CHAPTER XI.

A WRECK.

A week or so after the events related in the last chapter.

It is about the hour when the theatres close, and the scene is the interior of the Albion--the well-known tavern near Old Drury, where actors and others of the male s.e.x are wont to sup, after the play and opera are over.

At a table is a man sitting by himself, moodily drinking whisky--which he takes with very little water--and smoking cigar after cigar.

At a glance, you can see that he is a wreck--a gentleman who has become the slave of alcohol. His hand shakes, his eye is fierce and restless, and his three days' beard and unbrushed clothes show that carelessness of appearance which are the early signs of a man's going to the dogs through drink. The recklessness of a man who has lost his self-respect is apparent in his every gesture.

This is Tommy Hudson, but terribly changed. He is not beautiful and refined of features now, but coa.r.s.e, bloated, spirit-sodden. Not now are the bright, merry eyes, the hopeful buoyancy of manner; but, in their place, sullenness, or the sneers and flippancy born of a gnawing consciousness of degradation and failure.

This man had known a lofty ideal--so was his fall the greater.

The life of the young London barrister is perhaps the most perilous of all for weak natures such as his. Hundreds of promising young lives have fallen victims to its strong temptations. Living in solitary chambers, waiting for work that never comes, desponding at his want of success, the young man is driven out night after night into dissipation--first, by desire of society; lastly, by a morbid restlessness that makes dissipation a necessity.

As long as the man is strong, the whirl of wild amus.e.m.e.nts may do little harm. He may, in spite of his rackety youth, become a leader of his profession. The lives of many of our greatest judges have been notorious. But, for these few hard ones that do pa.s.s through unscathed or slightly wounded, how many fall and perish! How many, in that apprenticeship to the legal profession, play so fiercely in the frequent leisure, that at last, when the work does come, they cannot do it--it is too late! The giants survive--the pigmies are destroyed. Some of these Old Bailey men, we know, have drank deeply in the old-fashioned way, and have thrown themselves into every form of dissipation for forty years and more, and yet are at the top of their branch of the profession. But, young man, before you set out to emulate their ways, and live their lives, remember that they are as one in a hundred, and consider whether you are stronger than ninety-nine men out of a hundred.

It is so easy for a jolly good fellow to degenerate into the drunkard; then to the disreputable drunkard--cut by all his acquaintance; and then to the wreck.

Thus was it with the unfortunate Tommy Hudson. His youth, his beauty, his wit, were all gone; and people now seeing the abject wretch for the first time would never have guessed what he once had been.

No wonder that men, observing such things, carry their gospel of temperance to fanaticism--indeed, no wonder!

And so this nervous wretch stooped there over his drink, casting fierce, furtive glances around him like some hunted animal, as is the way of one on the brink of delirium tremens--ever impressed with an idea that those around were watching him, and talking of him.

Dr. Duncan, who had been spending the evening at a neighbouring theatre, came into the Albion to have some supper before going home.

His pa.s.sion for Mary and her strange behaviour, when he declared his love to her at his last interview, had disturbed him greatly, so that, contrary to his wont, he had been nightly visiting some theatre or other place of amus.e.m.e.nt, with the vain hope of distracting his mind from the uneasy misery which oppressed it, and almost unfitted him for work.

Since that interview, she had rather avoided him, and he had held no conversation with her, save of the briefest and most matter-of-fact description, in the course of their respective duties in the hospital.

There was a gloom on the doctor's brow, and his usually keen-glancing eye was dull of expression. As he walked to an unoccupied table in the corner of the room, he took no notice of anything that was going on around him.

On the other hand, the barrister--who was nervously watching all that pa.s.sed, and followed every movement with his eyes--raised his head from his elbows, and stared at the other with a savage, insolent manner. Then his expression changed--suddenly grew softer, and a puzzled look came to his face. He pa.s.sed his hand across his forehead; shook his head, as if to throw off some painful idea; looked again; then cried, in a surprised voice that sounded half-timid, the tone of one who had fallen, but not beneath all sense of shame--of one doubtful whether his old friend will acknowledge him.

"Why! Duncan! Duncan! Is that you?"

The doctor started--stared at him, evidently puzzled, and not recognizing the man who addressed him.

The drunken man continued, in melancholy tones: "Am I so altered as all that, then? Why, don't _you_ even remember me?"

The doctor looked at him, and replied, with hesitation: "I do know you.

I know your face, but I cannot exactly--."

The barrister interrupted him: "I was once your friend, old man--once--long--long ago." He drawled out these words in a maudlin fashion; then, conscious that he was just on the point of weeping, he pulled himself together, and stretched out his hand to seize his gla.s.s, but, in doing so, knocked it off the table, and it broke into pieces.

"Like that gla.s.s, sir," he continued, "like that gla.s.s, I'm broken--broken altogether."

Then he hung down his head, and laughed to himself in a foolish manner.

Suddenly he raised it again, and cried out, in a savage voice: "Duncan!

d.a.m.n it, man! Don't you know me, or are you going to cut me, like all the rest of them? Eh?"

His friend recognized him at last. "Why, it is Hudson!" he exclaimed much shocked at the fearful change that had come over his once intimate friend. "Hudson! my dear old boy, I am so glad to see you again. What has become of you all this time?"

"How many years is it since you saw me last, Duncan?" asked the barrister in a sulky voice.

"Between three and four years, I think," was the reply.

"Don't you think you might have taken the trouble to look your old friend up all that time? Eh?"

"So I have," replied the doctor, "several times. But I never found you in. I have written to you too, don't you remember? You never replied to my letters though. I began to think you wanted to cut me, old fellow."

"Yes! now I do remember," said his friend sadly. "It's just like me--just like me; and now I turn round and reproach you. I'm an a.s.s, an ungrateful blackguard. Drink, drink--that's what does it, Duncan. It dulls all the good feeling in a man. Look at me! you are my old chum. I get your kind letters and invitations, I never reply to them. I am drunk and chuck them aside. I neglect and quarrel with all my old--my true friends; I have no friends now, a few harpies only around me who drink and laugh with me, as long as my pocket gives out a clinking sound.

Forgive me, Duncan."

The doctor took a chair and sat down opposite his friend.

The barrister continued after a pause, "How many years did you say it was since you saw me last, Duncan?"

"About three."

"And I have changed so much in that time that you didn't know me. Pooh!

what do I care? It's all over. No good crying over spilt milk. Have a drink, my boy. What will you take?"

"Nothing now, thanks; I am going to sup."

"Nonsense! Waiter, two brandies. If you won't name your poison yourself I must do it for you. Let's look at you, Duncan. You look fit enough--not much older. I've heard of you--got all the best appointments at your hospital--lucky man!"

The brandies came. The doctor observed that Hudson drank his neat this time, and then commenced to become quite sober again--a dangerous symptom.

"Hudson," said the doctor, "excuse me, old man, but what on earth is the meaning of all this? You don't look the man you were. You are twenty years older."

"Well! I am older, old man," Hudson replied, flippantly.

"Yes, but only by three years or so. What a fellow you were then, and now you look as if you were going to the dogs."

"Going! gone, you mean," the barrister exclaimed with a bitter laugh.

"But do I look so very much worse then, Duncan?"

"Much worse! Why, man, I should not know you for the old Hudson of Caius, our stroke, our scholar, our rowdy, jolly, clever, healthy Tommy Hudson. Oh, my dear boy, if you could but see what you were and what you are. You must put on the brake. You'll have to come and live with me, and you'll soon be your old self again."

Hudson shook his head. "Never! No! no! It's too late--too late now, old man, you don't know all. I've chucked up the sponge."

"Nonsense, man. It's not too late."