahr and at Aliwal, when the cavalry of his Right had driven the Khâlsas back across the Red Ford. Waiting for the elephants with the heavy siege-guns and the ammunition and stores to come up from Delhi, took a hell of a time. Seven long weeks of broiling by day and freezing o' nights, while Tij Sinh and his thirty-five thousand Khâlsas entrenched themselves, mounted their heavy artillery--made their bridge of boats, and encamped their cavalry up the river. But the day came--our day!--and I don't forget that foggy tenth of February while I'm breathing."

Captain Breagh sucked at his pipe and reflectively pulled a whisker. And the silent voice went on:

"We were with the Left Division under General Dick, and led the assault, while Gilbert and Smith feigned to attack on the enemy's left and center. And in that charge,--when the General got his death-wound from a swivel-ball,--I was the second red-coat to cross the ditch, and scramble over the big mud rampart, and saber a Sikh gunner with his linstock in his hand!..."

Mrs. Breagh, chagrined at remaining so long the object of her husband's inattention, picked up his fallen newspaper and almost timidly laid it on his knee. And the child under the table kept as quiet as a mouse, almost...

"Thank ye, my dear!" said the Captain, while the other Breagh went on:

"And when the Treaty was signed and the rumpus all over--for the time!--because Dalhousie's bungling brought the hornets about our ears again!--we marched from Lahore to Calcutta with Britain's victorious army--barring the force we'd left with Lawrence at Mian Mir."

The silence continuing, Mrs. Breagh drew her work-table toward her, and began to look over a basket of little toeless and heel-less stockings. As she did this she sighed. The Captain smoked thoughtfully. And the inward voice went on:

"The Governor-General and his staff rode with Sir Harry Smith and the Advance--and between the Cavalry Brigade that came after 'em--for Sir Harry swore he'd be damned but since we'd seen the hottest of the fighting, we should have the post of honor!--between the Cavalry and Ours came the spoils of war, drawn by the Government elephants--two hundred and fifty Sikh guns we'd taken at Sobraon. Hah!"

The Captain's eyes were fixed on the fire. He smoked in quick, short puffs.

"Standards waving, bands blowing their heads off, and a bit o' loot in most men's knapsacks. Glory for the dead, and praise and promotion for the living--begad! it was worth while--just then!--to be a British soldier! And I'd been wounded just enough to look interesting, and got a Special Mention in Despatches--and the women were pulling caps for me,--devil a lie in that! And I danced with Milly at the Welcome Back Ball at Government House, in March, 1846. And whether it was Fate--or that way she had of looking up under her eyelashes, and showing a laughing mouth full of tiny pearly-white teeth over the top of her fan, I've never been quite clear. But even before the steward introduced Lieutenant Breagh to the Hon. Millicent Fermeroy, I'd fallen head over ears in love with Milly, and she was as mad for me!"

Still silence reigned in the room, only broken by the cinders falling on the hearth, and the breathing of three people. Mrs. Breagh still bent over her basket of little worn socks, of which those in most crying need of darning belonged to Carolan. Her lips were tightly closed, but as the man within her husband talked to the man, the woman within the woman talked to his wife.

"I wonder whether he knows I know he's thinking of her again? I wonder whether she'd have liked to sit and toil and moil for a child of mine, and know that the other woman held the first place in his heart? Ah, dear me!"

She glanced at her husband. He did not see her. He was living in the Past.

"Nobody noticed how often we danced together.... It had gone pretty far with us before Her Ladyship scented what was in the wind, and sent an aide-de-camp to remind Miss Fermeroy that the doctor had set down his foot against her overheating herself with waltzing,--and I found myself staring after her with her bouquet in my hand.... And I took it home to quarters--and I've got it now, stowed away with her letters and a lot of other things in a tin uniform-case.... Fanny hasn't an idea of that!"

The smoke-puffs came more slowly, and the darning-needle now worked busily. The voice of a sergeant who was drilling a squad of recruits came in gruff barks from the Parade.

"The Fermeroys were great folks.... Colonel Lord Augustus Fermeroy--Milly's uncle, was a tremendous Light Cavalry swell on the Commander-in-Chief's Staff. Of course, I knew that he would never hear of an engagement between his brother's orphan daughter--(to do the old man justice, he loved her as his own!)--and a Lieutenant of a marching regiment of infantry who'd nothing but his pay. So--as Milly and me had made up our minds we couldn't live without each other,--we were married secretly--first at a Protestant Mission Church, and then by a French Franciscan padre--and he made bones about splicing us--because I wasn't a Catholic,--and if I hadn't told a white lie or two about my intention of turning Papist, I don't believe he'd have tied the knot. But all's fair in love!--and we were in love with a vengeance. I suppose I was a selfish beggar to coax Milly into deceiving her people, but----"

A long ray of chilly January sunshine, full of dancing dust-motes, came in at the window. Mrs. Breagh sneezed as it fell across her face.

"A time came when I knew I had been as selfish as she never would have called me. People had to be told!--so we enlightened 'em by shooting the moon. The condition of my war-chest wasn't over and above flourishing, but I got a month's leave for the Mofussil and secured a twenty-rupee furnished bungalow at Titteghur--and next morning--before the hue and cry had well begun, Lady Augustus got a chit from Milly by harkára--I remember every word of it. 'Dearest Aunt,--I hope you have not been alarmed, supposing me to have been murdered or carried off by wicked persons. I am safe and happy with my own dear husband, from whom, I shall never be parted now.'"

The pipe was nearly smoked out, but the Captain did not appear aware of that.

"'Never be parted,' and before three months were over our heads..."

Clash! Mrs. Breagh had let her scissors fall. Her husband made a long arm, picked them up, and gave them back to her.

"Thank you, Alex, love!" said Mrs. Breagh effusively. But he went on sucking at the now empty pipe, and staring at the waning fire. And the silent voice went on:

"The Fermeroys were furious. But there was no use in making a fuss and a scandal, and I must say they took the blow awfully well. Good haters both--declared that under no conceivable circumstances would they ever admit within their doors an officer who had acted so dishonorably, but they'd receive Milly whenever she liked to come. Nor would they--though her uncle was her guardian and trustee--deprive her of her fortune--seven thousand pounds in East India Stock, Home Rails, and Government Three Per Cents. But they tied it up tight for the benefit of the child that was coming, and others that might come--in what they called a Post-Matrimonial Settlement, and I was agreeable; though, mind you!--I had the law on my side if I'd chosen to make a fuss. And I was too much in love to bother over money--or to care a cowrie about being cut by the Fermeroys' friends."

Nothing but gray ashes remained in the pipe-bowl.

"I don't know whether it wasn't to get me out of the way that the regiment was ordered to Sikandarabad. There'd been a Sepoy rising at Haidarabad, six miles north of the Subsidiary Force's cantonments--and as the big Mussulman city was swarming with all the blackguards and budmashes in the Dekkan--and bazar-gup had it that another Rohilla riot was threatening--Ours got the route to go. And Milly--God bless her! wouldn't hear of being left behind. And we steamed down coast to Masulipatam, and marched the two hundred miles; and though it was early in January, the roads were confoundedly squashy and the heat was like a vapor-bath--there being no winter to speak of in the South."

"He's in a regular brown study," said her unseen gossip and confidante to the Captain's second wife. "Perhaps his tailor has been dunning him, or he's been losing at cards. When men are out of spirits, money's generally at the bottom of it! Better get him to tell what's the matter by-and-by--not now!"

"And the long road ran like a brown snake between mangrove-swamps and paddy-fields, where it wasn't coffee-plantations and cotton-ground. And there were black-buck and partridge for the shooting when you could get away from the columns; and duck and snipe when we were hung up at the river-fords waiting for the elephants that were to take over the baggage and guns."

The shouts of the drill-sergeant came more faintly from the Parade-ground. The Captain seemed to doze as he sucked at the empty pipe, but Memory's voice went on:

"The women and children of the rank and file were carried on the baggage-wagons, and the officers' wives traveled by bullock-tonga or palki-dak, under an escort of good-conduct men of the Subsidiary Force the Brigadier had sent down from cantonments. Milly laughed at their oilskin-covered wickerwork chimney-pot hats and little old red coatees, and black unmentionables and bare sandaled feet. But they couldn't keep the beggars of bearers from turning out of the road and taking short-cuts through jungle-paths. Then they'd dump the palkis down in the shade, and light a fire of sticks, and squat round and smoke their hubble-bubbles or chew betel.... And Milly's blackguards had gone out of sight behind some trees, and she was scared at finding herself alone and unprotected. And she tried to be calm and plucky, thinking of--what she and me were looking for.... But something trotted out of a cane-brake and snuffed at the palki curtains--and she went off in a dead faint and small blame to her! For there were the prints of a full-grown tiger's pugs in the soft ground round the palanquin--and the place where his hind-claws had torn up the grass when he bounded off...."

The forgotten pipe was upside down in the smoker's mouth now. A pinch of ashes had fallen upon the breast of the unhooked scarlet coat.

"When I came up I made those coolie-brutes eat plenty stick. But Milly--poor girl! had got her death-blow. And the boy was born that night under canvas by the roadside. An old Murderer--Surgeon-Major Murdoch of Ours--did all man could do to save her. But--just at dawn--with the eastern sky all lemon-yellow and pink and madder behind a mango-tope, with a Hindu temple near it, and a clump of mud huts--and some old saint's shrine under a sacred peepul-tree--the boy was born and the mother went out like a blown waxlight. Oh, my darling! ... And the Catholic chaplain--who'd been fetched to give Milly the Last Sacraments--baptized the boy, for Milly had made me swear all the children should be of her faith. And the boy would have died, too, but that my company Sergeant's wife--she that is nurse to my youngest child to-day--happened to be able and willing to suckle him. And we struck camp and set out on the last march, carrying a corpse and a new-born baby. And that night we buried my girl by torchlight in the cemetery belonging to the European infantry-barracks. And it's six years ago to-day--and here I am married to another woman! Are you happy with her, Alex Breagh? She's as unlike the other as chalk's different from cheese--and poor Milly 'ud have called her a vulgar person! I know she would! And yet--Milly never gave me a decent meal, and the servants did as they liked! and Fanny's a rare housekeeper. I've been more comfortable since I married her than I ever was in my life before. Yes, I'm a happy man!..."

He told himself this continually. And yet the knowledge of material comfort could not long silence the crying of his heart.

He took the smoked-out pipe from his mouth, and turned to look at the plump, high-colored, personable woman who was sitting darning his children's stockings with his wedding-ring shining on her finger, and the present had its value for him, and he ceased to company with the dead. His regard, at first chill and gloomy, warmed: his good-humored smile curled his full red lips again....

"Why, how you look, love!" said Mrs. Breagh, and she rose and came to his side. Then she sat on his knee and smoothed his hair from his forehead. And the Captain returned her kiss, and told himself that true wisdom lay in making the best of one's luck generally, and being grateful for whatever good the gods chose to grant.

"No use crying over spilt milk! ... Beg pardon, my dear!--but what were you asking me?"

"I was asking--supposing Carolan had never been born--or had died--whether you would have come into his mother's money?"

"Would I have inherited Milly's seven thousand pounds? Not a halfpenny of it, my dear! In the event of her decease without issue it would have gone back to her family. And even during Milly's lifetime she only had the half-yearly interest. Couldn't sell out stock, or raise a lump sum for--ahem!--for the benefit of any person she'd a mind to help. And husband and wife are one flesh, so the Bible tells you!"

"The poor thing that's gone ought to have had more spirit than to let you be treated so!" said the second wife, who had possessed no fortune beyond a hundred pounds or so, bestowed as dowry on his younger daughter by the hard-worked apothecary of an English country town; and was conscious that in marrying her the Captain had not aspired to a union above his social rank.

"Begad! my dear! I don't mind owning that Lord Augustus hated me, from the top hair of my head to the last peg in my boot-sole. And--when he died--and he did go over to the majority not long after the Fermeroys had sailed for England with Lord Hardinge--when he died it didn't make a pin's difference, for under that settlement I've told you of, the co-trustee, a solicitor--Mr. Mustey, of Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London--took his son,--who'd been made partner in his business--as his partner in the trusteeship. And, of course, the money's the boy's!--though the two-hundred-and-twenty-odd annual interest is paid to me--the whole of it!--until Carry's old enough to go to school and college--and when he reaches twenty-three the whole lump of the principal will be his--seven thousand golden sovereigns--to play ducks and drakes with if he likes!"

"And my poor darlings will have nothing," Mrs. Breagh bleated, "unless,---because I've treated Carolan in all respects--and more!--as if he were my own child, and that I would declare with my head upon my dying pillow!--unless he has the gratitude and the decent feeling to do something for Alan,--if it's only giving him a few hundreds to start him properly in life...."

"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched," advised her lord. "My dear, if you'll get me the materials from the sideboard, I'll wet my whistle. Talking's dry work!"

With wifely compliance Mrs. Breagh placed the whisky-decanter and the Delhi clay-bottle of drinking-water near her Alexander's elbow. You are to imagine the Captain mixing a jorum on half-and-half principles, nodding to his Fanny, and taking a refreshing swig of the cooling draft. And at this juncture a head of scarlet curls was poked out from the covert of the Indian shawl tablecloth, and the clear treble of his eldest son piped out:

"Dada, how much money is seven fousand golding sovereigns? And how long will it be before I get them to make ducks and drakes?"

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III

You are to suppose Captain Breagh, startled by the unexpected apparition of his eldest son, swallowing the whole jorum of whisky and water at a gulp, and his wife dropping her darning into her lap with the very exclamation Carolan had previously promised himself. Still as a mouse, he had lain in ambush beneath the Pembroke table, with the portrait of the Duke of Wellington on a gray charger in the foreground of the highly varnished oil-painting--representing the Royal Ennis Regiment in the performance of prodigies of gallantry in conflict with the French at Vimiera--staring with bolting blue eyes, and pointing at him with a Field-Marshal's bâton whenever he had peeped out.

Now, conscious of having made an impression, and with a curious mixture of sensations, emotions, impulses, fermenting in a brain of six years, the boy stood upright before his elders, his well-knit shoulders thrown back, his sturdy legs, arrayed in their virile coverings of blue cloth adorned with cat-stitches of yellow basting-thread, planted wide apart upon the tiger-skin hearthrug, and his stomach thrust forward with the arrogance characteristic of the newly made capitalist.

"Why the devil were you hiding there? Eh, you young Turk, you?" blustered the Captain.

"Eavesdroppers," said Mrs. Breagh acidly, "never go to Heaven."

"Farver Haygarty----" Carolan began.

"We don't want to know what Father Haygarty says!" snapped Mrs. Breagh, whose Protestant gorge rose at the Papistical teachings of the regimental chaplain. And then she remembered that in a few years the worldly prospects of her three children might depend on the good-will of this chubby-faced, red-haired urchin who stood silently before her, contemplating her with a new expression in a very round pair of oddly amber-flecked gray eyes. And being a weak, ill-balanced, underbred woman, and a mother into the bargain, she truckled, as such women will, to the latent potentialities vested in the stubborn wearer of the unfinished suit of clothes.

"Not but what Father Haygarty is a good man and much respected--and I dare say you're sorry for having kicked poor Josey. So, since it's your birthday we won't say any more about it--and Nurse shall pull out those basting-threads and sew on the brace-buttons when you're in bed to-night----"

"There! you hear! Stop, you young rascal! Come back and kiss your mother, and thank her, and run away to Mrs. Povah!" bade the Captain, for Carolan, driving a pair of grubby fists deep into the pockets of the new breeches, had swung contemptuously upon his heel, and made for the door.

"She's not my muvver!" said the son, pausing in his struggle with the door-handle to turn a flushed and frowning face upon his sire. "She said so just now and so did you!"

"Then shut the door!" thundered the Captain, but it had slammed before the words were fairly out. And Carolan stamped across the landing whistling defiantly, and burst into the nursery, where Baba--for the moment its sole occupant--was asleep in her bassinette, Alan and Monica having gone out to walk with Miss Josey, and Nurse being busy in the adjoining room.

Carolan's head was hot, and his heart felt big and swollen. He was a person of consequence, and at the same time a thing of no account. Thus the pride that flamed in his gray eyes was presently quenched by scalding salt drops of resentful indignation. He was sorrowful, elated, angry, and complacent, all at once, as he stood by Baba's crib.

He had never until now suspected Mrs. Breagh was not his mother. He had called her "Mamma" ever since he could speak. No question had ever risen in his mind as to the existence of some secret reason for her dislike of him.

When she had seemed most hateful in his eyes, by reason of her lacking reticence and absent sense of honor--for she couldn't keep a secret if she promised you ever so, and was always telling tales of you to Dada!--Carolan had frequently relieved his feelings by going into corners and calling her "that woman" under his breath. The appalling sense of crime, involved with the relief this process brought--for to call your real mother names would be a sin of the first magnitude--bad invested it with a dreadful fascination. Now the glamour had vanished, together with the wickedness. Mrs. Breagh was nothing to Carolan. He was the son of another woman--and she was dead in India. Her name was Milly--a gentle, prettily sounding name.

Only the day before, Carolan had found out what the thing grown-up people called "death" and "dying" meant. He had given a shiny sixpence that had lain hidden for weeks at the bottom of the pocket in his old plaid frock to Bugler Finnerty for a thrush he had limed, a beautiful brown thrush with a splendidly dappled breast. Only the bird's eyes looked like beads of dull jet glass instead of round black blobs of diamond-bright bramble-dew. And it had squatted on the foul floor of the little wood and wire cage in which Finnerty had been keeping it, panting, with ruffled feathers and open beak.

Finnerty had said that the bird would thrive on snails and worms, and Carolan had promised it plenty of these luxuries. He had meant to range for them through all the soldiers' vegetable-allotments, and ransack the Parade-ground flower-beds. But all at once the thrush had fallen over on its side, fluttering and struggling--and Carolan had been so sorry for it that he had thrust his pudgy hand into the cage, and taken the poor sufferer out with the intention of nursing it in his pinafore for a little, and then letting it go free, since it was so unhappy in captivity.

But when he had bidden it fly away it had had no strength to do so. It had lain helpless in his hands, and the strange quivering thrills that had passed through its slender body had communicated themselves to the child. Something was taking place--some change was coming. Without previous knowledge he had been sure of that.

And the change had come, with the drawing of the thin gray membrane from the corners next the beak, over the round yellow-rimmed eyes. Then the upper and underlids had sealed themselves over the veiled eyeballs--the quick panting had changed to long gasps, the head had rolled to one side helplessly--and with a long shuddering convulsion the thing had taken place. The slender body had stiffened in Carolan's hand, the glossy wings had closed down tightly against its dappled sides, its scaly legs had stretched out rigidly and not been drawn back again. And a voice that seemed to speak inside Carolan had said to him: "This is death!"

Now broke in upon his immature brain a flash of blinding brilliancy. Milly, who had been his mother, was dead, like the thrush. He shut his eyes, and saw her lying, very pale and pretty and helpless, with ruffled brown hair the exact color of the bird's feathers, and beautiful brown eyes--why was he so certain that they had been brown?--all dim and filmy, and her slender body and long graceful limbs now quivering and convulsed, and now growing rigid and stiff. And a lump rose in his throat, and a tear splashed on the front of the brand-new blue jacket, and another that would have fallen was dried by a glow of inspiration. For he had dug a grave with a sherd of broken flower-pot in the angle of one of the official flower-beds that decorated the oblong patch of lawn before the Mess House, and buried the dead thrush in the shelter of a clump of daffodils, and said a "Hail Mary!" for it, because, though Miss Josey and Mrs. Breagh--whom he would never call "Mamma" again!--termed it a Popish practice,--Father Haygarty said that one ought to pray for the dead....

Surely one ought to pray for the soul of Milly. She would understand, it was to be hoped! why one had never done it before. Somebody would tell her Carolan hadn't known! Poor, poor Milly! He wished he had been there with his new tin sword when that snuffing Thing came out of the jungle and frightened her so that she had died....

He looked about the nursery. There stood Monica's Indian-cane cot, and Alan's green-painted iron crib on either side of Nurse's wooden four-poster. At the bed-head above Nurse's pillow was nailed a little plaster Calvary, and a miniature holy-water stoup, and over Carolan's little folding camp-bedstead hung a noble crucifix of ebony and carved ivory, so large and so massive that two iron staples held it in its place.

The Face of the pendent, tortured Figure--there was death in that also. It seemed to the child that the breast beneath the drooped, thorn-encircled Head, heaved with long sighs, that the lips gasped for breath--that long shuddering spasms rippled through the tortured Body, bringing home, as nothing ever had before, the meaning of the lines that the boy had learned as a parrot might....

"He was crucified also for us ... suffered ... and was buried...."

And that was why we prayed to Him for the dead and buried people, because He had suffered death and gone down into the dark grave, and He knew how to help souls.... Carolan nailed his resolution to say a nightly "Our Father" for poor Milly to the masthead of determination, unaware that Father Haygarty had incurred the displeasure of Mrs. Breagh by urging the necessary discharge of this filial duty as a reason why the boy should be told about his mother who was dead.

We may guess that the influence of the second wife had inspired the Captain to insist that the hour of enlightenment should be deferred indefinitely. And if any one had suggested to Mrs.. Breagh that she had been prompted by a belated jealousy of her predecessor, she would have been genuinely horrified at the idea.

Nurse came in as Carolan decided on his course of future loyalty, and started at the sight of the sturdy little figure standing, with legs planted wide apart, on the shabby nursery drugget, its childish brows puckered with profound thought.

"Now may the Saints stand between you and the mischief I know you're plannin'!" said Nurse, who prided herself on reading thoughts in faces. "Is ut playin' acreybats on the windy-sill, or shavin' wid the Captain's razor? Spake ut out!"

Carolan spoke.

"Mamma is not my muvver, an' I shall call her Mrs. Breagh always!"

"God be good to me!" said Nurse, quite pale, and putting her hand to her side. "An' who tould ye that, an' set the two eyes of ye blazin' like coals of fire?"

