XVII
"My student-cap and schläger and the silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and my mother's Crucifix" found their places on the walls of the clean and comfortable room, and upon cheap stained-deal shelves the books of which Mr. Knewbit had spoken so respectfully were ranged, waiting to refresh their owner's memory whenever he chose to dip into them.
The sharkish manager of the "Royal Copenhagen Hotel" had been cowed into giving up the detained luggage by Mr. Knewbit's assurance that the story of his knavery was even then taking literary form under the skilled hand of a young and aspiring journalist of his (Knewbit's) own acquaintance, and might shortly appear in a newspaper to the confusion of the said manager, unless the property was surrendered upon payment of a corrected version of the bill.
These terms being hastily accepted, the Rules of Fair Play, according to Mr. Knewbit, demanded that the written record of the manager's iniquity should be consigned to Miss Ling's kitchen-fire.
"Not that it ain't a pity, for it ain't half bad for a beginner, though wanting in what I call snap and sparkle. But honor is honor—and if Mr. Ticking reads this knowing you're not going to use it—you'll find the story cropping up presently in the Camberwell Clarion or the Islington Excelsior.... Couldn't you do something else—just for a taster? Or haven't you something finished and put away and forgot?"
P. C. Breagh finally disinterred from the litter of manuscript notes at the bottom of a book-box, a scrawled description of a duel between two Freshmen at a well-known tavern and concert-room outside the walls of Schwürz-Brettingen. The humors of the battle, waged in a low-ceiled room in the upper story, crowded with chaffing, drinking, smoking students; the marvelous nature of the defensive armor worn by the inexperienced Füchse, the blows that fell flat, the final entanglement of their swords, and abandonment of these unfamiliar weapons in favor of fisticuffs, made Mr. Knewbit chuckle, and won the suffrages of Mr. Ticking; who said the fight and the bit of knock-about at the end was nearly good enough to be put on at the Halls.
Mr. Ticking was a journalist who possessed a knack of rhyme, penned comic ditties for Lion Comiques, when these gentlemen would sing them,—and lived in the hope of getting a Burlesque produced at a West-End Theater one day. He had educated himself because you couldn't get on if you were not educated. He could not have explained to you how the process had been carried out. By dexterously angling matter for short paragraphs from the swirl of happenings about him, he contrived—between the Camberwell Clarion, the Islington Excelsior, and the Afternoon, a late daily published in Fleet Street—to net some three pounds at the end of each week. Thirty shillings of this went to support an aged and invalid mother resident at Brixton; and if you had lauded Mr. Ticking as a heroic exemplar of filial virtues, he would have been excessively surprised. Though if you had told him that he wrote Burlesque better than Byron, he would have believed you implicitly.
Mr. Mounteney, Miss Ling's ladylike gentleman, proved to be a tall, stout, elderly, rather depressed individual, whose gold-rimmed glasses, attached to a broad black ribbon, sat a little crookedly upon a high, pink Roman nose. His light blue eyes were over-tried and rather watery, his hair had come off at the top, leaving his crown bald and shiny; his customary attire was a rather seedy black frock-coat, a drab vest with pearl buttons, and rather baggy brown trousers, and he wore turned-down collars and black ribbon neckties, and displayed onyx studs and links in a carefully preserved shirt. Pieces of paper protected his cuffs, invariably covered with memoranda written in violet-ink-pencil, referring to the most delicate and confidential affairs.
For Mr. Mounteney, under the nom de guerre of "Araminta," edited the "Happiness, Health, and Beauty" column of that fashionable feminine monthly, the Ladies' Mentor, into whose bureau, according to Mr. Mounteney, a vast correspondence,—penned by the wives and daughters of what Mr. Mounteney termed the Flower of Britain's Nobility and Gentry, as by their governesses and maids, and the wives and daughters of their butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers,—continually flowed. Signing themselves by fancy names, these confiding ones would put questions concerning matters of the toilette and so forth, the Answers to which interrogations, with the pseudonyms prefixed, were inserted month by month.
"Little Fairy.—A lady who weighs fourteen stone need not necessarily give up waltzing.
