"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?"
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—"youngladiesdo 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 moresoigné." 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.
"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 chantO 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.
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, thedernier criin 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 inventionde luxeeconomically 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 ofmodistes,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 frilledpaniers, the bustles, thejupesof 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 theLadies' 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.
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-downviveur, 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!"