Part 4

"_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: