Sir Brook Fossbrooke Volume I Part 55

"We have some monstrous clever fellows, let me tell you. Halkett made a famous examination at Sandhurst, and Jocelyn wrote that article in 'Bell's Life,' 'The Badger Drawn at Last.'"

"To come back to where we were, how are you to square matters with the Chief Baron? Are you going to law with him about this appointment, or are you about to say that _I_ am the objection? Let me have a definite answer to this question."

"We have not fully decided; we think of doing either, and we sometimes incline to do both. At all events, we are not to have it; that's the only thing certain."

"Have you got a cigar? No, not these things; I mean something that can be smoked."

"Try this," said Balfour, offering his case.

"They 're the same as those on the chimney. I must say, Balfour, the traditional hospitalities of the Castle are suffering in their present hands. When I dined here the last time I was in town, they gave me two gla.s.ses of bad sherry and one gla.s.s of a corked Gladstone; and I came to dinner that day after reading in Barrington all about the glorious festivities of the Irish Court in the olden days of Richmond and Bedford."

"Lady Trafford insists that your names--your wife's as well as your own--are to be scratched from the dinner-list. Sir Hugh has three votes in the House, and she bullies us to some purpose, I can tell you. I can't think how you could have made this woman so much your enemy. It is not dislike,--it is hatred."

"Bad luck, I suppose," said Sewell, carelessly.

"She seems so inveterate too; she'll not give you up, very probably."

"Women generally don't weary in this sort of pursuit."

"Couldn't you come to some kind of terms? Couldn't you contrive to let her know that you have no designs on her boy? You've won money of him, have n't you?"

"I have some bills of his,--not for a very large amount, though; you shall have them a bargain."

"I seldom speculate," was the dry rejoinder.

"You are right; nor is this the case to tempt you."

"They 'll be paid, I take it?"

"Paid! I'll swear they shall!" said Sewell, fiercely. "I'll stand a deal of humbug about dinner invitations, and cold salutations, and such-like; but none, sir, not one, about what touches a material interest."

"It's not worth being angry about," said Balfour, who was really glad to see the other's imperturbability give way.

"I'm not angry. I was only a little impatient, as a man may be when he hears a fellow utter a truism as a measure of encouragement. Tell your friends--I suppose I must call them your friends--that they make an egregious mistake when they push a man like me to the wall. It is intelligible enough in a woman to do it; women don't measure their malignity, nor their means of gratifying it; but _men_ ought to know better."

"I incline to think I'll tell my 'friends' nothing whatever on the subject."

"That's as you please; but remember this,--if the day should come that I need any of these, details you have given me this morning, I'll quote them, and you too, as their author; and if I bring an old house about your ears, look out sharp for a falling chimney-pot! You gave me a piece of advice awhile ago," continued he, as he put on his hat before the gla.s.s, and arranged his necktie. "Let me repay you with two, which you will find useful in their several ways: Don't show your hand when you play with as shrewd men as myself; and, Don't offer a friend such execrable tobacco as that on the chimney;" and with this he nodded and strolled out, humming an air as he crossed the Castle yard and entered the city.

CHAPTER XLI. THE PRIORY IN ITS DESERTION

The old Judge was very sad after Lucy's departure from the Priory. While she lived there they had not seen much of each other, it is true.

They met at meal-times, and now and then Sir William would send up the housekeeper to announce a visit from him; but there is a sense of companionship in the consciousness that under the same roof with you dwells one upon whose affection you can draw, whose sympathy will be with you in your hour of need; and this the old man now felt to be waiting; and he wandered restlessly about the house and the garden, tenacious to see that nothing she liked or loved was threatened with any change, and repeating to all that she must find everything as she left it when she came back again.

Sewell had been recalled to the country by the illness of his child, and they were not expected at the Priory for at least a week or two longer.

Haire had gone on circuit, and even Beattie the Judge only saw hurriedly and at long intervals. With Lady Lendrick he had just had a most angry correspondence, ending in one of those estrangements which, had they been nations instead of individuals, would have been marked by the recall of their several envoys, but which they were satisfied to signalize by an order at the Priory gate-lodge not to admit her Ladyship's carriage, and an equally determined command at Merrion Square for the porter to take in no letters that came from the Chief Baron.

