THE
MAN OF IRON

RICHARD DEHAN

AUTHOR OF
BETWEEN TWO THIEVES, ONE BRAVER THING,
(THE DOP DOCTOR), ETC.

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1915, by
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

February, 1915>

PREFACE

For the second time, since this book's beginning, the rose of July had flamed into splendid bloom. I drew breath, for my task approached its ending, and looked up from the yellowed newspaper records of a great War waged forty-four years ago.

Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and portents, or the web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all but privileged eyes.... Now I saw, looming on the eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a man's clenched fist in a gauntleted glove of mail.

For days previously the frames of the open windows that look across the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in answer to the incessant thud-thudding of big naval guns at sea. One opal dawn showed the grim shapes of super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and a school of submarines. Night fell, and sea, land, and sky alternately whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the searchlights. Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty Secret Code. Gulls cradled on the glassy waters of the Channel must have been roused by outbursts of full-throated British cheering, and the crash of the Fleet bands striking into the National Anthem, as the sealed orders of the Supreme Admiral were signalled from the Flagship commanding the Southern Fleet. No sound reached us ashore but the hush of the waves, the whisper of the night-wind, and the plaintive ululation of the mousing owls on Muttersmoor. Yet what we saw that night was the awakening of Great Britain to the knowledge that her greatness is not past and gone.

Since then, the menacing cloud in the east has assumed solidity. The mailed fist has fallen, imprinting Ruin on the soil of a neutral country, demolishing the matchless heirlooms of Art and the priceless treasures of Literature, bringing down in gray fragments the glories of Gothic architecture, everywhere destroying the Temple of God and shattering the House of Life. The galleries and cabinets of noble and burgher, the treasure-houses of a nation are plundered.

We have lived to see the War of Nations. We are in it: fighting as our Allies of Belgium, France, and Russia are fighting; for racial name, national existence, social independence, and freedom of bodies and souls. And this being so, I see no cause to blot a line that I have written. For the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1914. The New Spirit of Teutonism had not shown itself in those dead days I have tried to vivify.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was waged sternly and mercilessly, but not in defiance of the Rules that govern the Great Game. Treaties were held as something more sacred than scraps of paper. Blood was lavishly poured out, gold relentlessly wrung from the coffers of a vanquished and impoverished State. Things were done—as in the instances of Bazeilles and Châteaudun that made the world shudder, but not with the sickness of mortal loathing. Kings and nobles made War like noblemen and Kings.

Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labor reared up stone by stone the German Empire was, unless biographers have lied, haunted and obsessed in his declining days by remorse of conscience and terrors of the soul. "But for me," he is reported to have said, "three great wars would not have been made, nor would eight hundred thousand of my fellow men have died by violence. Now, for all that I have to answer before Almighty God!" ... Could the relentless exponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron have foreseen the imminent, approaching disintegration of his colossal life-work, under the hands of his successors—might he have known what Dead Sea fruit of ashes and bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of Germany, was fated to bring forth—he would have drunk ere death of the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment; he would have seen in the shape of his pupil the grotesque, distorted image of himself.

RICHARD DEHAN.

SOUTH DEVON, November, 1914.

THE MAN OF IRON

I

When Patrick Carolan Breagh attained the age of six years, the boy being tall enough to view his own topknot of scarlet curls and freckled snub nose in the big shining mirror of his stepmother's toilet-table, without standing on the tin bonnet-box that was kept under the chintz cover, or climbing on a chair,—he was fated to acquire, during one brief half-hour's concealment under a Pembroke table, more knowledge of Life, Death, and the value of Money, than would otherwise have come to him in the course of half a dozen more years.

Upon this unforgetable third of January, his plaid frock had been taken off and, to his infinite delight, replaced by a little pair of blue cloth breeches and a roundabout jacket. Amateurish as to cut, the nether garments displaying so little difference fore and aft that it did not matter in the least which way you faced when you stepped into them, they were yet splendid,—not only in Carolan's eyes. Alan, his junior by three years, bellowed with envy on beholding them; and four-year-old Monica sucked her finger and stared with all her might.

It was plain to Carolan that, having once assumed the manly garments, no boy could be expected to put on those hateful petticoats again. In vain Nurse Povah,—who had been Carolan's foster-mother,—and Miss Josey, the governess, explained to him that the breeches were not completed, and directed his eyes to the mute evidence of pins, chalk-marks, and yellow basting-threads. Their arguments were vain, their entreaties addressed to deaf ears. An attempt to remove the cause of contention by force resulted in Nurse's being butted, though not hard! and Miss Josey kicked with viciousness. In the confusion that ensued, the rebel effected an escape from the scene of combat. And the door of the sitting-room being open, Carolan trotted across the Government cocoanut matting of the landing with the intention of confessing his own misdeeds, since Miss Josey was quite certain to report him at headquarters, had not this often-tested method of blunting the edge of retributory justice failed, through his own fault.

For upon entering the large, shabbily furnished room, situated on the second floor of a gaunt, gray stone building known as Block D, Married Officers' Quarters—the room that served Captain Breagh and his second wife as sitting-room, dining-room, smoking-room and boudoir—Carolan became aware that his stepmother, quite unconscious of his intrusion, was dusting the china vases on the mantel-shelf, and was instantly possessed by the conviction that it would be huge fun to hide under the large round table that occupied the middle of the worn Brussels carpet, and bounce out upon the poor lady when she turned, making her say "Owh!"

So the boy noiselessly dived under the deep, hanging, silk-fringed border of the Indian shawl that covered the circular Pembroke table, upon which were ranged, about a central basket of wax fruit and flowers, gilt frames with spotty daguerrotypes, albums of scraps, Books of Beauty containing the loveliest specimens of Early Victorian female aristocracy, and Garlands of Poetry reeking with the sentimental effusions of Eliza Cook and L.E.L., interspersed with certain card-cases and paper-knives of Indian carved ivory and sandal-wood, and other trifles of brass and filigree ware.

The big, shabbily furnished second-floor room had three windows looking out upon the graveled expanse of the Parade-ground, and commanding a view of the flower-bedded patch of sacred green turf, inclosed by posts and chains, that graced the front of the pillared, pedimented, and porticoed building that housed the Officers' Mess. And when the regiment got the route for another garrison town, nearly everything the room contained—from the Pembroke center-table and chintz-covered sofa, to the secrétaire at which Captain Breagh penned his letters, the big leather-covered arm-chair in which he sat, and the Bengal tiger-skin hearthrug,—would be packed,—with the picture of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Vimiera, and the chimney-glass over which it always hung—into wooden cases, with the before-mentioned chimney-glass, curtains and carpets, beds, baths, uniform-cases and a great number of other things; and then after a period of rumbling confusion there would be a new sitting-room looking on another barrack-square, other bedrooms and a fresh nursery,—and Carolan would forget the old ones in something under a week. As a matter of fact, the regiment had been shifted four times since its return from India, when Carolan was little more than a baby, and Monica and Alan and Baba were nowhere at all.

Now either Mrs. Breagh occupied an unconscionable time in dusting the vases and making up the fire for her Captain, who by reason of long service with the regiment in the East was susceptible to chill; or Carolan, with the mental instability shared by the child and the savage, lost interest in his new project and abandoned it. He was squatting silently in his hiding-place when Miss Josey entered; he heard her complaint, noted down two spiteful exaggerations and one malicious falsehood, and witnessed the exhibition of a bulgy ankle in a badly-gartered white cotton stocking surmounting an elastic-sided cloth boot. When the governess withdrew, consoled by Mrs. Breagh's sympathy, Nurse Povah was summoned from the other side of the landing by a tinkle of the hand-bell, and bore stout witness on the culprit's side.

"Did ye see her leg, I'd make so bould as ask, or did ye take her worrud for ut? And—av there was anythin' to show barrin' a flaybite, is ut natheral a boy wud parrut wid his furrst breches widout a kick? Sure, they're the apple av his eye, and the joy av his harrut! And her—wid her talk av bendin' his will and breakin' his temper! is ut like ye wud lay a finger on the Captain's eldest son, to plaze the likes of her?"

"The Captain has said himself—over and over—that a sound thrashing would be a capital thing for Carry," Mrs. Breagh returned.

"He praiches—ay, bedad!—but does he ever practuss?" demanded Nurse, smoothing her apron with stout, matronly hands, and getting very red in the cheeks. "Niver fear but he'd be too wise to bring a curse upon himself by ill-thrating a motherless child!"

"Motherless!" What did the word mean? Carolan wondered, recalling how Nurse would describe some particularly down-hearted person as being as long in the jaw as a motherless calf. And now Mrs. Breagh was saying, in the kind of voice some good people use for the purpose of Scriptural quotation, and which is not in the least like their accents of every day...

"Solomon said, 'He that spareth the rod'—but you Catholics never seem to read the Bible. And I always treat Carolan as if he were my own child—and you know I do! 'Ssh! Here comes the Captain—and I think I hear Baba crying...."

And Nurse, with the honors of war, retired to the nursery on the other side of the landing, as Captain Breagh's hasty footsteps and the jingle of his scabbard were heard on the stone stair. A minute later he entered the room. But during the minute's interval Carolan had had time to ponder, mentally digest and form a conclusion from what he had just heard.

It had never previously occurred to him that the stout, dark, beady-eyed, brightly dressed lady whom he had been taught to call Mamma was not really his mother, but he knew it now. It was revealed to him in one lightning-flash of comprehension that this was the reason why her hands felt so like hands of wood whenever they touched him, and why her kiss,—religiously administered night and morning—was a thing he would much sooner have gone without. He knew,—and something inside him was glad to know—that it was not wicked of him not to love her as he loved Nurse, or Monica, or Ponto the brown retriever. And then his heart dropped like a leaden plummet to the pit of his infant stomach. This was to be a day of discoveries. He had discovered that by kicking out lustily it had been possible to resist the forcible removal of his new breeches. He had discovered that "Mamma" was not his real, real mother! Would Daddy turn out to be Monica's and Alan's and Baba's Daddy, and not Carolan's, after all?

A sob rose in his throat, and his hot, dry eyes began to smart and water. But the manly trampling and clanking came nearer. The door opened—his father was in the room. He could only see his shiny Wellington boots, and the bottoms of the red-striped dark blue breeches that were strapped over them. But familiar knowledge built from the boots the handsome manly figure in the light brick-red coat with the Royal blue facings, the China and Punjab war-medals, the crimson sash and the other martial accouterments topped by the stiff leather stock, and the head whose wealth of jet-black curls and luxuriant bushy whiskers might have been the glory of a fashionable hairdresser's window; in combination with the well-cut features, light blue eyes, and fine rosy complexion, as yet scarcely deteriorated by Mess port, whisky punch, and late hours.

Captain Breagh kissed Mrs. Breagh with a hearty smack that made Carolan start in his hiding-place, and said the wind was enough to cut you in two, and that the fire looked tempting; as he laid down his pipeclayed gloves and dress-schako with the gilt grenade and white ball-tuft on the aged and dilapidated sideboard, and permitted his lady to relieve him of his sword. Then he rubbed his hands and thrust them to the blaze enjoyingly, and threw himself into the creaking leathern arm-chair. This, it suddenly occurred to Carolan, would be a favorable moment for emerging from concealment. He had got on all-fours, ready to appear in the character of a bear or tiger, when Mrs. Breagh stopped him by beginning to tell tales. The child was beyond control, she declared—there was no end to his naughtiness. For the sake of his immortal soul, something would have to be done....

"What's he been doing? For my own part,—I wouldn't give a brass farthing for a pup that wouldn't bite, or a boy that wouldn't show fight when he was put to it!" The arm-chair creaked suggestively as the Captain stretched out his legs, and the firelight danced in the polish of his boots, hardly dimmed by the dry gravel of the Parade-ground. "And it's in the blood, that high spirit. Don't suppose I'm bragging that the Breaghs are any great shakes in the way of family!—though the name's as decent a one as you'll meet in a long day's march. But Carolan's a Fermeroy on the mother's side—and they're a hot-headed, high-handed breed," the Captain added, taking the newspaper from the Pembroke table, "and have been ever since the year One—if you take the trouble to look 'em up in Irish History. Not that I've ever read any, but my poor Milly used to say——"

His wife's eyes snapped with irrepressible jealousy at the reference to her predecessor.

"And everything that came from her you took for Gospel, I suppose?"

"Pretty near!" said Captain Breagh, and began to unfold his newspaper.

"I get little enough time for reading things that are useful," said Mrs. Breagh, as the Captain dipped into the crackling sheets. "It was my bounden duty to speak, and I've done it! And if you think you are doing your duty by the child—let alone his mother——"

She broke off, for the Captain bounced in his chair, and dashed down the newspaper.

"Haven't I told you I won't have poor Milly's name dragged into these discussions! She's dead!—and so let her be!"

If a lady can be said to snort, Mrs. Breagh gave utterance to a sound of that nature.

"I'm willing, Alexander, I'm sure! But all things considered, I must say I think it's a pity her ladyship died and left you a widower!"

"And you're right there, begad you are! And how many times have I told you she was merely an Honorable, and not her ladyship!" He left the newspaper sprawling on the hearthrug, and mechanically reaching down his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the corner of the mantelshelf, proceeded to fill the well-browned meerschaum, and when his wife lighted a spill and held it to him as an olive-branch, he thanked her in an absent way. What did the Captain see as he pulled at the gnawed, amber mouthpiece and stared into the red-hot heart of the fire, communing with that other self that dwells within every man?

II

I think he saw young Alex Breagh, a junior Lieutenant of the Grenadier company of the Royal Ennis Regiment of Infantry, winning his spurs of manhood under Gough and Hardinge and Gilbert on the plain beside the Sutlej, where stands Ferozshahr.

"For I don't pretend to be a hero or anything of that sort, but I've never shirked my share of fighting," said the silent voice within him, and the Captain exhaled a spirt of smoke and mumbled: "I believe you!" And the other Breagh went on:

"Fair play and no favor won us our honors, mind you! though the chance didn't come until later on. True, we helped Sir Harry Smith to pound the Sikhs at Ferozshahr and at Aliwal, when the cavalry of his Right had driven the Khâlsas back across the Red Ford. Waiting for the elephants with the heavy siege-guns and the ammunition and stores to come up from Delhi, took a hell of a time. Seven long weeks of broiling by day and freezing o' nights, while Tij Sinh and his thirty-five thousand Khâlsas entrenched themselves, mounted their heavy artillery—made their bridge of boats, and encamped their cavalry up the river. But the day came—our day!—and I don't forget that foggy tenth of February while I'm breathing."

Captain Breagh sucked at his pipe and reflectively pulled a whisker. And the silent voice went on:

"We were with the Left Division under General Dick, and led the assault, while Gilbert and Smith feigned to attack on the enemy's left and center. And in that charge,—when the General got his death-wound from a swivel-ball,—I was the second red-coat to cross the ditch, and scramble over the big mud rampart, and saber a Sikh gunner with his linstock in his hand!..."

Mrs. Breagh, chagrined at remaining so long the object of her husband's inattention, picked up his fallen newspaper and almost timidly laid it on his knee. And the child under the table kept as quiet as a mouse, almost...

"Thank ye, my dear!" said the Captain, while the other Breagh went on:

"And when the Treaty was signed and the rumpus all over—for the time!—because Dalhousie's bungling brought the hornets about our ears again!—we marched from Lahore to Calcutta with Britain's victorious army—barring the force we'd left with Lawrence at Mian Mir."

The silence continuing, Mrs. Breagh drew her work-table toward her, and began to look over a basket of little toeless and heel-less stockings. As she did this she sighed. The Captain smoked thoughtfully. And the inward voice went on:

"The Governor-General and his staff rode with Sir Harry Smith and the Advance—and between the Cavalry Brigade that came after 'em—for Sir Harry swore he'd be damned but since we'd seen the hottest of the fighting, we should have the post of honor!—between the Cavalry and Ours came the spoils of war, drawn by the Government elephants—two hundred and fifty Sikh guns we'd taken at Sobraon. Hah!"

The Captain's eyes were fixed on the fire. He smoked in quick, short puffs.

"Standards waving, bands blowing their heads off, and a bit o' loot in most men's knapsacks. Glory for the dead, and praise and promotion for the living—begad! it was worth while—just then!—to be a British soldier! And I'd been wounded just enough to look interesting, and got a Special Mention in Despatches—and the women were pulling caps for me,—devil a lie in that! And I danced with Milly at the Welcome Back Ball at Government House, in March, 1846. And whether it was Fate—or that way she had of looking up under her eyelashes, and showing a laughing mouth full of tiny pearly-white teeth over the top of her fan, I've never been quite clear. But even before the steward introduced Lieutenant Breagh to the Hon. Millicent Fermeroy, I'd fallen head over ears in love with Milly, and she was as mad for me!"

Still silence reigned in the room, only broken by the cinders falling on the hearth, and the breathing of three people. Mrs. Breagh still bent over her basket of little worn socks, of which those in most crying need of darning belonged to Carolan. Her lips were tightly closed, but as the man within her husband talked to the man, the woman within the woman talked to his wife.

"I wonder whether he knows I know he's thinking of her again? I wonder whether she'd have liked to sit and toil and moil for a child of mine, and know that the other woman held the first place in his heart? Ah, dear me!"

She glanced at her husband. He did not see her. He was living in the Past.

"Nobody noticed how often we danced together.... It had gone pretty far with us before Her Ladyship scented what was in the wind, and sent an aide-de-camp to remind Miss Fermeroy that the doctor had set down his foot against her overheating herself with waltzing,—and I found myself staring after her with her bouquet in my hand.... And I took it home to quarters—and I've got it now, stowed away with her letters and a lot of other things in a tin uniform-case.... Fanny hasn't an idea of that!"

The smoke-puffs came more slowly, and the darning-needle now worked busily. The voice of a sergeant who was drilling a squad of recruits came in gruff barks from the Parade.

"The Fermeroys were great folks.... Colonel Lord Augustus Fermeroy—Milly's uncle, was a tremendous Light Cavalry swell on the Commander-in-Chief's Staff. Of course, I knew that he would never hear of an engagement between his brother's orphan daughter—(to do the old man justice, he loved her as his own!)—and a Lieutenant of a marching regiment of infantry who'd nothing but his pay. So—as Milly and me had made up our minds we couldn't live without each other,—we were married secretly—first at a Protestant Mission Church, and then by a French Franciscan padre—and he made bones about splicing us—because I wasn't a Catholic,—and if I hadn't told a white lie or two about my intention of turning Papist, I don't believe he'd have tied the knot. But all's fair in love!—and we were in love with a vengeance. I suppose I was a selfish beggar to coax Milly into deceiving her people, but——"

A long ray of chilly January sunshine, full of dancing dust-motes, came in at the window. Mrs. Breagh sneezed as it fell across her face.

