Sir Brook Fossbrooke Volume Ii Part 43

What says Sir Brook Fossbrooke to this? or how would he act were he in my place?"

"Just as you mean to act now," said Fossbrooke, promptly.

"And how may that be, sir?"

"By refusing all a.s.sistance to such party warfare; at least, my Lord Chief Baron, it is thus that I read your character."

"You do me justice, sir; and it is my misfortune that I have not earlier had the inestimable benefit of your friendship. I trust," added he, haughtily, "I have too much pride to be made the mere tool of a party squabble; and, fortunately, I have the means to show this. Here, sir, is a letter I have just received from the Prime Minister. Read it,--read it aloud, Haire and my son will like to hear its contents also."

"Downing Street, Tuesday evening.

"My dear Lord Chief Baron,--It is with much pleasure I have to communicate to you that my colleagues unanimously agree with me in the propriety of submitting your name to the Queen for the Peerage. Your long and distinguished services and your great abilities will confer honor on any station; and your high character will give additional l.u.s.tre to those qualities which have marked you out for her Majesty's choice. I am both proud and delighted, my Lord, that it has fallen to my lot to be the bearer of these tidings to you; and with every a.s.surance of my great respect and esteem, I am, most sincerely yours,

"Ellerton."

"At last," cried Haire,--"at last! But I always knew that it would come."

"And what answer have you returned?" cried Lendrick, eagerly.

"Such an answer as will gladden your heart, Tom. I have declined the proffered distinction."

"Declined it! Great G.o.d! and why?" cried Haire.

"Because I have pa.s.sed that period in which I could accommodate myself to a new station, and show the world that I was not inferior to my acquired dignity. This for my first reason; and for my second, I have a son whose humility would only be afflicted if such greatness were forced upon him. Ay, Tom, I have thought of all it would cost you, my poor fellow, and I have spared you."

"I thank you with my whole heart," cried Lendrick, and he pressed the old man's hand to his lips.

"And what says Lucy?" said the Judge. "Are you shocked at this epidemic of humility amongst us, child? Or does your woman's heart rebel against all our craven fears about a higher station?"

"I am content, sir; and I don't think Tom, the miner, will fret that he wears a leather cap instead of a coronet."

"I have no patience with any of you," muttered Haire. "The world will never believe you have refused such a splendid offer. The correspondence will not get abroad."

"I trust it will not, sir," said the Chief. "What I have done I have done with regard to myself and my own circ.u.mstances, neither meaning to be an example nor a warning. The world has no more concern with the matter than with what we shall have for dinner to-day."

"And yet," said Sir Brook, with a dry ripple at the angle of his mouth, "I think it is a case where one might forgive the indiscreet friend"--here he glanced at Haire--"who incautiously gave the details to a newspaper."

"Indiscreet or not, I'll do it," said Haire, resolutely.

"What, sir!" cried the Chief, with mock sternness of eye and manner,--"what, sir! if I even forbade you?"

"Ay, even so. If you told me you'd shut your door against me, and never see me here again, I 'd do it."

"Look at that man, Sir Brook," said the Judge, with well-feigned indignation; "he was my schoolfellow, my chum in college, my colleague at the Bar, and my friend everywhere, and see how he turns on me in my hour of adversity!"

"If there be adversity, it is of your own making," said Haire. "It is that you won't accept the prize when you have won it."

"I see it all now," cried the Chief, laughing, "and stupid enough of me not to see it before. Haire has been a bully all his life; he is the very terror of the Hall; he has bullied sergeants and silk gowns, judges and masters in equity, and his heart is set upon bullying a peer of the realm. Now, if I will not become a lord, he loses this chance; he stands to win or lose on me. Out with it, Haire; make a clean confession, and own, have I not hit the blot?"

"Well," said Haire, with a sigh, "I have been called sly, sarcastic, witty, and what not, but I never thought to hear that I was a bully, or could be a terror to any one."

The comic earnestness of this speech threw them all into a roar of laughing, in which even Haire himself joined at last.

"Where is Lucy?" cried the old Judge. "I want her to testify how this man has tyrannized over me."

"Lucy has gone into the garden to read a letter Trafford brought her."

Sir Brook did not add that Trafford had gone with her to a.s.sist in the interpretation.

"I have told Lord Ellerton," said the Chief, referring once more to the Minister's letter, "that I will not lend myself in any way to the attack on the late Government. The intrigue which they planned towards me could not have ever succeeded if they had not found a traitor in the garrison; but of him I will speak no more. The old Greek adage was, 'Call no man happy till he dies.' I would say, he is nearer happiness when he has refused some object that has been the goal of all his life, than he is ever like to be under other circ.u.mstances."

Tom looked at his father with wistful eyes, as though he owed him grat.i.tude for the speech.

"When it is the second horse claims the cup, Haire," cried the old Judge, with a burst of his instinctive vanity, "it is because the first is disqualified by previous victories. And now let us talk of those whose happiness can be promoted without the intrigues of a Cabinet or a debate in the House. Sir Brook tells me that Lady Trafford has made her submission. She is at last willing to see that in an alliance with us there is no need to call condescension to her aid."

