IX

A tall slight figure in the plain black, tight-fitting gown of a

novice, made with a little cape covering the upper arm. A sweet

plain face with eyes of hazel brown, framed in a close white cap with

three rows of gophered frills, and there you have Monica, the chosen

friend of the fiery Juliette.

"She has not three ideas! How can you think so much of her?" a

jealous rival is reported to have said.

Juliette retorted with a lightning riposte:

"Possibly no more than three, but they are good ones!" She marked

them off on her tiny fingers. "First, to serve God.... Again,--to

serve her friends.... Once more--to help her enemies! ... If not,

how is it that she spent two hours yesterday, working with you at

that F major fugue in Bach's Book of Forty-eight? ... Has not that

stopped you the whistle? ... I have eyes in my head, see you well?

_Pour tout dire_--you are an ingrate, you!"

"See you well!" could be a slogan on occasion, a blood-chilling note

heralding the shock of battle. But it came now in the softest of

dove-notes, as they hurried to meet each other, clasped hands, and

kissed.

"Dear one, I am so glad! See you well, we have a whole half-hour to

spend together.... And there is so much to tell you that I know not

where to begin." ... She drew back frowning a little, vexed that

Monica was not alone. "I entreat your pardon! ... I did not know you

entertained a visitor.... It is best that I retire.... I fear I

am.... how do you say? ... very much in the road!"

Monica explained, holding the big red hand of an awkward young man in

a shaggy greatcoat.

"You are not in the way, dear--and this is not a visitor! Let me

introduce my brother, of whom you have heard. Caro, this is my

friend, Mademoiselle de Bayard."

The shaggy young man, blushing savagely to the tips of his ears and

the roots of his flaming hair, made a clumsy inclination, and offered

the large red paw to Mademoiselle, who gravely inspected it, drawing

down her upper lip, folding her own infinitesimal hands before her

narrow waist, but made no movement to take it.

"He has angry eyes, with curious amber _taches_ in them, ..." she

thought. "And he looks dusty as a voyager after a long travel....

Not _bien tenu_ as a gentleman should be.... Living with Germans in

Germany--he has become indifferent to the _petits soins_ of the

toilet. I would put the hand in the fire rather than tell

Monica!--but, for me, I find him horrible. What is he saying? One

would expect from a being so clumsy and so shaggy, not merely speech,

but a roar!"

Yet the voice was fresh and rather pleasant, as he replied to

Monica's interested questions. Had he had a good journey? ... How

long had he been in London? ... Three days, and never let her know?

... Why not? ... Had he dined early, or lunched, and if not--he had

been understood to mumble a negative,--would he not have something

now? Tea and sandwiches--Sister Boniface would cut the latter in a

minute. It was only three o'clock. Benediction wasn't until

four--there would be heaps of time....

The mumbled refusals grew faint. Monica smiled her triumph. Intent

on hospitality she hurried out of the parlor, saying with a backward

glance, and a smile halved between sulky Carolan and somber Juliette:

"Sit down!--talk to each other ... I'll soon be back again!..."

But the sound of the closing door smote the shaggy youth with a dumb

palsy and transformed Mademoiselle de Bayard into the semblance of a

large mechanical doll in black merino.

"Stiff, pale, proud little creature!" Carolan mentally termed her.

It occurred to him that, attired in a brocade Court dress over a

hooped farthingale, crowned with a wig of stiffened ringlets adorned

with lace and ribbons and diamond powder, with a fan in one of those

rigid little hands, she might have sat to Velasquez as a child

Infanta. Or, upholstered and decked in Moorish finery, posed as one

of the female midgets in the royal group of the Familia. Whatever

Velasquez might have thought, she was priggish, prudish, dull,

doltish.... Obstinate, too, with that long, deeply-channeled upper

lip. And how persistently she kept those long, thick, uncurling

lashes down. One wondered rather what might be the color of the eyes

so concealed? Black or brown? Or--one had had a gleam of blue when

for an instant she had looked at one. Nobody cared--but perhaps they

were blue?

She made no movement to sit down, nor did she indicate a desire that

he should seat himself. She flickered her somber eyelids for an

instant, and the eyes seemed inky-black. Burnt holes in a blanket,

the observer brutally termed them, lifting his mental gaze to the

china-blue orbs of his ideal, the colossal

Britomart-Kriemhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde.

