Claudia’s introduction served so well that Paul was allowed to show what he was made of in rehearsal at the Mirror Theatre, with a prospective salary of fifty shillings a week. He had been a personage of late, and Darco had delegated to him a good deal of his own authority. He was not a personage any longer, and he was not altogether happy in his fall from dignity. But Claudia was coming. He and Claudia would be in the same house together, and playing at the same theatre. He would see her at breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner; he would escort her from the theatre and home again. That would be happiness enough to atone for anything.

This prophecy was not quite realized. Claudia chose to breakfast in her own room, and she was a woman of many friends, and lunched out and dined out so often that Paul hardly saw anything of her. The Sundays would have been Elysian days, but ladies and gentlemen of fashionable aspect drove to the house in handsome equipages, and spirited Miss Belmont away to revels at Richmond and elsewhere in which Paul had no part. He moved sadly about the house, in the streets, with no heart for study, or for the writing of the new comedy on which his mind had been set so warmly only a few weeks before. His old companions were travelling about the country, meeting old friends and making new ones, and he wished himself back amongst them many a time. He could have written to Claudia, and have looked forward to the time when he could have met her again on equal terms. They were not equals any longer. Miss Belmont was starred in big type, and was leading lady, at a biggish salary; for her first real chance had come to her, and she had charmed the town. Paul was a walking gentleman with a part of fifty lines, and not a solitary critic named his name.

Sometimes, but very rarely, Claudia shone upon him. On fine evenings, and on those sparse occasions when she and Paul dined at the same table, she would walk to the theatre and accept his escort Then, for a brief half-hour, life was worth the living again. But there was one nightly hour of torment. His work was over early, for he had nothing to do after the opening of the third act of the piece then playing. He would dress and wait in his room, and wonder whether that idiot, that dolt and fool incomparable, Captain the Honourable John MacMadden, was waiting at the stage-door. Captain MacMadden belonged to the Household Brigade, and was a bachelor of five-and-thirty. He parted his hair in the middle, and wore a moustache and weeping whiskers of the jettiest, shiny black. He smiled constantly, to show a set of dazzling white teeth. In his own mind Paul loaded this exquisite with savage satire. He was a tailor’s dummy carrying about a barber’s dummy, and the barber’s dummy was finished with a dentist’s advertisement He carried a very thin umbrella—the mere ghost of an umbrella—he was gloved and booted with the fineness of a lady, and he was always delicately perfumed. He was reported to be wealthy, abominably wealthy, and three nights a week or more he would present himself at the theatre, and take Miss Belmont out to supper. But so discreet was that lady, and so careful of her good report, that Captain MacMadden never came without a guardian dragon in the person of another young lady of the theatres, who was accompanied by a gentleman who was in all points tailored and barbered and gloved and booted like Captain MacMadden himself.

Paul would wonder if the splendid warrior were below until he could endure himself no longer. Then he would descend and hang about the stage-door, to find his enemy or not to find him, as the case might be, but in either event to eat his heart in jealousy and impatience. When he found him he burned to insult him by asking him what tailor he advertised, or by addressing him as the Housemaid’s Terror or the Nursegirl’s Blight. He ground tegmenta of ‘Maud’ between his teeth as he looked at him. ‘His essences turn the live air sick,’ and ‘that oiled and curled Assyrian bull, smelling of musk and of insolence.’ And it happened one night that Captain MacMadden, arriving late, and in a mighty hurry and flutter lest he should have missed the lady, tapped Paul upon the shoulder, and said:

‘My boy, can you tell me if Miss Belmont has left the theatre?’

Paul, who was at that instant bending all the force of his mind upon Captain MacMadden, and punching his head in visioned combat, turned on him with a passionate ‘Damn your impertinence, sir!’ which set the startled gentleman agape with wonder. At this instant Claudia pushed through the swinging door which led from the stage to the corridor, and she ran in between the belligerent Paul and the object of his rage.

‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘This gentleman,’ said Paul, ‘is sadly in want of a lesson in good-breeding. I shall be happy to offer him one.’

‘Upon my word,’ returned Captain MacMadden mildly, ‘you’re devilish peppery. Hadn’t the slightest intention to affront anybody, upon my word. Nothing further from thoughts. Can’t say moah.’

‘Mr. Armstrong,’ said Claudia, ‘I have never seen you display this ill-bred brutality before. I had not expected you to show it in my presence to my friend.’

