The first day of his attendance in the dissecting-room was a memorable
one, and had memorable consequences. He had considerable misgivings
about the new experience he had to meet, and sought, by the
concentration of his will, to prepare himself to encounter the
inevitable with calmness, and, if possible, with seeming indifference.
But he was not prepared after all for the disadvantage of entering a
company already hardened to those peculiarities of the position for
which a certain induration is as desirable as unavoidable.
When he entered the room, he found a group already gathered. He drew
timidly towards the table on the other side, not daring to glance at
something which lay upon it--"white with the whiteness of what is
dead;" and, feeling as if all the men were looking at him, as indeed
most of them were, kept staring, or trying to stare, at other things in
the room. But all at once, from an irresistible impulse, he faced
round, and looked at the table.
There lay the body of a woman, with a young sad face, beautiful in
spite of a terrible scar on the forehead, which indicated too plainly
with what brutal companions she had consorted. Alec's lip quivered, and
his throat swelled with a painful sensation of choking. He turned away,
and bit his lip hard to keep down his emotion.
The best quality he possessed was an entire and profound reverence for
women. Indignation even was almost quelled in the shock he received,
when one of the students, for the pleasure of sneering at his
discomposure, and making a boast of his own superiority to such
weakness, uttered a brutal jest. In vain the upturned face made its
white appeal to the universe: a laugh billowed the silence about its
head.
But no rudeness could hurt that motionless heart--no insult bring a
blush on that pale face. The closed eyes, the abandoned hands seemed
only to pray:
"Let me into the dark--out of the eyes of those men!"
Alec gave one sob in the vain effort to master the conflicting emotions
of indignation and pity. It reverberated in the laugh which burst from
the students of the healing art. Almost quenched in the laugh he heard
one word however, in the same voice which had made the jest--a voice he
knew well enough--that of Patrick Beauchamp. His face blazed up; his
eyes flashed; and he had made one step forward, when he was arrested by
the still face of the dead woman, which, ghostly as the morning moon,
returned no glow in the red sunlight of his wrath; and in reverence he
restrained his anger. In another moment, the professor arrived.
During the lecture and accompanying demonstrations. Alec was deaf and
blind from burning rage; in the midst of which, however, he almost
forgot his own wrong in regarding that done to the dead. He became, in
his own eyes, the champion of one whom nature and death had united to
render defenceless. From the verge of a gulf more terrible than the
grave, her cry had reached him, and he would rise to avenge her.
As soon as they came out, he walked up to Beauchamp.
"You called me a spoony," he said through his set teeth.
"I did," answered Beauchamp, with an admirable drawl of indifference.
Alec replied with a blow; whereupon Beauchamp knocked him down. But he
was up in a moment; and, although his antagonist was both older and
bigger, the elasticity of his perfect health soon began to tell. There
was little science between them, and what there was lay on Beauchamp's
side; yet he defended himself more and more feebly, for his wind had
soon given way. At length, after receiving a terrible blow on the
mouth, Beauchamp dropped his arms and turned his back; and Alec, after
some hesitation, let him go without the parting kick which he was
tempted to give him, and which he had so well deserved.
The men dispersed without remark, ashamed of themselves, and admiring
the bumpkin--most of them were gentlemen enough for that; while each of
the combatants retired unaccompanied to his own lodging--Alec with a
black eye, which soon passed through yellow back to its own natural
hue, and Beauchamp with a cut, the scar of which deepened the sneer on
his upper lip, and was long his evil counsellor from the confessional
of the mirror.