"You saided it!--and she saided it--and Dada saided it--when I was playin' robber's cave under the sittin'-woom table," Carolan proclaimed. "And I'm goin' to pray for Milly--that's my weal muvver--because she's dead--even if they say I shan't!"

"There'll none durst," said Nurse rather awfully, "wid Bridget Povah to the fore! And what else?"

Slightly damped by the prospect of being permitted to carry out his shining new intention without interruption, Carolan reflected.

"Nuffing," he said at last, "'cept that I want to know how much is seven fousand golding sovereigns? For I am going to have them when I grow up."

"Sure!" said Nurse, slightly bewildered, "a sovereign is the same as a wan-pound note! Ye have seen thim things, have ye not?"

Carolan had seen the soiled rags of Bank paper changing hands on market-days, and the recollection wrinkled his nose.

"'Tis quare talk ye have," said Nurse, "about the sivin thousand wan-pound notes. 'Tis a little haystack av them ye would be gettin' from the gintleman at the Bank. Where arr ye goin' now, ye onaisy wandherer? Wid your hoop for a rowl in the Barrack-square? Take your cap--an' remember that wheniver ye're clane out av sight, Biddy Povah has her eye on you!"

But Carolan was already out of the room and half-way down the stairs.

Outside under the blue sky, with its flocks of fleecy white clouds all hurrying southward, it was easy to forget the things that had hurt. The crackle of the sandy gravel underfoot, the purr of the iron hoop in the metal driving-hook soothed and stimulated; the ringing clatter when one got upon the cobblestones, and the echo when one came under the archway of the Barrack-gate--were familiar, pleasant things.

Familiar, too, was the sentry on guard, great-coated--for at all times and seasons of the year a nipping wind howled through the stony tunnel that ended in the arch of the Barrack-gateway--and pacing his official strip of pavement, that began at the yellow-painted sentry-box with the blunt lamp-post near it, and ended at the big spiked gate. And the peep into the guardroom, with unbuttoned privates in the familiar red coats with Royal blue facings sprawling on plank beds reading thumbed newspapers, and the sergeant sitting on his cot stiffly stocked and fully accoutered--that had the charm of a well-known, never too familiar sight. To other senses besides the eyes and ears appealed the figure of Mary Daa, the apple, cake and ginger-pop woman, sitting under a vast and oddly-patched blue gingham umbrella at her stall, made of a short plank mounted on two barrels, against the great bare wall on the left of the Barrack-entrance, exercising a privilege permitted to no other, because Mary's stone ginger-pop bottles might be relied upon as containing nothing else....

It was market-day, and the great cobblestoned place, bordered by a line of shops and houses, broken by the bridge, under which flowed a famous salmon-river, was seething with people out to buy and sell and enjoy themselves. On the right hand was the Catholic Church, a modern building of no great design, animated bundles of rags containing female penitents performing the devotions of the Stations round it. While upreared upon the summit of an isolated rock beyond the rushing river, perched the ivy-mantled remnant of the ancient castle from which the town derived its name; once held against the Commonwealth by King James, and with Ireton's round-shot yet bedded in the massive masonry.

The distracting grind-organ accompaniment of a round-about blared on the ear from a field where some caravans of strolling show-people had encamped themselves. Rows of empty jaunting-cars, shafts down, waited their squireen owners in the bleakest angle of the market-place; and in the farm-carts with feather-beds in them, covered with gay patchwork counterpanes, the strapping matrons and buxom maids of the hill-farms or mountain-villages had jolted and joggled from their distant homes, and--the last bargain made--would jolt and joggle back again.

Booths and stalls, presided over by them, exhibited cheese, butter, and other dairy-produce. Crates were crammed with quacking ducks and loudly cackling fowls. Strings of shaggy-footed horses and knots of isolated cows were ranged along the curbs to tempt the would-be purchaser; hurdled pens of sheep waited to change owners; but the staple article of commerce, in the active and the passive mood, alive and squealing or dead and smoked, was pig. In reeking basements below the shops--cellars where potatoes, cabbages, and onions were peddled to the poorest, and turf and firewood were sold in ha'p'orths--piles of pigs-tails, fresh and dried, rivaled the salted herring in popularity, and were borne home, wrapped in red-spotted handkerchiefs, and stowed away in the crowns of hats, to be frizzled over turf-embers for supper.

A jig was being danced to the music of a fiddle and a clarionet on a square of smooth flagstones in the middle of the market-place. And--for this was the West of Ireland in the early fifties--the bright red or dark blue cloaks and white frilled caps of the matrons, the short stuff petticoats, chintz jacket-bodices and bright handkerchief-shawls of the unwedded women; the corduroy breeches, blue yarn stockings and buckled brogues of the men, their long-tailed gray or blue coats and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed chimney-pots--gave charm and variety to the shifting scene.

Not for the first time observed, the half-dozen of coarse, strapping, red-faced women who daily patroled the square in the neighborhood of the Barracks; whisky-hardened viragoes whose uncovered heads of greasy hair, thrust into sagging nets of black chenille-velvet, and uniform attire of clean starched cotton print, worn over a multiplicity of whaleboned petticoats, bespoke them,--as did their coarse speech and loud laughter,--members of the ancient sisterhood of Rahab and Delilah, followers of the most ancient profession in the world.

Prone at all times to hunt in pack or couples, the wearers of the greasy hair-nets flauntingly displayed a pair of captive red-coats. One of them was fairly sober, and sulky at being thus paraded under the eyes of his countrymen. The other, a raw young recruit, half-fuddled with libations of porter and whisky, staggeringly promenaded the pavement with a siren on either elbow; and, being in the pugnacious stage of liquor, was stung by some sarcastic comment from the crowd into shaking off the women who supported,--while they feigned to lean on him,--and challenging the critic of morals, in broad Yorkshire, to a bout at fisticuffs.

"Leggo o' me, tha----!" he hiccoughed to the Paphians. "Cannowt a chap walk wi'out women-fowk hangin' on, an' armin' him? As for tha!"--he addressed the critic--"Ah'll teach tha to meddle wi' thy betters. If tha'rt a mon--coom on!"

"Fight, is ut? Och, ye poor craythur, the wind av a fist wud level ye," commented the censor, turning on his heel contemptuously. Upon which, the belligerent, taking the act as a confession of recreancy, wrenched himself from the women, and, staggering forward, came into violent contact with Mary Daa's plank-and-barrel stall; with the result that certain apples, oranges, and cakes, displayed to tempt customers, were scattered on the flagged sidewalk, or rolled gaily down the gutter; pursued with yells of joy by certain ragged urchins who usually were to be found in the vicinity of Mary's stall.

Carolan clapped his hands with a child's delight in the upset and the subsequent fray, as Mary, vociferating maledictions on the soldier's drunken clumsiness and the predatory activity of the raiders, shook her fists at their flying heels.

"Ah nivir meant t' dommage tha! Wull sixpence neet maak guid thy loss t' tha?" stammered the Yorkshireman, thrusting a hand into his trousers-pocket in search of the coin. Then his flaming face darkened heavily, and he said, withdrawing the hand, empty, "Ah havena a brass farden t' pitch at dog or devil, let alone sixpence. Mak't oop to her, Noorah lass, an' Ah'll gie't thee back agean!"

And the woman he had called Norah said, linking her arm in the soldier's and affectionately ogling him:

"Sure, I'll give the ould craythur a shillin', asthore, and a kiss av the handsome boy you are will pay me!"

Then happened what Carolan, with a child's intuitive sense of things that are incomprehensible, saw with a strange shock and thrill that never quite passed away.

The bright new shilling tendered to Mary by the plump clean fingers with the twinkling glass-and-pinchbeck rings on them was dashed to the flags by a fierce blow of the old, bony, wrinkled hand....

"Take up yer money, ye livin' disgrace!" Mary had said sternly to the staring woman, "and thrapse upon your way!"

And under the regard of many eyes, for nearly all the faces in the crowded market-place seemed to be looking that way, the woman had picked up the coin; and as her comrades hurried on, had slunk after them, leaving the tipsy soldier standing there.

"Had ye no modher, ye fool-man?" Mary asked him, "that ye are hastin' quick to hell, arrum-in-arrum wid Thim Wans?"

And the tipsy young soldier had given a thick grunt that might have meant anything, and hung his head sulkily, and gone staggering upon his way, but in an opposite direction to that taken by the women. And Mary Daa looked after him long and sorrowfully.

"Please tell me," asked Carolan, edging up to the apple-woman, for Mary and he had struck up a friendship over divers ha'p'orths of nuts and pink peppermint-candy sticks, "what are they, and why are they wicked?"

Mary brought round the weather-stained brown tunnel of her huge and venerable bonnet, and became aware of a small boy with a scarlet topknot and a pair of honest gray eyes.

"Who arr ye talkin' of?" she demanded, and there were shining drops of water on her wrinkled cheeks, and the cracked glasses of her huge iron-framed spectacles were foggy. She took them off, and wiped them on her old green plaid shawl, as Carolan explained that he had been referring to Thim Wans.

"What arr they? Wandherin' waves av the say, poisonous planets; thraps for the feet, fiery dhragons that ate up the bodies an' souls av men! Look me in the face wid your child's eyes, ye that will be a man wan day, an' get by harrut the worruds I'm spakin' to you! An' when the pith is set widin your bones, and the hair is thick upon your lip, and the blood is hot widin the veins av you--kape them worruds in mind!"

Carolan thanked Mary Daa, and, having a stray half-penny, purchased a cocked-hat of brown peppermint rock, and went home crunching. He had learned a good deal that day. The mystery of Death and the power of Money had been revealed to him. Also, he had gained some slight preliminary inkling of the forces that are arrayed against the human soul in its march through this strange world of ours, and of the strange and foul and ugly things that lie hidden beneath the shining surface of Life.

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IV

Furnival's Inn, Holborn, with its parallelogram of dusty or rain-washed cobblestones unrelieved by any patch of railed-in grass plot, where sooty lilacs and rusty hawthorns make a show of putting forth green leaves in Spring, and plane-trees shed their bark, as boa-constrictors doff their skins, at the approach of Winter--Furnival's Inn, even in the year of stress of 1870, impressed itself upon the casual visitor as a dismal spot in wet weather and a dusty one in dry. But that an immortal genius wrote a deathless work of humor in its cheerless precincts, one would have said that nothing young or gay or natural could ever flourish there.

At nine o'clock upon the morning of a day heavily fraught with Fate for the protagonist of this unpretending life-drama, recent puddles testified to overnight's rain, and gray clouds rushing north-westward across a monochromatic parallelogram of sky, framed in by the bilious-hued, grimy-windowed, decrepit-looking Inn buildings, predicted more presently.

Punctually upon the stroke of the hour you might have seen a shaggy young man in a red-hot hurry plunge under the round-topped carriage archway, eschewing the smaller side-entrance intended for pedestrians. Whereat the upper half of a porter, crowned with a tarred chimney-pot hat, and wearing a brown livery with copper-gilt buttons, appeared at the wicket of his lodge-door, and the fresh-faced, shaggy-haired boy in the battered felt wideawake and well-worn frieze overcoat, had felt an eye boring hard into his back, as, after one doubtful glance about him, he dived between the gouty Corinthian columns of the fourth portico on the left-hand side, and rang the first-floor bell.

"I'd ring if I was you!" the porter had soliloquized, noting the masterful tug given by the early visitor to the dingy brass bell-handle--third of a row of six sticking out like organ-stops on the right of the heavy, low-browed outer door. "And again! ... Don't be shy!" said the porter, who was something of a cynic: "Break the bell-wire, and then you won't have done no good to yourself!--supposing you to be a client or a creditor of Mustey and Son--though you're over-young to be the first and over-cheerful to be the second, it strikes me! Good-day, Mr. Chown!" And the porter touched his hat to a lean, mild-looking, elderly man in black, who turned in at that moment beneath the smaller archway. "You're not the first this morning, early as you are. There's a young chap who don't seem in the mind to take no answer--has been ringing ten minutes without stopping at Mr. Mustey's bell."

"Pressing business, I suppose, to bring him out so early!" said the person addressed.

A glance of intelligence may have been exchanged between Mr. Chown and the porter, but there were no further words. Mr. Chown passed on, and joined the younger man on the doorstep under the fourth portico on the left side, as he prepared to fulfill the porter's prophecy about breaking the bell-wire; and said, shifting his umbrella to the hand that held a shiny bag of legal appearance, and drawing a shabby latchkey from the pocket of his vest:

"Excuse me, but if it is a business appointment with Mr. Mustey Junior,"--he tapped the key upon the tarnished brass door-handle as though to knock some grains of dust out of the words, and went on, punctuating his utterances with more tapping--"I happen to know"--tap-tap-tap--"that he won't be here to-day." He added, as he took a brief, comprehensive survey of the healthy, square-shouldered, well-built youngster of some five feet eight (with a hopeful promise of more inches in the breadth of the shoulders, and the depth of the chest), buttoned up in the rough frieze garment that had seen hard wear. "But possibly it is the head of the Firm" (tap-tap) "you want, and not Son? ... In which case I'm afraid you'll have to wait some time, as the old gentleman stayed very late at work yesterday. I should mention that I am employed in the capacity of head-clerk by" (tap) "a firm of solicitors who have offices on the ground-floor immediately underneath Mustey and Son" (tap), "and----"

Mr. Chown, still industriously tapping, nodded at the lowest of a series of legends in letters of black paint, flanking the right-hand row of bells, and setting forth the titles of "Wotherspoon and Cadderby, Attorneys and Commissioners of Oaths." He continued: "And though I was detained myself, and did not leave till eight-thirty, I noticed particularly--when I shut the front-door behind me, that the gas in Mr. Mustey Senior's private room was burning still."

"For the matter of that, it's burning now!" said the strange young man, whose head was plentifully covered with a crop of decidedly red and obstinately curly hair, crowned with the battered gray felt wideawake previously mentioned; and whose square, blunt-featured, fresh-colored, rather freckled face was illuminated with a pair of very clear and intelligent eyes of a good gray, curiously flecked with yellow. He indicated with a knotty vine-stick he carried two dingy, wire-blinded windows on the first floor, and Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk, with an irrepressible start of consternation, saw that the darkness of the room behind them was thrown into relief by a greenish patch of radiance that indicated the position of a paper-shaded gas reading-lamp which to his knowledge hung over the heavy writing-table that occupied the middle of the elder Mustey's private room.

"God bless my soul, so it is!"

The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion, stepped backward from the doorstep to the pavement, conveyed himself in the same crab-like fashion to the center of the quadrangle of ancient buildings constituting the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the window with the yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown wire-blinds, and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it on the door-knob. Then he rejoined the other to say, with rather a perturbed and dubious air:

"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and you--being a stranger, as I take it?--and new to the sights of London--were to indulge in a little walk along Holborn--say as far as Bloomsbury Street--and drop in at the British Museum, and have a look at the Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian Bulls,--or the--the Mummies in the Egyptian Department,--and then come back again,--you might stand a better chance of getting the bell answered." The speaker added, meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in keeping with the pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin with a cleft in it: "Unless you can suggest a better idea, you know...."

"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell is answered. But I am obliged to you all the same!" said the young man.

"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk.

The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown freckles.

"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young man.

"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have begun waiting in your cradle! But time flies and business presses, and----"

"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man, as the head-clerk inserted his latchkey into the heavy door and it swung slowly backward, revealing a bare and gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak and hung with mildewed flock-paper. "Donnerwetter! how you smell here!" he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium that served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air. "But I suppose you're used to it!"

"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London offices, I should be inclined to call us rather fresh than otherwise," said Mr. Chown, who had dropped his latchkey and was groping for it on the dirty floor by the oblong of daylight admitted by the open hall-door. "But I suppose--as some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are still away on their vacations--the place might seem--to a stranger from the country--a trifle close."

"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression of disgust was highly uncomplimentary. "Drainy, black-beetly, mousey, dusty, cellary. With a tinge of escaped gas and a something else that I----" He sniffed and said, puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's gunpowder! The place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt gunpowder.... Here! Hallo! What the devil are you trying to do? What do you mean?"

For the other, who had risen to his feet with a reversion to the sallow change of countenance previously observed in him, had caught him by the arm, as his eager foot had touched a dilapidated mat that lay as a snare for the unwary at the foot of the uncarpeted staircase, and with unexpected strength and quickness had swung him to the hall-door, and was endeavoring to push him over the threshold.

"I mean----" Mr. Chown was of middle age and evidently quite unused to wrestling: and as he strove with the shaggy young man upon the threshold of the dingy hall, it was evident that he would very soon give in. "I mean..." he panted, "... that you ... can't you be sensible?"

"I should be a fool if I couldn't see that you're hiding something. Let go!" said the red-haired young man, not at all malevolently, "or I shall have to hurt you! I'm going upstairs, and you can't stop me! What harm do you think I am going to do to the white-haired old man who's lying fast asleep across his table? I shan't go in without knocking, if that's what you're thinking of! And what harm do you suppose he's going to do to me?"

A sullen bang answered, for Mr. Chown had reached out a wary hand behind his own respectable back, and grabbed at the dim brass knob and slammed the heavy door upon himself and his antagonist. There were circles round his eyes, and he puffed and panted heavily.

"You young--puff--idiot!" he gasped, "I'm not--whoof!--considering you--for--a--whuff!--moment. It's him,"--he pulled out a colored handkerchief and mopped his face--"him that I've known since I was first articled, and had many a kindly word from, and many a liberal present. And now that this has happened--I may say I've seen it coming, and many a night I've stayed here--knowing him busy over his accounts above, and many a time I've been on the point of going up and knocking and offering a word of sympathy. But--it wasn't to be done! ... You could never take a liberty with him, alive--and no one shall if I can stop 'em--now that he isn't!"

"Now that he--why, man!--you don't mean to say----"

They confronted each other on the doorstep, and the shaggy, obstinate young man had now flushed to ripe tomato-color as he stammered:

"You don't mean he's dead? It isn't possible!"

"I say nothing and I mean nothing. There's no third party present," asserted Mr. Chown, with professional caution, "to testify to what I said or didn't say. But his son has to be looked for, and brought here if they can find him--and if Mr. William can't be found--and without prejudice I think that's more than likely!--some one he knew and trusted must be the first to go into that room. His housekeeper I've heard is a good creature. He's often dropped a word in praise of her to me, I know.... We'll telegraph--I know his address! Number Three----"

The young man interrupted: "Addington Square, Camberwell."

"Send her a wire! I'll pay!" Mr. Chown plucked a shilling from his waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed it on the stranger. "There's a telegraph office at Snow Hill!"

"Where is Snow Hill? I'm a stranger in London. As it happens, I came from Schwärz-Brettingen--it's a University town in North Germany--to keep a business appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son." The shaggy-haired young man pointed to those first-floor windows.... adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my mother's fortune--his son, who you say's missing, is the other--that is, he has been since the death of a great-uncle of mine.... For I didn't come of age, according to my mother's settlement, until my twenty-third birthday. And as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"

"I see! He was to have paid the money over! ... Good Lord! Good Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what a world it is!--what a world it is!"

"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow upstairs may be dying for help that we could give him!" snarled the younger man, and caught the head-clerk by the shoulder in a grip that struck him as unpleasantly powerful. "Look here!--where is your key?"

"Just inside in the hall there.... I'd dropped it, don't you remember--I was looking for it when you--when you--said you smelt gunpowder," explained the attorney's clerk, "and then it all rushed on me."

"You did on me!--and I thought you'd gone crazy. Look here----" the other began.

"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly," said Mr. Chown, adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and you must add--I was effective! And if you've got it into your head that there's life in the poor old man yet--put it out again! For he shot himself last night just on the stroke of nine--and I could take my oath of it! I heard what must have been the--the noise--as I passed out at the gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion somewhere in the neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was a thunderclap.' And I thought it might have been thunder--for the weather observations in the newspapers had mentioned storms as prevailing in South and South-Eastern England--and the winds have been blowing from south and south-east. And my wife has headaches when electricity's in the atmosphere--and she has been bad three days past."

"But let's do something--not stand here with our hands in our pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with eagerness. "I'm a surgeon--not diplomaed, worse luck! but enough of a one to give aid in such a case as you've hinted at."

"My key's inside the house--as I've told you!" retorted Mr. Chown, "and unless we were to break down the door--which would bring the police upon us before they're wanted--or one of us could climb like a cat--so as to look in at that window and make certain----"

"Donnerwetter! Good idea!" said the shaggy young man, in whose conversation mingled interjectional scraps and snatches of a language not comprehended by Mr. Chown, but dimly conjectured to be German. In the same instant he had pulled off his frieze overcoat, revealing the unsuspected fact that he wore no jacket under it--had thrown it upon the area-railings close to the row of bells that resembled organ-stops, and mounted upon it, shirt-sleeved, vigorous, ready and purposeful. An iron torch-extinguisher, a rusted relic of the days when respectable citizens went forth o' nights attended by linkmen, jutted from the wall immediately above his head. He made a long arm and grasped it--and to the dazzled observation of the head-clerk appeared to walk up the wall like a housefly. But in reality he had wedged a toe in an ornamental border of sooty masonry of the brick-in-and-brick-out description, that outlined the doors and windows of the Inn buildings; and with a degree of skill and suppleness that testified to no small degree of practice, hoisted himself up. Directly afterward he was observed to be in the act of getting over the sooty balustrading that edged a narrow ledge of stone running before those first-floor windows, and the head-clerk, holding his breath, saw him stoop and peer in over a wire blind.

Directly afterward, as it seemed, he withdrew his head and looked down into Mr. Chown's pale face, and his own had lost its ruddy color. Then, coming down as he had gone up, much to the astonishment and curiosity of Mr. Chown's two juniors and several legal-looking personages who had arrived upon the scene and gathered in quite a little crowd upon the cobblestones--he said in a low tone, as he drew the former gentleman apart:

"You were right. Whether it was done last night or more recently, it has been done, and thoroughly. With a new-looking revolver. He has it in his hand!"