Paul felt for the instant that he had been brutal and ill-bred. Claudia judged him so, and whatever Claudia said must needs be just But when she had swept by him to the waiting brougham and the fashionable escort had followed her, he stood in a choking rage, and felt like Cain. A thick drizzle was falling, and he swung out into the night, glad of the wet coolness in his flaming face, and the wet wind that fanned him. The streets were heavily mired and the drizzle grew to a fast downpour. He turned up his coat-collar and ploughed along, growing more and more resolutely angry, and more and more resolved to fight his case out with Claudia. The house in which they lived was dark when he reached it, except for a single gas-jet in the hall at which guests bound bedward lit their candles. He walked into the dining-room and sat down to wait, with nothing but the winking jet on the wall and his own thoughts for company. The fire in the grate had died, and its cooling ashes made a crisp, faint noise from time to time. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked irritatingly, and sounded the quarters at intervals which seemed curiously irregular. At times one quarter seemed to follow close on another’s heels, and the next seemed to lag for hours. Paul was soaked to the skin, and had violent fits of shivering, but he would not leave his post lest he should miss Claudia.

Cabs rolled by, and every one brought Claudia to his fancy, but scores of them passed without pause. One o’clock sounded and no Claudia. Two o’clock, and no Claudia. Then the rumble of a lonely hansom, a slippery stoppage of a horse’s feet, and Claudia’s voice crying, ‘Two doors higher up.’ Then a renewed motion, a pause, the scrape of a latchkey at the lock, and Paul was on his feet, candlestick in hand.

‘Mayn’t I come in?’ asked the hateful voice of Captain MacMadden. ‘On’y a moment, upon my word.’

‘Certainly not,’ Claudia answered curtly. ‘Good-night.’

‘You’ll think of what I asked you?’

‘Indeed,’ said Claudia, in a voice of scorn, ‘I will do nothing of the kind. I have never been so insulted in my life, and I shall be obliged if you will put an end to your attentions.’

The heart of the involuntary listener glowed within him, but Captain MacMadden’s drawl broke in and chilled him horribly.

‘Well, look here, Claudia, damn it all! Will you marry me? I’ll go that far, if nothing else will do for you. I will, upon my word.’

‘You may ask me that question in a week’s time,’ said Claudia. ‘At present I have no more to say to you than just “Good-night.”’

The door closed and there was a silence. Claudia laughed quietly to herself, and rustled towards the gas-jet. Paul stepped out and intercepted her, the unlit candle in his hand, his hair disordered, and his face stained with the dye the rain had soaked from his hat His teeth were chattering noisily and rapidly, and he and Claudia faced each other. Paul lit his candle mechanically, and set it on the hall table, below the jet, which blinked with a faint intermittent hum.

‘Are you spying upon me, Mr. Armstrong? asked Claudia, with a touch of the manner of the stage.

‘Not I,’ Paul answered bluntly; ‘I waited up to speak to you. Are you going to marry that grinning nincompoop?’

‘You presume,’ said Claudia, with yet more of the manner of the stage. ‘You presume abominably. Allow me to pass, sir.’

‘The man has offered you a life of shame,’ said Paul. ‘You mean to listen to him after that? She looked at him scornfully and defiantly. ‘Well,’ he said, shivering strangely from head to foot, ‘you’re not the woman I took you for. It’s good-bye to Claudia.’

He stood aside for her to pass. She lit her candle and swept by him. He heard her door close, and the key turn in the lock. He stood shuddering in the hall, the chance-held candle dropping grease upon the oil-cloth. He gave one big dry sob and mounted to his garret-room. There was no sleep for him, and he did not undress. The candle burned down in its socket, the light flared up and died, and the nauseous stink of wick and tallow filled the room. His mind was strangely vacant, but even in the darkness and the silence he found a thousand things in which to take a leaden interest: as the swaying of the window-curtains where a slight draught caught them; the faintly-seen progress of the rain-drops down the window-pane; the wet glints of light where the street gas-lamp dimly irradiated the windows and the houses on the opposite side of the way; a ticking insect in the wall-paper; sounds of night traffic in the great thoroughfare a quarter of a mile off; the squashing tramp of a policeman on his rounds; the moaning voices of wind and rain; the very beating of his own pulses in his head; the very stupor of his own intelligence.

It was still raining when the dismal dawn crept up, and he was chilled to the marrow. He rose stupidly from the chair in which he had passed the night, and began to change his dress, stiffly and with difficulty. During the greater part of the night he had been sitting in a drooping posture, and he found without trouble or interest that he could not change it. There was an aching weight upon his loins, but he had no interest in that either. He sat in his room all day. The chambermaid came to the door and tapped, and receiving no answer, entered. She stared to see him sitting at the window and the bed undisturbed, but she went away again. Somehow the day crawled on, and as the darkness fell he crept downstairs, and crawled, an aching stoop, to the theatre. He was an hour before the time, but by hazard he met the manager at the stage-door.

