VI
To-day, as P. C. Breagh sat paupered on the doorstep of St. Dunstan's, he realized that, from childhood to this hour, dead Milly's money had been his bane.
"When I was quite a little shaver I expected to be knocked under to, and given the best of everything, because I was going to be rich one day.... I knew my money kept my stepmother from grumbling and nagging at me. And—my first thrashing at Rockhampton was because I'd bragged about it to a bigger boy. He said when he let me get up—that I should be obliged to him one day, if I wasn't at the moment! And my first fight—no, my second—because the first was over my Irish brogue!—my second fight came off because I'd forgotten my lesson, and talked about being able to drive four-in-hand, and live up to a Commission in the Household Cavalry when I should come of age.... Silly young idiot! And when I was old enough for a public school—and passed—I wonder, with my luck, how I managed to pass?—into Bradenbury College—I had mills, no end! with the fellows there, because I couldn't keep mum about my expectations."
He leaned his dusty elbows on his knees and went on thinking, as a regular procession of legs of all sexes, ages, and colors went past, and the muddy river of Fleet Street traffic roared over the cobblestones, boiled in swirling eddies where it received the stream flowing down Chancery Lane, and choked and gurgled in and out of the squat archways of Temple Bar.
"I'd talked of Oxford as a preliminary to Sandhurst and a Cavalry Commission—and I went in for an Exhibition Entrance—but my classics queered me for the University. Knock Number One! The Head put it on the Italianate Latin I'd learned from the Marist Fathers—and why old Virgil, and Ovid, Horace, Cæsar, and Livy, and the rest of 'em, should be supposed to have pronounced their language with a British accent I've never been able to understand! ... When I went up for the Woolwich Open Competitive—having altered my views about the Household Cavalry!—my plane trigonometry dished me for the Royal Horse Artillery.... Knock Number Two! So I told myself that it wasn't as easy getting into a Queen's uniform as it was in my father's time.... You were given the Commission—or you bought it—and if you could drill, and march, and fight, no more was asked of you.... And I tried for the Royal Engineering College of India—and failed in dynamics—and had a shot for the I.C.S.—and missed again! Oh, damn! And do I owe every one of the whole string of failures to the belief that money makes up for everything and buys anything? I'm half beginning to believe I do! Even the kindness I have had from people I'd no claim on—and who is there alive I have a claim on? Have I been cad enough—ape enough—worm enough—to put it down to——Grrh!—how I loathe myself!"
He covered his reddened face with his hands and shuddered. It is horrible to have to go on living inside a fellow you have begun to hate.
"Even Father Haygarty's untiring kindness, his interest in all I did and thought and hoped for.... Weren't there times when I suspected that my—in some degree representing property—accounted for—oh, Lord! And when he was dying and his housekeeper sent for me—for he'd given up being an army chaplain and got a little living in Gloucestershire—did I realize even then what a friend and father I was losing? I hope to God I did, but I'm hardly sure of myself!"
He stubbed with the toe of his muddy boot the jutting corner of a paving-stone, and scowled at the image of himself that was growing more and more distinct. He had always thought P. C. Breagh rather a fine young fellow. Now he knew him for what he had always been.
"When Father Haygarty was gone—it wasn't long before Mustey and Son began to send explanations and apologies, instead of the whole of the quarter's interest-money. There had been a drop in securities of this kind and the other, and Consols were down—and at first I was as pleased as a prize poodle at being made excuses to..... But the fact remained that where I'd been getting two hundred and forty, I was only getting one hundred and seventy-three.... And that—if I really meant to go in for my Degree in Surgery and Medicine, for I'd made up my mind to be a medical swell—I had—if Monica was to go on staying with the Sisters!—I'd got to give up the idea of Edinburgh, or the London University, and matriculate somewhere abroad. So I went to Schwärz-Brettingen, and shared rooms with another English chap.... It was admitted I had solid abilities—the Professors whose lectures I attended thought well of me. And I failed!—Failed for the fourth time! Have I the accursed money to thank for that last blow?"
He perspired as though he had been running, and, indeed, nothing takes it out of you like a spruit over the course of the past with your conscience as pacer.
"I'd thought myself rather a fine fellow when, with my student-card in my pocket and my Anmeldungsbuch in my hand I called—in company with a squad of other candidates—on the Rector Magnificus. We had a punch afterwards, and a drive and coffee at the Plesse—and made a night of it at Fritz's. I woke with a first-class student's headache in the morning, and a hazy recollection that I'd told one or two of the British colony—in confidence—and several Germans—about the money I was coming into by-and-by...."
He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyelids together, trying to shut out the picture of P. C. Breagh in the character of a howling cad.
"But if I bragged—and I did brag!—I worked.... The Marist Fathers had grounded me in French and German in spite of myself, and my pride had been nicely stung up by that failure for Sandhurst and the others.... Men told me what I'd got to grind at, and I ground; filling piles of lecture-pads with notes on all sorts of subjects. Anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology.... My brain was a salad of 'em—but I passed the Abiturienteti-Examen at a classical gymnasium with a better certificate than a lot of other Freshmen—thanks to the Marist Fathers, who'd pounded Latin and Greek into me!—and then—after two years of walking hospitals, attending demonstrations and lectures, and doing laboratory-work—varied by beers and schläger—and more beers and more schläger!—and perhaps I took to sword-play all the more kindly because of the soldier-blood in me!—came the first regular examination. And I don't forget that third of November—not while I'm breathing!"