"Poor old gentleman, I could swear that what he did he has been driven to do, through despair and debt and misery.... 'Mr. William will be my ruin, Chown!' he said to me only three days ago. And he has been his ruin, sir!" said Mr. Chown, blowing his nose with a flourish, and wiping his eyes furtively. "His ruin, Mr. William has been.... You may depend upon that!"

Said the young man from North Germany, pulling on his shabby overcoat:

"The table is covered with papers, and the safe facing the window is open.... Do you think----"

"I don't think--I know! He had a kind of swooning fit a week back, when the crash came, and a Receiving Order in Bankruptcy was made against him on the petition of his creditors. He was a long time coming round--and I stayed by him while the caretaker went to fetch a hackney-cab--for I'd been called, being a sort of favorite with him, and having known him for years. He'd been robbed and plundered then, because he groaned it out to me; and he pointed to that safe, and told me that it had been gutted by means of false keys--the Bramah he always wore on his watch-riband having been got at and copied. 'All the cash I had left in the world, Chown, besides seven thousand in Trust Securities! ... It's my punishment for having been near and hard to others that I might be generous to him!' Are you going!"

The shaggy young man, crimson to the lining-edge of the old gray wideawake he had pulled over his brows after buttoning his overcoat, made an incoherent sound in his throat, and swung abruptly round upon his heel. The reflection had occurred to him: "He'd have been generous to me if he'd waited to have seen me--and blown out my brains before scattering his own; pfui!--over that table and all the papers!" But he did not voice it aloud.

"Leave me your address," said the kindly-hearted Mr. Chown, "and--it's not business to say you may trust me!--but I'll undertake to bring your name before the Official Receiver--for you're one of the principal creditors--provided what you've told me can be proved...."

"I suppose you know that--dead man's writing when you see it?" said the other, swinging round on Mr. Chown with no very pleasant look.

"As well as I know my own!" retorted Mr. Chown, nodding back.

"If so--and not because I admit you've any right!--but because I choose to show it you--you may read this!" went on the late Mr. Mustey's chief creditor, pulling a rather worn and crumpled oblong envelope out of his pocket and exhibiting the direction written on it in a flowing, old-fashioned, legal hand.

"'P. C. Breagh, Esq., care of Frau Busch, Jaeger Strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen, N. Germany.' ... But I really shouldn't have dreamed--" began Mr. Chown.

"Read it!" said the owner of the letter, savagely thrusting it upon him, and the head-clerk with another protest, nipped in mid-utterance by another order to read it, mastered the contents.

The writer acknowledged the receipt of Mr. P. C. Breagh's letter, and begged to remind him that he was quite well acquainted with the terms of his late mother's Marriage Settlement. He congratulated his young friend on having so nearly attained the age of discretion decided under the provisions of the instrument referred to; and appointed the hour of nine o'clock upon the morning of the 3d of January, to discharge his trust and hand over the cash, deposit-notes, and securities....

"While all the time he knew--none better, except his precious partner!--that I should leave his office as poor as I'd come there. It would have been decent," snarled Patrick Carolan Breagh, "to have owned the truth."

"And accused his own son!--And now I look at the date of this it was written on the day before that affair of the false Bramah.... Do him justice, Mr. Breagh! ... Try to think he meant fair by you. Wherever he's gone..." Mr. Chown looked vaguely up at the monochromatic sky--now darkening as though it meant to rain in earnest--and then down at the cobblestones, "he'll be no worse for that, and you'll be the better here, I dare to say! You'll give me your address, sir? I don't know but that as you were the first to discover the body, you'll be expected to give evidence before the Coroner."

"Damn the Coroner!" said P. C. Breagh. "Whether he wants it or not I haven't an address to give. I paid my bill at a thundering beastly cheap hotel in the Euston Road by handing over my trunks of clothes, and books and instruments to the landlord.... He promised to keep them for three weeks--to give me a chance to redeem them!--and he grunted when I said I'd be back with money enough to buy his bug-ridden lodging-house before two days were over his head. And I pawned my coat for dinner yesterday and a coffee-house bed last night.... That's why you saw shirt-sleeves when I pulled off this old wrap-rascal.... But I'll look in here again to-morrow--unless I--change my mind!"

He had passed under the archway and was gone before Mr. Chown had recovered himself sufficiently to call after him. To follow would have been no use. So the head-clerk went sorrowfully back to write and dispatch those urgent telegraphic messages.

And Carolan, shouldering through the double torrent of pedestrian humanity rolling east and west along the worn pavements of Holborn, plunged through the roaring traffic of the cobblestoned roadway, and with his chin well down upon his chest, and his hands rammed deep into his pockets, turned down Fetter Lane, knowing that he, who had been heir to a goodly sum in thousands, was, by this sudden turn of Fortune's wheel, a beggar.

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V

As a dog will skulk dejectedly from the spot where a bone previously buried has failed to reward the snuffing nose and the digging paw, so P. C. Breagh, on the long-expected twenty-third birthday that was to have made him master of dead Milly's fortune, slouched down Fetter Lane, humming and vibrant with the vicinity of great printing-works, and redolent of glue and treacle, tar, printers' ink, engine-oil, and size.

A double stream of carts and trucks, heavily laden with five-mile rollers of yellow-white paper for the revolving vertical type-cylinders of the Applegarth steam printing-machine--then in its heyday--bales of tow, forms of type and piles of wood-blocks, choked the narrow thoroughfare. The smells from the cheaper eating-houses--where sausages frizzled in metal trays, and tea and coffee steamed in huge tapped boilers, and piles of doubtful-looking eggs, and curly rashers of streaky bacon were to be had by people with money to pay for breakfast--even the sight of compositors in clean shirt-sleeves and machine-men steeped in ink and oil to the eyebrows eating snacks of bread and cheese and saveloy, and drinking porter out of pewter on the doorsteps of great buildings roaring with machinery--sickened P. C. Breagh with vain desire.

His world was all in ruins about him. He was conscious of a painful sense of stricture in the throat, and a tight pain as though a knotted rope were bound about his temples. His hand did not shake, though, when he thrust it out under his eyes and looked at it curiously. But he shouldered his way so clumsily along the narrow, crowded sidewalk that he found himself every now and then in collision with some more or less incensed pedestrian, such as the printer's devil, who cried, "Now then, Snobby, where are yer a-comin' to?" or the stout red-faced matron in black, displaying a row of bootlaces and a paper of small-tooth combs for sale--who emerged from the swing-doors of a public-house as P. C. Breagh charged past them, and wanted to know whether he called himself a young man or a mad bull? A well-dressed, elderly gentleman, carrying a calf-skin bag and a gold-mounted umbrella, confounded him for a bungling, blundering, blackguardly! ... and was left reveling in alliteratives as the provoker of his wrath swung out of the Lane and found himself upon the reported Tom Tiddler's ground of Fleet Street. And then a curious swirling giddiness overtook him, and he dropped down upon some stone steps under the Gothic doorway of a church with a lofty tower, and sat there with hunched shoulders and drooped head, staring dully at the pavement between his muddy boots.

He was conscious of a dull resentment at his lot, but no base hatred of that old man with the shattered skull, lying prone among the bloody litter of his office-table, mingled with it. All his life, since that sixth birthday when he had learned the meaning of Death, and the potential value of Money, the attainment of his twenty-third year had been the goal toward which he had striven; and every third of January crossed off the almanac "brings me nearer," he had said to himself, "to the money that will be mine to spend as I shall choose!"

And now ... without a profession--for he had failed to obtain his degrees in Medicine and Surgery--without funds, for a reason that did him no dishonor--without books or belongings of any kind except the clothes upon his back; without hope--for who can be hopeful on an empty and craving stomach?--without work to occupy those strong young hands and the sound, capable brain behind those gray, amber-flecked eyes, the unlucky young man who had been reared on expectations sat under St. Dunstan's Tower; and heard St. Dunstan's clock and St. Paul's, and all the other City churches answer the boom of Big Ben of Westminster, solemnly striking the hour of ten.

His prospects had been blighted and ruined, his young hopes lay dead: he felt bruised and battered by the experiences and discoveries of that birthday morning, as though the pair of wooden clock-giants that some forty years back had figured among the City sights from their vantage in the ancient steeple of St. Dunstan's, had beaten out the hour with their mallets on his head.

His stepmother had always resented the monetary independence of her husband's son by Milly Fermeroy. Well! she and her vulgarities, her resentments and jealousies, had long been laid to rest, poor soul!

In that bloody June of the Mutiny of '57 she and her two youngest children had perished at Cawnpore. A fortnight later Major Breagh, previously wounded in the head by a shell-splinter in the defense of the entrenchments, was bayoneted by a Sepoy infantryman during a desperate sortie.

Carolan had remained as a boarder at the Preparatory School of the Marist Fathers at Rockhampton where he had previously been placed, thanks to the "interference," as Mrs. Breagh had phrased it, of the regimental chaplain. Father Haygarty. And, owing to the same influence, Monica, Carolan's junior by two years, had--after the double stroke of Fate that left the children orphaned--been sent to the Sisters of the Annunciation in London, the charges of her support and education being defrayed out of the interest of Carolan's seven thousand, and the compassionate allowance of twenty-five pounds granted her by Government as the orphan daughter of an officer killed in war.

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VI

To-day, as P. C. Breagh sat paupered on the doorstep of St. Dunstan's, he realized that, from childhood to this hour, dead Milly's money had been his bane.

"When I was quite a little shaver I expected to be knocked under to, and given the best of everything, because I was going to be rich one day.... I knew my money kept my stepmother from grumbling and nagging at me. And--my first thrashing at Rockhampton was because I'd bragged about it to a bigger boy. He said when he let me get up--that I should be obliged to him one day, if I wasn't at the moment! And my first fight--no, my second--because the first was over my Irish brogue!--my second fight came off because I'd forgotten my lesson, and talked about being able to drive four-in-hand, and live up to a Commission in the Household Cavalry when I should come of age.... Silly young idiot! And when I was old enough for a public school--and passed--I wonder, with my luck, how I managed to pass?--into Bradenbury College--I had mills, no end! with the fellows there, because I couldn't keep mum about my expectations."

He leaned his dusty elbows on his knees and went on thinking, as a regular procession of legs of all sexes, ages, and colors went past, and the muddy river of Fleet Street traffic roared over the cobblestones, boiled in swirling eddies where it received the stream flowing down Chancery Lane, and choked and gurgled in and out of the squat archways of Temple Bar.

"I'd talked of Oxford as a preliminary to Sandhurst and a Cavalry Commission--and I went in for an Exhibition Entrance--but my classics queered me for the University. Knock Number One! The Head put it on the Italianate Latin I'd learned from the Marist Fathers--and why old Virgil, and Ovid, Horace, Cæsar, and Livy, and the rest of 'em, should be supposed to have pronounced their language with a British accent I've never been able to understand! ... When I went up for the Woolwich Open Competitive--having altered my views about the Household Cavalry!--my plane trigonometry dished me for the Royal Horse Artillery.... Knock Number Two! So I told myself that it wasn't as easy getting into a Queen's uniform as it was in my father's time.... You were given the Commission--or you bought it--and if you could drill, and march, and fight, no more was asked of you.... And I tried for the Royal Engineering College of India--and failed in dynamics--and had a shot for the I.C.S.--and missed again! Oh, damn! And do I owe every one of the whole string of failures to the belief that money makes up for everything and buys anything? I'm half beginning to believe I do! Even the kindness I have had from people I'd no claim on--and who is there alive I have a claim on? Have I been cad enough--ape enough--worm enough--to put it down to----Grrh!--how I loathe myself!"

He covered his reddened face with his hands and shuddered. It is horrible to have to go on living inside a fellow you have begun to hate.

"Even Father Haygarty's untiring kindness, his interest in all I did and thought and hoped for.... Weren't there times when I suspected that my--in some degree representing property--accounted for--oh, Lord! And when he was dying and his housekeeper sent for me--for he'd given up being an army chaplain and got a little living in Gloucestershire--did I realize even then what a friend and father I was losing? I hope to God I did, but I'm hardly sure of myself!"

He stubbed with the toe of his muddy boot the jutting corner of a paving-stone, and scowled at the image of himself that was growing more and more distinct. He had always thought P. C. Breagh rather a fine young fellow. Now he knew him for what he had always been.

"When Father Haygarty was gone--it wasn't long before Mustey and Son began to send explanations and apologies, instead of the whole of the quarter's interest-money. There had been a drop in securities of this kind and the other, and Consols were down--and at first I was as pleased as a prize poodle at being made excuses to..... But the fact remained that where I'd been getting two hundred and forty, I was only getting one hundred and seventy-three.... And that--if I really meant to go in for my Degree in Surgery and Medicine, for I'd made up my mind to be a medical swell--I had--if Monica was to go on staying with the Sisters!--I'd got to give up the idea of Edinburgh, or the London University, and matriculate somewhere abroad. So I went to Schwärz-Brettingen, and shared rooms with another English chap.... It was admitted I had solid abilities--the Professors whose lectures I attended thought well of me. And I failed!--Failed for the fourth time! Have I the accursed money to thank for that last blow?"

He perspired as though he had been running, and, indeed, nothing takes it out of you like a spruit over the course of the past with your conscience as pacer.

"I'd thought myself rather a fine fellow when, with my student-card in my pocket and my Anmeldungsbuch in my hand I called--in company with a squad of other candidates--on the Rector Magnificus. We had a punch afterwards, and a drive and coffee at the Plesse--and made a night of it at Fritz's. I woke with a first-class student's headache in the morning, and a hazy recollection that I'd told one or two of the British colony--in confidence--and several Germans--about the money I was coming into by-and-by...."

He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyelids together, trying to shut out the picture of P. C. Breagh in the character of a howling cad.

"But if I bragged--and I did brag!--I worked.... The Marist Fathers had grounded me in French and German in spite of myself, and my pride had been nicely stung up by that failure for Sandhurst and the others.... Men told me what I'd got to grind at, and I ground; filling piles of lecture-pads with notes on all sorts of subjects. Anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology.... My brain was a salad of 'em--but I passed the Abiturienteti-Examen at a classical gymnasium with a better certificate than a lot of other Freshmen--thanks to the Marist Fathers, who'd pounded Latin and Greek into me!--and then--after two years of walking hospitals, attending demonstrations and lectures, and doing laboratory-work--varied by beers and schläger--and more beers and more schläger!--and perhaps I took to sword-play all the more kindly because of the soldier-blood in me!--came the first regular examination. And I don't forget that third of November--not while I'm breathing!"

Donnerwetter! P. C. Breagh could see the cocked-hatted and scarlet-gowned University beadle ushering a pale young man, with saucers round his eyes, into the awful presence of the Dean, and Examiners in the Faculties of Surgery and Medicine....

The neophyte--arrayed in the swallow-tail coat, low-cut vest, black cloth inexpressibles, white cravat, and kid gloves inseparable from an English dinner-party, or the ordeal of examination at a German university, found his inquisitors also in formal full dress, seated in a semicircle facing the door, and looking singularly cheerful.

A solitary chair marked the middle of the chord of the arc formed by the chairs of the examiners. Upon this stool of judgment--after bowing and shaking hands all round and being bowed to and shaken--the victim had been invited to seat himself. The Dean opened the ball with the Early Theorists. And he had seemed quite to cotton to P. C. Breagh's ideas on the subject of Egyptian Sacerdotal Colleges, the preparation of Soma in the Vedas, the therapeutical formulas of Zoroaster, Chinese sympathetic medicine--the dietetic method of Hippocrates--who invented barley-water!--the observations of Diocles and Chrysippus and the criticisms of Galen. At the expiration of half an hour, when the Hofrath delivered him over to the next examiner, P. C. Breagh had felt that, if the others were no worse than the Dean, all might yet be well.

Professor Barselius, who followed the Dean, and was reported to be a terror, when correctly replied to upon an interrogation as to the chemical composition of the fatty acids, vouchsafed a grunt of approbation.

Professor Troppenritt, who succeeded Barselius, was a person with a reputation for amiability, and a mobility of mental constitution which enabled him to flit like the butterfly or leap like the grasshopper from subject to subject, harking back to Number One, perhaps, when you felt quite sure he had done with it for good. But on that fateful third of November a tricksy demon seemed to possess Troppenritt. He no longer flitted like the butterfly, or hopped like the grasshopper--he sported with the seven great departments of Structural Anatomy, Physiology, Pathological Anatomy, General Pathology, Ophthalmology, Medicine, Hygiene and Midwifery--as a fountain might toss up glass balls, or a conjurer juggle with daggers.... His victim after a while found himself breathlessly watching the hugh knobby rampart of forehead, behind which the Professor's intentions were hiding, in the vain hope that the next question might be foreshadowed on its shining surface. A hope destined never to be fulfilled....

The fact remains that P. C. Breagh, after some really creditable answers, was beginning to recover the use of his mental faculties, when the Dean--prompted by the candidate's evil genius--suggested a little pause for cake and wine. It was awful to see how Hofrath and Professors--there were three of them besides the conjurer Troppenritt--enjoyed themselves at this sacrificial banquet, which had been arranged upon a little table in a corner, waiting the five-minute interval. And P. C. Breagh rejected cake, which was of the gingerbread variety, garnished with blanched almonds and sugar-plums. But the single glass of Rüdesheimer he accepted might have been the Brobdingnagian silver-mounted horn that hung within a garland of frequently-renewed laurel leaves upon the walls of a famous students' beer-hall--or have been filled with raw spirits above proof,--the contents mounted so unerringly to his head, and wreaked such havoc therein.

The three remaining Professors were almost tender with the sufferer, but what Troppenritt had begun, the wine had completed. The nicht wahr's had been succeeding one another at marked intervals,--like distress-signals or funereal minute-guns, when the traditional three hours expired.

P. C. Breagh--removed to cold storage in the anteroom--was detained but five minutes longer.... His nervous shiverings had reached a crescendo, when the beadle opened the door.... And the Dean, stepping forward, in staccato accents delivered himself:

"Candidate, from the quality of the dissertations in writing previously submitted, we, the Faculty of Surgery and Medicine of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen--would a more satisfaction-imparting result have anticipated as the result of the just-concluded oral examination undergone by you.... But although lacking in Gedächtniss--has been manifested on your part a so-remarkable degree of Einbildung and Begriff that the Faculty of-hesitation-none-whatever have in the following-advice-to-you-imparting;--Yourself another semester give, or better still, another twelvemonth! and try again, young man!--try again!"

Not bad advice, if the young man had chosen to follow it. But January drew near, and the inheritor-expectant of seven thousand pounds scorned to toil and moil over intellectual ground already traversed. He had tried for honors, and he had failed, thanks to the hypnotizing methods of the too-agile Troppenritt.

So P. C. Breagh spent the money that would have kept him, with economy, for six months, in giving a farewell banquet to his friends; called--in his best attire, with kid gloves and a buttonhole bouquet--on his favorite lecturers; left cards on the wives of those who possessed them; paid his landlady--who had faithfully labored to convert his formal, class-room German into a malleable, useful tongue,--kissed her round cheek--tipped the civil servant-maid five dollars,--and turned his back for ever on Schwärz-Brettingen, its Aula, Collegien-Haus, Theatrum Anatomicum, Botanical Garden, Library and Career--(a correctional edifice the interior accommodations of which were only known to him by hearsay),--its restaurants, beer-saloons, coffee-gardens, and fencing-halls; its chilly wood-stoves, its glowing enthusiasms; its pleasant companionships, its passing flirtations with schoppen-bearing Hebes, and nymphs of the coffee-garden, restaurant, or ninepin alley. One cannot say its love-affairs, because in the esteem of P. C. Breagh--though Passion might bloom red by the wayside at every mile of a man's journey--Love was a rare blossom found once in a lifetime, too often never found at all.

P. C. Breagh's idea of Love was that it should be spelt with a capital, and spoken of in whispers. Nor, let us hint, was the ideal Woman at whose feet, he promised himself, he would one day pour forth all the gold and jewels of his heart and intellect, a being to be lightly trifled with.

To commence with, she would have to be six feet high or thereabouts.... Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, of classical features, cream-and-rose complexion, powerful intellect and thews matching, the ideal woman of P. C. Breagh must have weighed about fourteen stone. He imagined her a kind of Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--with a dash of Mary Queen of Scots, Kingsley's Hypatia, and a spice of Edith Dombey and the beautiful shrewish Roman Princess out of "The Cloister and the Hearth"--though these heroines were jetty-locked, and for this reason fell short of P. C. Breagh's ideal of female loveliness. Fair and colossal, he had seen her over and over again,--though a little too roseate and pulpy in texture to come up to his ideal--in the vast canvases of Kaulbach and in the overwhelming frescoes of the Bavarian Spiess. But he had never yet encountered her in the flesh. One day they would meet--and she would be scornful of the young, obscure, unknown man who looked at her--she felt it from the first, and that made her quite furious!--with the eye of a consciously superior being--a master in posse.

All the masculine world would bow down before the intellect combined with the beauty--of Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde--and so on, for he amalgamated new heroines with the others, in the course of his reading. But one man lived who would not bow down. She would taunt him with this stiff-necked pride of his, in the course of an interview on the terrace of a castle, whose moat he had swum and whose guarded ramparts he had scaled in order to be discovered, scorning her, and communing with the moon. And he would quell her tempestuous wrath, and silence her reproaches, by telling her that it was for her to pay homage and court smiles. Then she would summon her vassals and lovers, and half a dozen of them would set upon P. C. Breagh, who would strangle one with his naked hands, run another through with his own sword--and provide materials, broadly speaking, for half a dozen first-class funerals--before he leapt into the moat, carrying a rose that she had dropped between his teeth---and "gained the distant bank in safety," or "dripping and bloody, emerged from the dark water, gripped an iron chain, eaten with the rust of centuries, and, painfully scaling the frowning masonry, disappeared into the..." etc.

Absurd, if you will, and bombastic and impossibly high-flown. Yet such boyish dreams keep the soul clean and the body from grosser stain. Walking with your head erect you may stub your toe, and come a cropper on the stones occasionally. But you pick yourself up again and proceed more warily--none the less rejoicing, seeing the splendor of the sunset, or braving the blaze of noonday, or drinking in the delicate spring-like hues of dawn....

One does not know how long P. C. Breagh might have remained upon the steps of St. Dunstan's, had not the hour of twelve sounded from the new clock--a youngster barely forty years old--that had replaced the gong-hammering wooden giants, now on view outside the Marquis of Hertford's villa in Regent's Park. A constable civilly asked him to move on. He got up, heavily, and mechanically felt for his watch that was in keeping of the landlord of the fourth-rate hostelry in the Euston Road. And it occurred to him--as a pin-prick among innumerable stiletto strokes--that the watch alone, being a heavy silver one attached to a slender gold snake-chain once the property of dead Milly--would have satisfied the man's claim, which, exorbitant as it was for the accommodation afforded, was considerably under three pounds. You are to understand that P. C. Breagh had been so certain of returning in a few hours, heavy with ready money, that he had treated the landlord's detention of his luggage as a joke.

The present situation was no joke. But Youth preserves above all the property of rising unbruised and elastic from a tumble, and of healing readily when it has sustained mental or physical wounds!

The blood in the veins of P. C. Breagh was mingled with the finer strain that came from the breed of Fermeroy. He had no idea of finding a craven's refuge in suicide. The single shilling remaining to him might purchase sufficient strychnine for a painful, unheroic exit, but P. C. Breagh was not disposed to invest his remaining capital in that unpleasant alkaloid. And neither did it occur to him then to test the depth and drowning-capacity of the muddy liquid running under any one of London's bridges, from Westminster to the Tower. For by the contradictory law of Nature, reversing scientific fact, a helpless weight that hung about his strong young neck kept his moral head above the turbid waters of Despondency.

He was not alone in the world. There was Monica. With the remembrance of that frail link, binding him to the rest of humanity, awakened in him the desire to see her. He turned his face Westward and stepped into the moving throng.

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VII

The Great Class fermented in irrepressible excitement. Subsequently to the arrival of a foreign mail, Juliette Bayard had been summoned by an attendant lay-sister to the presence of Mère M. Catherine-Rose.

She had remained nearly half an hour in the Parlor of Cold Feet--so called in recognition of the fact that the apartment contained no fireplace, and that even in the hottest weather cool draughts played hide-and-seek across the polished parquet from circular brazen gratings inserted in the wainscot, which ancient legend connected with the presence of a French calorifère.

When the door opened and Juliette emerged, somewhere about the middle of the noon recreation, an advance-patrol in the shape of a pupil of the Little Class, by name Laura Foljambe--happened to be buttoning a shoe-strap at the end of the corridor. The apoplectic attitude inseparable from this particular employment would have rendered observation impossible--in the case of an adult. But Laura, under the cover of a luxuriant head of yellow ringlets, unconfined by any comb or ribbon, observed, firstly, that Juliette had been crying, and secondly, that Mère M. Catherine-Rose had tears in her own eyes. More, she had called Juliette back, embraced her affectionately, and said: "We shall miss you, my dear!" "You will be brave, I know!" and "Remember to write!" Packed with news, Laura rushed into the Lesser Hall, where the seniors were gathered round the stove, the raw chill of the January weather rendering the garden a place of penitence, and emptied her budget of intelligence upon the spot.

Juliette must be going away! The forty girls of the Great Class had unanimously arrived at this conclusion when Juliette herself arrived upon the scene. It needed but a glance to assure her of the treachery of Laura; it needed but a moment, and the spy, blubbering and protesting, was seized, shaken, and forced upon her knees.

You are to understand that when Juliette Bayard was angry, she was so with a vengeance. Heroic by temperament, her wrath smacked of the superhuman. A demi-goddess enraged might have manifested as semi-divine a frenzy. Ordinary prose seemed too poor a vehicle to convey such indignation. You expected hexameters or Alexandrines....

"That you listened I would stake my honor!--I would pledge my life!--I would put the hand in the fire! Mean! Base! Despicable! Ah, you look simple, little thing, but you are cunning as a mouse--fine as amber! No! I do not pinch, I would scorn it--you know that perfectly! Yes! I will permit you to go when you confess who set you on!"

Laura, unwilling to incur the resentment of forty grown-ups, undesirous of forfeiting the saccharine reward of treachery, boohooed in a whisper, for class-hour was approaching. The wrathful goddess towered over her, eyed with blue lightning, crowned with dusky clouds of thunder, flushed like the sunset that comes after the day of storm.

Had Arthur Hughes or Fred Walker been privileged to peep--one painter at least would have armed her uplifted hand with a bulrush-spear, helmeted her with a curled water-lily leaf, and given the smiling world Titania in the character of Pallas Athene, or Queen Mab as an Amazon. And Juliette would never have pardoned the painter. For--despite the testimony of her tale of inches--she would have it that she was tall, even above the average height of woman.

"I shall not be beautiful, no! but I shall be commanding!" she had assured those favored girls on whom she deigned to bestow her imperial confidence. This select number in turn possessing a circle of confidantes, the drop of a secret meant a series of widening rings, extending to the circle of the day scholars, reaching the Orphanage by-and-by, and trickling at length into the basement, where the Poor School assembled on Wednesdays and Fridays, to gather up the crumbs of knowledge that fell from the tables of the daughters of the great and rich.

You may imagine the scene in Lesser Hall upon this chilly day in January. Excitement was much more warming than crowding round the smoky stoves. Of the semi-circle of great girls in their black school-dresses, enlivened only by the red or white class-rosettes, or the pale blue ribbons of the Children of Mary, all the heads, adorned with every shade of feminine tresses,--all the eyes of all colors, set in faces plain or pretty--were turned toward the tragic figure of Juliette.

Once kindled, such violet fires of wrath blazed in those implacable eyes, one would have supposed nothing could ever quench them. But when she was sorrowful, they were bottomless lakes of misery. Despair lay drowned and wan amid the long black sedges drooping at their borders. Under the dark, hollowed precipices that shadowed them it seemed as though no sun could ever shine. But when the laugh was born, it leaped to the surface with a quiver that caught the light and flashed it back pure sapphire or loveliest Persian turquoise. No face ever framed of earthly clay had more of the mirth of Heaven in it, then. Her long upper lip, the elastic, mobile feature that could draw out to so portentous a length, would be haunted by flying smiles, and the deep-cut corners of her short scarlet under lip would quiver. To inventory the beauties of a young lady and omit the nose would suggest cause for reticence on the writer's part. Juliette's nose was not of Greek or Roman type, but neither was it snubbed or tip-tilted. It had a rounded end, and deep, curved, passionate nostrils. It pertained to no known order of nasal architecture. It was Juliette's nose, and could never have belonged to anybody else.

If you would more of her,--and after the first encounter you either sought or shunned--loved or loathed--as she would have had you do who was in all things sincere and candid, you are to understand that her cloud of dusky hair framed a small oval face that made no show of carnation or vaunt of rose. Her clear fine skin was almost always pale. She would have laughed you to scorn had you likened those colorless cheeks of hers to lilies. She prided herself upon a frame of mind eminently commonplace, antipodean to the romantic. "I am sensible, me!" you often heard her say.

In form--though as you know she believed herself to be a giantess--she was small and slight, and not at all remarkable. A framework of slender bones, frugally covered with tender, healthful flesh. Her shoulders sloped so much that in her loose-bodied, full-sleeved, black merino school uniform she seemed about to vanish. Her hips were narrow, without the voluptuous curves that belong to heroines. But a Divine jest had added to her little high-arched head a tiny pair of rosy shells for hearing, and the palms and nails and finger-tips of her narrow hands,--and feet I have heard it said by some who loved her--were roseate also. The younger children liked to pretend that this was a judgment on Juliette for stealing strawberries in the early June season, but she only joined in that one raid on the Sisters' kitchen-garden "To be a good comrade!" ... and as it happened, all the strawberries were slug-eaten. And where are there strawberries worth the stealing, unless it be in France?

For next to God and Our Lady, and her father M. le Colonel, Juliette Bayard loved her country. Paradise was but an improvement on France, to hear her describe it to the little ones. Further, though she had a perfect taste in dress, when released from the school uniform; though an ordinary hat under her deft transforming fingers would become a miracle of exquisite millinery; her groups of flowers, and landscapes, in water-color, her crayon dog's heads, were mercifully hidden from the drawing-master's eye. She sang out of tune, but in time; played correctly, but hated the piano; danced like an air-wafted tuft of dandelion-down or a gnat upon a summer evening,--and had a Heaven-born gift for housekeeping and cookery.

Of this last gift more anon. Meanwhile Laura writhed, or seemed to writhe, under the torrent of passionate reproaches, culminating in another shake, and a slap which might have damaged a kitten newly-born. Laura fell prone, moaning and gurgling. And Juliette, pierced by remorse at her own ruthlessness, sank, pale as ashes, beside the victim's corse.

"Darling Laura! sweetest Laura!--tell me I have not hurt you! Just Heaven! how could I strike you?--I, who am so strong! Indeed, I might have killed you! ... Pray for me, my little angel! It will need a miracle to cure my temper, as Mother Veronica constantly says. Cannot you get up? Do try, to please me! Tell me where you feel most injured? Quick, or I know I shall be angry again! ... Show me the bruise! Pouf! that is a mere nothing! I will kiss it and make it well, and you shall have the blue bead Rosary."

The mention of the blue beads palpably restored vitality. The sufferer was understood to intimate that a chocolate elephant would absolutely complete the cure.

"The elephant to-morrow when the Great Class return from the promenade. The Rosary before Benediction. Away with you!"

Laura scuttled. Juliette blew her a parting kiss, and said, with a comprehensive glance of scorn at the faces of her classmates:

"It was not she who deserved the---- I have not the expression! ... It is one of your English words that mean many things together ... a kiss ... a blow ... the boat of a sailor who catches fishes and crabs.... I have seen such boats at Havre and Weymouth, and they are very pretty.... Ah! Now I remember. You call them fishing-spanks!"

The Class shrieked. Juliette stood calmly while the tumult of laughter and exclamations raged about her. Her long upper lip shut down upon its scarlet neighbor, her brows frowned a little; her slender arms, lost in their loose sleeves, hung straightly by her narrow sides. Millais would, seeing her, have painted a maiden martyr. Watts might have limned her as Persephone new-loosed from the dark embrace of Dis, her wooer, taking her first timid steps upon the glowing floor of Hell.

"When you have finished making so much noise--peu importe--but I have a piece of news to tell you. You are none of you inquisitive--that goes without saying!--or you would not have dispatched that poor infant to play the spy outside the parlor door. Bridget-Mary and Alethea Bawne, I do not mean you--you are souls of honor--incapable of curiosity! ... Also, Monica Breagh, c'est là son moindre defaut! But there are others--yet my friends--who are not so delicate,--and to these I address myself. You do not deserve to hear--and yet I cannot be unkind to you; I, who have such joy of the heart in the knowledge that I am to return to my dear father!--such grief--ah! but such grief of the soul in bidding adieu to the School!"

"Not for good?"

"You are going to leave the School?"

"Dear, darling Juliette, say you're only joking!"

"She is in earnest. Look at her upper lip!"

"Vous moquez-vous du monde de parler ainsi!"

Throbbed out a Spanish voice, husky and passionate:

"Qué vergüenza! No, no, es imposible!"

"Sure, dear, you'd not be so cruel as to make game of us?"

She stood her ground, firm, but no longer frowning. Her heart swelled, her eyes were heavy with the promise of rain. Her slender arms went out as though she would have embraced them all.

"My dears, it is true! I go to Versailles to rejoin my father. He says to me also--I have his letter here!" ...

Silence fell upon the turbulent crowd as she laid a slender hand on the place where her heart could be seen throbbing. The paper rustled, but she did not draw it forth.

"He says, in this--I am to be married ... soon,--very quickly!"

A Babel of cries, ejaculations, and exclamations broke out about her. A girl's voice, more strident than the rest, shrieked:

"I hate your father! Beast!" and broke down in hysterical sobbing. Juliette replied, those about her hushed to hear; and in the oasis of silence her tender, silvery voice rose like a fountain springing from the heart of purity.

"My father is not what you say, but the Emperor's brave soldier and a noble gentleman. I am proud to obey when he commands! He has said to me that I am to be married, and does he not know what is best for me? Would he wish to bring unhappiness upon his Juliette?"

She was not so much loyal as Loyalty personified, standing there defending him; with her little hand keeping down her bursting heart of anguish, and salt lakes of unshed tears pent up behind her sorrowful sapphire eyes.... Her voice broke as she said "his Juliette," and one of the Bawnes, a stately, black-browed girl, answered, speaking in French:

"He would not if he is--what you have described him! ... But--unless you knew of this before--it is so sudden.... It would seem to argue that M. le Colonel was thinking more--you will not be offended!--of the happiness of his future son-in-law than of his daughter's----"

"Non, non, non!" She made an emphatic gesture with her little hand, and shook her head so that a tear fell from her lashes on the bosom of her black school-dress, "Dear Lady Biddy--you are mistaken. For--comprehend you?--my happiness is in obeying that beloved father, always. For me, there is no greater joy.... And his letter bears date of the New Year--three days since--behold the postmark. It is the custom to give young people étrennes at that season--my father bestows on me a husband, and I am--content! See you well?"

It was faulty English, yet Juliette's "See you well?" haunted the music-loving ear.

And now even the reserved began to question, while the frankly curious waxed importunate concerning the date of Mademoiselle Bayard's impending departure, the name, rank and personal appearance of the mysterious husband-elect, the number and uniform of his regiment. For, of course, he was certain to be an officer of Cavalry, Dragoons, Lancers, or Cuirassiers. That he must be handsome went without saying; but were his eyes dark or light, and did he wear a moustache only, or sport the hirsute ornament in conjunction with an imperial? Beset from all quarters, Juliette was beginning to lose command of herself, when the hour of two struck from the great clock in the corridor.

The clang-clang of an iron bell succeeded, the double doors at the upper end of the Hall rolled backward, uniting the Great and the Middle Classes in the religious exercise that opened afternoon School. The hymn sung, the brief litany chanted to an accompaniment played on the harmonium by a mistress in the purple habit and creamy veil of the choir-sisters, another nun approached Juliette and whispered in her ear.

She was to go to the dormitory and pack her trunk, which would presently be brought her by one of the lay-sisters. And this done, she was free to spend the half-hour previous to Benediction in the parlor with----

The name was lost in Juliette's embrace and kiss of gratitude. She was usually chary of caresses, perhaps she wished to hide her eyes.

They were fairly overflowing, poor eyes! when their owner gained the solitude of her white-draped cubicle in the Greats' dormitory. Once the curtains fell behind her she was free to fall upon her knees beside the bed and sob there, to call upon Our Lady for succor and pity, to rock herself and hug her bleeding heart. And all these things Juliette did, until the dull thump of felt shoes upon the shining boards betokened the arrival of the lay-sister, bearing the oilskin-covered dress-basket, disinterred from some below-stairs repository, which had to be filled from the locker, dress-hooks, and drawers.

Ten minutes had been devoured in grief, forty yet remained for packing. A lover of method in all things, frugal and prudent in the expenditure of resources ("I am sensible, me!"), Juliette was economical of time. Ten minutes might be spared to re-perusal of the letter that had set her faith in that dearest father rocking like a palm in tempest, and wrung such tears of anguish from the heart that worshiped him.

She drew the bulky envelope from its pure hiding-place, kissed it, and moaned a little. There were three sheets of thin foreign note, flourished over in a big, bold, soldierly hand. The date bore evidence that the letter had been penned on the Eve of Saint Sylvestre, answering to our New Year's Eve. The address was:

"Barracks of the 777th Regiment, "Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, "Versailles.

"My Daughter,

"Of news thy father has not much to tell thee that thou wouldst find of the most interesting, save that of the fashions prevailing in Paris at the moment, the most daring and eccentric is the little hat or miniature bonnet, tilted forward upon the forehead by the chignon, and spangled with beetles, dragon-flies, and other brilliant insects. Jeweled birds, yachts in full sail, or baskets of flowers, dangle from the ears of all the feminine world!

"The Empress is as beautiful as even she could wish to be. I saw her driving a pair of little thoroughbred mares in the low park-phœton yesterday in the Bois, near the Rond des Cascades. She was so gracious as to recognize me--though I was in civilian riding-dress--and beckoned me with her parasol-whip from the line of equestrians respectfully mustered on the left side of the road. She patted the gray Mustapha--thou wilt be glad thy horse was so honored!--and asked if I was quite recovered of the wound I received at Solferino,--proving that an Imperial memory can be conferred with the hand that raises to Imperial rank. Later on I met Dumas, and--at the corner of the Rue Laffitte--Baron Rothschild and Cham, the caricaturist--and there thou hast a résumé of the encounters of the day.

"Do political matters really interest thee? Learn, then, a new Ministry is in formation by M. Emile Ollivier--a 'homogeneous cabinet,' is to be drawn chiefly from the Left Center in the Corps Législatif. My father's friend, M. le Général Lebœuf, Minister of War, retains the post he held in the expired Administration. M. le Maréchal Vaillant continues as Minister of the Emperor's Household. Haussmann has fallen! his ten thousand hands will no longer scatter gold from the Imperial Treasury. The last announcement emanating from the Prefecture of the Seine gave notice that the cemeteries of Mont-Parnasse, Montmartre, Ivry, and others are to be seized by the municipality in 1871. All the private monuments are to be withdrawn before the first of April.... With what sorrow of heart these tragic removals will be effected thou wilt realize, who hast so often accompanied thy father, bearing wreaths to lay upon thy grandmother's tomb at Père Lachaise. Pray that the necessity to find a home for those sacred, beloved ashes may not devolve upon us.

"_Thou must know that in October, during the maneuvers at the camp of Châlons, a new and terrible weapon was placed in the hands of the Imperial army of France. It is the Mitrailleuse, conceived by the brain of De Reffye--an invention worthy to rank with that of the Chassepôt rifle, which fulfilled such great expectations the first time the weapon was used in action, at Mentana, against the Garibaldians. How shall I describe it? I will say, briefly, that it is a rifled, breech-loading gun of from fourteen to twenty-nine barrels; that it has as many locks as barrels; that it can be transported from place to place by two men, and fired by one, who manipulates a lever, sitting upon a saddle attached to the gun-carriage. And that it is a mill that grinds--a machine that hails--death upon an enemy. Armed with batteries of these invincible weapons, the march of an invading army would be irresistible!_

"Two of these marvelous guns have been by the Imperial favor bestowed upon our regiment. The men baptized them in wine by the names of Didi and Bibi. They are treated as regimental infants, and thrive exceedingly well.

"My child, whether this news will make thee sad or joyful it must be that Juliette joins her father here at Versailles not later than on the twentieth of the month of January. Madame la Supérieure will supply thee with funds in exchange for the enclosed note of credit furnished me by my bankers. Purchase thyself--on arriving in Paris--for certainly the modes of London will never content a taste so fastidious--some fresh and charming toilettes of the evening, costumes for the house, theater or promenade, and suitable lingerie. Last, but not least, bring a marriage-robe, crown and veil. I am not joking, I assure thee! For my daughter I have found a husband. A young man, sincere, upright, honorable, and a good Catholic, whom I have known from boyhood, whom my child will love as a wife should; and by whom she will be adored and cherished. Thou knowest Charles Tessier, the son of my mother's widowed friend, the estimable Madame Tessier, whom we have visited in the Rue de Provence, Versailles! Charles has succeeded to his father's large businesses at Paris, Lyons, and in Belgium, as a manufacturer of woolen dress-materials, the pattern Écossais, so much in favor with S.M. the Empress and the belles of the Imperial Court, having been imported, woven and supplied by this wise, enterprising and energetic young man. Who--but it will be for his wife to perceive and praise his many excellencies. I leave thee to the pleasant task of discovering them.

"My Juliette, if so much of thy father mingles in thy nature that of all careers this of a soldier seems to thee the noblest--if the pursuit and attainment of military glory--distinctions won upon the field of War, appeal to thee--as Heaven knows they have to me!--since my blood first learned to thrill at the roll of the drum--and leap at the sound of the trumpet--if thou hast pictured in thy innocent mind--loved in thy spotless dreams--some brave and noble officer chosen for thee by him who now writes--tear the picture!--forget the dream! For when such dreams become realities they are--how often rudely shattered by the rush and shock of armies meeting in the blood-stained field of War!

"_My dear, War is a monster composed of flesh, and iron, and steel, that like the dragon or chimera of classical mythology--devours the hopes of virgins and the happiness of matrons, and leaves children orphans and homes heaps of dust. Thou rememberest thy grandmother? She had been married just five years when my father reddened with his heart's blood the soil of Algeria. Yet when I wished to follow the profession of arms she did not endeavor to dissuade me. She hid her anguish as only mothers can, but her beloved life was shortened by anxiety undergone during the terrible war of the Crimea; that war so protracted, so disastrous to our brave ally of England--so fraught with loss and suffering to the more fortunate army of France. And that was not the only blow Fate dealt me while I served as aide-de-camp upon the staff of M. le Maréchal Grandguerrier. Thou dost not know as yet!--one day I may find courage to tell thee.... Even a soldier may shrink from baring wounds that are of the soul._

"My daughter, I have never spoken to thee of thy mother.... The time has arrived when----"

The sixteen words were lined out by a heavy stroke of the quill. The closing sentences were----

"In the event of War abroad--taking thy father from thee--perhaps to lay his bones in a trench hastily dug by peasants in some foreign province!--or in the event of War at home,--sudden, unexpected--sweeping as a cataclysm over thy native soil, thou wilt believe me, my Juliette, when I tell thee this marriage would be absolutely for the best! Living or dead, for me to know thee safe and cherished, here at Versailles with thy husband Charles and his estimable mother, would be happiness.... Wilt thou consent to the union? Wilt thou obey thy father, who loves thee as his soul? One finds this a scrawl which will prove difficult to decipher. As thou knowest, I am a better artist with the sword than with the pen.

"Written here at my new quarters, which comprise a sleeping chamber and boudoir elegantly furnished, suitable for a young lady of refinement; and a little kitchen, full of pots and bright pans.