‘Why, great God, Armstrong! what’s the matter?’

‘I got wet last night,’ Paul answered, in a voice which startled him and pained his throat.

He had not spoken a word since he had said good-bye to Claudia.

‘You’ve no right to be out like this,’ said the manager brusquely; ‘it’s suicide. You’re no good here, you know,’ he added, in a kinder voice. ‘Here, you, Collins; call a cab, and help Mr. Armstrong into it.’

‘Can you do without me?’ Paul asked, in that strange voice.

‘Do without you? Yes. I’ve a man at hand that will swallow your lines and biz in half an hour. Get a fire in your bedroom; have a good stiff glass of rum as hot as you can drink it. Get somebody to make you cayenne pills—cayenne-pepper and bread-crumbs. Take three or four, and have ‘em hot. Why, man alive, you’ve got an ague!’

The cab was brought, and Paul was helped into it and driven home. He could not lift his hand above his head to pay the fare, and the cabman descended grumblingly to take it; but seeing how his fare’s feet fumbled at the steps, got down a second time to help him to the door. Paul walked into the dining-room, hat in hand, and bent The boarders were at dessert, and Claudia for once was with them.

‘No beggars allowed in this bar,’ said one of the professional boarders jocularly, thinking the entrance a bit of playful masquerade.

‘I’m not very well,’ said Paul, with a frog-like roop. ‘I’ve been down to the theatre, and Walton has sent me home again. I’m afraid I can’t quite manage to get upstairs.’

He did not look at Claudia, but he was conscious of her gaze, and he knew somehow that there was fright in her eyes.

Two of the boarders engineered him to his room, and one undressed him whilst the other ran for rum and cayenne-pepper. They were all theatrical folk in the house, and kindly in case of trouble, as their tribe is always. Paul was put to bed, and had extra blankets heaped upon him, and a fire was lit in the grate. He was dosed with hot rum-and-water and the cayenne pills, and was then left, first to grow maudlin, and next to fall into a sleep which was full of monstrous dreams. At one time he lay in a great cleft between two hills, and stones rolled down upon him, causing him dull pain; then the stones formed themselves into a fence—a kind of rough arch on which other stones battered without ceasing till he was walled in thickly. At another time he had to climb up an endless hill, with hot chains about his loins and knees.

Somebody came into his room with a candle, and the light awoke him. It was one of his fellow-boarders back from the theatre, with news that it was nearly midnight. He forced more hot rum on the patient, and sat with him until he was sound asleep. The liquor did its work, and he slept without dreams until daylight. He strove to rise and dress, but the task was beyond him, and there was nothing left but to lie and stare at the ceiling, and to say to himself over and over again, without a touch of interest or feeling: ‘It’s good-bye to Claudia.’ The landlady came to see him, and found him burning and shivering, and complaining of the bitter cold. She went away, and came back again with a doctor, who told him cheerfully that he was in for rheumatic fever, big or little, as sure as a gun.

‘But he’s young, ma’am,’ said the doctor—‘he’s young, and we shall pull him through.’

‘Can he be moved?’ asked the landlady.

‘Moved? No, possibly not for weeks.’

‘Have you any money, Mr. Armstrong?’ said the landlady, ‘or shall I write to your friends?’

‘There’s fifty-one pounds in my dressing-bag,’ croaked Paul. ‘When you’ve buried me and paid your bill, send the balance to my father.’

‘Buried you?’ said the doctor. ‘You don’t suppose you’re going to peg out, do you?’

‘I hope so,’ said Paul.

‘Oh,’ said the doctor, casting a shrewd, good-humoured eye at him, ‘you feel like that, do you? But you’ve got me to reckon with, and the British Pharmacopoeia. When did you eat last?

‘Day before yesterday.’

‘All right, young man; I’ll fettle you, and if you think you’re going to slip your cable, you’re mightily in error.’

‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.’

The time went on, and a day later he was light-headed, and babbled, as he learned afterwards, of Claudia. Sometimes he upbraided her savagely, and sometimes he made tragic love to her. He had intervals of complete sanity, in which the thought of her was like an inward fire; then he had a five weeks’ spell of madness, and awoke from it free from pain, but a mere crate of bones which felt heavier than lead. He remembered some of his own delusions clearly, but lost count of whole weeks of time, and had yet to learn how long he had lain there. When he awoke he knew that somebody was in the room, and made an effort to turn his head. That failed, but the somebody heard the faint rustle he made, and the first face his eyes looked at was the face of Darco.

‘Ah!’ said Darco, ‘you haf got your prains pack again. You know me, eh?’

Paul tried to nod, but succeeded only in closing his eyes in sign of assent.