"Ruby.—We should recommend you to powder it.
"Ravenlocks.—To stand in the sun too soon after applying is prejudicial to a successful result.
"Peri.—Try peppermint."
Or the bosom of Araminta, guarded by the onyx studs and the black pince-nez ribbon, would be made, according to its owner, the receptacle of confidences calculated, if revealed, to convulse Society to its core. Thus burdened with secrets, it weighed heavily on Mr. Mounteney. When lachrymose with gin-and-water, to which cooling beverage he was rather addicted, he would with tears deplore the wreck of a once noble constitution, caused by reason of emotional strain. But he never gave any of his correspondents away. And being of a kindly disposition, he induced the Editor of the Ladies' Mentor to read and accept a brief, mildly-humorous article, descriptive of a German ladies' cake-and-coffee party; the details having been long ago previously supplied by a fellow-student at Schwärz-Brettingen, and worked up by P. C. Breagh.
Several other social paragraphs by the same hand found their way, thanks to Mr. Ticking's introduction, into the columns of the Islington Excelsior. In recognition, P. C. Breagh, producing pairs of basket-hilted swords, pads, cravats and goggles from one of the cases rescued from the hotel manager, instructed Mr. Ticking in the noble art of fence.
Their thrusts, lunges and stampings seriously threatening the stability of the third-floor landing, these combats were transferred to the back-yard in fine weather, and permitted in the kitchen when it was wet. And Mr. Ticking, though he never mastered the science of the schläger, inducted P. C. Breagh into the mysteries of boating and velocipeding,—having a cutter-rigged Thames sailing-boat in housing near Chelsea Bridge Stairs, and a huge-wheeled bone-shaker of the prevailing type stowed away in a decrepit conservatory adjoining the bathroom on Miss Ling's second floor.
Mr. Mounteney could not be prevailed upon to handle what he stigmatized as "deadly weapons," or to risk his person on the whirling wheel, while even fresh-water boating caused him to suffer from symptoms not distantly resembling those peculiar to the malady of the ocean. But, flabby as the ladylike gentleman appeared, he was a vigorous and tireless pedestrian, able to reduce Mr. Ticking, who was not unhandy in the usage of his feet, into a human pulp, and walk Mr. Knewbit, who had reason to pride himself upon his powers of locomotion, completely off his legs.
Expeditions were made to Addiscombe, in the green swelling Surrey country, where the once famous East India College was founded in 1812, and sold and dismantled in 1858 upon the transfer of the Company to the Crown. Of the 3,600 cadets who were trained here, the names of Lawrence, Napier, Durand, and Roberts are written upon the rolls in letters of undimming gold. Or to Sydenham with its acres of glittering crystal, its matchless fountains, and the view from the North Tower, extending over six counties and compassing the whole course of the Thames. Or to Ascot, with its stretches of sandy heathland, its noble racecourse and its woods of fir and birch, would the lady-like gentleman, accompanied by one or the other or both of his young friends, betake himself upon a highday or a holiday, when duchesses ceased from troubling and milliners were at rest. Or they would make for Hampton Court or Bushey Park, or the ancient manor of Cheshunt, or to Chigwell, immortalized by Dickens, where in the oak-wainscoted dining-room of the King's Head, such rare refreshment of cold beef and salad, apple pie and Stilton cheese could be had, and washed down by the soundest and brightest of ales; then even "Araminta" was tempted to forget the crushing responsibilities inseparable from the delicate position of adviser upon Health, Happiness, and Beauty to the feminine flower of England's nobility and gentry, and eat and drink like a navvy free from care.
And upon the return of the three wearied pedestrians from these excursions, there would be a cheery supper in Mr. Ticking's room, or in Mr. Mounteney's, or, best of all, in Miss Ling's clean and comfortable kitchen, with more beer and more tobacco,—though by reason of a digestion impaired by the continual wear and tear of his fair clients' confidences, or by excessive indulgence in tea, Mr. Mounteney restricted himself to the mildest of Turkish cigarettes.