"Thy father, "HENRI-ANTOINE-ALBERT DE BAYARD, "Colonel Commandant."

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VIII

Will it not be admitted that a letter such as this was calculated to cause a flutter of agitation in the meekest feminine bosom? To be recalled from School before the completion of the tiresome process technically known as "finishing," that was matter for rejoicing. The little bedroom-boudoir in the Colonel's quarters at the Cavalry Barracks, "elegantly furnished, suitable for a young lady of refinement," presented an alluring picture, the tiny kitchen, "full of pots and bright pans," charmed....

For Mademoiselle de Bayard, going back to her Colonel after two years' absence, laden as the working-bee with the honey of accomplishments and the well-kneaded wax of useful knowledge, promised herself that it should not be long before her idol should be convinced by practical demonstration that his Juliette had not forgotten how to cook. Irish stew, saddle-of-mutton with onion-sauce, pancakes, Scotch collops, English plum-pudding and mince-pies had been added to her lengthy list of recipes, by grace of the Convent cook, Sister Boniface, who had permitted the ardent amateur to experiment in a second kitchen, used in hot weather, abutting on the garden, and not regarded as a portion of the nuns' enclosure.

To return, and resume the old dear life of companionship, how sweetly welcome had been the summons. But nothing could disguise the taste of the powder that came after the jam.

You are to conceive the struggle in Juliette's faithful heart between obedience and anger. Marry, my faith! yes! Every sensible young girl naturally expected to be married; but a husband approved of by oneself, if selected by one's father--that was what one had had reason to expect.

And this Charles, eulogized as wise, sensible, far-seeing, and business-like. Were these qualities, though naturally desirable in the estimation of a father-in-law, attributes that weighed down the scale in the opinion of a bride? Had one ever beheld him? She shut her eyes and summoned up all the masculine faces in her gallery of mental portraits, dismissing one after the other with no's, and no's, and no's! ... Was it not horrible to have to admit even to oneself that one had not the faintest recollection of ever having seen or spoken to him? Madame Tessier she remembered well as a little, stout, very gentille and amiable, elderly lady, whom she had visited with M. le Colonel, who had embraced one cordially, and insisted on one's partaking--immediately and at great length--of a collation of sandwiches, fruit, cakes, and syrups; excellent--and to a hungry school-girl, welcome at any hour of the day. What more? ... Ah, yes! Madame had much deplored Charles's absence, possibly at Lyons or in Belgium. Further, Madame had remarked to M. le Colonel:

"My friend, your Juliette is the image of her beloved grandmother!"

"Will nobody ever say that I am like my mother?" Juliette had gaily cried. And with a strange stiff smile, the Colonel had answered for Madame Tessier,--who at that juncture had opportunely upset a dish of little sugar-cakes.

"There have been moments, my child, when I have"--he coughed rather awkwardly for M. le Colonel--"anticipated that a resemblance might exist."

Could he have been on the verge of saying "feared," and substituted the other word at the last moment? Such an idea was ridiculous, yet it had occurred to Juliette.

To questions on the subject of the faintly remembered mother the grandmother had been impervious. The Colonel had always answered--yet with palpable reticence....

"You have no mother, my little Juliette; she was taken from us, my child, while I was absent with the Army in the Crimea," or "She left us, while yet I was detained in Eastern Russia, serving as aide upon the staff of M. le Maréchal Grandguerrier.... It is true, she was both good and beautiful when I married her! Now run and play!" Or, in later years: "Now come and read to me!" or "Walk with me," or "Ride with me," or "Now tell me how and where thou didst learn to turn out such savory dishes with those tiny pattes de mouche of thine? Nowhere is there a chef whose choicest efforts can com-pare with my Juliette's. And I have dined with the Emperor--and with Milord Hertford at Bagatelle--and with Consul-General Baron Rothschild--and--parole d'honneur!--I have told them so!"

And all the time M. le Colonel had been keeping back something.... Was it not strange, thought Juliette, that, while upon the anniversary of the Jour des Mort Mass had invariably been offered for all deceased relatives of the De Bayard family, the actual date of the death of one so young and beautiful had never been marked with special solemnity.

Could it be that the lost mother was not dead, but living! Oh, but impossible! ... And yet--once awakened, the doubt would never sleep again....

Did ever a girl receive such a letter? It was fuller of darts than even the fabled porcupine. It awakened stinging doubts of the kindness of the gentlest and tenderest of fathers. "Tear the picture!--forget the dream!" he had said. Ah, my Heaven! what young girl cherishes not such images--such visions! ... Juliette wondered sorrowfully. Sitting on her school locker, lost in thought, her elbows on her knees, her little pointed chin cupped in the slender hands, you saw her as a haggard, weary little creature. For while joy made of Juliette a living rainbow, grief transformed her to the wan and rigid nymph that droops above a classic urn upon a mourning cameo; and anxiety or suspense or remorse of soul set a changeling in her place, wizened her, pinched her, struck her prematurely old.

She might--to employ hyperbole--have been sitting on her locker until the present hour, had not her sad eyes lighted upon a colored photograph of M. le Colonel in full military harness and equipment, contained in a little ivory frame fastened by a safety-pin to one of the starched white dimity curtains that imparted an air of select privacy to the little white-covered dormitory bed.

You are to behold Juliette's father--per medium of this pen-portrait--and would that you might have heard his cordial voice, and pressed his living hand.... Conceive him as a little man; and somewhat stout and paunchy; you would never have dared to term him so in the presence of Juliette. And yet so manly, soldierlike and ingratiating was the boldly-featured face, with its brave eyes, curled moustache and imperial; the fur talpack with the green and scarlet plume and the red Hussar bag, was worn with such an air; the dolman of fine green cloth, laced and corded with heavy galons of silver and faced with the brilliant red of his silver-striped pantaloons, fitted his compact round person with such creaseless tightness; his silver-striped ceinture, belts and buckles were so point-device; his spurred Hessian boots graced such neat small feet; his right hand rested on his hip, his left upon the hilt of his long saber, with so pleasant a grace, that you could not but warm to this picture of a cavalry commander.

His daughter melted even as she gazed. The generous soul, once wrought to the pitch of heroism, piles sacrifice on sacrifice. She had meant to temporize, but she would not do so now. She began to comprehend, as stray sentences of the father's letter floated back, that his mood had been sorrowful when he wrote it; and that those wounds of the soul he spoke of had been bleeding, though hidden from his daughter, many a year.... He was never sentimental; that sentence about laying his bones in a trench hastily dug by peasants in a foreign province had been struck from the steel of his nature by some flint hurled from the sling of Fate. The words that followed, picturing War,--sudden, unexpected, sweeping as a cataclysm over the country,--had the solemnity of deep organ-notes. And the rushing tenderness in the words, "Living or dead, to know thee safe and cherished!" thrilled, and the dignity of the entreaty touched and conquered: "Wilt thou obey thy father, who loves thee as his soul? ..."

You saw light and warmth and youth and loveliness visibly flowing back into her as she looked at the picture. The witches' changeling fled, a christened maiden remained in her place. Words came to the lips that had been dumb, dews of tenderness bathed the eyes that had been dry as those of a sandstone statue in the Theban desert....

"Dearest--beloved--best! ... Oh! shame that I should have dreamed of doubting you! ... There is some great reason for this decision--something terrible behind this haste of yours. What, I may not know now!--one day all will be explained to me! ... Until then"--she rose and kissed the portrait--"until then I will trust you--who have never deceived me.... I will write to you as you would wish me to this very night. Now I must pack, and then go down to Monica.... How to answer if she should question! ... but no, she never will!"

Dismissing the phantom of Charles, faceless and bodiless, but none the less terrible, she flew at the locker--pulled out the three drawers--stripped the row of regulation dress-pegs. Brushing, smoothing, and folding, she even sang as she worked.... Presently a bell rang twice. It was yet vibrating where it hung, on the passage-landing at the dormitory stair-head, when Juliette passed on her way to the guest-parlor. Monica was waiting there.

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IX

A tall slight figure in the plain black, tight-fitting gown of a novice, made with a little cape covering the upper arm. A sweet plain face with eyes of hazel brown, framed in a close white cap with three rows of gophered frills, and there you have Monica, the chosen friend of the fiery Juliette.

"She has not three ideas! How can you think so much of her?" a jealous rival is reported to have said.

Juliette retorted with a lightning riposte:

"Possibly no more than three, but they are good ones!" She marked them off on her tiny fingers. "First, to serve God.... Again,--to serve her friends.... Once more--to help her enemies! ... If not, how is it that she spent two hours yesterday, working with you at that F major fugue in Bach's Book of Forty-eight? ... Has not that stopped you the whistle? ... I have eyes in my head, see you well? Pour tout dire--you are an ingrate, you!"

"See you well!" could be a slogan on occasion, a blood-chilling note heralding the shock of battle. But it came now in the softest of dove-notes, as they hurried to meet each other, clasped hands, and kissed.

"Dear one, I am so glad! See you well, we have a whole half-hour to spend together.... And there is so much to tell you that I know not where to begin." ... She drew back frowning a little, vexed that Monica was not alone. "I entreat your pardon! ... I did not know you entertained a visitor.... It is best that I retire.... I fear I am.... how do you say? ... very much in the road!"

Monica explained, holding the big red hand of an awkward young man in a shaggy greatcoat.

"You are not in the way, dear--and this is not a visitor! Let me introduce my brother, of whom you have heard. Caro, this is my friend, Mademoiselle de Bayard."

The shaggy young man, blushing savagely to the tips of his ears and the roots of his flaming hair, made a clumsy inclination, and offered the large red paw to Mademoiselle, who gravely inspected it, drawing down her upper lip, folding her own infinitesimal hands before her narrow waist, but made no movement to take it.

"He has angry eyes, with curious amber taches in them, ..." she thought. "And he looks dusty as a voyager after a long travel.... Not bien tenu as a gentleman should be.... Living with Germans in Germany--he has become indifferent to the petits soins of the toilet. I would put the hand in the fire rather than tell Monica!--but, for me, I find him horrible. What is he saying? One would expect from a being so clumsy and so shaggy, not merely speech, but a roar!"

Yet the voice was fresh and rather pleasant, as he replied to Monica's interested questions. Had he had a good journey? ... How long had he been in London? ... Three days, and never let her know? ... Why not? ... Had he dined early, or lunched, and if not--he had been understood to mumble a negative,--would he not have something now? Tea and sandwiches--Sister Boniface would cut the latter in a minute. It was only three o'clock. Benediction wasn't until four--there would be heaps of time....

The mumbled refusals grew faint. Monica smiled her triumph. Intent on hospitality she hurried out of the parlor, saying with a backward glance, and a smile halved between sulky Carolan and somber Juliette: "Sit down!--talk to each other ... I'll soon be back again!..."

But the sound of the closing door smote the shaggy youth with a dumb palsy and transformed Mademoiselle de Bayard into the semblance of a large mechanical doll in black merino.

"Stiff, pale, proud little creature!" Carolan mentally termed her. It occurred to him that, attired in a brocade Court dress over a hooped farthingale, crowned with a wig of stiffened ringlets adorned with lace and ribbons and diamond powder, with a fan in one of those rigid little hands, she might have sat to Velasquez as a child Infanta. Or, upholstered and decked in Moorish finery, posed as one of the female midgets in the royal group of the Familia. Whatever Velasquez might have thought, she was priggish, prudish, dull, doltish.... Obstinate, too, with that long, deeply-channeled upper lip. And how persistently she kept those long, thick, uncurling lashes down. One wondered rather what might be the color of the eyes so concealed? Black or brown? Or--one had had a gleam of blue when for an instant she had looked at one. Nobody cared--but perhaps they were blue?

She made no movement to sit down, nor did she indicate a desire that he should seat himself. She flickered her somber eyelids for an instant, and the eyes seemed inky-black. Burnt holes in a blanket, the observer brutally termed them, lifting his mental gaze to the china-blue orbs of his ideal, the colossal Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde.

In contempt of the prim puppet in the black merino he found himself adding inches to his loved one's height. Or perhaps it was to keep himself from madly shouting to Monica to tell them to hurry up with that tray....

When you have pawned your jacket and waistcoat for two-and-eightpence early on Wednesday, and have dined on a sausage and mashed for threepence, supped on a drink of water from a pump in a livery-stable yard.... When the bed at a coffee-house has cost you a shilling, breakfast of burned-bread coffee and roll, threepence, and you have spent twopence on a paper collar, your remaining capital stands at a shilling, and by three o'clock on Thursday, if you have not ventured to break into this, you are beginning to return to the savage of the Earlier Stone Age. Who, supposing his neighbor to be gnawing a lump of gristle when his own stomach was clamorous, dropped in upon the banquet armed with a flint axe, and possessed himself of the coveted bonne-bouche.

P. C. Breagh was frankly astonished at the savage voracity of his own impulses. It did not occur to him that his nerves--he had always jeered at men who had talked of their nerves--had sustained a tremendous shock, and that this was the inevitable reaction. His laboriously crammed scientific knowledge had never yet been called upon to account for his own bodily sensations--unless in the case of a jammer headache--diagnosed as the result of too many beers overnight. At any rate he was not hungry now,--and the room with its stiff row of chairs, its high-molded ceiling, its dingy blue distempered walls, hung with engravings of Popes and Cardinals, Roman views, and Scriptural oil-paintings, began to heave and surge like the decks of the evil-smelling, second-rate passenger-steamer that had brought him third-class from Ostend. He thought of that old man with the shattered skull sprawling among his bloody papers, and knew that in another moment he should--horror of horrors! despite the presence of yonder speechless Immobility in the fiddle-bodied black frock and medaled blue neck ribbon--either faint or be violently sick.

He chose the first alternative, for the whole room, with its faded gilt mirrors, its album-laden tables, its formal rows of chairs skirting the wainscot, the little mats in front of them, and the beeswaxed floor on which with growing difficulty he maintained a perpendicular position, melted away from about and from under him, letting him sink down, down ... into bottomless, boundless abysses of intangible gray mist....

Out of which, after an interval of a hundred years or three minutes, he emerged sufficiently to say in a husky whisper:

"It's nothing! I'm all----"

And then be swallowed up again. Coming to the surface in another æon or so to ask, with a wince of pain:

"Did the old fellow shoot me in the head? It--hurts like the dickens!"

And to receive the answer in a cool little silvery voice like the playing of a fountain in a mossy basin at the end of a green alley, or the trickle of a brook through lush grasses and forget-me-not beds.

"You knocked the floor with it when you made to fall so suddenly!" Something cool and light touched his aching forehead, and the voice went on again: "It does not bleed, no! but there will certainly be one big bump there!"

"One bump.... Feels like one-and-twenty!" P. C. Breagh muttered, adding, with a heave and struggle that brought him into a sitting posture: "Help me up, whoever you are! ... Not all at once.... Donnerwetter! how giddy I am! Try again in a minute! ... Here! ... Give me hold of your fist!"

The silvery voice said, with a liquid tremble in it that might have been laughter or shyness:

"But I do not comprehend--feesth! Permit that I offer you the hand.... I am so very strong, me!"

"Strong, eh?" P. C. Breagh said vacantly, being still absorbed in the effort to remember where he was. He was certainly sitting up on a shiny, cold and slippery floor, leaning back against something warm and fragrant and soft, but he had not the least notion as to the nature of the support afforded him, nor did he associate the ownership of the voice with any person previously met.

"Strong!..." he repeated, and yawned, and could not leave off yawning. "Physical exhaustion, fatigue, and lack of food," he mentally diagnosed, and found that, when his eyes had left off blinking and watering, the room was coming back. There were the Popes, Cardinals, and views of Roman Basilicas; there the oil-paintings of sacred subjects--there the dingy gilt mirrors, the round center-table with books upon it, the oval one with an inkstand and nothing more,--the formal rows of chairs, instantly reviving the impression of a Convent parlor ... and stimulating him to rise, after some slips and sprawls and flounders, and stand upright on the beeswaxed boards, smiling rather stupidly and clutching something small and soft and sentient, for it fluttered in his big inclosing palm as a captive titmouse or robin might have done.... Donnerwetter! it was the hand whose aid he had asked a moment before in his extremity.... A child's.... No!--a girl's.... Who was the girl? ...

The truth burst on him then that it was to the mechanical doll, the stiff, pale, proud, absurd little creature, the Infanta of the drooping eyelids, the Moorish pigmy, he owed the help the little hand had given. The silvery, sweet voice was hers, and against her he had leaned as he sat on the floor gathering in his scattered faculties.... The light touch that had visited his aching forehead, when she had said it did not bleed, had soothed him like the contact of a flower. The sweetness of the voice was in his ears again....

"Will you not sit down? You are not strong, and should manage your forces. A gentleman to faint like that I have never before seen! Your sister will be grieved that you----"

"You are not to tell her!" He dropped heavily into the chair she had brought, and made a feebly-emphatic blow at the table near which she had set it. "Promise me! ... I--I must ask you to be good enough.... Who has gone and unbuttoned my coat?"

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X

The pitiable secret the shaggy garment had concealed, the absence of jacket and waistcoat, bringing his hidden poverty into horrible relief, the dinginess of the shirt of two days' wear, the deceptive nature of the paper collar purchased at an outlay of twopence, had been revealed by some traitorous hand during his unguarded weakness of a moment back. The color rushed back to his haggard young face in flood, as with shaky fingers he wedded the big horn buttons to their buttonholes, and felt about his neck to find it wet.... Juliette had said to herself that he had angry eyes. They were tigerish as they flamed at her. Then the yellow flame died out of them and they were nothing but gray and miserable. He said brokenly:

"I--beg your pardon! I must seem the last thing out in the way of a brute to you. I had--fainted or something!--I've been through a lot of late! And you meant to--be kind, I'm sure...."

He had thought her a mere child in size, but her personal dignity lent her height and presence. Her great eyes met his full, and they were deeply blue as scillas in May, with great black pupils and velvety-black bands about the irises. She said in an icy little voice:

"Sir, it is customary in these days to instruct young ladies in the knowledge of imparting medical aid to the sick or wounded. A moment since I saw you fall to the floor! I lanced myself to your side!--I debuttoned your paletot--sprinkled on your forehead water from that vase upon the table,"--she indicated the ornament with an infinitesimal forefinger,--"and in a few minutes I have the relief to behold you sufficiently recovered to demand if a man has shooted you? ... Naturally, I do not mean to be unkind! But the promise not to speak of this to Mademoiselle, your sister, see you well?--I cannot give it! Young ladies"--there was an appalling stateliness about the tone and manner of this delivery, worthy of a mistress of deportment--"young ladies do not have secrets with strange young gentlemen! And Monica is my dear friend, not you!"

"Then if she is so much a friend of yours, you would wish to spare her knowledge of things certain to shock and grieve her. You would not like to have her anxious and worried about what she couldn't help, would you?" His eyes constrained and besought. His voice was humbly entreating....

Juliette recognized the cunning in this appeal. She lowered her little pointed chin and leveled her thick straight eyelashes at the speaker. "Yes!" the chin said: "No!" the eyelashes replied. Thus encouraged, P. C. Breagh had an inspiration.

"But if I trust you!--you look as if you could be trusted...."

From her little neck in its plain white frill to the cloud of dusky hair that crowned her, she flushed rosy as Alpine snows at sunset. Did he mean to insult, or ingratiate, this overbearing, shaggy youth? She said, with delicate reproof, completely lost upon his bluntness:

"My father has honored me with his confidence, as long as I can remember, sir."

"Then I'll risk mine with you!" said P. C. Breagh.

"Not risk!" She had lost her glow, the sapphires of her eyes were shadowed by the blackness of the lowered lashes. "Do not say risk, for that is to gamble. See you--I will be trusted absolutely, or I will not be trusted at all!"

He understood, in part, that he had wounded, and awkwardly begged her pardon, ending: "And show that you forgive me by letting me tell you that I wouldn't have my sister know, for the world!" He got up and went to one of the white-curtained, ground-glass-filled windows, that masked the outlook upon Kensington Square, and said still more awkwardly:

"You see--you must have already seen from my togs--that I am a beggar. I came back from Germany three days ago to find myself one. I was to receive a fortune from the hands of trustees, and I found that their firm had gone bankrupt. The elder partner had committed suicide--the younger had shot the moon. My thousands in his pockets!" He ground his teeth. "And if I live--and ever meet that fellow!--he'll pay me in inches of skin!"

She said, and the silvern voice had the sweetness of Cordelia's:

"I am so very sorry! Could you not prevail upon this dishonest gentleman to restore to you your property?"

P. C. Breagh said, with a flash of white teeth in his blunt-featured freckled face:

"I might, if he had been considerate enough to mention where I could find him! ... Meanwhile..." He shrugged his strong young shoulders in rather a despondent way.

"Meanwhile you are without a home ... and without money?"

He nodded, biting fiercely on his jutting underlip. "Just now! But by-and-by----"

She persisted.

"Without money and--starving! Surely, starving! and that was why you fainted! ... And I, mon Dieu!--I have been blind and stupid.... Je ne me doutais de rien! Forgive me, I beg of you!"

Her small face was all white and pinched and working. Sobs choked her voice; she struck her little bosom--she wrung the tiny hands in anguish.... And it was all real. You could not doubt Juliette's sincerity. And though his manhood was sufficiently new to revolt at commiseration, still, it was not unpleasant to know that one's misfortunes had pierced the bucklered pride of the little Infanta, and wrung tears from the most wonderful eyes he had ever seen. And what was she saying?

"Monsieur Breagh, it is a misfortune of the most grand that you are a man and I a woman! Otherwise it would be so easy to say to you this.... Me, I am for the moment rich. I could--if you would accord me the permission?--relieve these pressing necessities.... Let me know where a letter will readily find you.... Do not, I entreat you, be angry that I ask this!"

But he was angry. His broad stripe of meeting red eyebrows came loweringly down over eyes that had the tigerish flame in them. His face burned and he clenched his hands until the knuckles showed out white upon their sunburned backs. He tried to speak and could not, so choking was his indignation. To be asked to borrow from a girl--his sister's schoolmate, added one last dash of wormwood to the brimming cup of bitterness. Unlucky P. C. Breagh!

