Part 7

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.

XI

"I--I haven't got the address on me just now! By George, that's just ... Ha, ha, ha!"

"What is the joke? Do tell me!" she urged, puzzled by the mirthless bark of laughter.

He could not have explained. His Irish sense of humor had been tickled to realize that in actual fact he did carry his address about him. Did not the shabby old frieze greatcoat constitute his hotel, chambers and club? To change the subject he began to question her experiences in the Novitiate. She looked happy, he admitted. He did not hide that her decision to take the Veil had been a surprise.

"You see, you'd always been such a jolly girl," he told her. "Such a stunning companion--I'd never have expected it of you."

Her bright laugh rang through the room.

"Dear boy, do you suppose that nuns are dismal things, or indifferent to pleasant companionship? You should hear us laugh and chatter at Recreation. Perhaps because the time for fun is limited, as the time for other things--we enjoy that half-hour's freedom all the more. Not"--her smile did not leave her, but it changed in expression,--"not that I did not have my miserable hours. For the matter of that I have them still!"

He got up and went over to the hearth-side, where a tiny gas-fire made pretense of cheerfulness.

"I never thought it was all jam in the Novitiate. A fellow I knew who had wanted to be a Carthusian monk--and found it impossible to stick out the preliminaries!--hinted as much to me."

"I suppose," she said calmly, "that he could not submit to the--necessary experiences that lead to the final breaking of the will."

"Breaking of the will!" He kicked the old-fashioned fender savagely. "What do they do to break yours, in Heaven's name?"

"What is done is done in Heaven's name," she said, "and that is why one can submit cheerfully. But my first weeks in the noviceship were cloudlessly happy." She laughed a little. "I thought it was always going to be like that!"

"I see! ... I twig! ... They made much of you in the beginning...." He gritted his teeth and turned his face away.

"Perhaps they did! ... I remember I had all the nicest things to do, and nobody minded.... I was allowed to dust the High Altar, change the flowers in the vases, and help the Sister-Sacristan brush and fold the vestments away. And one day I was permitted to wash the lunette of the monstrance. It was a wonderful experience. One could understand how the Magdalene must have felt when she wiped the Sacred Feet."

He was silent, for she had soared to heights beyond him.

"Perhaps it made me proud, for next day I was set to tidy the linen-room presses. I worked for some weeks there, darning and mending and folding. Then I was sent to the Refectory." The smile was only in her eyes now. "I liked laying the long tables, but I hated washing dirty plates and dishes, and I simply loathed cleaning knives and forks."

"I should think so! Housemaid's duty! I understand now what you meant a minute back! ... By George! ... 'Miserable hours!' ..."

Her deep eyes rested on him calmly:

"And after I am clothed--after I have received the habit--I shall most likely go on having them! I daresay I shall have them after I have taken the Veil."

He kicked the fender again, his hands shoved deep into his empty pockets, and felt the shilling, sole coin remaining to him, burn against his aching ribs. He would have given ten years of life to have been able to tell her that a home with him was ready and waiting,--in case she shrank from the final plunge. He made a great effort and groaned out:

"But that won't be for two years to come. And things may happen--who knows!"

"Oh! I pray," she said with a sudden flush, "that I need not wait two years!"

Her eagerness lifted a load that had been crushing him. In sheer relief he began to stammer:

"What a blessed idiot I am! I didn't understand ... I thought you ... I believed you.... Of course you don't do the dirty work now. That was only for a time, at the beginning. Well, I'm glad! I'd hate to think of my sister tackling servants' duties, anyway! All right! Well, what are you on to now, eh? Back at dusting the Altar and doing the flowers?"