Mr. Knewbit, who reveled in the growing popularity of his protégé, though he might in secret have shaken his head over the articles and paragraphs published in the Ladies' Mentor and the Islington Excelsior, learned very willingly to whistle a beer-waltz, knocking the bottom of his tumbler on the table in time to the tune; to say "Prosit" when he drank, and vocally unite in the final melodic outburst of: "O jerum, jerum, jerum, jerum, la la la!" In which historic and legendary burden Miss Ling would also join, and laugh until the tears ran down.
Of the junior-staff room of the Early Wire, a bare, gaunt place, lighted by three seldom-washed windows looking on a sooty yard, or by six flaring gas-jets by night or in foggy weather, Carolan was, by the interest of Mr. Ticking, one day made free. Names of power were cut with penknives on the ink-splashed deal tables, and the bottoms of the cane-seated chairs had given way under the weight of personalities now famous, men who were paid for a single article as much as Ticking earned in a year.
And thus P. C. Breagh joined the gallant company of the Free Lances of Fleet Street, and very soon had its offices and eating-houses, its haunts and traditions by heart. What demi-gods walked upon those historic flags and cobblestones! Russell, the pioneer and King of War Correspondents, and Simpson of Crimean fame, whose war-sketches for the Illustrated London News had set England ablaze in '54-5, and George Augustus Sala, and Macready—long since retired from the stage in 1870,—the veteran Charles Mathews and Byron of burlesque fame, and Bulwer Lytton, and Tennyson and Browning, and Planche and Edmund Yates, and genial, handsome Tom Robertson, who was to die, with his laurels green upon him, in another year. All these were pointed out to the young man, with certain places rendered for ever sacred by the footsteps of Dickens and Thackeray, and other of the Immortals who have passed beyond these voices into peace.
And into the world of Music and the Drama, our fortunate youth, by virtue of his initiation into the cheery brotherhood of Pressmen, was now admitted. There were free admissions for Popular Concerts where one could hear Professor Burnett and Signor Piatti play the piano and violoncello, and Santley most gloriously sing, and Sims Reeves deliver Beethoven's incomparable "Adelaida" with that splendor of voice and style that will never be surpassed. The Christy Minstrels of St. James's Hall beguiled our hero of a stealthy tear or two, and made him roar with laughter; and Blanchard's Drury Lane Pantomime of "Beauty and the Beast," with Kate Santley as Azalea, the Peri, and Miss Vokes as the lovely Zemira, was an eye-opener to a youth who had witnessed only provincial productions in his native country, and half a dozen performances of Schiller's "Robbers," "Don Carlos," and "The Stranger" of Kotzebu as given by a stock-company of Bavarian actors at the Theater of Schwärz-Brettingen.
Also our hero was privileged to witness the performances of Mrs. Wood as Miss Hardcastle in "She Stoops to Conquer," and afterwards in the extravaganza of "La Belle Sauvage," at the St. James's Theater, and J. S. Clarke, then drawing the town with "Amongst the Breakers" at the Strand.
At the Olympic, Patti Josephs was touching the hearts of the British Public as Little Em'ly, Rowe was tickling people to laughter with the unctuosities and impecuniosities of Micawber, a certain Mr. Henry Irving was holding his audiences spellbound with the sardonic slyness and hypocritical cunning displayed in his performance of Uriah Heep, and beautiful Mrs. Rousby was breaking hearts at the Queen's Theater. And evenings spent with these, or with Professor Pepper at the Polytechnic, or the German Reeds, who were playing Gilbert and Sullivan's little operas, and "Cox and Box" at the Gallery of Illustration,—were crowned by suppers in the grill-room of "The Albion" in Drury Lane, or at Evan's at the north-west corner of Covent Garden. And these were merry times and merry mimes, my masters, and we shall not look upon their like again.
And in the environment I have endeavored to depict, and with the associates I have tried to delineate, and with the pleasant hum and swirl of this new life setting the tune for his young pulses and mingling with his blood, Carolan's temperament recovered its elasticity, and his character developed apace. The magic gift of sympathy found in the gutter on that night of homeless, hungry wandering was his now, never to be lost or alienated. He had learned much when he had discovered how to fit himself inside the ginger kitten's ragged skin.