Donnerwetter! P. C. Breagh could see the cocked-hatted and scarlet-gowned University beadle ushering a pale young man, with saucers round his eyes, into the awful presence of the Dean, and Examiners in the Faculties of Surgery and Medicine....
The neophyte—arrayed in the swallow-tail coat, low-cut vest, black cloth inexpressibles, white cravat, and kid gloves inseparable from an English dinner-party, or the ordeal of examination at a German university, found his inquisitors also in formal full dress, seated in a semicircle facing the door, and looking singularly cheerful.
A solitary chair marked the middle of the chord of the arc formed by the chairs of the examiners. Upon this stool of judgment—after bowing and shaking hands all round and being bowed to and shaken—the victim had been invited to seat himself. The Dean opened the ball with the Early Theorists. And he had seemed quite to cotton to P. C. Breagh's ideas on the subject of Egyptian Sacerdotal Colleges, the preparation of Soma in the Vedas, the therapeutical formulas of Zoroaster, Chinese sympathetic medicine—the dietetic method of Hippocrates—who invented barley-water!—the observations of Diocles and Chrysippus and the criticisms of Galen. At the expiration of half an hour, when the Hofrath delivered him over to the next examiner, P. C. Breagh had felt that, if the others were no worse than the Dean, all might yet be well.
Professor Barselius, who followed the Dean, and was reported to be a terror, when correctly replied to upon an interrogation as to the chemical composition of the fatty acids, vouchsafed a grunt of approbation.
Professor Troppenritt, who succeeded Barselius, was a person with a reputation for amiability, and a mobility of mental constitution which enabled him to flit like the butterfly or leap like the grasshopper from subject to subject, harking back to Number One, perhaps, when you felt quite sure he had done with it for good. But on that fateful third of November a tricksy demon seemed to possess Troppenritt. He no longer flitted like the butterfly, or hopped like the grasshopper—he sported with the seven great departments of Structural Anatomy, Physiology, Pathological Anatomy, General Pathology, Ophthalmology, Medicine, Hygiene and Midwifery—as a fountain might toss up glass balls, or a conjurer juggle with daggers.... His victim after a while found himself breathlessly watching the hugh knobby rampart of forehead, behind which the Professor's intentions were hiding, in the vain hope that the next question might be foreshadowed on its shining surface. A hope destined never to be fulfilled....
The fact remains that P. C. Breagh, after some really creditable answers, was beginning to recover the use of his mental faculties, when the Dean—prompted by the candidate's evil genius—suggested a little pause for cake and wine. It was awful to see how Hofrath and Professors—there were three of them besides the conjurer Troppenritt—enjoyed themselves at this sacrificial banquet, which had been arranged upon a little table in a corner, waiting the five-minute interval. And P. C. Breagh rejected cake, which was of the gingerbread variety, garnished with blanched almonds and sugar-plums. But the single glass of Rüdesheimer he accepted might have been the Brobdingnagian silver-mounted horn that hung within a garland of frequently-renewed laurel leaves upon the walls of a famous students' beer-hall—or have been filled with raw spirits above proof,—the contents mounted so unerringly to his head, and wreaked such havoc therein.
The three remaining Professors were almost tender with the sufferer, but what Troppenritt had begun, the wine had completed. The nicht wahr's had been succeeding one another at marked intervals,—like distress-signals or funereal minute-guns, when the traditional three hours expired.
P. C. Breagh—removed to cold storage in the anteroom—was detained but five minutes longer.... His nervous shiverings had reached a crescendo, when the beadle opened the door.... And the Dean, stepping forward, in staccato accents delivered himself:
"Candidate, from the quality of the dissertations in writing previously submitted, we, the Faculty of Surgery and Medicine of the University of Schwärz-Brettingen—would a more satisfaction-imparting result have anticipated as the result of the just-concluded oral examination undergone by you.... But although lacking in Gedächtniss—has been manifested on your part a so-remarkable degree of Einbildung and Begriff that the Faculty of-hesitation-none-whatever have in the following-advice-to-you-imparting;—Yourself another semester give, or better still, another twelvemonth! and try again, young man!—try again!"
Not bad advice, if the young man had chosen to follow it. But January drew near, and the inheritor-expectant of seven thousand pounds scorned to toil and moil over intellectual ground already traversed. He had tried for honors, and he had failed, thanks to the hypnotizing methods of the too-agile Troppenritt.
