Part 5

"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:

"I hate your father! Beast!" and broke down in hysterical sobbing. Juliette replied, those about her hushed to hear; and in the oasis of silence her tender, silvery voice rose like a fountain springing from the heart of purity.

"My father is not what you say, but the Emperor's brave soldier and a noble gentleman. I am proud to obey when he commands! He has said to me that I am to be married, and does he not know what is best for me? Would he wish to bring unhappiness upon his Juliette?"

She was not so much loyal as Loyalty personified, standing there defending him; with her little hand keeping down her bursting heart of anguish, and salt lakes of unshed tears pent up behind her sorrowful sapphire eyes.... Her voice broke as she said "his Juliette," and one of the Bawnes, a stately, black-browed girl, answered, speaking in French:

"He would not if he is--what you have described him! ... But--unless you knew of this before--it is so sudden.... It would seem to argue that M. le Colonel was thinking more--you will not be offended!--of the happiness of his future son-in-law than of his daughter's----"

"_Non, non, non!_" She made an emphatic gesture with her little hand, and shook her head so that a tear fell from her lashes on the bosom of her black school-dress, "Dear Lady Biddy--you are mistaken. For--comprehend you?--my happiness is in obeying that beloved father, always. For me, there is no greater joy.... And his letter bears date of the New Year--three days since--behold the postmark. It is the custom to give young people étrennes at that season--my father bestows on me a husband, and I am--content! See you well?"

It was faulty English, yet Juliette's "See you well?" haunted the music-loving ear.

And now even the reserved began to question, while the frankly curious waxed importunate concerning the date of Mademoiselle Bayard's impending departure, the name, rank and personal appearance of the mysterious husband-elect, the number and uniform of his regiment. For, of course, he was certain to be an officer of Cavalry, Dragoons, Lancers, or Cuirassiers. That he must be handsome went without saying; but were his eyes dark or light, and did he wear a moustache only, or sport the hirsute ornament in conjunction with an imperial? Beset from all quarters, Juliette was beginning to lose command of herself, when the hour of two struck from the great clock in the corridor.

The clang-clang of an iron bell succeeded, the double doors at the upper end of the Hall rolled backward, uniting the Great and the Middle Classes in the religious exercise that opened afternoon School. The hymn sung, the brief litany chanted to an accompaniment played on the harmonium by a mistress in the purple habit and creamy veil of the choir-sisters, another nun approached Juliette and whispered in her ear.

She was to go to the dormitory and pack her trunk, which would presently be brought her by one of the lay-sisters. And this done, she was free to spend the half-hour previous to Benediction in the parlor with----

The name was lost in Juliette's embrace and kiss of gratitude. She was usually chary of caresses, perhaps she wished to hide her eyes.

They were fairly overflowing, poor eyes! when their owner gained the solitude of her white-draped cubicle in the Greats' dormitory. Once the curtains fell behind her she was free to fall upon her knees beside the bed and sob there, to call upon Our Lady for succor and pity, to rock herself and hug her bleeding heart. And all these things Juliette did, until the dull thump of felt shoes upon the shining boards betokened the arrival of the lay-sister, bearing the oilskin-covered dress-basket, disinterred from some below-stairs repository, which had to be filled from the locker, dress-hooks, and drawers.

Ten minutes had been devoured in grief, forty yet remained for packing. A lover of method in all things, frugal and prudent in the expenditure of resources ("_I am sensible, me!_"), Juliette was economical of time. Ten minutes might be spared to re-perusal of the letter that had set her faith in that dearest father rocking like a palm in tempest, and wrung such tears of anguish from the heart that worshiped him.

She drew the bulky envelope from its pure hiding-place, kissed it, and moaned a little. There were three sheets of thin foreign note, flourished over in a big, bold, soldierly hand. The date bore evidence that the letter had been penned on the Eve of Saint Sylvestre, answering to our New Year's Eve. The address was:

"_Barracks of the 777th Regiment,_ "_Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard,_ "_Versailles._

"_My Daughter,_