"A time came when I knew I had been as selfish as she never would have called me. People had to be told!—so we enlightened 'em by shooting the moon. The condition of my war-chest wasn't over and above flourishing, but I got a month's leave for the Mofussil and secured a twenty-rupee furnished bungalow at Titteghur—and next morning—before the hue and cry had well begun, Lady Augustus got a chit from Milly by harkára—I remember every word of it. 'Dearest Aunt,—I hope you have not been alarmed, supposing me to have been murdered or carried off by wicked persons. I am safe and happy with my own dear husband, from whom, I shall never be parted now.'"

The pipe was nearly smoked out, but the Captain did not appear aware of that.

"'Never be parted,' and before three months were over our heads..."

Clash! Mrs. Breagh had let her scissors fall. Her husband made a long arm, picked them up, and gave them back to her.

"Thank you, Alex, love!" said Mrs. Breagh effusively. But he went on sucking at the now empty pipe, and staring at the waning fire. And the silent voice went on:

"The Fermeroys were furious. But there was no use in making a fuss and a scandal, and I must say they took the blow awfully well. Good haters both—declared that under no conceivable circumstances would they ever admit within their doors an officer who had acted so dishonorably, but they'd receive Milly whenever she liked to come. Nor would they—though her uncle was her guardian and trustee—deprive her of her fortune—seven thousand pounds in East India Stock, Home Rails, and Government Three Per Cents. But they tied it up tight for the benefit of the child that was coming, and others that might come—in what they called a Post-Matrimonial Settlement, and I was agreeable; though, mind you!—I had the law on my side if I'd chosen to make a fuss. And I was too much in love to bother over money—or to care a cowrie about being cut by the Fermeroys' friends."

Nothing but gray ashes remained in the pipe-bowl.

"I don't know whether it wasn't to get me out of the way that the regiment was ordered to Sikandarabad. There'd been a Sepoy rising at Haidarabad, six miles north of the Subsidiary Force's cantonments—and as the big Mussulman city was swarming with all the blackguards and budmashes in the Dekkan—and bazar-gup had it that another Rohilla riot was threatening—Ours got the route to go. And Milly—God bless her! wouldn't hear of being left behind. And we steamed down coast to Masulipatam, and marched the two hundred miles; and though it was early in January, the roads were confoundedly squashy and the heat was like a vapor-bath—there being no winter to speak of in the South."

"He's in a regular brown study," said her unseen gossip and confidante to the Captain's second wife. "Perhaps his tailor has been dunning him, or he's been losing at cards. When men are out of spirits, money's generally at the bottom of it! Better get him to tell what's the matter by-and-by—not now!"

"And the long road ran like a brown snake between mangrove-swamps and paddy-fields, where it wasn't coffee-plantations and cotton-ground. And there were black-buck and partridge for the shooting when you could get away from the columns; and duck and snipe when we were hung up at the river-fords waiting for the elephants that were to take over the baggage and guns."

The shouts of the drill-sergeant came more faintly from the Parade-ground. The Captain seemed to doze as he sucked at the empty pipe, but Memory's voice went on:

"The women and children of the rank and file were carried on the baggage-wagons, and the officers' wives traveled by bullock-tonga or palki-dak, under an escort of good-conduct men of the Subsidiary Force the Brigadier had sent down from cantonments. Milly laughed at their oilskin-covered wickerwork chimney-pot hats and little old red coatees, and black unmentionables and bare sandaled feet. But they couldn't keep the beggars of bearers from turning out of the road and taking short-cuts through jungle-paths. Then they'd dump the palkis down in the shade, and light a fire of sticks, and squat round and smoke their hubble-bubbles or chew betel.... And Milly's blackguards had gone out of sight behind some trees, and she was scared at finding herself alone and unprotected. And she tried to be calm and plucky, thinking of—what she and me were looking for.... But something trotted out of a cane-brake and snuffed at the palki curtains—and she went off in a dead faint and small blame to her! For there were the prints of a full-grown tiger's pugs in the soft ground round the palanquin—and the place where his hind-claws had torn up the grass when he bounded off...."

The forgotten pipe was upside down in the smoker's mouth now. A pinch of ashes had fallen upon the breast of the unhooked scarlet coat.

"When I came up I made those coolie-brutes eat plenty stick. But Milly—poor girl! had got her death-blow. And the boy was born that night under canvas by the roadside. An old Murderer—Surgeon-Major Murdoch of Ours—did all man could do to save her. But—just at dawn—with the eastern sky all lemon-yellow and pink and madder behind a mango-tope, with a Hindu temple near it, and a clump of mud huts—and some old saint's shrine under a sacred peepul-tree—the boy was born and the mother went out like a blown waxlight. Oh, my darling! ... And the Catholic chaplain—who'd been fetched to give Milly the Last Sacraments—baptized the boy, for Milly had made me swear all the children should be of her faith. And the boy would have died, too, but that my company Sergeant's wife—she that is nurse to my youngest child to-day—happened to be able and willing to suckle him. And we struck camp and set out on the last march, carrying a corpse and a new-born baby. And that night we buried my girl by torchlight in the cemetery belonging to the European infantry-barracks. And it's six years ago to-day—and here I am married to another woman! Are you happy with her, Alex Breagh? She's as unlike the other as chalk's different from cheese—and poor Milly 'ud have called her a vulgar person! I know she would! And yet—Milly never gave me a decent meal, and the servants did as they liked! and Fanny's a rare housekeeper. I've been more comfortable since I married her than I ever was in my life before. Yes, I'm a happy man!..."

He told himself this continually. And yet the knowledge of material comfort could not long silence the crying of his heart.

He took the smoked-out pipe from his mouth, and turned to look at the plump, high-colored, personable woman who was sitting darning his children's stockings with his wedding-ring shining on her finger, and the present had its value for him, and he ceased to company with the dead. His regard, at first chill and gloomy, warmed: his good-humored smile curled his full red lips again....

"Why, how you look, love!" said Mrs. Breagh, and she rose and came to his side. Then she sat on his knee and smoothed his hair from his forehead. And the Captain returned her kiss, and told himself that true wisdom lay in making the best of one's luck generally, and being grateful for whatever good the gods chose to grant.

"No use crying over spilt milk! ... Beg pardon, my dear!—but what were you asking me?"

"I was asking—supposing Carolan had never been born—or had died—whether you would have come into his mother's money?"

"Would I have inherited Milly's seven thousand pounds? Not a halfpenny of it, my dear! In the event of her decease without issue it would have gone back to her family. And even during Milly's lifetime she only had the half-yearly interest. Couldn't sell out stock, or raise a lump sum for—ahem!—for the benefit of any person she'd a mind to help. And husband and wife are one flesh, so the Bible tells you!"

"The poor thing that's gone ought to have had more spirit than to let you be treated so!" said the second wife, who had possessed no fortune beyond a hundred pounds or so, bestowed as dowry on his younger daughter by the hard-worked apothecary of an English country town; and was conscious that in marrying her the Captain had not aspired to a union above his social rank.

"Begad! my dear! I don't mind owning that Lord Augustus hated me, from the top hair of my head to the last peg in my boot-sole. And—when he died—and he did go over to the majority not long after the Fermeroys had sailed for England with Lord Hardinge—when he died it didn't make a pin's difference, for under that settlement I've told you of, the co-trustee, a solicitor—Mr. Mustey, of Furnival's Inn, Holborn, London—took his son,—who'd been made partner in his business—as his partner in the trusteeship. And, of course, the money's the boy's!—though the two-hundred-and-twenty-odd annual interest is paid to me—the whole of it!—until Carry's old enough to go to school and college—and when he reaches twenty-three the whole lump of the principal will be his—seven thousand golden sovereigns—to play ducks and drakes with if he likes!"

"And my poor darlings will have nothing," Mrs. Breagh bleated, "unless,—-because I've treated Carolan in all respects—and more!—as if he were my own child, and that I would declare with my head upon my dying pillow!—unless he has the gratitude and the decent feeling to do something for Alan,—if it's only giving him a few hundreds to start him properly in life...."

"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched," advised her lord. "My dear, if you'll get me the materials from the sideboard, I'll wet my whistle. Talking's dry work!"

With wifely compliance Mrs. Breagh placed the whisky-decanter and the Delhi clay-bottle of drinking-water near her Alexander's elbow. You are to imagine the Captain mixing a jorum on half-and-half principles, nodding to his Fanny, and taking a refreshing swig of the cooling draft. And at this juncture a head of scarlet curls was poked out from the covert of the Indian shawl tablecloth, and the clear treble of his eldest son piped out:

"Dada, how much money is seven fousand golding sovereigns? And how long will it be before I get them to make ducks and drakes?"

III

You are to suppose Captain Breagh, startled by the unexpected apparition of his eldest son, swallowing the whole jorum of whisky and water at a gulp, and his wife dropping her darning into her lap with the very exclamation Carolan had previously promised himself. Still as a mouse, he had lain in ambush beneath the Pembroke table, with the portrait of the Duke of Wellington on a gray charger in the foreground of the highly varnished oil-painting—representing the Royal Ennis Regiment in the performance of prodigies of gallantry in conflict with the French at Vimiera—staring with bolting blue eyes, and pointing at him with a Field-Marshal's bâton whenever he had peeped out.