So P. C. Breagh spent the money that would have kept him, with economy, for six months, in giving a farewell banquet to his friends; called—in his best attire, with kid gloves and a buttonhole bouquet—on his favorite lecturers; left cards on the wives of those who possessed them; paid his landlady—who had faithfully labored to convert his formal, class-room German into a malleable, useful tongue,—kissed her round cheek—tipped the civil servant-maid five dollars,—and turned his back for ever on Schwärz-Brettingen, its Aula, Collegien-Haus, Theatrum Anatomicum, Botanical Garden, Library and Career—(a correctional edifice the interior accommodations of which were only known to him by hearsay),—its restaurants, beer-saloons, coffee-gardens, and fencing-halls; its chilly wood-stoves, its glowing enthusiasms; its pleasant companionships, its passing flirtations with schoppen-bearing Hebes, and nymphs of the coffee-garden, restaurant, or ninepin alley. One cannot say its love-affairs, because in the esteem of P. C. Breagh—though Passion might bloom red by the wayside at every mile of a man's journey—Love was a rare blossom found once in a lifetime, too often never found at all.
P. C. Breagh's idea of Love was that it should be spelt with a capital, and spoken of in whispers. Nor, let us hint, was the ideal Woman at whose feet, he promised himself, he would one day pour forth all the gold and jewels of his heart and intellect, a being to be lightly trifled with.
To commence with, she would have to be six feet high or thereabouts.... Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, of classical features, cream-and-rose complexion, powerful intellect and thews matching, the ideal woman of P. C. Breagh must have weighed about fourteen stone. He imagined her a kind of Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde—with a dash of Mary Queen of Scots, Kingsley's Hypatia, and a spice of Edith Dombey and the beautiful shrewish Roman Princess out of "The Cloister and the Hearth"—though these heroines were jetty-locked, and for this reason fell short of P. C. Breagh's ideal of female loveliness. Fair and colossal, he had seen her over and over again,—though a little too roseate and pulpy in texture to come up to his ideal—in the vast canvases of Kaulbach and in the overwhelming frescoes of the Bavarian Spiess. But he had never yet encountered her in the flesh. One day they would meet—and she would be scornful of the young, obscure, unknown man who looked at her—she felt it from the first, and that made her quite furious!—with the eye of a consciously superior being—a master in posse.
All the masculine world would bow down before the intellect combined with the beauty—of Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde—and so on, for he amalgamated new heroines with the others, in the course of his reading. But one man lived who would not bow down. She would taunt him with this stiff-necked pride of his, in the course of an interview on the terrace of a castle, whose moat he had swum and whose guarded ramparts he had scaled in order to be discovered, scorning her, and communing with the moon. And he would quell her tempestuous wrath, and silence her reproaches, by telling her that it was for her to pay homage and court smiles. Then she would summon her vassals and lovers, and half a dozen of them would set upon P. C. Breagh, who would strangle one with his naked hands, run another through with his own sword—and provide materials, broadly speaking, for half a dozen first-class funerals—before he leapt into the moat, carrying a rose that she had dropped between his teeth—-and "gained the distant bank in safety," or "dripping and bloody, emerged from the dark water, gripped an iron chain, eaten with the rust of centuries, and, painfully scaling the frowning masonry, disappeared into the..." etc.
Absurd, if you will, and bombastic and impossibly high-flown. Yet such boyish dreams keep the soul clean and the body from grosser stain. Walking with your head erect you may stub your toe, and come a cropper on the stones occasionally. But you pick yourself up again and proceed more warily—none the less rejoicing, seeing the splendor of the sunset, or braving the blaze of noonday, or drinking in the delicate spring-like hues of dawn....
One does not know how long P. C. Breagh might have remained upon the steps of St. Dunstan's, had not the hour of twelve sounded from the new clock—a youngster barely forty years old—that had replaced the gong-hammering wooden giants, now on view outside the Marquis of Hertford's villa in Regent's Park. A constable civilly asked him to move on. He got up, heavily, and mechanically felt for his watch that was in keeping of the landlord of the fourth-rate hostelry in the Euston Road. And it occurred to him—as a pin-prick among innumerable stiletto strokes—that the watch alone, being a heavy silver one attached to a slender gold snake-chain once the property of dead Milly—would have satisfied the man's claim, which, exorbitant as it was for the accommodation afforded, was considerably under three pounds. You are to understand that P. C. Breagh had been so certain of returning in a few hours, heavy with ready money, that he had treated the landlord's detention of his luggage as a joke.
The present situation was no joke. But Youth preserves above all the property of rising unbruised and elastic from a tumble, and of healing readily when it has sustained mental or physical wounds!
The blood in the veins of P. C. Breagh was mingled with the finer strain that came from the breed of Fermeroy. He had no idea of finding a craven's refuge in suicide. The single shilling remaining to him might purchase sufficient strychnine for a painful, unheroic exit, but P. C. Breagh was not disposed to invest his remaining capital in that unpleasant alkaloid. And neither did it occur to him then to test the depth and drowning-capacity of the muddy liquid running under any one of London's bridges, from Westminster to the Tower. For by the contradictory law of Nature, reversing scientific fact, a helpless weight that hung about his strong young neck kept his moral head above the turbid waters of Despondency.
He was not alone in the world. There was Monica. With the remembrance of that frail link, binding him to the rest of humanity, awakened in him the desire to see her. He turned his face Westward and stepped into the moving throng.