In contempt of the prim puppet in the black merino he found himself

adding inches to his loved one's height. Or perhaps it was to keep

himself from madly shouting to Monica to tell them to hurry up with

that tray....

When you have pawned your jacket and waistcoat for two-and-eightpence

early on Wednesday, and have dined on a sausage and mashed for

threepence, supped on a drink of water from a pump in a livery-stable

yard.... When the bed at a coffee-house has cost you a shilling,

breakfast of burned-bread coffee and roll, threepence, and you have

spent twopence on a paper collar, your remaining capital stands at a

shilling, and by three o'clock on Thursday, if you have not ventured

to break into this, you are beginning to return to the savage of the

Earlier Stone Age. Who, supposing his neighbor to be gnawing a lump

of gristle when his own stomach was clamorous, dropped in upon the

banquet armed with a flint axe, and possessed himself of the coveted

_bonne-bouche_.

P. C. Breagh was frankly astonished at the savage voracity of his own

impulses. It did not occur to him that his nerves--he had always

jeered at men who had talked of their nerves--had sustained a

tremendous shock, and that this was the inevitable reaction. His

laboriously crammed scientific knowledge had never yet been called

upon to account for his own bodily sensations--unless in the case of

a jammer headache--diagnosed as the result of too many beers

overnight. At any rate he was not hungry now,--and the room with its

stiff row of chairs, its high-molded ceiling, its dingy blue

distempered walls, hung with engravings of Popes and Cardinals, Roman

views, and Scriptural oil-paintings, began to heave and surge like

the decks of the evil-smelling, second-rate passenger-steamer that

had brought him third-class from Ostend. He thought of that old man

with the shattered skull sprawling among his bloody papers, and knew

that in another moment he should--horror of horrors! despite the

presence of yonder speechless Immobility in the fiddle-bodied black

frock and medaled blue neck ribbon--either faint or be violently sick.

He chose the first alternative, for the whole room, with its faded

gilt mirrors, its album-laden tables, its formal rows of chairs

skirting the wainscot, the little mats in front of them, and the

beeswaxed floor on which with growing difficulty he maintained a

perpendicular position, melted away from about and from under him,

letting him sink down, down ... into bottomless, boundless abysses of

intangible gray mist....

Out of which, after an interval of a hundred years or three minutes,

he emerged sufficiently to say in a husky whisper:

"It's nothing! I'm all----"

And then be swallowed up again. Coming to the surface in another æon

or so to ask, with a wince of pain:

"Did the old fellow shoot me in the head? It--hurts like the

dickens!"

And to receive the answer in a cool little silvery voice like the

playing of a fountain in a mossy basin at the end of a green alley,

or the trickle of a brook through lush grasses and forget-me-not beds.

"You knocked the floor with it when you made to fall so suddenly!"

Something cool and light touched his aching forehead, and the voice

went on again: "It does not bleed, no! but there will certainly be

one big bump there!"

"One bump.... Feels like one-and-twenty!" P. C. Breagh muttered,

adding, with a heave and struggle that brought him into a sitting

posture: "Help me up, whoever you are! ... Not all at once....

_Donnerwetter!_ how giddy I am! Try again in a minute! ... Here!

... Give me hold of your fist!"

The silvery voice said, with a liquid tremble in it that might have

been laughter or shyness:

"But I do not comprehend--_feesth_! Permit that I offer you the

hand.... I am so very strong, me!"

"Strong, eh?" P. C. Breagh said vacantly, being still absorbed in the

effort to remember where he was. He was certainly sitting up on a

shiny, cold and slippery floor, leaning back against something warm

and fragrant and soft, but he had not the least notion as to the

nature of the support afforded him, nor did he associate the

ownership of the voice with any person previously met.

"Strong!..." he repeated, and yawned, and could not leave off

yawning. "_Physical exhaustion, fatigue, and lack of food,_" he

mentally diagnosed, and found that, when his eyes had left off

blinking and watering, the room was coming back. There were the

Popes, Cardinals, and views of Roman Basilicas; there the

oil-paintings of sacred subjects--there the dingy gilt mirrors, the

round center-table with books upon it, the oval one with an inkstand

and nothing more,--the formal rows of chairs, instantly reviving the

impression of a Convent parlor ... and stimulating him to rise, after

some slips and sprawls and flounders, and stand upright on the

beeswaxed boards, smiling rather stupidly and clutching something

small and soft and sentient, for it fluttered in his big inclosing

palm as a captive titmouse or robin might have done....