"I'm uncommonly obliged, but decent men--in this country--don't do that sort of thing! Even Frenchmen might call it caddish!" he choked out at last.

Her eyes blazed murderously, a savage dusky crimson dyed the small white face that had looked at him with such pitiful entreaty. She did not tower, she contracted--she crouched like a savage little cat ready to spring and rend him; her muscles grew visibly tense under her transparent skin. He could hear the sharp hiss of her intaken breath, and see her lips writhe in the struggle to control utterance that seemed on the point of breaking from them. When she spoke, it was in a low clear whisper, more piercing, it seemed to her unlucky auditor, than any shriek.

"Sir, when you say to me that even a Frenchman might find despicable the deed an Englishman would shrink from as a stain upon his honor,--you insult my country of France, and my brave father; and the noble gentleman who will be my husband soon! ... It is fortunate for you that M. Charles is not here, see you well? Brave as a lion, he is a master of the sword. But enough!--I was mistaken and I have been justly humiliated.... Permit that I wish you a very good afternoon!"

She curtsied to the miserable P. C. Breagh with crushing ceremony, turned, and had swept from the room before he could even reach the door. It shut in his face with a deliberate gentleness that was more final than a slam would have been....

"I've done it, by golly!" said P. C. Breagh.

Just after this lofty, dignified fashion had Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde quitted the scene of many an imaginary interview. That a being so small and frail should assume the airs of these heroines tickled even while it angered him. A moment more he glowered and fumed, cursing the Fate that had dealt him another set-back, and then ... the tinkle of crockery heralded the return of Monica with Sister Boniface and a tray, satisfactorily laden with a stout brown teapot, bread and butter, home-made preserves, and a dish of somewhat solid ham-sandwiches, the welcome sight of which drove away the dark blue devils and restored his cheeriness again. He could go a long time on one full meal, he told himself, as he perpetrated a surprising onslaught on the eatables and thirstily swallowed cup after cup of convent tea.

Replete at length, he leaned back in his chair, conscious--so overwhelming was the sensation of fullness after his protracted fast--of feeling like a boa-constrictor who had swallowed his blanket. He longed to sleep, the continual battle with recurrent yawns was becoming painful; and yet you are mistaken if you suppose that this young man did not love his gentle step-sister, and was not glad at heart to be once more in Monica's company. But Brother Ass, the body, ridden fast and far by the turbulent spirit and the eager mind, belabored by the cudgel of Fate until his solid ribs were cracking within his shaggy hide, wanted repose more than social converse. Carolan's eyelids were closing under the stream of Monica's eager talk. His head was nodding--his mouth had fallen ajar--a faint snore was on the point of issuing from the organ immediately above it--when he started as broad awake as though a wasp had stung him.... Monica was speaking of Juliette....

"I am so glad that you have met her!--yet sorry, too, because she is leaving us so soon now. Is she not sweet?--with those grave airs, and those angelic eyes under determined eyebrows, and that shy wild smile..." thus Monica prattled on. To stop her--or to prevent himself from giving her his candid opinion of her lauded idol, he inquired whether she did not find him handsome, and had her reply:

"Not a bit! rather ugly than otherwise; but I love your face, and always shall, Caro! Why, you have a mustache already!" she cried.

He blushed as Monica jumped up for a nearer inspection, to discover that the close sprinkling of dark-brown freckles on the egg-smooth young surface of his upper lip had deceived the sisterly observation.

"The mustache will come," Monica said with a smile, "and then you will begin to be more of a dandy."

He fancied that her look betrayed a shade of disappointment. "No wonder! such a beast as I must look!" he thought. But he said with rather a clumsy air of indifference:

"I daresay my clothes are a bit shabby, perhaps more than a bit! But, you see, I've been knocking about on the rail--and aboard steamers--and so on."

"Still, you could be--what Juliette would call more soigné." There was a little accent of sisterly rebuke in the words. "And I have talked to her so much about you----"

"That you're afraid she'll chaff you, now she has beheld the wonder! If she did I shouldn't be surprised! ... And if I'd known you wanted me to turn up a thundering swell, I'd have polished myself up a bit. My hair is too long, of course.... But--most British fellows run shaggy after a year or two at a German University."

He spoke as easily and naturally as was possible, with a lump in the throat embraced by the paper collar, and a savage pain tearing at his heart.

She said:

"It is a bargain then, and I shall see my old Caro looking as he ought to look, next time he comes here! ... Tell me, when will next time be?"

He stuttered, inwardly writhing:

"I had no idea you'd mind the sort of--togs a fellow went about in! You, who are going--you told me in your last letter! to take a vow of poverty and all the rest!..."

She laughed and patted the brown hand.

"But you aren't going to take a vow of poverty.... You will be independent.... You will have everything--I hope you will have everything; that goes to make Life pleasant, and all the other things that make it--precious.... I am very ambitious for you, Carolan!"

He laughed rather roughly.

"Ambition in the cap and cape of a postulant! What would the Mistress of the Novices say to that?"

The face framed in the triple row of white frills was very pure and tender.

"She would say that there are more kinds of ambition, than one. I am ambitious that my brother should be spoken of among men--as a man who in the whole course of his career was never once ashamed to own himself a Catholic, and to prove not only in words, but in deeds--his loyalty to his Master in the face of the world! You understand me, don't you?"

He answered her in an embarrassed, awkward way, and with a look that evaded hers.

"Of course! You mean--you'd like me to be the kind of fellow who goes regularly to Mass, and receives the Blessed Sacrament on all the Feasts of Obligation! Well, I can't boast of being quite as scrupulous as that! But at any rate I have--ringed in with the late-comers--at Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide...." He added, "Not that I should have been thought priggish if I'd gone oftener.... Of course the bulk of the students at Schwärz-Brettingen were Lutheran Protesants. But about one-third were Catholics, I should think."

"And were all of them late-comers--ringing in at the last minute?"

"I can't say that. When one did turn out for early Mass one found the churches--there were three of 'em--packed full."

"Ah! ... Where are you staying?" she asked him in a changed tone.

He faltered, sick at heart at having to lie to her.

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XI

"I--I haven't got the address on me just now! By George, that's just ... Ha, ha, ha!"

"What is the joke? Do tell me!" she urged, puzzled by the mirthless bark of laughter.

He could not have explained. His Irish sense of humor had been tickled to realize that in actual fact he did carry his address about him. Did not the shabby old frieze greatcoat constitute his hotel, chambers and club? To change the subject he began to question her experiences in the Novitiate. She looked happy, he admitted. He did not hide that her decision to take the Veil had been a surprise.

"You see, you'd always been such a jolly girl," he told her. "Such a stunning companion--I'd never have expected it of you."

Her bright laugh rang through the room.

"Dear boy, do you suppose that nuns are dismal things, or indifferent to pleasant companionship? You should hear us laugh and chatter at Recreation. Perhaps because the time for fun is limited, as the time for other things--we enjoy that half-hour's freedom all the more. Not"--her smile did not leave her, but it changed in expression,--"not that I did not have my miserable hours. For the matter of that I have them still!"

He got up and went over to the hearth-side, where a tiny gas-fire made pretense of cheerfulness.

"I never thought it was all jam in the Novitiate. A fellow I knew who had wanted to be a Carthusian monk--and found it impossible to stick out the preliminaries!--hinted as much to me."

"I suppose," she said calmly, "that he could not submit to the--necessary experiences that lead to the final breaking of the will."

"Breaking of the will!" He kicked the old-fashioned fender savagely. "What do they do to break yours, in Heaven's name?"

"What is done is done in Heaven's name," she said, "and that is why one can submit cheerfully. But my first weeks in the noviceship were cloudlessly happy." She laughed a little. "I thought it was always going to be like that!"

"I see! ... I twig! ... They made much of you in the beginning...." He gritted his teeth and turned his face away.

"Perhaps they did! ... I remember I had all the nicest things to do, and nobody minded.... I was allowed to dust the High Altar, change the flowers in the vases, and help the Sister-Sacristan brush and fold the vestments away. And one day I was permitted to wash the lunette of the monstrance. It was a wonderful experience. One could understand how the Magdalene must have felt when she wiped the Sacred Feet."

He was silent, for she had soared to heights beyond him.

"Perhaps it made me proud, for next day I was set to tidy the linen-room presses. I worked for some weeks there, darning and mending and folding. Then I was sent to the Refectory." The smile was only in her eyes now. "I liked laying the long tables, but I hated washing dirty plates and dishes, and I simply loathed cleaning knives and forks."

"I should think so! Housemaid's duty! I understand now what you meant a minute back! ... By George! ... 'Miserable hours!' ..."

Her deep eyes rested on him calmly:

"And after I am clothed--after I have received the habit--I shall most likely go on having them! I daresay I shall have them after I have taken the Veil."

He kicked the fender again, his hands shoved deep into his empty pockets, and felt the shilling, sole coin remaining to him, burn against his aching ribs. He would have given ten years of life to have been able to tell her that a home with him was ready and waiting,--in case she shrank from the final plunge. He made a great effort and groaned out:

"But that won't be for two years to come. And things may happen--who knows!"

"Oh! I pray," she said with a sudden flush, "that I need not wait two years!"

Her eagerness lifted a load that had been crushing him. In sheer relief he began to stammer:

"What a blessed idiot I am! I didn't understand ... I thought you ... I believed you.... Of course you don't do the dirty work now. That was only for a time, at the beginning. Well, I'm glad! I'd hate to think of my sister tackling servants' duties, anyway! All right! Well, what are you on to now, eh? Back at dusting the Altar and doing the flowers?"

"No. That is for others.--There are many others, and each of them must have a turn at the pleasant things. When you have lived in the community only a short time, you begin to understand that.... And when you have lived in it only a little longer you learn that between the pleasant duties and the unpleasant duties there is no difference, whatever. Nothing being done that is not done for God. When I was scrubbing the desks in the Little Class to-day,--there are seventy children, and the tiny ones come in with muddy boots from the garden in wet weather, and splash the ink over everything,--I was dusting the Altar.... When I was washing the slates I was washing the Feet of Christ. It is no matter what we do as long as it is nothing to be ashamed of--and is done with a right intention! ... The lowest service counts as the highest in the sight of Almighty God. It is one of the great mysteries of Faith that this should be so. But it is so! ... There's the first bell for Benediction!"

It was too late now. But even as she rose with that wonderful look in the calm face framed in by the triple row of little starched frills, and took his hand and led him to the door, P. C. Breagh realized that he ought from the first to have told the truth to her.

The parlor door led them into the corridor upon the boarders' side. She guided him along it, left him at the entrance of the chapel, pressed his hand, whispered "Good-bye for now!" and vanished through a curtained archway on the right hand, communicating with the cloister, possibly.

He entered the chapel. A small portion of the nave, near the west door, was open to the public. Some dozen worshipers, chiefly elderly ladies, knelt or sat upon the rush-bottomed chairs. Beyond, a high, wrought-iron grille partitioned off the capacious choir, separated from the cloisters upon either hand by the tall carved screen that backed the rows of stalls. And the dying daylight of the January afternoon shone through high windows, stained in hues tender as flower-petals or brilliant as jewels, depicting the various scenes in the life of the Virgin Mother of Christ.

The second bell had not yet rung for Benediction as Carolan bent the knee and slipped into a chair near the central gate of the grille. The place was full of the presence and perfume of flowers, and the spice of incense burned at the morning Mass. Tapers tall and short blazed on the High Altar, and a nun in purple habit and creamy veil knelt at a faldstool, absorbed in adoration of the Throned Mystery of Faith. Within the space of a Paternoster the second bell rang. The choir-sister rose, knelt in adoration, moved her stool carefully aside, and went out by a side-door in the sanctuary. And a sound as of many moving waters began to grow upon the ear. A curtain was drawn that masked an archway upon the farther side of the grille upon the right side: there was the invariable convent signal of a hand-clap, and two girlish shapes, in long white muslin veils over dark uniform dresses, entered together; and went to the bottom of the broad aisle between the rows of benches, moving sedately side by side. One wore a pale blue, the other a crimson ribbon supporting a silver medal. One was of solid Teutonic build, with magnificent plaits of golden hair, vivid red and white coloring, and rather stiff, if dignified, bearing. The other--a slender creature of stature almost childlike, yet with womanly coils of duskiness shot through with a tortoiseshell arrow, seemed insignificant as she walked beside her stately white-veiled mate. And yet, it was not walking, but gliding, hovering, floating ... such airy grace of movement as P. C. Breagh had never dreamed of,--Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde having covered the ground with the magnificent indolence of a glacier, or traversed it with the overwhelming rush of an avalanche, when the exigencies of some imaginary scene of passion had compelled her to "fly from her conqueror's presence," or "impetuously gain his side." Now for the first time her inventor found himself wavering.... Was his heroic ideal too Titanic, too colossal, too big and too clumsy? Would it not be just as well to shorten her by half a dozen superfluous inches--reduce her superabundant flesh? And if at the same time one were to darken her dandelion tresses?--tone down the staring china-blue of her eyes into----

What was the color? The blue of the spring flower or the blue of the sapphire? ... You never knew until she looked at you ... and then you weren't certain ... you kept wanting her to look again! Meek or tigress-like, in whatever mood you found her, you would always be wanting Juliette to look, and look again.

The revelation of his monstrous folly, the knowledge of his faithlessness came in the instant of recognition, hit him like a seventh wave and bowled him off his mental legs.

Before he had recovered, the white-veiled hovering figure had vanished. The aisle had noiselessly filled with a great procession of similar figures, standing motionless, waiting, two by two. There was a second clap of hands,--and the white-veiled column knelt in adoration. At a third signal they rose and slowly filed into their seats. And a second double line of younger girls, the Middle Class, also white-veiled and white-gloved, formed in the place of them, and the orderly, impressive maneuver was repeated by these. Little children took their places, and did as their seniors. A noble voluntary burst from the organ in the high-placed loft, and the purple-habited, creamy-veiled choir-sisters poured in and took their stalls, and the lay-sisters and novices followed, filling the great choir to overflowing, as the door of the vestry was opened by a sweet-faced child in a red cassock and white cotta, and the vested priest, a scholarly-looking, gray-haired man, came in and went to his place. And the strains from the organ changed, and a voice fresh and sweet as a thrush's, passionless-pure as an angel's, began to chant O Salutaris,--and something like a sob broke from P. C. Breagh's throat, and hot tears came crowding, and one at least fell.

He had been shipwrecked, and here was a little green-palmed islet of peace to rest on--his only for a moment, but a moment in which to gather strength, and breath to face the raging seas again. His mood changed. He was glad he had not told Monica that he was homeless, half-clothed, and all but penniless in big, black, brutal, noisy London, and would have to water cab-horses, or sweep a crossing, or clean boots to keep alive.

Ah, what was it Monica had said? Without her knowing it those words had been somehow meant for Carolan. Let's see--how did they go? ... Something this way....

"It is no matter what we do, as long as it is nothing to be ashamed of, and is done with a right intention. The lowest service counts as the highest in the sight of Almighty God. It is one of the great mysteries of Faith that this should be so. But it is so!"

"I--see!"

He had sheltered his shamed and burning face in his big hands. But with that ray of inward light had come courage and resourcefulness. He lifted his head bravely now and drew in a deep chestful of the sweet, warm, pleasant air.

"Perhaps the money was spoiling me!--making me look to it instead of to myself--and I've been stripped and pitched into deep water as the big fellows used to do to us little chaps, when we funked. Perhaps this is for the best--and I'll find it so one day. Perhaps I can make up for some of the caddish things I've done--refusing that girl's offered help so savagely among 'em--by taking this thing well! Facing what there is to face--and putting up with what I've got to. Well, I'll have a shot at it!" said P. C. Breagh to P. C. Breagh. "I'll do nothing that I'm ashamed of--and be ashamed of nothing that's honest; I'll labor for my daily bread--and for my nightly bed,--with these hands and shoulders,--if nobody will pay me for my brains!--And what I do I'll do cheerfully. Shall I kick at sweeping a crossing, when He was a carpenter?"

It seemed to him that he had not prayed, and yet he had without knowing it. The Benediction seemed to fall on him like dew. He went out by the west door with the small congregation, and found himself in the foggy London square within sound of the roaring traffic of the London streets, with a return of the old hideous shrinking. A sensation paralleled by that of the shipwrecked castaway who has found brief resting-place upon the tiny coral atoll and must perforce commit himself, upon his crazy raft of planks and hencoops, to the shark-infested, treacherous Pacific seas again.

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XII

He strolled up a short street, and looked for and found a roomy, double bow-fronted house of warm old red brick, with huge capacious areas. "Vanity Fair" had been written there, he knew, perhaps "Esmond" too, though he was not sure. He took off his hat to the memory of the magician, and wondered where his other idol, the still living author of the "Cloister and the Hearth," and "Never Too Late to Mend" might be run to earth, and made up his mind to see Dickens's grave in Westminster Abbey on the morrow, whether it cost sixpence, or whether it did not.... And then he wavered, sixpence, as we know, being the moiety of his capital; and then he remembered that to-morrow could only be reached by the bridge of to-night. He walked very fast for some distance, trying to exorcise the demons that this thought evoked, and,--blinded by their buzzing and stinging--was in Piccadilly before he knew. The high railings of the Green Park, and the foggy solitude of the gravel-walks between the wintry lawns, tempted him to turn in and rest upon a seat a while, for he was still somewhat giddy and shaky, and the bump so confidently prophesied by the Infanta had appeared upon his brow.

He took off the old felt wideawake and stared at Piccadilly, brilliant with the paroquet-colors of passing omnibuses, green and royal blue, chocolate and white-and-gold. Behind the shining windows of the great Clubs, the members' heads, gleamingly bald, or affluent of hair and whiskers, alternately appeared and vanished. He caught brief passing glimpses of white-bosomed waiters, ... the twinkle of gilt buttons on livery coats.... Beer-drays, driven by burly red-faced men, frequently in shirt-sleeves, went by with a whiff of malt, and the thunder of heavy hoofs. Vans of business-houses passed with a clang of bells. Victorias and landaus with muffled, and furred, and veiled ladies in them; shut-up broughams, madly-daring velocipedists on the machine of the era, a giant wheel followed by a pigmy one, made fleeting pictures on the retina of P. C. Breagh. And the double river of traffic, and the eastward and westward-flowing stream of pedestrians went by without a break in them. Gas-lamps began to make islands of yellow light upon the fog, but showed no dwindling in their numbers. He wondered if they would go on like this all night? And then some one came up and sat down on the other end of the seat rather heavily, and the slight resultant shock and jar brought round P. C. Breagh's head.

He saw the thick-set, rather lax and round-shouldered figure of a man of middle age, dressed in a suit of tweeds patterned in giant checks of black and white and gray, the dernier cri in masculine morning-wear, had the observer but known it. His hat, a low-crowned chimney-pot in hard gray felt, was tilted backward, his hair, of a pale tow-color, tufted out from beneath the hat in a way that cried for the attention of the barber; his whiskers, and mustache, of the same shade as the hair, were raggedly in need of the shears. He wore a buttonhole-bouquet composed of a pink camellia with Neapolitan violets, and pale lemon kid gloves, and sucked the carved ivory knob of an ebony stick he carried, until,--upon his neighbor's looking round as above recorded,--he took it from a somewhat lax and swollen mouth, and observed that it was a nice afternoon. Adding, as P. C. Breagh made a sound which might have been assent or denial:

"If it is affernoon? Without my fellow to post me, I'm apt to be wrong about time. Not that that's remarable. Lots of people the same, don't you know? Nothing extra--nothing ex--oh, damn!"

A covert anxiety--and a very visible tremulousness were combined in the speaker's manner. His large watery blue eyes were painfully vague and blurred, with distended pupils that looked uneven; his gestures were uncertain, and his words, well chosen enough, and uttered with the tone and accent usually distinctive of a gentleman, came haltingly from a tongue that seemed to be too large for its owner's mouth:

"You don't regard it as extra ... Stop a minute!" A pause ensued, during which the vague-eyed gentleman waited, clutching his stick with both hands, and holding his swollen mouth ajar. And when he shut the mouth to shake his head, and looked at P. C. Breagh in the act of doing this, the perspiration shone upon his puffy cheeks and stood in beads upon his reddened forehead, as though it had been July instead of a foggy afternoon in January, and the pink-bordered cambric handkerchief with which he wiped his worried face became, after this usage, a very rag. And a queer, unwillingly-yielded-to sense of commiseration prompted Carolan to suggest:

"'Extraordinary' was the word you wanted, wasn't it?"

"Much obliged! The word, unnoutedly! 'Stror'nary how words do dodge one on occasion!" returned the uncertain gentleman in the large-patterned tweeds. He added, pulling at the ragged light mustache, with a gloved hand that was decidedly shaky: "I don't know that it matters parricurarly--but I'd prefer you to know that I'm not runk!"

"Not--what?..."

"Not runk!" repeated the vague-eyed gentleman emphatically. "Not cut, foozled, miffed, fizzed, screwed! Not that it's oblig--that's another of the words that perretually queer me!--or incumment on me to isplain, but I regard it as due to myself, by Gad! that you should clearly unnerstand the case. As I said to the manuscript upon the Bench when the bobby ran me in on Thursday--or was it Friray? ... Appearances are sally against me, but I have never been a rinking man! The doctors have a crajjaw name for my connition, which under the exissing circ--and that's another of the words that play the deuce and all with me! ... Look at my westick, buttoned all wrong!"

He slewed round upon the seat, and throwing back the large-patterned, fashionably cut-away coat, exhibited the garment mentioned, every buttonhole of which afforded hospitality to a button not its own. His necktie, the ample, sailor-knotted necktie of the period, was under his left ear, and his shirt had come unstudded. Being appealed to, P. C. Breagh admitted that the existing condition of things left something to be desired!