The bond of brotherhood, established between a shaggy-haired boy and all other created beings capable of joy and susceptible to suffering, would hold unbroken through all the years to come. We are aware that the confidence of Mr. Knewbit had been won that morning on Waterloo Bridge, and we have heard Miss Ling (not ordinarily given to broach the subject of the faithless underbutler) tell him in her simple way of the desertion that had left her kind heart empty and sore. We may know also that Mr. Ticking revealed, with the fact of the existence of the invalid mother resident at Brixton, the secret that he was beloved by a certain Annie, the orphan daughter of a deceased relative, who lived with the old lady as housekeeper and nurse. Annie, it seemed, had a little fortune of her own, and was so kind, so clever and so charming, that only the indiscreetly-evident anxiety of Ticking's mother to bring about a match, and the too plainly manifested willingness of Annie to accept the hand of Mr. Ticking, were it offered—held him back from becoming an engaged man. As it was, he spoke, in somber whispers, of an amatory entanglement with a splendid creature, not good as Annie was good, but possessing the beauty in whose baleful luster honest prettiness pales, and the charm whose sorcery kills the conscience, and wakens the scorching desires of man.
"Passion!—there's no going against that, you know!" he would say, wagging his head dismally, "and if ever you see Leah, you'll understand."
But when P. C. Breagh did see Leah, who presided over the gaudy necktie and imitation gold cuff-link department at an East Strand hosier's, he failed to understand at all. She had big burnt-out dusky-brown eyes and loops of coarse black hair, and a big bust and a tiny waist with a gilt dog-collar belt about it. Ticking had paid for the belt when he had taken her to the Crystal Palace, and she had admired the trinket on one of the fancy stalls in the French Court next the Great Concert Hall. And there had been a display of fireworks on the Terrace, and in the dark interval between two set-pieces there had been a mutual declaration; and the moth Ticking had singed his wings in the flame of illicit passion, and would return to flutter about the candle, he supposed, until he met his doom.
Mr. Mounteney spoke of Passion as well as Mr. Ticking, but in the exhausted accents of a world-weary cynic who had drunk of the cup to satiety. He knew so much of women, thanks to "Araminta," that he had nothing more to learn. Yet when a pert and pretty waitress, who served the table at which he commonly lunched at a Fleet Street chop-house, proved ungrateful after six months of extra tips, trips to Kew and Rosherville Gardens and innumerable theater tickets, and told Mr. Mounteney in the plainest terms that he was "too bow-windowy in figure for a beau," and that she preferred young swells on the Stock Exchange to elderly newspaper gents, Mounteney—the expressed preference having been illustrated by demonstration,—was tragically comic in his manifestations of wounded vanity, quite funnily touching in his display of jealousy and despair. For a whole week following the betrayal his pale blue eyes were suffused with tears, his Roman nose was red, and his light hair stood up on end, where his despairing fingers had rumpled it. His black ribbon necktie straggled untied over a limp shirt-front, the violet-ink-pencil memoranda on his paper cuffs had merged into blotches and blurs.
Then suddenly his dismal countenance recovered its mild placidity, his necktie was tied, his hair lay once more in smoothly brushed streaks across his shining crown. His nose paled, his eyes reverted to their purely normal wateriness. It seemed that nestling amid the grasses at the feet of one who had plucked the fairest flowers that bloom in the garden of Passion and sickened of their cloying perfume and dazzling hues, the disillusioned Mounteney had discovered a simple violet, and that the humble sweetness and modest beauty of this shrinking blossom had refreshed his jaded senses and solaced his wearied mind.