_Donnerwetter!_ it was the hand whose aid he had asked a moment

before in his extremity.... A child's.... No!--a girl's.... Who

was the girl? ...

The truth burst on him then that it was to the mechanical doll, the

stiff, pale, proud, absurd little creature, the Infanta of the

drooping eyelids, the Moorish pigmy, he owed the help the little hand

had given. The silvery, sweet voice was hers, and against her he had

leaned as he sat on the floor gathering in his scattered

faculties.... The light touch that had visited his aching forehead,

when she had said it did not bleed, had soothed him like the contact

of a flower. The sweetness of the voice was in his ears again....

"Will you not sit down? You are not strong, and should manage your

forces. A gentleman to faint like that I have never before seen!

Your sister will be grieved that you----"

"You are not to tell her!" He dropped heavily into the chair she had

brought, and made a feebly-emphatic blow at the table near which she

had set it. "Promise me! ... I--I must ask you to be good enough....

Who has gone and unbuttoned my coat?"

X

The pitiable secret the shaggy garment had concealed, the absence of

jacket and waistcoat, bringing his hidden poverty into horrible

relief, the dinginess of the shirt of two days' wear, the deceptive

nature of the paper collar purchased at an outlay of twopence, had

been revealed by some traitorous hand during his unguarded weakness

of a moment back. The color rushed back to his haggard young face in

flood, as with shaky fingers he wedded the big horn buttons to their

buttonholes, and felt about his neck to find it wet.... Juliette had

said to herself that he had angry eyes. They were tigerish as they

flamed at her. Then the yellow flame died out of them and they were

nothing but gray and miserable. He said brokenly:

"I--beg your pardon! I must seem the last thing out in the way of a

brute to you. I had--fainted or something!--I've been through a lot

of late! And you meant to--be kind, I'm sure...."

He had thought her a mere child in size, but her personal dignity

lent her height and presence. Her great eyes met his full, and they

were deeply blue as scillas in May, with great black pupils and

velvety-black bands about the irises. She said in an icy little

voice:

"Sir, it is customary in these days to instruct young ladies in the

knowledge of imparting medical aid to the sick or wounded. A moment

since I saw you fall to the floor! I lanced myself to your side!--I

debuttoned your paletot--sprinkled on your forehead water from that

vase upon the table,"--she indicated the ornament with an

infinitesimal forefinger,--"and in a few minutes I have the relief to

behold you sufficiently recovered to demand if a man has shooted you?

... Naturally, I do not mean to be unkind! But the promise not to

speak of this to Mademoiselle, your sister, see you well?--I cannot

give it! Young ladies"--there was an appalling stateliness about the

tone and manner of this delivery, worthy of a mistress of

deportment--"young _ladies_ do not have secrets with strange young

gentlemen! And Monica is my dear friend, not you!"

"Then if she is so much a friend of yours, you would wish to spare

her knowledge of things certain to shock and grieve her. You would

not like to have her anxious and worried about what she couldn't

help, would you?" His eyes constrained and besought. His voice was

humbly entreating....

Juliette recognized the cunning in this appeal. She lowered her

little pointed chin and leveled her thick straight eyelashes at the

speaker. "Yes!" the chin said: "No!" the eyelashes replied. Thus

encouraged, P. C. Breagh had an inspiration.

"But if I trust you!--you look as if you could be trusted...."

From her little neck in its plain white frill to the cloud of dusky

hair that crowned her, she flushed rosy as Alpine snows at sunset.

Did he mean to insult, or ingratiate, this overbearing, shaggy youth?

She said, with delicate reproof, completely lost upon his bluntness:

"My father has honored me with his confidence, as long as I can

remember, sir."

"Then I'll risk mine with you!" said P. C. Breagh.

"Not risk!" She had lost her glow, the sapphires of her eyes were

shadowed by the blackness of the lowered lashes. "Do not say risk,

for that is to gamble. See you--I will be trusted absolutely, or I

will not be trusted at all!"

He understood, in part, that he had wounded, and awkwardly begged her

pardon, ending: "And show that you forgive me by letting me tell you

that I wouldn't have my sister know, for the world!" He got up and

went to one of the white-curtained, ground-glass-filled windows, that

masked the outlook upon Kensington Square, and said still more

awkwardly:

"You see--you must have already seen from my togs--that I am a

beggar. I came back from Germany three days ago to find myself one.