Now, conscious of having made an impression, and with a curious mixture of sensations, emotions, impulses, fermenting in a brain of six years, the boy stood upright before his elders, his well-knit shoulders thrown back, his sturdy legs, arrayed in their virile coverings of blue cloth adorned with cat-stitches of yellow basting-thread, planted wide apart upon the tiger-skin hearthrug, and his stomach thrust forward with the arrogance characteristic of the newly made capitalist.

"Why the devil were you hiding there? Eh, you young Turk, you?" blustered the Captain.

"Eavesdroppers," said Mrs. Breagh acidly, "never go to Heaven."

"Farver Haygarty——" Carolan began.

"We don't want to know what Father Haygarty says!" snapped Mrs. Breagh, whose Protestant gorge rose at the Papistical teachings of the regimental chaplain. And then she remembered that in a few years the worldly prospects of her three children might depend on the good-will of this chubby-faced, red-haired urchin who stood silently before her, contemplating her with a new expression in a very round pair of oddly amber-flecked gray eyes. And being a weak, ill-balanced, underbred woman, and a mother into the bargain, she truckled, as such women will, to the latent potentialities vested in the stubborn wearer of the unfinished suit of clothes.

"Not but what Father Haygarty is a good man and much respected—and I dare say you're sorry for having kicked poor Josey. So, since it's your birthday we won't say any more about it—and Nurse shall pull out those basting-threads and sew on the brace-buttons when you're in bed to-night——"

"There! you hear! Stop, you young rascal! Come back and kiss your mother, and thank her, and run away to Mrs. Povah!" bade the Captain, for Carolan, driving a pair of grubby fists deep into the pockets of the new breeches, had swung contemptuously upon his heel, and made for the door.

"She's not my muvver!" said the son, pausing in his struggle with the door-handle to turn a flushed and frowning face upon his sire. "She said so just now and so did you!"

"Then shut the door!" thundered the Captain, but it had slammed before the words were fairly out. And Carolan stamped across the landing whistling defiantly, and burst into the nursery, where Baba—for the moment its sole occupant—was asleep in her bassinette, Alan and Monica having gone out to walk with Miss Josey, and Nurse being busy in the adjoining room.

Carolan's head was hot, and his heart felt big and swollen. He was a person of consequence, and at the same time a thing of no account. Thus the pride that flamed in his gray eyes was presently quenched by scalding salt drops of resentful indignation. He was sorrowful, elated, angry, and complacent, all at once, as he stood by Baba's crib.

He had never until now suspected Mrs. Breagh was not his mother. He had called her "Mamma" ever since he could speak. No question had ever risen in his mind as to the existence of some secret reason for her dislike of him.

When she had seemed most hateful in his eyes, by reason of her lacking reticence and absent sense of honor—for she couldn't keep a secret if she promised you ever so, and was always telling tales of you to Dada!—Carolan had frequently relieved his feelings by going into corners and calling her "that woman" under his breath. The appalling sense of crime, involved with the relief this process brought—for to call your real mother names would be a sin of the first magnitude—bad invested it with a dreadful fascination. Now the glamour had vanished, together with the wickedness. Mrs. Breagh was nothing to Carolan. He was the son of another woman—and she was dead in India. Her name was Milly—a gentle, prettily sounding name.

Only the day before, Carolan had found out what the thing grown-up people called "death" and "dying" meant. He had given a shiny sixpence that had lain hidden for weeks at the bottom of the pocket in his old plaid frock to Bugler Finnerty for a thrush he had limed, a beautiful brown thrush with a splendidly dappled breast. Only the bird's eyes looked like beads of dull jet glass instead of round black blobs of diamond-bright bramble-dew. And it had squatted on the foul floor of the little wood and wire cage in which Finnerty had been keeping it, panting, with ruffled feathers and open beak.

Finnerty had said that the bird would thrive on snails and worms, and Carolan had promised it plenty of these luxuries. He had meant to range for them through all the soldiers' vegetable-allotments, and ransack the Parade-ground flower-beds. But all at once the thrush had fallen over on its side, fluttering and struggling—and Carolan had been so sorry for it that he had thrust his pudgy hand into the cage, and taken the poor sufferer out with the intention of nursing it in his pinafore for a little, and then letting it go free, since it was so unhappy in captivity.

But when he had bidden it fly away it had had no strength to do so. It had lain helpless in his hands, and the strange quivering thrills that had passed through its slender body had communicated themselves to the child. Something was taking place—some change was coming. Without previous knowledge he had been sure of that.

And the change had come, with the drawing of the thin gray membrane from the corners next the beak, over the round yellow-rimmed eyes. Then the upper and underlids had sealed themselves over the veiled eyeballs—the quick panting had changed to long gasps, the head had rolled to one side helplessly—and with a long shuddering convulsion the thing had taken place. The slender body had stiffened in Carolan's hand, the glossy wings had closed down tightly against its dappled sides, its scaly legs had stretched out rigidly and not been drawn back again. And a voice that seemed to speak inside Carolan had said to him: "This is death!"

Now broke in upon his immature brain a flash of blinding brilliancy. Milly, who had been his mother, was dead, like the thrush. He shut his eyes, and saw her lying, very pale and pretty and helpless, with ruffled brown hair the exact color of the bird's feathers, and beautiful brown eyes—why was he so certain that they had been brown?—all dim and filmy, and her slender body and long graceful limbs now quivering and convulsed, and now growing rigid and stiff. And a lump rose in his throat, and a tear splashed on the front of the brand-new blue jacket, and another that would have fallen was dried by a glow of inspiration. For he had dug a grave with a sherd of broken flower-pot in the angle of one of the official flower-beds that decorated the oblong patch of lawn before the Mess House, and buried the dead thrush in the shelter of a clump of daffodils, and said a "Hail Mary!" for it, because, though Miss Josey and Mrs. Breagh—whom he would never call "Mamma" again!—termed it a Popish practice,—Father Haygarty said that one ought to pray for the dead....

Surely one ought to pray for the soul of Milly. She would understand, it was to be hoped! why one had never done it before. Somebody would tell her Carolan hadn't known! Poor, poor Milly! He wished he had been there with his new tin sword when that snuffing Thing came out of the jungle and frightened her so that she had died....

He looked about the nursery. There stood Monica's Indian-cane cot, and Alan's green-painted iron crib on either side of Nurse's wooden four-poster. At the bed-head above Nurse's pillow was nailed a little plaster Calvary, and a miniature holy-water stoup, and over Carolan's little folding camp-bedstead hung a noble crucifix of ebony and carved ivory, so large and so massive that two iron staples held it in its place.

The Face of the pendent, tortured Figure—there was death in that also. It seemed to the child that the breast beneath the drooped, thorn-encircled Head, heaved with long sighs, that the lips gasped for breath—that long shuddering spasms rippled through the tortured Body, bringing home, as nothing ever had before, the meaning of the lines that the boy had learned as a parrot might....

"He was crucified also for us ... suffered ... and was buried...."

And that was why we prayed to Him for the dead and buried people, because He had suffered death and gone down into the dark grave, and He knew how to help souls.... Carolan nailed his resolution to say a nightly "Our Father" for poor Milly to the masthead of determination, unaware that Father Haygarty had incurred the displeasure of Mrs. Breagh by urging the necessary discharge of this filial duty as a reason why the boy should be told about his mother who was dead.

We may guess that the influence of the second wife had inspired the Captain to insist that the hour of enlightenment should be deferred indefinitely. And if any one had suggested to Mrs.. Breagh that she had been prompted by a belated jealousy of her predecessor, she would have been genuinely horrified at the idea.

Nurse came in as Carolan decided on his course of future loyalty, and started at the sight of the sturdy little figure standing, with legs planted wide apart, on the shabby nursery drugget, its childish brows puckered with profound thought.

"Now may the Saints stand between you and the mischief I know you're plannin'!" said Nurse, who prided herself on reading thoughts in faces. "Is ut playin' acreybats on the windy-sill, or shavin' wid the Captain's razor? Spake ut out!"

Carolan spoke.

"Mamma is not my muvver, an' I shall call her Mrs. Breagh always!"

"God be good to me!" said Nurse, quite pale, and putting her hand to her side. "An' who tould ye that, an' set the two eyes of ye blazin' like coals of fire?"

"You saided it!—and she saided it—and Dada saided it—when I was playin' robber's cave under the sittin'-woom table," Carolan proclaimed. "And I'm goin' to pray for Milly—that's my weal muvver—because she's dead—even if they say I shan't!"

"There'll none durst," said Nurse rather awfully, "wid Bridget Povah to the fore! And what else?"

Slightly damped by the prospect of being permitted to carry out his shining new intention without interruption, Carolan reflected.

"Nuffing," he said at last, "'cept that I want to know how much is seven fousand golding sovereigns? For I am going to have them when I grow up."

"Sure!" said Nurse, slightly bewildered, "a sovereign is the same as a wan-pound note! Ye have seen thim things, have ye not?"

Carolan had seen the soiled rags of Bank paper changing hands on market-days, and the recollection wrinkled his nose.

"'Tis quare talk ye have," said Nurse, "about the sivin thousand wan-pound notes. 'Tis a little haystack av them ye would be gettin' from the gintleman at the Bank. Where arr ye goin' now, ye onaisy wandherer? Wid your hoop for a rowl in the Barrack-square? Take your cap—an' remember that wheniver ye're clane out av sight, Biddy Povah has her eye on you!"

