V
As a dog will skulk dejectedly from the spot where a bone previously buried has failed to reward the snuffing nose and the digging paw, so P. C. Breagh, on the long-expected twenty-third birthday that was to have made him master of dead Milly's fortune, slouched down Fetter Lane, humming and vibrant with the vicinity of great printing-works, and redolent of glue and treacle, tar, printers' ink, engine-oil, and size.
A double stream of carts and trucks, heavily laden with five-mile rollers of yellow-white paper for the revolving vertical type-cylinders of the Applegarth steam printing-machine—then in its heyday—bales of tow, forms of type and piles of wood-blocks, choked the narrow thoroughfare. The smells from the cheaper eating-houses—where sausages frizzled in metal trays, and tea and coffee steamed in huge tapped boilers, and piles of doubtful-looking eggs, and curly rashers of streaky bacon were to be had by people with money to pay for breakfast—even the sight of compositors in clean shirt-sleeves and machine-men steeped in ink and oil to the eyebrows eating snacks of bread and cheese and saveloy, and drinking porter out of pewter on the doorsteps of great buildings roaring with machinery—sickened P. C. Breagh with vain desire.
His world was all in ruins about him. He was conscious of a painful sense of stricture in the throat, and a tight pain as though a knotted rope were bound about his temples. His hand did not shake, though, when he thrust it out under his eyes and looked at it curiously. But he shouldered his way so clumsily along the narrow, crowded sidewalk that he found himself every now and then in collision with some more or less incensed pedestrian, such as the printer's devil, who cried, "Now then, Snobby, where are yer a-comin' to?" or the stout red-faced matron in black, displaying a row of bootlaces and a paper of small-tooth combs for sale—who emerged from the swing-doors of a public-house as P. C. Breagh charged past them, and wanted to know whether he called himself a young man or a mad bull? A well-dressed, elderly gentleman, carrying a calf-skin bag and a gold-mounted umbrella, confounded him for a bungling, blundering, blackguardly! ... and was left reveling in alliteratives as the provoker of his wrath swung out of the Lane and found himself upon the reported Tom Tiddler's ground of Fleet Street. And then a curious swirling giddiness overtook him, and he dropped down upon some stone steps under the Gothic doorway of a church with a lofty tower, and sat there with hunched shoulders and drooped head, staring dully at the pavement between his muddy boots.
He was conscious of a dull resentment at his lot, but no base hatred of that old man with the shattered skull, lying prone among the bloody litter of his office-table, mingled with it. All his life, since that sixth birthday when he had learned the meaning of Death, and the potential value of Money, the attainment of his twenty-third year had been the goal toward which he had striven; and every third of January crossed off the almanac "brings me nearer," he had said to himself, "to the money that will be mine to spend as I shall choose!"
And now ... without a profession—for he had failed to obtain his degrees in Medicine and Surgery—without funds, for a reason that did him no dishonor—without books or belongings of any kind except the clothes upon his back; without hope—for who can be hopeful on an empty and craving stomach?—without work to occupy those strong young hands and the sound, capable brain behind those gray, amber-flecked eyes, the unlucky young man who had been reared on expectations sat under St. Dunstan's Tower; and heard St. Dunstan's clock and St. Paul's, and all the other City churches answer the boom of Big Ben of Westminster, solemnly striking the hour of ten.
His prospects had been blighted and ruined, his young hopes lay dead: he felt bruised and battered by the experiences and discoveries of that birthday morning, as though the pair of wooden clock-giants that some forty years back had figured among the City sights from their vantage in the ancient steeple of St. Dunstan's, had beaten out the hour with their mallets on his head.
His stepmother had always resented the monetary independence of her husband's son by Milly Fermeroy. Well! she and her vulgarities, her resentments and jealousies, had long been laid to rest, poor soul!
In that bloody June of the Mutiny of '57 she and her two youngest children had perished at Cawnpore. A fortnight later Major Breagh, previously wounded in the head by a shell-splinter in the defense of the entrenchments, was bayoneted by a Sepoy infantryman during a desperate sortie.
Carolan had remained as a boarder at the Preparatory School of the Marist Fathers at Rockhampton where he had previously been placed, thanks to the "interference," as Mrs. Breagh had phrased it, of the regimental chaplain. Father Haygarty. And, owing to the same influence, Monica, Carolan's junior by two years, had—after the double stroke of Fate that left the children orphaned—been sent to the Sisters of the Annunciation in London, the charges of her support and education being defrayed out of the interest of Carolan's seven thousand, and the compassionate allowance of twenty-five pounds granted her by Government as the orphan daughter of an officer killed in war.