I was to receive a fortune from the hands of trustees, and I found

that their firm had gone bankrupt. The elder partner had committed

suicide--the younger had shot the moon. My thousands in his

pockets!" He ground his teeth. "And if I live--and ever meet that

fellow!--he'll pay me in inches of skin!"

She said, and the silvern voice had the sweetness of Cordelia's:

"I am so very sorry! Could you not prevail upon this dishonest

gentleman to restore to you your property?"

P. C. Breagh said, with a flash of white teeth in his blunt-featured

freckled face:

"I might, if he had been considerate enough to mention where I could

find him! ... Meanwhile..." He shrugged his strong young shoulders

in rather a despondent way.

"Meanwhile you are without a home ... and without money?"

He nodded, biting fiercely on his jutting underlip. "Just now! But

by-and-by----"

She persisted.

"Without money and--starving! Surely, starving! and that was why you

fainted! ... And I, _mon Dieu!_--I have been blind and stupid....

_Je ne me doutais de rien_! Forgive me, I beg of you!"

Her small face was all white and pinched and working. Sobs choked

her voice; she struck her little bosom--she wrung the tiny hands in

anguish.... And it was all real. You could not doubt Juliette's

sincerity. And though his manhood was sufficiently new to revolt at

commiseration, still, it was not unpleasant to know that one's

misfortunes had pierced the bucklered pride of the little Infanta,

and wrung tears from the most wonderful eyes he had ever seen. And

what was she saying?

"Monsieur Breagh, it is a misfortune of the most grand that you are a

man and I a woman! Otherwise it would be so easy to say to you

this.... Me, I am for the moment rich. I could--if you would accord

me the permission?--relieve these pressing necessities.... Let me

know where a letter will readily find you.... Do not, I entreat you,

be angry that I ask this!"

But he was angry. His broad stripe of meeting red eyebrows came

loweringly down over eyes that had the tigerish flame in them. His

face burned and he clenched his hands until the knuckles showed out

white upon their sunburned backs. He tried to speak and could not,

so choking was his indignation. To be asked to borrow from a

girl--his sister's schoolmate, added one last dash of wormwood to the

brimming cup of bitterness. Unlucky P. C. Breagh!

"I'm uncommonly obliged, but decent men--in this country--don't do

that sort of thing! Even Frenchmen might call it caddish!" he choked

out at last.

Her eyes blazed murderously, a savage dusky crimson dyed the small

white face that had looked at him with such pitiful entreaty. She

did not tower, she contracted--she crouched like a savage little cat

ready to spring and rend him; her muscles grew visibly tense under

her transparent skin. He could hear the sharp hiss of her intaken

breath, and see her lips writhe in the struggle to control utterance

that seemed on the point of breaking from them. When she spoke, it

was in a low clear whisper, more piercing, it seemed to her unlucky

auditor, than any shriek.

"Sir, when you say to me that even a Frenchman might find despicable

the deed an Englishman would shrink from as a stain upon his

honor,--you insult my country of France, and my brave father; and the

noble gentleman who will be my husband soon! ... It is fortunate for

you that M. Charles is not here, see you well? Brave as a lion, he

is a master of the sword. But enough!--I was mistaken and I have

been justly humiliated.... Permit that I wish you a very good

afternoon!"

She curtsied to the miserable P. C. Breagh with crushing ceremony,

turned, and had swept from the room before he could even reach the

door. It shut in his face with a deliberate gentleness that was more

final than a slam would have been....

"I've done it, by golly!" said P. C. Breagh.

Just after this lofty, dignified fashion had

Britomart-Krimhilde-Brünhilde-Isolde quitted the scene of many an

imaginary interview. That a being so small and frail should assume

the airs of these heroines tickled even while it angered him. A

moment more he glowered and fumed, cursing the Fate that had dealt

him another set-back, and then ... the tinkle of crockery heralded

the return of Monica with Sister Boniface and a tray, satisfactorily

laden with a stout brown teapot, bread and butter, home-made

preserves, and a dish of somewhat solid ham-sandwiches, the welcome

sight of which drove away the dark blue devils and restored his

cheeriness again. He could go a long time on one full meal, he told

himself, as he perpetrated a surprising onslaught on the eatables and

thirstily swallowed cup after cup of convent tea.