"When a man entirely ripends on valets and domessicks," explained his incoherent neighbor, "a man is apt to be neglected and so on. As a marrer of fact I live in that little joppa cottisit!" He waveringly pointed to a large, handsome private dwelling with an ornate portico, situated nearly opposite, and sandwiched between two Clubs. "An' as a narrural conquicense of my temorrary irrability to pronounce words of the most orinary nature, I am----" He drew an aimless figure in the muddy gravel with his ivory-topped, ebony stick, and went on with a weak laugh, "I am absoluly neglected by my own househol'. My own children seem ashamed or afray of me--all but Little Foxhall--splendid little chap is Little Foxhall! But his mother--my wife----" He broke off to say--"You will escuse my touching on these priva' matters in conversation with a perfec' stranger. I am quite conscience I trepsass against the orinary usages of propriety, especially in speaking of my wife! ... But--the fact is, sir! I am most desperately wretched. Six people imagine me runk--out of every half-dozen. While the other six--the irriots whisser it when they think I'm out of earshock--suppose me to be suffrig from Sofrig of the Bray!"

He began to tremble and shake, and put his stick between his knees to hold on to the edge of the seat with his lemon-kidded hands--and couldn't hold the stick in that position, and it fell, and P. C. Breagh picked it up and put it back.

"I am murrabliged," said the owner of the stick, "by your kind attention!" Something struggled and fought in the vague blue eyes that he turned upon Carolan,--it seemed as though in another moment Fear and Terror might have leaped glaring into sight. "And while I am boun' to ajopolize for thrussing my privarrafairs upon a stranger--I feel bound to put the quession; Why should thissorathing happen to ME? Goolor'! I've been no worse than lossa urra fellers!" He rose up shaking, and shakily sat down again, nearly missing the bench.

"Bessaran loss of 'em--if you come to that!" He turned to Carolan, and the vague eyes were piteous and desperate.... "You see the sort of chap my luck--my damble luck--has made o' me! Yet I used to be envied--envied ... you unnerstand! I have belonged to the best regiment in the Brigade of Guards--the devil another! I have played the bes' cards, driven the bes' turnouts, smoked the bes' cigars and had the most stunnin' women! Do you unnerstand me?--Have!" He brought down the uncertain hand in an attempt to strike his knee emphatically, and missed it; and tried to look as though he had not, and went on: "And I have belonged to the best gloves, by Gad! an' put on the clubs with the most celebrarred li'-weights! And I rode my steeplechase at York, and romped in first, and they toasted and speechified me at the Gimcrack dinner. And I won my Oaks and my Derby--and led in the winner, with all the cheeple reering;--the seeple peering--the--Goolor'! Goolor'! And the horse was Gladianor--and the victory was a popular one--and my name was a household word through the Unirred Kingom. A household word!..." He broke off, trembling and sweating, as the horse might have done after the race, and put the wavering hand to his head, and turned his empty blue eyes from Carolan's as though they hurt. "What was my name?" he asked himself in a dull, thick, shaky whisper, "Goolor'! Goolor'! What was my name? ... That you, Murchison?"

For a decent figure in the irreproachable dark clothing of a servant out of livery had passed and turned back, and now approached the bench, eyeing Carolan suspiciously even in the act of uncovering its well-brushed head, and saying in the smooth accents of servility:

"It is Murchison, your Grace. It's cold, your Grace, and you've not got on an overcoat. Your Grace had best come home now, before your Grace is missed!..."

"Home?" His Grace looked mildly from the authoritative Murchison to the stately "cottage opposite," and one of the uncertain hands in the pale lemon kid gloves, making as though to pluck at an untrimmed whisker, found itself imprisoned in a deferential but vigorous grip.

"Home, your Grace!" said Murchison, applying muscular leverage to raise the inert figure.

"All right. Prass I better, Murchison!" He rose to the perpendicular.... "Wish you a very good evening, sir!" With a faded reminiscence of what might have been a courtly manner, he touched his hat to P. C. Breagh, who returned the farewell greeting, avoiding the sharp glance of Murchison. Then valet and master moved off, leaving a little trail of dialogue behind them:

"You give us the fair slip that time, your Grace!..."

"Perhass I did, Murchison--now you happen to mention it."

"Might have been killed crossing Piccadilly, your Grace, and none of us the wiser."

"Goolor'! I'd wish I had, Murchison--if it wasn't for Little Foxhall!" ... Then in a high, quavering note of eagerness, the plea, pitiable and ridiculous and pathetic: "I--I say! ... Tell me the boy'd have minded, Murchison--whass a lie to you, you dam' smoo'-ranged Ananias!--and I'll give you my nex' week's sovereign--I'm dead broke now!"

And Murchison and His Grace went away together, the man steering, with deft guiding touches of the master's elbow, the latter stepping high and bringing his feet down with a peculiar thump that threw a light upon the situation in the eyes of P. C. Breagh. Not softening of the brain.... Donnerwetter! what were the London doctors thinking of? Had none of them read the "Dissertation on Tabes Dorsalis" of the Herr Doctor Max Baumgarten, published in Berlin only a twelvemonth previously, and dealing fully with that rare and curious disease of the nervous system? ... Fibrous degeneration of the posterior columns of the spinal cord, affecting the patient's sight, gait, and--in isolated cases--speech and memory.

"I'd like to have got him to let me rap his shins! Bet you anything there'd have been total absence of reflex action! Remember that peddler in the Nervous Ward of the Augusta Hospital at Schwärz-Brettingen! ... They cured that chap with spinal injections and regular massage. And this man--being a thundering swell and having the best advice possible--is naturally being treated all wrong! Hang it!--how cold I am! Better be moving!" He got up and stamped some warmth into his cold feet and flailed his cold ribs with his elbows until they tingled again. He had learned something of the wretchedness that may sometimes dwell in princely homes, yet be homeless; and fare delicately from plate of gold and silver, and yet go hungry,--and lie down to toss and stare through dreadful sleepless nights on soft luxurious beds. Therefore the bright reflections of great fires dancing on the plate-glass windows of the "cottage opposite" stung him to no comparisons. "Is it base in me that the knowledge of the misery of this wealthy nobleman makes me more contented with my own obscure poverty?" he asked himself, and the answer was: "Not if your content does not make you callous to his woe!"

"I hope that Little Foxhall would have minded!" he found himself saying; "and I wish to Heaven Baumgarten could get a chance of doing something for his father! I've half a mind to drop a postcard to him--or write a line to the Herr Professor! ... Stop, though!"

He remembered that he must break into his last remaining shilling to buy the postcard and pay for the stamps. Then he swung out through the Park side-gates, and now he was one of the crowd rolling Circus-wards, and all the street gas-lamps had been lighted by certain officials with poles, furnished with hooks for keying the gas on, and perforated iron sockets filled with blazing tow that had been soaked in naphtha; thus every shop or restaurant became an Aladdin's cave of brilliancy, and the down-drawn blinds of the houses and clubs hid splendor unspeakable--if only one had been able to pull them up....

Alas! to us who live in these pushful days of Electrical Power Supply, the glories of the illuminated capital in the year of grace 1870 would appear murky enough. We should sneer at the stumpy iron lamp-posts and the chandeliers yet adorned with Early Victorian crystal glass lusters. The wood pavement, an invention de luxe economically confined to the West End, and upon the greasy surface of which bus-horses broke legs as easily as the most aristocratic thoroughbreds--the loose iron gratings covering basement-lights, and incidentally presenting man-traps for unwary pedestrians, as receptacles for stray umbrellas, dead cats, wisps of packing straw, discarded newspapers and orange-peel--the untrapped gutter-drains and sewer-vents would awaken our ridicule and evoke our indignation, even as the displays in the shop windows, especially those of modistes, couturières, and tailors, would provoke us to mirth.

The extraordinary little hats, pot-shaped or plate-shaped, worn upon huge chignons, surmounting cascades of ringlets, couleur Impératrice. The preposterous frilled paniers, the bustles, the jupes of velvet or plush, flounced to the waist or kilted--sometimes to mid-leg, displaying boots--such as are worn to this hour by Principal Boys in Christmas Pantomimes and serio-comic ladies of the Varsity Stage, who are, we know, Principal Boys in the pupa, or chrysalis-state. All these things compel us to hold our sides when we review them in the illustrated papers of the Ladies' Mentor,--which illuminating periodical, in the dearth of Fashionable Intelligence from Paris, the hub and center of the modish world, came to a sudden end in the October of that year, and has defied all efforts at resuscitation.

Though it is possible that the wearers of these long-vanished modes--surveying the belles of Belgravia, with their humbler followers of Brompton and Bayswater,--in the present year of progress, might be moved to laughter or provoked to wrath. To-day, when the ambition of every properly constituted woman is to be shaped like a golliwog and dressed like a pen-wiper, or to acquire the sinuosities of a Bayadere and drape the same in cobwebs calculated to conceal nothing and suggest everything--can we honestly enlarge upon the bygone improprieties of our aunts, and moan over our mothers' taste in toilettes?

It was just six when P. C. Breagh crossed Piccadilly Circus and turned down toward the Haymarket. Why hurry, he asked himself, when you have nowhere to go? The restaurants were filling with diners who were going to the theaters, the smell of cooked meats made savory the fogginess. He shrugged his shoulders, dug his hands deep into his empty pockets, and tried to whistle as he loafed along.

Misery stalked these West End streets, rampant and clamorous. A burly man devoid of legs, shuffling along with his hands in a pair of woman's clogs, entreated P. C. Breagh in stentorian tones to buy a tin nutmeg-grater. A miserable creature, whose sole garment appeared to be the upper portion of an adult pair of trousers, begged him, in the professional whine, to spare a penny for the pore orphan boy! A dank female, in rusty weeds, stationary by the curb, displaying a baby and a row of ballads, besought of him, for the love of Gawd! to pity the unfortunate widow and her starving orphans.

"Buy a ballad, kind genl'man! On'y a penny--goes to a lovelly choone!"

"Ho! Dermot, you look 'ealthy now, Your does is neat an' clean, Hi never sees you drunk about, W'erehever 'ave you been?"

The stave chanted as an appetizer for the music-lover, she wiped the baby's nose with her ostentatiously white apron, and protested it to be the image of its father--blowed up in a Mind.

"You mean a mine, don't you?" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when the widow once more burst into song.

"Your wife and Fam'ly--Har they well? You once did use them strynge! Ho! Har you kinder to them now? And wence this 'appy chynge?"

Reverting to prose, as P. C. Breagh lounged listlessly on, she demanded why, if he wasn't going to buy, he had stopped and given a respectable female Tongue.

"And not even fork out a copper, you blistered swindler! You blindin', blazin'----"

"Come now, Chanting Poll, what's all this here row about?"

The gruff, not unkindly voice of a policeman broke in upon the rusty widow's eloquence. P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, wheeled and swung back again.

"It's all right, constable, the lady was only having a bit of chaff with me!"

"I know her!" said P. C. 999, C. Division, removing a heavy but not brutal hand from the lady in question, "and the kind o' chaff she slings. Done Time for it, too, she 'as--before now!"

But he moved on, huge in his belted greatcoat, walking with the elephantine, clumping step begotten of boots with iron toe-caps, and iron-nailed soles at least two inches in thickness; and the dank widow cocked a knowing eye at his retreating back, and the other at her unexpected champion.

"Good for you, my dear! Stand us a drain for luck, since you're so civil!"

He returned:

"I would if I'd got the tin! I believe I'm poorer than you are!"

"S'welp me bob! wot 'ave we 'ere? A haristocrat in distress, har yer?" she demanded.

"Not quite," he told her, as she turned the ponderous batteries of her raillery upon him. "I've seen an aristocrat in distress to-day, and he was worse than me. I'd not change!"

"Fer ten thousand jimmies hannual hincome, an' a 'ouse at Number One 'Yde Park Corner!" she jeered. "'Ow did yer lose the I'm-so-funny?--for if you 'aven't it now, you 'ave 'ad it, I'll tyke me Davy!"

"It's--a long story! Good-bye!"

He nodded and was moving on, when she shot out a gaunt hand and clutched him by the sleeve, crying:

"'Old 'ard, Mister! 'Ang on till I give this 'ere squealer to its mammy. About due now, she ought to be!"

"Isn't it..." His surprised look tickled the relict of the blown-up husband into a chuckle.

"Mine? Not by 'arf! A tizzy per workin'-day is wot I pays for the loan of 'er. Nothin' like a babby--specially in narsty weather like this 'ere--to touch the people's 'arts! Lil's mine, though, ain't you, deary?"

A preternaturally bright-eyed, white-faced, wizened little creature peeped out from the shelter of the ostentatiously clean apron, making a sound as of assent.

"Is she ill?" asked P. C. Breagh commiseratingly.

"Not 'er, that's her color!"

"Hungry, perhaps?" he asked.

"Why should she be? ... Wot did yer 'ave fer dinner, Lil? Speak up like a good gal an' tell the gen'lman!"

The small, grimy finger came out of the wide mouth. She lisped confidingly:

"Ay'po'rth o' gin 'ot, an' a stit o' totlit!"

"My God!" gasped P. C. Breagh in horror, "does that baby drink hot gin?"

"When she can get it! an' so does Hi!" explained the lady of the ballads, whom a short female in a plaid shawl and a battered brown bonnet had now relieved of the baby. She added hospitably: "Come an' 'ave two-pennorth o' comfort along o' me now! It's meat and drink both! as you'll find afore long! I'll stand treat--no blarney!"

But he groaned and fled from the tragic pair, seeing the blazing eyes of the drunkard, set in the small white childish face, staring at him from the gas-lamps and the hoardings, from the paving-stones beneath his hurrying feet, and from under the hats of passing strangers; and peering between the slowly-moving shoals of sooty smoke and muddy vapor, streaking the livid grayness overhead.

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XIII

Pall Mall was some relief. He looked for the Junior United Service Club, and found it; for the Rag,--and for a time walked up and down in the vicinity of both of these stately institutions, heartened by the memory that his father had been a member of the former--listening with eager ears to scraps of conversation between soldierly, well-groomed, clear-voiced men in evening dress, lingering on the wide doorsteps to finish some animated discussion, or waiting for cabs and hansoms, the common hack, or the smart private vehicle, low on the wheels at that date, and more heavily built than the later S. and T.

Certain bald, mustached, and red-faced veterans, scrupulously attired for the evening--delighted him extremely.

"By George, General!" he heard one of them say, as he went by, his slouch forgotten, his shoulders squared, his head held up, "look at that seedy-looking chap there! Twelve to one in sixpences he's one of the 'supererogatory useless infantrymen,' kicked out by Cardwell, after twelve years' Service. D'ye take the bet or no?"

The reference to the unpopular War Secretary under whose effacing hand infantry regiments had not only lost their numbers, but in many cases vanished from the rolls of the Army, swallowed up in the New System of Amalgamation--had, as was intended, the effect of the red rag on the bull. The General bellowed:

"Confound me if I don't! Pay the cabman, McIntosh, while I put the fellow through his paces! Hi! Hi! Come here, you, sir!"

Then, as P. C. Breagh, summoned by an imperious wave of the umbrella, stepped out of the fogginess into the mellow circle of light streaming through the glass doors of the brilliant vestibule:

"What's your regiment? ... Give me the old designation! ... I know nothing of new-fangled names; ... All my eye and Betty Martin! and I don't care a dee who hears me say it! ... What is your rank, name and battalion-number? When were you discharged? ... Where's your small-book and certificate? ... Got 'em about you? ... Every soldier has 'em about him! And why don't you answer, dee you!--why don't you answer, man?"

The volley of interrogations left no room for reply. A second might have followed had not the General's crony, in unconcealed ecstasies at the sulky embarrassment of the victim and the determined attitude of the inquisitor, intervened:

"Dashed sorry! My mistake! Believe you've landed a civilian, after all, General!"

"Be dee'd! and so I have!" the General, after a raking stare, admitted. Then he took his crony's arm, they wheeled, and marched into the Club together. From whence issued, a moment later, a small boy in buttons, who, after a look up and a look down the street, pursued the retreating figure of the stalwart young man in the gray felt wide-awake and shaggy greatcoat, and arrested it with the words:

"'Arf a jiff, my covey!" He added, as the retreating figure wheeled and surveyed him in hard-eyed silence: "Wasn't it you what Old Fireworks went for just now on the 'Rag and Famish' steps?"

"The General called to me--mistaking me for----"

"I know!" The boy in buttons winked. "He's always a-pitching into somebody in mistake for somebody else! Catch hold! This is for you!"

This was a warm half-crown, thrust upon P. C. Breagh, without further ceremony. He flushed a murky, savage red, and shouted:

"What is this for? ... Who had the infernal insolence----"

He choked. Buttons, plainly regarding the tramp who could be insulted by half-a-crown as a new species, stared at him with circular orbs of astonishment, retorting:

"What's it for? How do I know, stoopid? He told me to catch you and give it you.... Cool that! Well, blow me!..."

These expressions being evoked by the swift, supple movement of arm and wrist that had sent the half-crown flying into the midst of the Pall Mall traffic. A sharp ring on the wood-pavement, a yell, and a flourish of naked heels, and a street Arab had seized the treasure. As the fog swallowed the wealthy imp, said Buttons icily:

"That's your game, is it?--pavin' Pall Mall with 'arf bulls for gutter-pads to pick up. Better ha' tipped it to me!--or sent it back to Old Fireworks. He ain't got too many of 'em. Signs too many toast-and-water tickets to be flush!"

Perhaps P. C. Breagh, scalding with wrath as he was, would have dived in among the traffic to recover the coin had it been recoverable. But the snows of yester-year were not more irretrievably gone. He realized it, hung his head and hunched his shoulders, and moved away from the region of clubs, where officers of the twin Services talked shop in sublime indifference to other subjects, as white-chokered attendants supplied them with savory meats and cheering drinks.

Be sorry for the boy with the gaunt wolf Hunger at his heels, and the black demon of Despair sitting on his shoulders. That determination of his to face what might come, and take his luck in a cheerful spirit, was to be put to a yet fiercer test before the dawn of a new day.

He was hungry and thirsty, and sorely tempted to break into his solitary shilling. But that silver barrier between himself and pennilessness was not to be lightly changed. He wondered, as he recalled to mind the many occasions upon which he had wantonly squandered and wasted money, whether an experience such as this, previously undergone, would not have been a valuable lesson in thrift?

He presently came by a well-known theater. It was too early for the frequenters of the Stalls and Boxes and Grand Circle. But playgoers of the humbler kind were pouring in to fill the unnumbered seats in the upper tiers, and a crowd composed of the usual elements had gathered at the doors of the Pit and Gallery, and filled the narrow side-alley in which these were situated, and overflowed into the Strand.

Queues not being officially recognized and regulated, there was a good deal of obstruction and pushing and persiflage. Pausing a moment under the gas-jet bordered, glazed shelter ornamenting the box-office entrance, his unseasoned eyes winced as they took in a sad, sad sight.

You saw her as a woman not past early middle-age, nobly proportioned, and even in her dreadful degradation, imperially beautiful. An old velvet mantle covered her, from which the torn and moth-eaten fur-trimming hung in draggled festoons. A trained silk gown, stained and torn and flounced with mud of many thicknesses, trailed upon the slushy Strand pavement; a broken bonnet perched on a palpably false and inconceivably dirty chignon, the false curls that cascaded from beneath it, hid a workhouse-crop of rusty gray.... And she lifted her skirts aside, disclosing muddy bare feet shod with a trodden-down, elastic-sided boot and a ragged slipper; and stepped across the threshold of the gilt and mirrored vestibule with a graceful, royal air....

"Now then, missus! Out of this, will you!"

A uniformed theater-attendant had advanced toward the intruder. But she did not retreat in terror at his truculence. She drew herself up, and folded her arms upon her bosom, and confronted the menial with a haughty, quelling stare.

"Man! who are you to drive me from this threshold? Out of the way! Clear!--and let me look at her. Do you ask whom? She! that woman who stands behind you smiling, with the white dove perched upon her whiter hand. Times have changed, my girl, since you and I last saw each other! Well, well! You are the same, whatever I may be!"

She laughed, a deep, melodious ha, ha, ha! not at all like the laughter of everyday people. Even P. C. Breagh, inexperienced as he was in such matters, recognized it as the artificial laughter of the stage. And, profiting by the momentary confusion of the functionary, she swept in her silken rags toward the person indicated; who looked back at her with beautiful stagey eyes from a life-sized canvas, wearing a stage costume; standing in a pose of the theater; fondling the bird that was palpably a property of the scene.

A long gilt-framed mirror hung beside the portrait, and to this she pointed with the tattered remnants of her theatrical manner, exclaiming with another of the stage laughs:

"Look upon this picture and on that! Ye gods!..." Adding, as the guardian of the vestibule, now wroth, advanced upon her: "No! Don't you hustle me. I'm off, governor! Farewell. Ta-ta!--until we meet again!"

She was gone, but she must have noted the boy who stared, fascinated by her haggard beauty and her dreadful misery. In fact, P. C. Breagh, passing on, had barely traversed a dozen yards of slushy pavement, before, with a bound and rush, a supple movement, predatory and feline, the woman emerged from an alley, and was by his side.

"Who are you? A waif, like me? Where do you come from? I saw you looking at me with all your eyes and your heart in them!--I played that scene with the picture and the mirror for you! You know----" She took P. C. Breagh's reluctant arm and leaned to his ear, being taller than he was, "There's always one person in the house you play to--and when that person's not there--the inspiration doesn't come. When it won't, you--shall I tell you what you do if God hasn't made you able to say 'No' to them?--you send out the devils to fetch you brandy and champagne!"

She laughed wildly and looked round suspiciously.

"Walk fast! A policeman's behind us, shadowing us. I'll tell you my story as we go. Did you ever hear of Anabel Foltringham? You must have! Everybody has! I drew crowds to that theater you've seen me kicked out of!--I was beautiful--great--famous! Men gloated over my beauty--they hung upon my every word. That made the devils jealous--the smooth, servile, obsequious devils in white aprons, that you find behind the scenes at every theater. They call them dressers, but I know better, you can't deceive me! You boy, I like your face! You look at me as if I were a Christian, and a man I knew had eyes like yours! ... Don't leave me! I'll make it worth your while to stay, only listen! ... I'll teach you all I know, make you a greater artist than any of them. For the things that you shall learn from me--I learned myself--in Hell!"

