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