Replete at length, he leaned back in his chair, conscious--so

overwhelming was the sensation of fullness after his protracted

fast--of feeling like a boa-constrictor who had swallowed his

blanket. He longed to sleep, the continual battle with recurrent

yawns was becoming painful; and yet you are mistaken if you suppose

that this young man did not love his gentle step-sister, and was not

glad at heart to be once more in Monica's company. But Brother Ass,

the body, ridden fast and far by the turbulent spirit and the eager

mind, belabored by the cudgel of Fate until his solid ribs were

cracking within his shaggy hide, wanted repose more than social

converse. Carolan's eyelids were closing under the stream of

Monica's eager talk. His head was nodding--his mouth had fallen

ajar--a faint snore was on the point of issuing from the organ

immediately above it--when he started as broad awake as though a wasp

had stung him.... Monica was speaking of Juliette....

"I am so glad that you have met her!--yet sorry, too, because she is

leaving us so soon now. Is she not sweet?--with those grave airs,

and those angelic eyes under determined eyebrows, and that shy wild

smile..." thus Monica prattled on. To stop her--or to prevent

himself from giving her his candid opinion of her lauded idol, he

inquired whether she did not find him handsome, and had her reply:

"Not a bit! rather ugly than otherwise; but I love your face, and

always shall, Caro! Why, you have a mustache already!" she cried.

He blushed as Monica jumped up for a nearer inspection, to discover

that the close sprinkling of dark-brown freckles on the egg-smooth

young surface of his upper lip had deceived the sisterly observation.

"The mustache will come," Monica said with a smile, "and then you

will begin to be more of a dandy."

He fancied that her look betrayed a shade of disappointment. "No

wonder! such a beast as I must look!" he thought. But he said with

rather a clumsy air of indifference:

"I daresay my clothes are a bit shabby, perhaps more than a bit!

But, you see, I've been knocking about on the rail--and aboard

steamers--and so on."

"Still, you could be--what Juliette would call more _soigné_." There

was a little accent of sisterly rebuke in the words. "And I have

talked to her so much about you----"

"That you're afraid she'll chaff you, now she has beheld the wonder!

If she did I shouldn't be surprised! ... And if I'd known you wanted

me to turn up a thundering swell, I'd have polished myself up a bit.

My hair is too long, of course.... But--most British fellows run

shaggy after a year or two at a German University."

He spoke as easily and naturally as was possible, with a lump in the

throat embraced by the paper collar, and a savage pain tearing at his

heart.

She said:

"It is a bargain then, and I shall see my old Caro looking as he

ought to look, next time he comes here! ... Tell me, when will next

time be?"

He stuttered, inwardly writhing:

"I had no idea you'd mind the sort of--togs a fellow went about in!

You, who are going--you told me in your last letter! to take a vow of

poverty and all the rest!..."

She laughed and patted the brown hand.

"But you aren't going to take a vow of poverty.... You will be

independent.... You will have everything--I hope you will have

everything; that goes to make Life pleasant, and all the other things

that make it--precious.... I am very ambitious for you, Carolan!"

He laughed rather roughly.

"Ambition in the cap and cape of a postulant! What would the

Mistress of the Novices say to that?"

The face framed in the triple row of white frills was very pure and

tender.

"She would say that there are more kinds of ambition, than one. I am

ambitious that my brother should be spoken of among men--as a man who

in the whole course of his career was never once ashamed to own

himself a Catholic, and to prove not only in words, but in deeds--his

loyalty to his Master in the face of the world! You understand me,

don't you?"

He answered her in an embarrassed, awkward way, and with a look that

evaded hers.

"Of course! You mean--you'd like me to be the kind of fellow who

goes regularly to Mass, and receives the Blessed Sacrament on all the

Feasts of Obligation! Well, I can't boast of being quite as

scrupulous as that! But at any rate I have--ringed in with the

late-comers--at Christmas and Easter and Whitsuntide...." He added,

"Not that I should have been thought priggish if I'd gone oftener....

Of course the bulk of the students at Schwärz-Brettingen were

Lutheran Protesants. But about one-third were Catholics, I should

think."

"And were all of them late-comers--ringing in at the last minute?"

"I can't say that. When one did turn out for early Mass one found

the churches--there were three of 'em--packed full."

"Ah! ... Where are you staying?" she asked him in a changed tone.

He faltered, sick at heart at having to lie to her.