But Carolan was already out of the room and half-way down the stairs.

Outside under the blue sky, with its flocks of fleecy white clouds all hurrying southward, it was easy to forget the things that had hurt. The crackle of the sandy gravel underfoot, the purr of the iron hoop in the metal driving-hook soothed and stimulated; the ringing clatter when one got upon the cobblestones, and the echo when one came under the archway of the Barrack-gate—were familiar, pleasant things.

Familiar, too, was the sentry on guard, great-coated—for at all times and seasons of the year a nipping wind howled through the stony tunnel that ended in the arch of the Barrack-gateway—and pacing his official strip of pavement, that began at the yellow-painted sentry-box with the blunt lamp-post near it, and ended at the big spiked gate. And the peep into the guardroom, with unbuttoned privates in the familiar red coats with Royal blue facings sprawling on plank beds reading thumbed newspapers, and the sergeant sitting on his cot stiffly stocked and fully accoutered—that had the charm of a well-known, never too familiar sight. To other senses besides the eyes and ears appealed the figure of Mary Daa, the apple, cake and ginger-pop woman, sitting under a vast and oddly-patched blue gingham umbrella at her stall, made of a short plank mounted on two barrels, against the great bare wall on the left of the Barrack-entrance, exercising a privilege permitted to no other, because Mary's stone ginger-pop bottles might be relied upon as containing nothing else....

It was market-day, and the great cobblestoned place, bordered by a line of shops and houses, broken by the bridge, under which flowed a famous salmon-river, was seething with people out to buy and sell and enjoy themselves. On the right hand was the Catholic Church, a modern building of no great design, animated bundles of rags containing female penitents performing the devotions of the Stations round it. While upreared upon the summit of an isolated rock beyond the rushing river, perched the ivy-mantled remnant of the ancient castle from which the town derived its name; once held against the Commonwealth by King James, and with Ireton's round-shot yet bedded in the massive masonry.

The distracting grind-organ accompaniment of a round-about blared on the ear from a field where some caravans of strolling show-people had encamped themselves. Rows of empty jaunting-cars, shafts down, waited their squireen owners in the bleakest angle of the market-place; and in the farm-carts with feather-beds in them, covered with gay patchwork counterpanes, the strapping matrons and buxom maids of the hill-farms or mountain-villages had jolted and joggled from their distant homes, and—the last bargain made—would jolt and joggle back again.

Booths and stalls, presided over by them, exhibited cheese, butter, and other dairy-produce. Crates were crammed with quacking ducks and loudly cackling fowls. Strings of shaggy-footed horses and knots of isolated cows were ranged along the curbs to tempt the would-be purchaser; hurdled pens of sheep waited to change owners; but the staple article of commerce, in the active and the passive mood, alive and squealing or dead and smoked, was pig. In reeking basements below the shops—cellars where potatoes, cabbages, and onions were peddled to the poorest, and turf and firewood were sold in ha'p'orths—piles of pigs-tails, fresh and dried, rivaled the salted herring in popularity, and were borne home, wrapped in red-spotted handkerchiefs, and stowed away in the crowns of hats, to be frizzled over turf-embers for supper.

A jig was being danced to the music of a fiddle and a clarionet on a square of smooth flagstones in the middle of the market-place. And—for this was the West of Ireland in the early fifties—the bright red or dark blue cloaks and white frilled caps of the matrons, the short stuff petticoats, chintz jacket-bodices and bright handkerchief-shawls of the unwedded women; the corduroy breeches, blue yarn stockings and buckled brogues of the men, their long-tailed gray or blue coats and high-crowned, narrow-brimmed chimney-pots—gave charm and variety to the shifting scene.

Not for the first time observed, the half-dozen of coarse, strapping, red-faced women who daily patroled the square in the neighborhood of the Barracks; whisky-hardened viragoes whose uncovered heads of greasy hair, thrust into sagging nets of black chenille-velvet, and uniform attire of clean starched cotton print, worn over a multiplicity of whaleboned petticoats, bespoke them,—as did their coarse speech and loud laughter,—members of the ancient sisterhood of Rahab and Delilah, followers of the most ancient profession in the world.

Prone at all times to hunt in pack or couples, the wearers of the greasy hair-nets flauntingly displayed a pair of captive red-coats. One of them was fairly sober, and sulky at being thus paraded under the eyes of his countrymen. The other, a raw young recruit, half-fuddled with libations of porter and whisky, staggeringly promenaded the pavement with a siren on either elbow; and, being in the pugnacious stage of liquor, was stung by some sarcastic comment from the crowd into shaking off the women who supported,—while they feigned to lean on him,—and challenging the critic of morals, in broad Yorkshire, to a bout at fisticuffs.

"Leggo o' me, tha——!" he hiccoughed to the Paphians. "Cannowt a chap walk wi'out women-fowk hangin' on, an' armin' him? As for tha!"—he addressed the critic—"Ah'll teach tha to meddle wi' thy betters. If tha'rt a mon—coom on!"

"Fight, is ut? Och, ye poor craythur, the wind av a fist wud level ye," commented the censor, turning on his heel contemptuously. Upon which, the belligerent, taking the act as a confession of recreancy, wrenched himself from the women, and, staggering forward, came into violent contact with Mary Daa's plank-and-barrel stall; with the result that certain apples, oranges, and cakes, displayed to tempt customers, were scattered on the flagged sidewalk, or rolled gaily down the gutter; pursued with yells of joy by certain ragged urchins who usually were to be found in the vicinity of Mary's stall.

Carolan clapped his hands with a child's delight in the upset and the subsequent fray, as Mary, vociferating maledictions on the soldier's drunken clumsiness and the predatory activity of the raiders, shook her fists at their flying heels.

"Ah nivir meant t' dommage tha! Wull sixpence neet maak guid thy loss t' tha?" stammered the Yorkshireman, thrusting a hand into his trousers-pocket in search of the coin. Then his flaming face darkened heavily, and he said, withdrawing the hand, empty, "Ah havena a brass farden t' pitch at dog or devil, let alone sixpence. Mak't oop to her, Noorah lass, an' Ah'll gie't thee back agean!"

And the woman he had called Norah said, linking her arm in the soldier's and affectionately ogling him:

"Sure, I'll give the ould craythur a shillin', asthore, and a kiss av the handsome boy you are will pay me!"

Then happened what Carolan, with a child's intuitive sense of things that are incomprehensible, saw with a strange shock and thrill that never quite passed away.

The bright new shilling tendered to Mary by the plump clean fingers with the twinkling glass-and-pinchbeck rings on them was dashed to the flags by a fierce blow of the old, bony, wrinkled hand....

"Take up yer money, ye livin' disgrace!" Mary had said sternly to the staring woman, "and thrapse upon your way!"

And under the regard of many eyes, for nearly all the faces in the crowded market-place seemed to be looking that way, the woman had picked up the coin; and as her comrades hurried on, had slunk after them, leaving the tipsy soldier standing there.

"Had ye no modher, ye fool-man?" Mary asked him, "that ye are hastin' quick to hell, arrum-in-arrum wid Thim Wans?"

And the tipsy young soldier had given a thick grunt that might have meant anything, and hung his head sulkily, and gone staggering upon his way, but in an opposite direction to that taken by the women. And Mary Daa looked after him long and sorrowfully.

"Please tell me," asked Carolan, edging up to the apple-woman, for Mary and he had struck up a friendship over divers ha'p'orths of nuts and pink peppermint-candy sticks, "what are they, and why are they wicked?"

Mary brought round the weather-stained brown tunnel of her huge and venerable bonnet, and became aware of a small boy with a scarlet topknot and a pair of honest gray eyes.

"Who arr ye talkin' of?" she demanded, and there were shining drops of water on her wrinkled cheeks, and the cracked glasses of her huge iron-framed spectacles were foggy. She took them off, and wiped them on her old green plaid shawl, as Carolan explained that he had been referring to Thim Wans.

"What arr they? Wandherin' waves av the say, poisonous planets; thraps for the feet, fiery dhragons that ate up the bodies an' souls av men! Look me in the face wid your child's eyes, ye that will be a man wan day, an' get by harrut the worruds I'm spakin' to you! An' when the pith is set widin your bones, and the hair is thick upon your lip, and the blood is hot widin the veins av you—kape them worruds in mind!"

Carolan thanked Mary Daa, and, having a stray half-penny, purchased a cocked-hat of brown peppermint rock, and went home crunching. He had learned a good deal that day. The mystery of Death and the power of Money had been revealed to him. Also, he had gained some slight preliminary inkling of the forces that are arrayed against the human soul in its march through this strange world of ours, and of the strange and foul and ugly things that lie hidden beneath the shining surface of Life.

IV

Furnival's Inn, Holborn, with its parallelogram of dusty or rain-washed cobblestones unrelieved by any patch of railed-in grass plot, where sooty lilacs and rusty hawthorns make a show of putting forth green leaves in Spring, and plane-trees shed their bark, as boa-constrictors doff their skins, at the approach of Winter—Furnival's Inn, even in the year of stress of 1870, impressed itself upon the casual visitor as a dismal spot in wet weather and a dusty one in dry. But that an immortal genius wrote a deathless work of humor in its cheerless precincts, one would have said that nothing young or gay or natural could ever flourish there.

At nine o'clock upon the morning of a day heavily fraught with Fate for the protagonist of this unpretending life-drama, recent puddles testified to overnight's rain, and gray clouds rushing north-westward across a monochromatic parallelogram of sky, framed in by the bilious-hued, grimy-windowed, decrepit-looking Inn buildings, predicted more presently.

Punctually upon the stroke of the hour you might have seen a shaggy young man in a red-hot hurry plunge under the round-topped carriage archway, eschewing the smaller side-entrance intended for pedestrians. Whereat the upper half of a porter, crowned with a tarred chimney-pot hat, and wearing a brown livery with copper-gilt buttons, appeared at the wicket of his lodge-door, and the fresh-faced, shaggy-haired boy in the battered felt wideawake and well-worn frieze overcoat, had felt an eye boring hard into his back, as, after one doubtful glance about him, he dived between the gouty Corinthian columns of the fourth portico on the left-hand side, and rang the first-floor bell.

"I'd ring if I was you!" the porter had soliloquized, noting the masterful tug given by the early visitor to the dingy brass bell-handle—third of a row of six sticking out like organ-stops on the right of the heavy, low-browed outer door. "And again! ... Don't be shy!" said the porter, who was something of a cynic: "Break the bell-wire, and then you won't have done no good to yourself!—supposing you to be a client or a creditor of Mustey and Son—though you're over-young to be the first and over-cheerful to be the second, it strikes me! Good-day, Mr. Chown!" And the porter touched his hat to a lean, mild-looking, elderly man in black, who turned in at that moment beneath the smaller archway. "You're not the first this morning, early as you are. There's a young chap who don't seem in the mind to take no answer—has been ringing ten minutes without stopping at Mr. Mustey's bell."

"Pressing business, I suppose, to bring him out so early!" said the person addressed.

A glance of intelligence may have been exchanged between Mr. Chown and the porter, but there were no further words. Mr. Chown passed on, and joined the younger man on the doorstep under the fourth portico on the left side, as he prepared to fulfill the porter's prophecy about breaking the bell-wire; and said, shifting his umbrella to the hand that held a shiny bag of legal appearance, and drawing a shabby latchkey from the pocket of his vest:

"Excuse me, but if it is a business appointment with Mr. Mustey Junior,"—he tapped the key upon the tarnished brass door-handle as though to knock some grains of dust out of the words, and went on, punctuating his utterances with more tapping—"I happen to know"—tap-tap-tap—"that he won't be here to-day." He added, as he took a brief, comprehensive survey of the healthy, square-shouldered, well-built youngster of some five feet eight (with a hopeful promise of more inches in the breadth of the shoulders, and the depth of the chest), buttoned up in the rough frieze garment that had seen hard wear. "But possibly it is the head of the Firm" (tap-tap) "you want, and not Son? ... In which case I'm afraid you'll have to wait some time, as the old gentleman stayed very late at work yesterday. I should mention that I am employed in the capacity of head-clerk by" (tap) "a firm of solicitors who have offices on the ground-floor immediately underneath Mustey and Son" (tap), "and——"

Mr. Chown, still industriously tapping, nodded at the lowest of a series of legends in letters of black paint, flanking the right-hand row of bells, and setting forth the titles of "Wotherspoon and Cadderby, Attorneys and Commissioners of Oaths." He continued: "And though I was detained myself, and did not leave till eight-thirty, I noticed particularly—when I shut the front-door behind me, that the gas in Mr. Mustey Senior's private room was burning still."

"For the matter of that, it's burning now!" said the strange young man, whose head was plentifully covered with a crop of decidedly red and obstinately curly hair, crowned with the battered gray felt wideawake previously mentioned; and whose square, blunt-featured, fresh-colored, rather freckled face was illuminated with a pair of very clear and intelligent eyes of a good gray, curiously flecked with yellow. He indicated with a knotty vine-stick he carried two dingy, wire-blinded windows on the first floor, and Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk, with an irrepressible start of consternation, saw that the darkness of the room behind them was thrown into relief by a greenish patch of radiance that indicated the position of a paper-shaded gas reading-lamp which to his knowledge hung over the heavy writing-table that occupied the middle of the elder Mustey's private room.

"God bless my soul, so it is!"

The speaker, with a tallowy change in his complexion, stepped backward from the doorstep to the pavement, conveyed himself in the same crab-like fashion to the center of the quadrangle of ancient buildings constituting the Inn, and so stood, staring up at the window with the yellow-green flare behind the dusty brown wire-blinds, and tapping his latchkey on his chin as he had tapped it on the door-knob. Then he rejoined the other to say, with rather a perturbed and dubious air:

"If your business could wait half an hour or so, and you—being a stranger, as I take it?—and new to the sights of London—were to indulge in a little walk along Holborn—say as far as Bloomsbury Street—and drop in at the British Museum, and have a look at the Elgin Marbles or the Assyrian Bulls,—or the—the Mummies in the Egyptian Department,—and then come back again,—you might stand a better chance of getting the bell answered." The speaker added, meeting a look of decided obstinacy, quite in keeping with the pouting, deeply-cut lips and the square chin with a cleft in it: "Unless you can suggest a better idea, you know...."

"My idea is to stop here and ring until the bell is answered. But I am obliged to you all the same!" said the young man.

"You've waited long enough, you think?" hesitated Messrs. Wotherspoon and Cadderby's head-clerk.

The answer came with a flash of strong white teeth in the fresh-colored countenance that was dusted with dark brown freckles.

"Just twenty-three years," said the shaggy-haired young man.

"Lord bless me!" said Mr. Chown, "you must have begun waiting in your cradle! But time flies and business presses, and——"

"My view exactly!" returned the freckled young man, as the head-clerk inserted his latchkey into the heavy door and it swung slowly backward, revealing a bare and gloomy hall wainscoted with grimy oak and hung with mildewed flock-paper. "Donnerwetter! how you smell here!" he commented, having taken in a chestful of the medium that served the inhabitants of the Inn buildings for air. "But I suppose you're used to it!"

"Comparing our atmosphere with that of other London offices, I should be inclined to call us rather fresh than otherwise," said Mr. Chown, who had dropped his latchkey and was groping for it on the dirty floor by the oblong of daylight admitted by the open hall-door. "But I suppose—as some of the gentlemen who rent chambers here are still away on their vacations—the place might seem—to a stranger from the country—a trifle close."

"Stuffy!" corrected the young man, whose expression of disgust was highly uncomplimentary. "Drainy, black-beetly, mousey, dusty, cellary. With a tinge of escaped gas and a something else that I——" He sniffed and said, puckering a sagacious nose: "Why, it's gunpowder! The place is chock-full of the fumes of burnt gunpowder.... Here! Hallo! What the devil are you trying to do? What do you mean?"

For the other, who had risen to his feet with a reversion to the sallow change of countenance previously observed in him, had caught him by the arm, as his eager foot had touched a dilapidated mat that lay as a snare for the unwary at the foot of the uncarpeted staircase, and with unexpected strength and quickness had swung him to the hall-door, and was endeavoring to push him over the threshold.

"I mean——" Mr. Chown was of middle age and evidently quite unused to wrestling: and as he strove with the shaggy young man upon the threshold of the dingy hall, it was evident that he would very soon give in. "I mean..." he panted, "... that you ... can't you be sensible?"

"I should be a fool if I couldn't see that you're hiding something. Let go!" said the red-haired young man, not at all malevolently, "or I shall have to hurt you! I'm going upstairs, and you can't stop me! What harm do you think I am going to do to the white-haired old man who's lying fast asleep across his table? I shan't go in without knocking, if that's what you're thinking of! And what harm do you suppose he's going to do to me?"

A sullen bang answered, for Mr. Chown had reached out a wary hand behind his own respectable back, and grabbed at the dim brass knob and slammed the heavy door upon himself and his antagonist. There were circles round his eyes, and he puffed and panted heavily.

"You young—puff—idiot!" he gasped, "I'm not—whoof!—considering you—for—a—whuff!—moment. It's him,"—he pulled out a colored handkerchief and mopped his face—"him that I've known since I was first articled, and had many a kindly word from, and many a liberal present. And now that this has happened—I may say I've seen it coming, and many a night I've stayed here—knowing him busy over his accounts above, and many a time I've been on the point of going up and knocking and offering a word of sympathy. But—it wasn't to be done! ... You could never take a liberty with him, alive—and no one shall if I can stop 'em—now that he isn't!"

"Now that he—why, man!—you don't mean to say——"

They confronted each other on the doorstep, and the shaggy, obstinate young man had now flushed to ripe tomato-color as he stammered:

"You don't mean he's dead? It isn't possible!"

"I say nothing and I mean nothing. There's no third party present," asserted Mr. Chown, with professional caution, "to testify to what I said or didn't say. But his son has to be looked for, and brought here if they can find him—and if Mr. William can't be found—and without prejudice I think that's more than likely!—some one he knew and trusted must be the first to go into that room. His housekeeper I've heard is a good creature. He's often dropped a word in praise of her to me, I know.... We'll telegraph—I know his address! Number Three——"

The young man interrupted: "Addington Square, Camberwell."

"Send her a wire! I'll pay!" Mr. Chown plucked a shilling from his waistcoat pocket and agitatedly pressed it on the stranger. "There's a telegraph office at Snow Hill!"

