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.
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.
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 myAnmeldungsbuchin 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 theAbiturienteti-Examenat 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 andschläger—and more beers and moreschläger!—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. Thenicht wahr'shad 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 inGedächtniss—has been manifested on your part a so-remarkable degree ofEinbildungandBegriffthat 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, itsAula, 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 withschoppen-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.
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 Frenchcalorifère.
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 theMitrailleuse, 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 asaide-de-campupon 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."
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, verygentilleand 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 tinypattes de moucheof thine? Nowhere is there achefwhose 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 theJour des MortMass 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—permedium 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 heavygalonsof silver and faced with the brilliant red of his silver-striped pantaloons, fitted his compact round person with such creaseless tightness; his silver-stripedceinture, belts and buckles were sopoint-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.
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 ambertachesin them, ..." she thought. "And he looks dusty as a voyager after a long travel.... Notbien tenuas a gentleman should be.... Living with Germans in Germany—he has become indifferent to thepetits soinsof 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 covetedbonne-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.