‘I am a bid of a dogtor,’ said Darco; ‘led me veel your bulse. Goot—goot, ant your demberadure is normal. It is now begome your business to ead and trink.’ He waddled across the room, and came back with a tin of jelly and a spoon, and fed the invalid ‘That is enough,’ he said, after the fifth spoonful. ‘Liddle and often; that is the came to blay.’

Paul was too weak to wonder at anything, or he would have wondered at Darco’s presence; but Nature was too wise to let him waste his forces on any such unprofitable exercise as thinking, and sent him to sleep again. When he awoke he was ravenously hungry, and in a day or two he began to abuse the nurse who tended him for stinting his victuals. But the nurse was a good-humoured old campaigner.

‘Why, bless your heart, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said, when in an interval of contrition Paul apologised, ‘it do me good to hear you swear that hearty! Most gentlemen does it when they’re picking up a bit.’

There was in his mind barely a thought of Claudia; the one fever seemed to have burned the other out of him.

‘The heart,’ said the doctor—‘the heart’s the thing we’re always afraid of in rheumatic fever, and the heart’s as sound as a nut.’

Paul stretched feebly, and thought he had his jest wholly to himself; but the doctor undeceived him.

‘It wasn’t always so, my young friend.’

Paul blushed like fire.

‘Have I been babbling? he asked guiltily.

‘A bit,’ said the doctor; ‘enough to justify those gloomy hopes of yours.’

Paul hung his head in a transient shame, and murmured that he was sorry.

‘Pooh, pooh!’ cried the doctor; ‘you’re all right now. You can bear to hear a little bit of news about the lady?’

‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘anything.’

‘She’s married,’ said the doctor—‘married to the Honourable Captain MacMadden, and has left the stage.’

‘Did she ever come to see me?’ Paul asked.

‘No,’ said the doctor.

The passion of the youth went to join the calf-love of the boy, and the man accomplished looked on them both with a half-humorous wonder. He was learning his world, he thought. It would not be easy to fool him in that way again.

He sat propped up with pillows in an arm-chair now, and could hold a book; but the lubricant at his joints had all been licked up by the fever, and it was slow to come back again, so that he had hideous twinges when he moved. He had plenty of society now that he was fit for it, for the fellow-boarders were idle during the day, and spared time to sit and talk with him.

‘You recognised old Darco when you saw him, didn’t you?’ one of them asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Paul, ‘I knew him. What brought him here? I behaved very badly toold Darco.’

‘Well, to tell you the truth,’ said the other, ‘he said so. “Ant I nefer forgive an incradidude,” says he, and proved it by paying the doctor’s bill.’

Every man in the profession had a more or less plausible imitation of old Darco’s ‘leedle beguliaridies.’ He was as well known as the Strand, and loved and hated as few men are.

‘I treated Darco very badly,’ said Paul. ‘I can’t rest under that sort of obligation to him. How much did he pay?’

‘You’d better ask the doctor.’

Paul asked the doctor next time he saw him, but elicited nothing.

‘But I can’t allow it,’ Paul cried; ‘I can’t endure it I behaved abominably to Darco; I behaved like a beast and a fool. I’d take his scorn and hatred if he thought I was worth either; but I can’t accept his benefits after the way in which I served him. I left the kindest friend I ever had, the man who took me out of the gutter—and that’s God’s truth, doctor; and I left him to follow that——’

He ground his teeth hard on the word he was fain to use.

‘Steady!’ said the doctor—’ steady!’

‘That Ignis Fatuus,’ groaned Paul. ‘Is that mild enough for you?’

The doctor knew everything. There was no further shame in making a clean breast of it.

‘It’s better than what you were going to say,’ the doctor answered, ‘whatever it was. I hate vulgarity as the devil hates virtue. It’s a pretty sex; I know something about it You seem to have lighted upon a pretty sample.’

Just at this instant there came a tap at the door, and the voice of the maid was heard saying, ‘This is the room, sir.’ The door opened, and in walked Armstrong the elder.

‘Dad!’ cried Paul

His father held his hand and looked at him.

‘I’ve been sore troubled by your silence, lad,’ he said. ‘I’ve had hard work to find ye. Ye might have written.’

‘I was coming to see you,’ said Paul, ‘so soon as I could travel. When will that be, doctor?’

‘In a fortnight’s time, perhaps,’ the doctor answered—‘not much earlier.’

The doctor went his way, and the father and son were together.

‘You’re out of Darco’s service, I understand?’ said Armstrong. ‘He wrote kindly about ye, but he said you’d parted. Why did you leave him, Paul?’

Paul was penitent and feeble of body, and his father was his dearest. Bit by bit he told his story, or as much of it as he could be told.

‘Man,’ said Armstrong, ‘ye’re beginning airly.’