"Trafford's account is most satisfactory," said Foss-brooke, "and I trust the letter of which he was the bearer from his mother will amply corroborate all he says."

"I like the young man," said the Judge, with that sort of authoritative tone that seems to say, The cause is decided,--the verdict is given.

"There's always good stuff in a fellow when he is not afraid of poverty," said Fossbrooke. "There are scores of men will rough it for a sporting tour on the Prairies or a three months' lion-shooting on the Gaboon; but let me see the fellow bred to affluence and accustomed to luxury, who will relinquish both, and address himself to the hard work of life rather than give up the affection of a girl he loves. That's the man for me."

"I have great trust in him," said Lendrick, thoughtfully.

"All the Bench has p.r.o.nounced but one," cried the Chief. "What says our brother Haire?"

"I 'm no great judge of men. I 'm no great judge of anything," muttered Haire; "but I don't think one need be a sphinx to read that he is a right good fellow, and worthy of the dearest girl in Christendom."

"Well summed up, sir; and now call in the prisoner."

Fossbrooke slipped from the room, but was speedily back again. "His sentence has been already p.r.o.nounced outside, my Lord, and he only begs for a speedy execution."

"It is always more merciful," said the Chief, with mock solemnity; "but could we not have Tom over here? I want to have you all around me."

"I 'll telegraph to him to come," said Fossbrooke. "I was thinking of it all the morning."

About three weeks after this, Chief Baron Lendrick opened the Commission at Limerick, and received from the grand jury of the county a most complimentary address on his reappearance upon the Bench, to which he made a suitable and dignified reply. Even the newspapers which had so often censured the tenacity with which he held to office, and inveighed against the spectacle of an old and feeble man in the discharge of laborious and severe duties, were now obliged to own that his speech was vigorous and eloquent; and though allusion had been faintly made in the address to the high honor to which the Crown had desired to advance him and the splendid reward which was placed within his reach, yet, with a marked delicacy, had he forborne from any reference to this pa.s.sage other than his thankfulness at being so far restored to health that he could come back again to those functions, the discharge of which formed the pride and the happiness of his life.

"Never," said the journal which was once his most bitter opponent, "has the Chief Baron exhibited his unquestionable powers of thought and expression more favorably than on this occasion. There were no artifices of rhetoric, no tricks of phrase, none of those conceits by which so often he used to mar the wisdom of his very finest displays; he was natural for once, and they who listened to him might well have regretted that it was not in this mood he had always spoken. _Si sic omnia_,--and the press had never registered his defects nor railed at his vanities.

"The celebrated Sir Brook Fossbrooke, so notorious in the palmy days of the Regency, sat on the Bench beside his Lordship, and received a very flattering share of the cheers which greeted the party as they drove away to Killaloe, to be present at the wedding of Miss Lendrick, which takes place to-morrow."

Much-valued reader, has it ever occurred to you, towards the close of a long, possibly not very interesting discourse, to experience a sort of irreverent impatience when the preacher, appearing to take what rowing men call "second wind," starts off afresh, and seems to threaten you with fully the equal of what he has already given? At such a moment it is far from unlikely that all the best teachings of that sermon are not producing upon you their full effect of edification, and that, even as you sat, you meditated ign.o.ble thoughts of stealing away.

I am far from desiring to expose either you or myself to this painful position. I want to part good friends with you; and if there may have been anything in my discourse worth carrying away, I would not willingly a.s.sociate it with weariness at the last. And yet I am very loath to say good-bye. Authors are, _par excellence_, b.u.t.ton-holders, and they cannot relinquish their grasp on the victim whose lapel they have caught. Now I would like to tell you of that wedding at the Swan's Nest. You 'd read it if in the "Morning Post," but I'm afraid you'd skip it from _me_. I 'd like to recount the events of that breakfast, the present Sir Brook made the bride, and the charming little speech with which the Chief proposed her health. I 'd like to describe to you the uproar and joyous confusion when Tom, whose costume bore little trace of a wedding garment, fought his way through the servants into the breakfast-room.

And I 'd like to grow moral and descriptive, and a bit pathetic perhaps, over the parting between Lucy and her father; and, last of all, I 'd like to add a few words about him who gives his name to this story, and tell how he set off once more on his wanderings, no one well knowing whither bent, but how, on reaching Boulogne, he saw from the steamer's deck, as he landed, the portly figure of Lady Lendrick walking beside her beautiful daughter-in-law, Sewell bringing up the rear, with a little child holding his hand on either side,--a sweet picture, combining, to Boulogne appreciation, the united charm of fashion, beauty, and domestic felicity; and finally, how, stealing by back streets to the hotel where these people stopped, he deposited to their address a somewhat weighty packet, which made them all very happy, or at least very merry, that evening as they opened it and induced Sewell to order a bottle of Cliquot, if not, as he said, "to drink the old buck's health," at least to wish him many returns of the same good dispositions of that morning.

If, however, you are disposed to accept the will for the deed, I need say no more. They who have deserved some share of happiness in this tale are likely to have it. They who have little merited will have to meet a world which, neither over cruel nor over generous, has a rough justice that generally gives people their deserts.

THE END.