She hung upon the boy's wincing arm, her terrible breath scorched him, her burned-out eyes appalled--her greedy, long-nailed clutch found his flesh through his sleeve like the talons of a beast of prey. And he wrenched himself free, and fled, sick at heart; fancying that the old boot and shoe were running after him, and that the mud-trimmed silk gown flapped at his hurrying heels like leathery wings.

He broke into his shilling to pass the turnstile of Waterloo Bridge, stowed himself in a corner of one of the seated niches, and found relief in the presence of a stray kitten, sore-footed, hungry-eyed, ginger-haired, that rubbed against his legs and responded with appreciative purrs to his tentative back-strokings and ear-rubbings, administered half-unconsciously, as he wondered why human beings--under certain given circumstances, should be so much more beastly than the brutes?

The kitten jumped on his knee. He saw that its fur had been torn--probably by a dog--and shuddered at the remembrance of having more than once set a rough-haired terrier--a companion of his early boyhood--to worry stray cats--and enjoyed the carnage resulting. Why did he shudder now? Because by a feat of imagination only possible to one who was beginning to learn what it is to be homeless and hunted and desperate, he had got inside the ginger kitten's ragged skin, and established between himself and what we are content to call inferior creatures a bond of brotherhood.

"Don't you go, Kitty! though I can't make it much worth your while to stop," he muttered. "If I'd got the things--a scrap of lint and a saucer of clean water, a needleful of silk and a dab of carbolic ointment--I could patch up that tear--you'd be as good as new inside of a week."

He yawned, and the tramp of booted feet and the shuffle of naked ones grew faint in his ears; and presently the rush and roar of the Bridge roadway-traffic dulled to a hum--and he was deadly sleepy. With blundering fingers he undid two buttons of the frieze greatcoat and tucked the kitten inside--and after turning round three times, and making a great parade of clawing the surface soft enough for comfort, it curled up and fell asleep, and its host not only slept, but snored.

Even in sleep he was dogged and haunted by those three tragic figures;--the broken-down viveur, the child dying on gin, the lost creature who had once been Anabel Foltringham--they cropped up in his troubled dreams, over and over again. And he woke up, and it was dark, and a sleety rain was stinging him, and even the kitten in his breast was cold and cried.

He got up, aching and stiff, hungry and thirsty, realizing that he must have slept for hours. Big Ben boomed twelve. A midnight express from Charing Cross dragged its chain of yellow lights across the railway bridge with a hollow roar and rattle. One or two shapes passed, vaguely human in the wintry darkness; a Post Office van or so, with an official inside sorting bags by the light of a swinging lantern, three or four crawling cabs, a trolley with a formless mass upon it, pushed by two indistinct, slow-moving figures, coming from the Surrey side.

Toward the Strandward end of the Bridge there was a light, with murky figures moving about it. Revealed by its two flaring naphtha-lamps, the characteristic hostelry of the London gutters, with its gaudy paint and patriotic decorations, its clean shelves piled up with homely food, and hung with common crockery, its steaming urns of hot and comforting drink,--proved a Godsend to one more hungry and homeless vagrant.

The shipwrecked mariner of his analogy might have known the same sense of relief, seeing his signal answered and some stout vessel, flying the red ensign of the British Mercantile Marine, bearing down upon his tiny, wave-washed raft.... P. C. Breagh was guilty of prodigality at that coffee-stall. A penny cup of coffee, weak, but hot, and a twopenny sandwich, consisting of two slices of bread smeared with mustard and inclosing something by courtesy called ham, but really pertaining to that less stylish part of the pig known as "gammon," took the edge off his savage appetite. A ha'porth of milk for the kitten, and another ha'porth of ham-trimmings, left him lord of seven-pence halfpenny cash.

Thus, warmed and cheered, he went back to his seat in the niche again, noting that every stone bench he passed had now its seated group, or prone extended figures. His recently vacated place had its occupant, a thin, barefooted young man, indescribably ragged; who slept with his famished face--sharp and yellow as a wedge of cheese--turned to the sky, and the Adam's apple of his lean throat jerking, as though something alive, swallowed inadvertently, was madly struggling to get out.

And as he leaned upon the eastward parapet of the Bridge with the ginger kitten, now replete and happy, purring on his shoulder, and watched the wild welter of black water, pale-patched with foam and spume, rushing away beneath him, to plunge growling through the arches of Blackfriars Bridge, and speed away under Southwark and London Bridges, past the Custom House, Traitor's Gate and the Docks, between Wapping and Rotherhithe on its way to Greenwich and Poplar and Blackwell; and thence, by the verdant heights of Charlton to Woolwich, widening to a mile here; and so on past Gravesend and the Nore Light to where it flows between Whitstable and Foulness Point--eighteen miles broad; a kingly river, carrying on its back the commerce of the world.

The wind blew bitter cold from the heights of Hampstead. A livid moon blinked through rifts in ink-black cloud-wrack above the Shot Towers and a huge mass of brewery-buildings on the right. On the left, revealed in glimpses and suggestions by stray moonbeams and wind-blown lamp-flares, was a great confusion of trucks and trolleys; huge cranes rearing skeleton arms aloft, colossal cauldrons, heaps of clay beside yawning trenches, winking red eyes of warning for belated wanderers. All this beyond a banking-face of stone masonry with completed piers, showed where the Victoria Embankment would be by-and-by. Meanwhile chaos reigned; the area would have been an appropriate playground for the inhabitants of Bethlem Hospital, in hours of relaxation, or on national holidays.

P. C. Breagh laughed gallantly at his own conceit, and his chapped lips cracked and hurt him. He staunched the bleeding with his handkerchief, conscious that a day might come when he should cease to have any use for such an article. Habits die hard with us, but the cleanly ones go first, being acquired. We continue to desire food and drink long after we have left off caring about the color of our linen--nay! long after we have become indifferent to the fact that we wear no linen at all.

He was bone-weary; his thigh-bones seemed wearing through their sockets. His knees ached, his feet were heavy as solid lumps of lead. It occurred to him that the two things most desirable on earth were an arm-chair and a roasting fire to toast before. Failing that, a seat on a stone bench, with a north wind gnawing you was better than nothing.... He thought that by now one of the sleepers in the niches would have wakened up and moved on.

Vain hope. Where one had withdrawn, his place had been filled by three newcomers. Misery, Dirt, Drunkenness, Disease, and Wretchedness herded in those stony refuges, mercifully winked at by the patroling policeman with the unsavory-smelling bull's-eye. And strange beings perambulated or crept the pavement; 2 a.m. is the time when you may see them!--emerging from the foul hiding-places where they pass the daylight hours, to wander forth unseen....

Such goblin forms, such Gorgon faces, revealed by some fitful ray of watery moonlight, or the lamp of a languid, belated cab.... It was a waking nightmare, a Dantesque vision realized, inconceivably hideous to nerves already weakening. The Celtic strain derived from his father, in conjunction with the sensitive romantic nature bequeathed by Milly Fermeroy, might have urged their son to end things that bleak January night, with a leap from the parapet and a plunge into the wild black welter tumbling under the Bridge arches. But P. C. Breagh was not fated to join the procession of grim, unconscious voyagers, that wallow in the tides and circle in the eddies, flounder under the sides of barges, beat upon the piles and bridge-piers, and sink to slumber in the river-sludge a while, before they rise, more dreadful than before, to journey on again....

His mother's faith plucked him as before, from the desperate brink of the temptation; and--he had worked in the dissecting-rooms and walked the hospitals, toward that end of failure previously recorded,--and the hardening did yeoman's service now. But it went badly with him--at one period of that week-long night particularly.... He never liked to speak of that experience.... But long, long afterward he said to one who loved him:

"I held on to my reason, and prayed Our Lord for daylight. And--I don't know how I managed--but somehow, I got through!"

He found a seat at length, not knowing by whom or how it had been vacated, and dropped into it and slept like the dead. And he awoke in a windless lull,--to a strange bluish-yellow radiance in the sky beyond the great squat dome of St. Paul's and the crowding chimneys of the City: and felt the stir and thrill and quiver that is the sign of this sad world's waking to yet another day.

Three homeless women shared the seat with him. Two were awake, watching him not unkindly. A third slept, leaning forward in a huddled attitude, propped by the handle of a basket she held upon her knees. She breathed in whistling squeals,--a night on Waterloo Bridge in January encourages bronchitis.... He listened for a moment, then with a prodigal impulse, dropped twopence of his eightpence into the basket on her lap. And she woke, and said with an Irish accent:

"May the heavens be yer bed!" and slept again, heavily.

The second woman snuffled out in the accents of the East End:

"Gawd bless you, good gen'leman!"

The third lifted a tattered scarlet head-shawl, and flashed a pair of jet-black Oriental eyes upon him:

"Fortune and Life!"

To her he said, with a creditable effort at cheeriness:

"I've lost the fortune, mother! the life's about all I've got that's left to me!"

"And a good thing too, my gorgious! Don't yer complain of it! Come, tip us yer vast!" She added, as he stared uncomprehending--"Eight or left-hand dook--whichever the Line's brightest in. Have yer a--No! I'll give yer of my jinnepen for naught!"

He held out the broad, strong palm, grimy enough by dawn-light. She peered, spat on the chilly gray pavement and said:

"You keep up heart--there's a change a-coming soon!"

"Can't come too soon for me!" His smile was rueful.

"Keep up heart, I tell yer!" she bade him. "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road, and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it. Until the end, that is, when tute is jasing. And there's a finer fortune than I meant yer to get o' me! Shake her up, Bet!" She explained, as the other woman turned to rouse the sleeper, "Taken a great cold, she has! We're fetching her to the Hospital. 'Tholomewses in Smithell, for the gorgio doctors to make her well. Though that's not where I would lie, my rye, and my pipes playing the death-tune. Shoon tu, dilya! Better shake her again!"

"Wake up, deer! There's a good soul!"

They stood up, supporting the bronchial Irishwoman between them, shaking and straightening their frowsy garments--tidying themselves as the poorest women will. Then with, a farewell word they moved on, northward. And P. C. Breagh, following them with reddened, night-weary eyes, saw his Fate coming, though he did not know it, in the person of a small and shabbily-attired elderly man.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIV

He came striding from the Strand side, in a red-hot hurry, making as much noise with his boots as three ordinary pedestrians. He wore no overcoat, but was buttoned up in a decent black serge frock, having his throat protected by a large white cashmere wrapper. Also he wore gray mixture trousers, rather baggy at the knees, and shiny, and was crowned with a well-worn silk top-hat.

He walked at a great pace, swinging his arms, which were inordinately lengthy, and finished with hands of extra size, encased in white knitted woolen bags not distantly resembling boxing-gloves. When he reached the middle of the Bridge, he stopped and backed against the west parapet, folded his arms, and,--or so it seemed to P. C. Breagh, who was watching him for the sole reason that he happened to be the only cheerful-looking, decently-clad human being within his range of vision--snuffed the breeze, and considered the prospect with a consciously-possessive air. In moving his head sideways, so as to extend his view, his sharp black glance encountered that of his neighbor, and he nodded, and thus their acquaintance began.

"I'm glad to see, young gentleman," said the little man--and "My eye! Do I still look like anything of that sort?" was the young gentleman's unvoiced aside: "I'm glad to see that you don't number one among the many thousands--if I was to say Millions I shouldn't be guilty of exaggeration--who under-estimate the value of fresh morning air. For my part, without boasting, I may call myself a walking Monument to its healthiness, or as you can't put up a monument to a live man--I'll say, a Living Testimonial."

He had a yellow, tight-drawn, wearied skin, with a patch of rather hectic red on either cheekbone, and his bright black eyes twinkled at the bottom of hollow orbits, overshadowed by shaggy eyebrows of the deepest black. When he took off his hat to cool his head, from which quite a cloud of steam arose, you could perceive that he was baldish, and that his bristly hair and large mutton-chop side-whiskers owed, like his shaggy eyebrows, their intense and aggressive blackness to a conscientious but unskillful dyer, for by the cold and searching light of morning, delicate nuances of green and purple were seen to mingle with their youthful sable, and here and there the roots showed grayish-white.

"I was given up by the Doctors at the age of twenty," said the little man, "as I had been previously give up by 'em at eleven and fifteen. 'The boy's in Rapid Decline,' says one, 'keep him out o' drafts and give him boiled snails and asses' milk.' My poor mother did her best, stopping up window-cracks with paste and paper, and stuffing chimneys with old carpets. And living as we was at Hampstead Village, and the Heath being productive in snails and donkeys, the rest o' the prescription was easy to carry out. Still I got lankier and went on coughing o' nights. Says Doctor Number Two, 'It's a case of Galloping Consumption. Feed him up, clothe him warmly, encourage him to take gentle exercise, and avoid chills whatever you do!' So my mother swadged me up in flannel, made me eat a mutton chop every two hours, and trot up and down the front-garden for exercise between chops; and she'd pour half-a-pint o' porter down me whenever I stood still. And in spite of all her affectionate solicitude," said the little man with a twinkle, "I kep' on wasting, and coughing and spitting, and doing everything that a young fellow in a galloping consumption could do, short of galloping out o' this world into another. And Doctor Number Three says,--being called in when I was twenty: 'It's phthisis pulmonalis in the advanced and incurable stage. You can do nothing at all for this young man but get him into an Institute for Incurables. Codliver Oil, Care, and Kindness,' so says he, 'may prolong his miserable existence a month or two. For the rest, there's nothing to be done!' If you'll believe me, that news was the death of my poor mother. She'd expected nothing else for years--and yet it killed her at the end! And I acted as Chief Mourner at her funeral," ended the little man with a queer twist of his lean, sharp jaws and a momentary dimming of his keen black eyes, "in the pouring rain, and walked home without an overcoat--and got wet to the skin, and stripped, and rubbed myself dry, and made a rough supper of scalding oatmeal porridge, and went to bed and slep' with the windows open top and bottom. And that was over thirty years ago, and I've never missed my morning sponge-over with cold water since; nor never shut a window night or day, nor never run up a doctor's bill, and don't mean to! I left off coddling--once the blessed old soul was gone! Got better--better still--always expected to die by those who'd knowed mother. I traveled and saw Foreign Parts,--not specially going about to pick the 'ealthiest climates, knocked about abroad--came home and took to Business, and have taken to it ever since, as you may see. My health is robust," he made a show of hitting his chest again, but thought better of it. "I live plain, and make a point of getting Fresh Air into my system whenever possible.--This is the place I come to, as a rule, for the morning's supply. I take it on Blackfriars Bridge after the dinner-hour, the eating-house I patronize being on Ludgate Hill," he added. "And--I don't know whether you happen to be a student of old Bill Shakespeare, but there are some lines of his which might be twisted into applying to me." He drew a deep breath and delivered himself as follows:

"Some are born Tough, some achieve Toughness--others have Toughness thrust upon them."

He smote his chest hard with a muffled hand, and coughed in that rather hollow fashion, adding: "Without vanity, I may consider myself as belonging to the latter class! Eh?"

P. C. Breagh agreed that the speaker might be considered as belonging to the latter class.

"For at this moment I am as fresh as paint," said the little man proudly, "and as lively as a kitten, yet I have been up and about and on my legs all night! I left our place of business at 3.20 a.m., reached Charing Cross by 3.30, was on the platform when the Dover Boat Train steamed in--bringing mails and passengers that have crossed in the Night Boat from Cally--took over a shorthand report from a Special Correspondent--who has been to Paris to gather details of a political murder," he tapped the breast of his black frock-coat, which showed the bulging outline of a thick notebook. "And in the absence of our News Editor--who's been sent to Brummagem to report Mr. Bright's speech on Popular Education, Irish Amelioration, and Free Trade,--Parliamentary affairs being at a standstill this holiday season,--I shall hand 'em to the Senior Sub., who'll distribute the stuff and have it set up by the time the Chief drops in from Putney at eleven. It's for to-morrow's issue, following the ten-line telegram we publish this morning. A column-and-a-half of Latest Intelligence!" the little man screwed up his eyes and licked his lips as though reveling in the flavor of some rare gastronomic delicacy. "And if I had the say as to the setting of it--which I haven't!--and was free to indulge my predilection for showy printing--which I never shall be!--it should be headed with caps an inch high--and spaced and leaded all the way down."

His black eyes snapped: his hectic cheeks grew fiery.

"Headed with inch-high caps, ah! and spaced and leaded from the top to the bottom. Fancy how it 'ud lay siege to the Public Eye, and draw the Public's coppers! When I shut my eyes I can fair see the editions running out."

He recited, marking out the lines and spaces with a finger encased in white woolen:

A PRINCE MURDERS ONE MAN AND FIRES AT ANOTHER IN HIS OWN GILDED DRAWING-ROOM. PARIS SENSATION. COUSIN OF THE FRENCH EMPEROR KILLS A JOURNALIST ON THE VERY DAY WHEN THE FRENCH LEGISLATIVE BODY MEET TO INAUGURATE THE NEW ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT UNDER NAPOLEON III.

His eyes snapped, his hectic cheeks flamed, he was evidently launched on a subject that was near the heart beating beneath the bulgy pocket-book. He talked fast; and as he talked he waved his arms, and gesticulated with the large hands encased in the woolly boxing-gloves.

"I cherish ambitions, perhaps you'll say, above my calling, which I don't mind owning is that of Newspaper Publishers' Warehouseman. Perhaps I do--perhaps I don't! My own opinion is I'm before my time, a kind of Anachronism the wrong way round," said the little man rather ruefully, "and rightly belong to--say forty years hence. As the poet Shakespeare says, and if it wasn't him it ought to have been! 'Sweet are the uses of Advertisement.' I'm a believer in Advertisement, always have been and always shall be!"

His garrulity was an individual and not unpleasant trait, implying confidence in others' sympathy. He went on:

"Being Nobody in particular, my views have never been took up and acted on. Though I enjoy a good deal of confidence and am--I hope I am!--respected in my place. For as Solomon said, somewhere in Proverbs--'Designs are strengthened by counsels,' and our Chief himself hasn't been too proud to say, on occasion: 'Knewbit, what would you do in this or that case?' Such as you see me, I am often at the 'Ouse of Commons, when sittings are late and speeches have to be jotted down in mouthfuls and carried away and set up in snacks.... For my constitution is of that degree of toughness--sleep or no sleep matters little to me, and that I am as fresh at this moment as you are," he bit off the end of a yawn, "I wouldn't mind betting a sixpence now!"

Said P. C. Breagh, at last getting in a word edgeways:

"If you lost--and you would lose!--and paid--and I expect you'd pay!--my capital would be doubled. I'm not a young swell who has got up early to look at London. I'm a vagrant on the streets--and it strikes me I must look like it. To-day I've got to find work of some kind. Can you give me a job in your warehouse? I'm strong and willing and honest--up to now! But by G--! if stealing a bunch of turnips off a costermonger's barrow will get me a full belly and a clean bed in prison, I expect I shall have to do it before long, if I can't find work anywhere!"

"Bless my soul!" said the garrulous little man excitedly. "And I thought you were a Medical Student or an artist (some of 'em aren't over-given to clothes-brushes and soap-and-water), and here I stood a-jawing and you starving all the time! ... Work--of course you shall have work, though I can't promise it'll be the kind o' work that's fit for an educated young gentleman----"

"Any work is fit for a gentleman," snarled P. C. Breagh, "that a decent man can do! What I want is----"

"What you want is--Breakfast and a wash and brush-up!" cried the little man excitedly. "And that you must go to Miss Ling and get. Say Mr. Knewbit sent you--I'm Knewbit,--Christian name Solomon. It's No. 288 Great Coram Street--second turn to your right above Russell Square. Cross the Strand and go up Wellington Street and Bow Street, cross Long Acre and ... but you're too dead-beat to walk it. Take a growler--it'll be eighteenpence from here unless the cabby's lost to every sense of decency. Borrow the money from me--here it is! I give you my word you shall be able to pay me back to-morrow. Here is a cab! Hi! Phew'w!" Mr. Knewbit whistled scientifically, and the preternaturally red-nosed driver of an old and jingling four-wheeler pulled up beside the curb as P. C. Breagh stammered out:

"I--I can't thank! ... You're too confoundedly kind! ... and I'd begun to think that all men were thieves or scoundrels--except a poor, sick beggar of a swell I met yesterday, whose wife and children shun him and whose valet bullies him! I can't refuse, you know! ... Things are too..."

"The fare will be two shillings if you talk one minute longer!" warned Mr. Knewbit, opening the door of the straw-carpeted, moldy-smelling vehicle. "I can see extortion in that man's eye. I'm a judge of character, that's what I am. Bless my soul! Is that kitten yours?"

For the ginger Tom, with arched back and erect tail, was walking round P. C. Breagh's legs, purring insinuatingly, and his companion of the night's vigil said hesitatingly, looking at the meager, homeless mite:

"He seems to think so! And--he helped me through last night. Would you mind if I took him? I'll pay for his keep as soon as ever I----"

Mr. Knewbit shouted in a violent hurry:

"In with you! Cat and all! Don't apologize! Miss Ling adores 'em! Three in the house already--waste bits left on the dustbin for needy strangers. Don't forget! 288 Great Coram Street, Russell Square. Drive on, cabby!"

He added, dancing up and down excitedly on the pavement, as the jingling four-wheeler rolled on, with the pair of castaways:

"Lord! if I only had the setting up of that young fellow's story, how I would give it 'em in leaded capitals!"

He closed his eyes in ecstasy and saw, in large black letters standing out across the clear horizon of the new day to which London was waking:

LONDON DRAMA. BEGGARED HEIR TO WEALTH ROBBED. CAST ON THE STREETS! SOLE COMPANION A KITTEN! PATHETIC STORY.

"Not that I know he is the heir to wealth, but it looks well, uncommon! Uncommon well, it looks!" said Mr. Knewbit.

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