In terms less obscure, Mr. Ticking explained that the humble violet was a certain Miss Rooper, who for a monthly salary attended at the office of the Ladies' Mentor thrice a week to assist in the Herculean task of opening the letters addressed to "Araminta"—take down in shorthand her representative's replies to the interrogations therein contained—make notes of queries impossible to answer on the spot, and ferret out the answers by application at such leading centers of information as the Reading-room of the British Museum, Heralds' College, the Zoological Gardens, the Doctors' Commons Will Office, Marshall and Snelgrove's, Whiteley's, Parkins and Gotto's, Twinings', the Burlington Arcade, Scotland Yard, and the Coöperative Stores. Ticking added that for years Miss Rooper had brought her luncheon-sandwiches to the office in a velvet reticule, and consumed them under cover of the lid of her desk, but that now, the lady being regularly engaged to Mr. Mounteney, he supposed the couple would go out to "Araminta's" usual ordinary arm-in-arm. It would be a jolly lark, he added, if Mounteney took his betrothed to his customary table, as Flossie had already been thrown over by the young jobber from Capel Court.
And when P. C. Breagh saw Flossie, who owned a turned-up nose (I quote Mr. Ticking) that you might have hung your hat on, and when he was introduced to Miss Rooper, who was on the shady side of thirty-five and had a long sagacious equine face, and boasted a fringe and chignon and waterfall of black hair as coarse as the mane of a Shetland pony, and was bridled with bands of red velvet, as the pony might have been,—and caparisoned with leather belts and strappings garnished with steel rivets, and tossed her head when she was coquettish, and whinnied when she laughed, and looked less like a modest violet than anything else you could have imagined, he wondered very much. For Mr. Mounteney had spoken of Passion in connection with the faithless Flossie, and by the latest bulletins his sentiment for Miss Rooper had developed into Passion of the strictly honorable kind.
Could the passion on which Shakespeare had strung the pearls and rubies of Romeo and Juliet, and to which the lyre of Keats throbbed out the deathless music of "Endymion" have anything in common with the loves of Ticking and Leah, or the emotion wakened in the bosom of Mr. Mounteney by Flossie and Miss Rooper?
Could the emotion of which Carolan himself was conscious, the sudden, fierce, stinging temptation born of the bold glance of a pair of painted eyes, ogling and laughing from under a clipped fringe and a tilted hat, partake of the nature, be worthy of the designation? For Sin beckoned sometimes, and the boy would tug at his chain, forged of links of instilled religion and honor, instinctive cleanliness and a sensitive, secret shrinking from the purchase of something that was never meant to be bartered or sold.
But there were times when, sitting at the rickety but useful and capacious old davenport in the room from tenancy of which Miss Morency had been ejected, the pen would hang idle between the fingers of P. C. Breagh, and the article commissioned by the benevolent editor of the Camberwell Clarion or the Islington Excelsior, or the more ambitious magazine-story that was being written as a bait to catch a literary reputation,—and would return as surely as the swallow of the previous summer, from the editorial offices of Blackwood's, or the Cornhill, or even Tinsley's—would hang fire.
With his elbows on the blotting-pad, exposing to view the shiny places on the right-hand cuff of the old serge jacket, and his eyes vaguely staring at the strip of London sky seen above the chimney-pots of Bernard Street, P. C. Breagh would fall into a brown study, a dreamy reverie of the kind to which hopeful Youth is prone.
The outer angles of the eyebrows would lift, giving an eager, wistful look to the gray eyes that had specks of brown and golden dust in them, the nostrils of the short, determined nose would expand as though in imagination they were inhaling some rare, strange, delicate fragrance,—the upper lip would lift at the corners, showing the canines of the upper jaw—a mouth of this kind can be fierce, and yet you have an example of it in the Laughing Faun.
A delicate, rushing sweetness would envelop, enter and possess him, body and brain and mind and soul, and his heart would beat fiercely for a minute or so, and then not seem to beat at all; and he would scarcely be able to breathe for the strange new joy, and the subtle, mysterious sense of being drawn to and mingled with the being of another, some one wholly and unutterably beloved and dear....