"Where is Snow Hill? I'm a stranger in London. As it happens, I came from Schwärz-Brettingen—it's a University town in North Germany—to keep a business appointment with Messrs. Mustey and Son." The shaggy-haired young man pointed to those first-floor windows.... adding: "The elder gentleman is chief trustee of my mother's fortune—his son, who you say's missing, is the other—that is, he has been since the death of a great-uncle of mine.... For I didn't come of age, according to my mother's settlement, until my twenty-third birthday. And as it happens, I'm twenty-three to-day!"

"I see! He was to have paid the money over! ... Good Lord! Good Lord!" groaned the head-clerk, "what a world it is!—what a world it is!"

"And all this while we're swopping talk, the old fellow upstairs may be dying for help that we could give him!" snarled the younger man, and caught the head-clerk by the shoulder in a grip that struck him as unpleasantly powerful. "Look here!—where is your key?"

"Just inside in the hall there.... I'd dropped it, don't you remember—I was looking for it when you—when you—said you smelt gunpowder," explained the attorney's clerk, "and then it all rushed on me."

"You did on me!—and I thought you'd gone crazy. Look here——" the other began.

"To be at all effective I had to take you suddenly," said Mr. Chown, adding, with a mild gleam of pride, "and you must add—I was effective! And if you've got it into your head that there's life in the poor old man yet—put it out again! For he shot himself last night just on the stroke of nine—and I could take my oath of it! I heard what must have been the—the noise—as I passed out at the gate, and the porter he said to me: 'A gas explosion somewhere in the neighborhood, Mr. Chown, or else it was a thunderclap.' And I thought it might have been thunder—for the weather observations in the newspapers had mentioned storms as prevailing in South and South-Eastern England—and the winds have been blowing from south and south-east. And my wife has headaches when electricity's in the atmosphere—and she has been bad three days past."

"But let's do something—not stand here with our hands in our pockets!" urged the red-haired young man with eagerness. "I'm a surgeon—not diplomaed, worse luck! but enough of a one to give aid in such a case as you've hinted at."

"My key's inside the house—as I've told you!" retorted Mr. Chown, "and unless we were to break down the door—which would bring the police upon us before they're wanted—or one of us could climb like a cat—so as to look in at that window and make certain——"

"Donnerwetter! Good idea!" said the shaggy young man, in whose conversation mingled interjectional scraps and snatches of a language not comprehended by Mr. Chown, but dimly conjectured to be German. In the same instant he had pulled off his frieze overcoat, revealing the unsuspected fact that he wore no jacket under it—had thrown it upon the area-railings close to the row of bells that resembled organ-stops, and mounted upon it, shirt-sleeved, vigorous, ready and purposeful. An iron torch-extinguisher, a rusted relic of the days when respectable citizens went forth o' nights attended by linkmen, jutted from the wall immediately above his head. He made a long arm and grasped it—and to the dazzled observation of the head-clerk appeared to walk up the wall like a housefly. But in reality he had wedged a toe in an ornamental border of sooty masonry of the brick-in-and-brick-out description, that outlined the doors and windows of the Inn buildings; and with a degree of skill and suppleness that testified to no small degree of practice, hoisted himself up. Directly afterward he was observed to be in the act of getting over the sooty balustrading that edged a narrow ledge of stone running before those first-floor windows, and the head-clerk, holding his breath, saw him stoop and peer in over a wire blind.

Directly afterward, as it seemed, he withdrew his head and looked down into Mr. Chown's pale face, and his own had lost its ruddy color. Then, coming down as he had gone up, much to the astonishment and curiosity of Mr. Chown's two juniors and several legal-looking personages who had arrived upon the scene and gathered in quite a little crowd upon the cobblestones—he said in a low tone, as he drew the former gentleman apart:

"You were right. Whether it was done last night or more recently, it has been done, and thoroughly. With a new-looking revolver. He has it in his hand!"

"Poor old gentleman, I could swear that what he did he has been driven to do, through despair and debt and misery.... 'Mr. William will be my ruin, Chown!' he said to me only three days ago. And he has been his ruin, sir!" said Mr. Chown, blowing his nose with a flourish, and wiping his eyes furtively. "His ruin, Mr. William has been.... You may depend upon that!"

Said the young man from North Germany, pulling on his shabby overcoat:

"The table is covered with papers, and the safe facing the window is open.... Do you think——"

"I don't think—I know! He had a kind of swooning fit a week back, when the crash came, and a Receiving Order in Bankruptcy was made against him on the petition of his creditors. He was a long time coming round—and I stayed by him while the caretaker went to fetch a hackney-cab—for I'd been called, being a sort of favorite with him, and having known him for years. He'd been robbed and plundered then, because he groaned it out to me; and he pointed to that safe, and told me that it had been gutted by means of false keys—the Bramah he always wore on his watch-riband having been got at and copied. 'All the cash I had left in the world, Chown, besides seven thousand in Trust Securities! ... It's my punishment for having been near and hard to others that I might be generous to him!' Are you going!"

The shaggy young man, crimson to the lining-edge of the old gray wideawake he had pulled over his brows after buttoning his overcoat, made an incoherent sound in his throat, and swung abruptly round upon his heel. The reflection had occurred to him: "He'd have been generous to me if he'd waited to have seen me—and blown out my brains before scattering his own; pfui!—over that table and all the papers!" But he did not voice it aloud.

"Leave me your address," said the kindly-hearted Mr. Chown, "and—it's not business to say you may trust me!—but I'll undertake to bring your name before the Official Receiver—for you're one of the principal creditors—provided what you've told me can be proved...."

"I suppose you know that—dead man's writing when you see it?" said the other, swinging round on Mr. Chown with no very pleasant look.

"As well as I know my own!" retorted Mr. Chown, nodding back.

"If so—and not because I admit you've any right!—but because I choose to show it you—you may read this!" went on the late Mr. Mustey's chief creditor, pulling a rather worn and crumpled oblong envelope out of his pocket and exhibiting the direction written on it in a flowing, old-fashioned, legal hand.

"'P. C. Breagh, Esq., care of Frau Busch, Jaeger Strasse, Schwärz-Brettingen, N. Germany.' ... But I really shouldn't have dreamed—" began Mr. Chown.

"Read it!" said the owner of the letter, savagely thrusting it upon him, and the head-clerk with another protest, nipped in mid-utterance by another order to read it, mastered the contents.

The writer acknowledged the receipt of Mr. P. C. Breagh's letter, and begged to remind him that he was quite well acquainted with the terms of his late mother's Marriage Settlement. He congratulated his young friend on having so nearly attained the age of discretion decided under the provisions of the instrument referred to; and appointed the hour of nine o'clock upon the morning of the 3d of January, to discharge his trust and hand over the cash, deposit-notes, and securities....

"While all the time he knew—none better, except his precious partner!—that I should leave his office as poor as I'd come there. It would have been decent," snarled Patrick Carolan Breagh, "to have owned the truth."

"And accused his own son!—And now I look at the date of this it was written on the day before that affair of the false Bramah.... Do him justice, Mr. Breagh! ... Try to think he meant fair by you. Wherever he's gone..." Mr. Chown looked vaguely up at the monochromatic sky—now darkening as though it meant to rain in earnest—and then down at the cobblestones, "he'll be no worse for that, and you'll be the better here, I dare to say! You'll give me your address, sir? I don't know but that as you were the first to discover the body, you'll be expected to give evidence before the Coroner."

"Damn the Coroner!" said P. C. Breagh. "Whether he wants it or not I haven't an address to give. I paid my bill at a thundering beastly cheap hotel in the Euston Road by handing over my trunks of clothes, and books and instruments to the landlord.... He promised to keep them for three weeks—to give me a chance to redeem them!—and he grunted when I said I'd be back with money enough to buy his bug-ridden lodging-house before two days were over his head. And I pawned my coat for dinner yesterday and a coffee-house bed last night.... That's why you saw shirt-sleeves when I pulled off this old wrap-rascal.... But I'll look in here again to-morrow—unless I—change my mind!"

He had passed under the archway and was gone before Mr. Chown had recovered himself sufficiently to call after him. To follow would have been no use. So the head-clerk went sorrowfully back to write and dispatch those urgent telegraphic messages.

And Carolan, shouldering through the double torrent of pedestrian humanity rolling east and west along the worn pavements of Holborn, plunged through the roaring traffic of the cobblestoned roadway, and with his chin well down upon his chest, and his hands rammed deep into his pockets, turned down Fetter Lane, knowing that he, who had been heir to a goodly sum in thousands, was, by this sudden turn of Fortune's wheel, a beggar.

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.

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.

VII

The Great Class fermented in irrepressible excitement. Subsequently to the arrival of a foreign mail, Juliette Bayard had been summoned by an attendant lay-sister to the presence of Mère M. Catherine-Rose.

She had remained nearly half an hour in the Parlor of Cold Feet—so called in recognition of the fact that the apartment contained no fireplace, and that even in the hottest weather cool draughts played hide-and-seek across the polished parquet from circular brazen gratings inserted in the wainscot, which ancient legend connected with the presence of a French calorifère.