A touch, light as a flower, would visit his forehead, and a voice, small and silvery-clear, and with a liquid tremble in it that might have been mirth or shyness, would sound in his ears again. He would sigh and lean back, shutting his eyes, and feel the slight yet firm support of the delicate limbs and slender body, and the small soft hand would stir and flutter in his palm like a captured bird, and he would find himself painting in the choicest colors of his mental palette upon the background of London sky or neutral-tinted wall-paper—a face that was not in the least like Krimhilde-Brünhilde's. And then he would frown, and shake himself as a red setter might have done, plunging back out of dripping sedges at the sound of its master's whistle, and hurl himself savagely upon the pile of blank pages before him, and never pause again until the daily task was done. Or—supposing this retrospective mood to have seized him at the ending of his stint of labor, he would set his teeth, summon up the image of his colossal beloved, and savagely add to her inches all that she had lost since his meeting with the frozen Infanta at the Convent, Kensington Square. For the truth must be told, and the painful fact faced,—that since that day the heroic Ideal of P. C. Breagh had been steadily shrinking; and the hour was coming when her golden tresses were to darken to the black-brown hue of rain-soaked oak leaves in Winter,—when her roseate cheeks were to blanch to the hue of old ivory, when her towering stature and robust limbs were to dwindle to the slender shape and delicate extremities of an elfin maiden's, and her late worshiper was shamelessly to dote upon the change.
But had this been foretold to P. C. Breagh, he would have scouted the prophet as an impostor, and laughed the prophecy to scorn. Came a day, when, fastidiously groomed, and dressed in well-cut, carefully chosen clothes, he called upon Monica at the Convent, this time to apprize her of the loss of his inheritance, and to assure her of his present well-being, despite the change in his prospects brought about by the defalcations of Mustey and Son.
He had not intended to ask after the Infanta; the query slipped out quite accidentally. But when Monica returned that by the latest advice received from France, the health of Mademoiselle Bayard might be pronounced excellent, the querist was conscious of a tightness within his collar, and a sudden rush of blood reddened him to the hair as his sister added:
"She may be 'Madame' and not 'Mademoiselle' to-day, since what date is uncertain. For her marriage was to take place almost instantly on her return to Paris, she told us. Her father—he is Colonel of the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard—had set his heart on this—she worships him—she would consent to any sacrifice—would let herself be cut to pieces if he but wished it. Dear Juliette!"
P. C. Breagh got out, with difficulty, "Then—but—look here, doesn't she love the fellow?"
The word last but three got out with difficulty. His throat was hurt by its passage. He gulped as he stared at Monica, moistening his dry lips.
"The fellow." Her eyes widened. "You don't call the Colonel—that?..."
"Of course not. I referred to the young lady's husband. Actual or yet expectant." He boggled horribly in the attempt to seem natural and at ease. "Why should it be a sacrifice to obey her father—what has the—the affair got in common with cutting to pieces if she—if she——"
He stuck there. Monica, of all Juliette's friends alone held worthy to share the aching secret, had not been told, for her own peace of mind. Yet, loving much, she had seen much. Now she sat silent. But a little line of distress came between her placid eyebrows, and tears were gathering behind the beautiful, tender eyes, in readiness to fall when next they might unseen. Carolan went on, not looking at her:
"She said he was a noble gentleman,—master of the sword, and brave as a lion. That doesn't suggest that she—would think herself sacrificed in marrying him?"
A sigh heaved Monica's breast and exhaled unnoticed. He mumbled with a hangdog grace:
"Could you, when you happen to write, just give her a message? Don't ask what it means—it has to do with something we spoke of here the other day when you were out of the room."
His eyes sought one particular square in the center of the beeswaxed parquet, where he had sat leaning against the Infanta's knees.
"Tell her that the man—a fellow-student of mine at Schwärz-Brettingen—realized not long after the—the girl—she will remember the girl's name!—after the girl had made the offer—she will not have forgotten what that was!—from how kind and generous a heart it came. And she will believe—she must believe!—that he has loathed himself heartily for the brutal way in which he answered her. And he entreats her to forgive, and he thanks her with all——"
Something splashed upon the clenched hand with which he had unconsciously emphasized his utterance. He wiped off the drop furtively, and said, still not looking at Monica, but scowling at that particular square in the middle of the parquet:
"With all his heart! You won't forget?"
He made her promise it, and left her wondering.