When the door opened and Juliette emerged, somewhere about the middle of the noon recreation, an advance-patrol in the shape of a pupil of the Little Class, by name Laura Foljambe—happened to be buttoning a shoe-strap at the end of the corridor. The apoplectic attitude inseparable from this particular employment would have rendered observation impossible—in the case of an adult. But Laura, under the cover of a luxuriant head of yellow ringlets, unconfined by any comb or ribbon, observed, firstly, that Juliette had been crying, and secondly, that Mère M. Catherine-Rose had tears in her own eyes. More, she had called Juliette back, embraced her affectionately, and said: "We shall miss you, my dear!" "You will be brave, I know!" and "Remember to write!" Packed with news, Laura rushed into the Lesser Hall, where the seniors were gathered round the stove, the raw chill of the January weather rendering the garden a place of penitence, and emptied her budget of intelligence upon the spot.

Juliette must be going away! The forty girls of the Great Class had unanimously arrived at this conclusion when Juliette herself arrived upon the scene. It needed but a glance to assure her of the treachery of Laura; it needed but a moment, and the spy, blubbering and protesting, was seized, shaken, and forced upon her knees.

You are to understand that when Juliette Bayard was angry, she was so with a vengeance. Heroic by temperament, her wrath smacked of the superhuman. A demi-goddess enraged might have manifested as semi-divine a frenzy. Ordinary prose seemed too poor a vehicle to convey such indignation. You expected hexameters or Alexandrines....

"That you listened I would stake my honor!—I would pledge my life!—I would put the hand in the fire! Mean! Base! Despicable! Ah, you look simple, little thing, but you are cunning as a mouse—fine as amber! No! I do not pinch, I would scorn it—you know that perfectly! Yes! I will permit you to go when you confess who set you on!"

Laura, unwilling to incur the resentment of forty grown-ups, undesirous of forfeiting the saccharine reward of treachery, boohooed in a whisper, for class-hour was approaching. The wrathful goddess towered over her, eyed with blue lightning, crowned with dusky clouds of thunder, flushed like the sunset that comes after the day of storm.

Had Arthur Hughes or Fred Walker been privileged to peep—one painter at least would have armed her uplifted hand with a bulrush-spear, helmeted her with a curled water-lily leaf, and given the smiling world Titania in the character of Pallas Athene, or Queen Mab as an Amazon. And Juliette would never have pardoned the painter. For—despite the testimony of her tale of inches—she would have it that she was tall, even above the average height of woman.

"I shall not be beautiful, no! but I shall be commanding!" she had assured those favored girls on whom she deigned to bestow her imperial confidence. This select number in turn possessing a circle of confidantes, the drop of a secret meant a series of widening rings, extending to the circle of the day scholars, reaching the Orphanage by-and-by, and trickling at length into the basement, where the Poor School assembled on Wednesdays and Fridays, to gather up the crumbs of knowledge that fell from the tables of the daughters of the great and rich.

You may imagine the scene in Lesser Hall upon this chilly day in January. Excitement was much more warming than crowding round the smoky stoves. Of the semi-circle of great girls in their black school-dresses, enlivened only by the red or white class-rosettes, or the pale blue ribbons of the Children of Mary, all the heads, adorned with every shade of feminine tresses,—all the eyes of all colors, set in faces plain or pretty—were turned toward the tragic figure of Juliette.

Once kindled, such violet fires of wrath blazed in those implacable eyes, one would have supposed nothing could ever quench them. But when she was sorrowful, they were bottomless lakes of misery. Despair lay drowned and wan amid the long black sedges drooping at their borders. Under the dark, hollowed precipices that shadowed them it seemed as though no sun could ever shine. But when the laugh was born, it leaped to the surface with a quiver that caught the light and flashed it back pure sapphire or loveliest Persian turquoise. No face ever framed of earthly clay had more of the mirth of Heaven in it, then. Her long upper lip, the elastic, mobile feature that could draw out to so portentous a length, would be haunted by flying smiles, and the deep-cut corners of her short scarlet under lip would quiver. To inventory the beauties of a young lady and omit the nose would suggest cause for reticence on the writer's part. Juliette's nose was not of Greek or Roman type, but neither was it snubbed or tip-tilted. It had a rounded end, and deep, curved, passionate nostrils. It pertained to no known order of nasal architecture. It was Juliette's nose, and could never have belonged to anybody else.

If you would more of her,—and after the first encounter you either sought or shunned—loved or loathed—as she would have had you do who was in all things sincere and candid, you are to understand that her cloud of dusky hair framed a small oval face that made no show of carnation or vaunt of rose. Her clear fine skin was almost always pale. She would have laughed you to scorn had you likened those colorless cheeks of hers to lilies. She prided herself upon a frame of mind eminently commonplace, antipodean to the romantic. "I am sensible, me!" you often heard her say.

In form—though as you know she believed herself to be a giantess—she was small and slight, and not at all remarkable. A framework of slender bones, frugally covered with tender, healthful flesh. Her shoulders sloped so much that in her loose-bodied, full-sleeved, black merino school uniform she seemed about to vanish. Her hips were narrow, without the voluptuous curves that belong to heroines. But a Divine jest had added to her little high-arched head a tiny pair of rosy shells for hearing, and the palms and nails and finger-tips of her narrow hands,—and feet I have heard it said by some who loved her—were roseate also. The younger children liked to pretend that this was a judgment on Juliette for stealing strawberries in the early June season, but she only joined in that one raid on the Sisters' kitchen-garden "To be a good comrade!" ... and as it happened, all the strawberries were slug-eaten. And where are there strawberries worth the stealing, unless it be in France?

For next to God and Our Lady, and her father M. le Colonel, Juliette Bayard loved her country. Paradise was but an improvement on France, to hear her describe it to the little ones. Further, though she had a perfect taste in dress, when released from the school uniform; though an ordinary hat under her deft transforming fingers would become a miracle of exquisite millinery; her groups of flowers, and landscapes, in water-color, her crayon dog's heads, were mercifully hidden from the drawing-master's eye. She sang out of tune, but in time; played correctly, but hated the piano; danced like an air-wafted tuft of dandelion-down or a gnat upon a summer evening,—and had a Heaven-born gift for housekeeping and cookery.

Of this last gift more anon. Meanwhile Laura writhed, or seemed to writhe, under the torrent of passionate reproaches, culminating in another shake, and a slap which might have damaged a kitten newly-born. Laura fell prone, moaning and gurgling. And Juliette, pierced by remorse at her own ruthlessness, sank, pale as ashes, beside the victim's corse.

"Darling Laura! sweetest Laura!—tell me I have not hurt you! Just Heaven! how could I strike you?—I, who am so strong! Indeed, I might have killed you! ... Pray for me, my little angel! It will need a miracle to cure my temper, as Mother Veronica constantly says. Cannot you get up? Do try, to please me! Tell me where you feel most injured? Quick, or I know I shall be angry again! ... Show me the bruise! Pouf! that is a mere nothing! I will kiss it and make it well, and you shall have the blue bead Rosary."

The mention of the blue beads palpably restored vitality. The sufferer was understood to intimate that a chocolate elephant would absolutely complete the cure.

"The elephant to-morrow when the Great Class return from the promenade. The Rosary before Benediction. Away with you!"

Laura scuttled. Juliette blew her a parting kiss, and said, with a comprehensive glance of scorn at the faces of her classmates:

"It was not she who deserved the—— I have not the expression! ... It is one of your English words that mean many things together ... a kiss ... a blow ... the boat of a sailor who catches fishes and crabs.... I have seen such boats at Havre and Weymouth, and they are very pretty.... Ah! Now I remember. You call them fishing-spanks!"

The Class shrieked. Juliette stood calmly while the tumult of laughter and exclamations raged about her. Her long upper lip shut down upon its scarlet neighbor, her brows frowned a little; her slender arms, lost in their loose sleeves, hung straightly by her narrow sides. Millais would, seeing her, have painted a maiden martyr. Watts might have limned her as Persephone new-loosed from the dark embrace of Dis, her wooer, taking her first timid steps upon the glowing floor of Hell.

"When you have finished making so much noise—peu importe—but I have a piece of news to tell you. You are none of you inquisitive—that goes without saying!—or you would not have dispatched that poor infant to play the spy outside the parlor door. Bridget-Mary and Alethea Bawne, I do not mean you—you are souls of honor—incapable of curiosity! ... Also, Monica Breagh, c'est là son moindre defaut! But there are others—yet my friends—who are not so delicate,—and to these I address myself. You do not deserve to hear—and yet I cannot be unkind to you; I, who have such joy of the heart in the knowledge that I am to return to my dear father!—such grief—ah! but such grief of the soul in bidding adieu to the School!"

"Not for good?"

"You are going to leave the School?"

"Dear, darling Juliette, say you're only joking!"

"She is in earnest. Look at her upper lip!"

"Vous moquez-vous du monde de parler ainsi!"

Throbbed out a Spanish voice, husky and passionate:

"Qué vergüenza! No, no, es imposible!"

"Sure, dear, you'd not be so cruel as to make game of us?"

She stood her ground, firm, but no longer frowning. Her heart swelled, her eyes were heavy with the promise of rain. Her slender arms went out as though she would have embraced them all.

"My dears, it is true! I go to Versailles to rejoin my father. He says to me also—I have his letter here!" ...

Silence fell upon the turbulent crowd as she laid a slender hand on the place where her heart could be seen throbbing. The paper rustled, but she did not draw it forth.

"He says, in this—I am to be married ... soon,—very quickly!"

A Babel of cries, ejaculations, and exclamations broke out about her. A girl's voice, more strident than the rest, shrieked:

The Man of Iron

THEMAN OF IRON

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

THE
MAN OF IRON