Lest the world should connect this breach with any interest in my story, I may as well declare at once the incident had no possible bearing upon it. It was a little episode entirely self-contained, and consisted in Lady Lendrick having taken advantage of Sir William's illness and confinement to house to send for and use his carriage-horses,--a liberty which he resented by a most furious letter, to which the rejoinder begot another infinitely more sarcastic,--the correspondence ending by a printed notice which her Ladyship received in an envelope, that the Chief Baron's horses would be sold on the ensuing Sat.u.r.day at Dycer's to the highest bidder, his Lordship having no further use for them.

Let me own that the old Judge was sincerely sorry when this incident was concluded. So long as the contest lasted, while he was penning his epistle or waiting for the reply, his excitement rallied and sustained him. He used to sit after the despatch of one of his cutting letters calculating with himself the terror and consternation it produced, just as the captain of a frigate might have waited with eager expectancy that the smoke might drift away and show him the shattered spars or the yawning bulwarks of his enemy. But when his last missive was returned unopened, and the messenger reported that the doctor's carriage was at her Ladyship's door as he came away, the Judge collapsed at once, and all the dreariness of his deserted condition closed in upon him.

Till Sewell returned to-town, Sir William resolved not to proceed farther with respect to the registrarship. His plan, long determined upon, was to induct him into the office, administer the oaths, and leave him to the discharge of the duties. The scandal of displacing an official would, he deemed, be too great a hazard for any government to risk. At all events, if such a conflict came, it would be a great battle, and with the nation for spectators.

"The country shall ring with it," was the phrase he kept repeating over and over as he strolled through his neglected garden or his leafy shrubberies; but as he plodded along, alone and in silence, the dreary conviction would sometimes shoot across his mind that he had run his race, and that the world had wellnigh forgotten him. "In a few days more," sighed he out, "it will be over, and I shall be chronicled as the last of them." And for a moment it would rally him to recall the glorious names with which he claimed companionship, and compare them--with what disparagement!--with the celebrities of the time.

It was strange how bright the lamp of intellect would shine out as the wick was fast sinking in the socket. His memory would revive some stormy scene in the House, some violent altercation at the Bar, and all the fiery eloquence of pa.s.sion would recur to him, stirring his heart and warming his blood, till he half forgot his years, and stood forth, with head erect and swelling chest, strong with a sense of power and a whole soul full of ambition.

"Beattie would not let me take my Circuit," would he say. "I wish he saw me to-day. Decaying powers! I would tell them that the Coliseum is grander in its ruin than all their stuccoed plastering in its trim propriety. Had he suffered me to go, the grand jury would have heard a charge such as men's ears have not listened to since Avonmore!

Avon-more! what am I saying?--Yelverton had not half my law, nor a tenth part of my eloquence."

In his self-exaltation he began to investigate whether he was greater as an advocate or as prosecutor. How difficult to decide! After all, it was in the balance of the powers thus displayed that he was great as a judge. He recalled the opinions of the press when he was raised to the bench, and triumphantly asked aloud, had he not justified every hope and contradicted every fear that was entertained of him? "Has my learning made me intolerant, or my brilliancy led me into impatience? Has the sense of superiority that I possess rendered me less conciliatory? Has my 'impetuous genius'--how fond they were of that phrase!--carried me away into boundless indiscretions? and have I, as one critic said, so concentrated the attention of the jury on myself that the evidence went for nothing and the charge was everything?"

It was strange how these bursts of inordinate vanity and self-esteem appeared to rally and invigorate the old man, redressing, as it were, the balance of the world's injustice--such he felt it--towards him. They were like a miser's h.o.a.rd, to be counted and re-counted in secret with that abiding a.s.surance that he had wealth and riches, however others might deem him poor.

It was out of these promptings of self-love that he drew the energetic powers that sustained him, broken and failing and old as he was.

Carried on by his excited thoughts, he strayed away to a little mound, on which, under a large weeping-ash, a small bench was placed, from which a wide view extended over the surrounding country. There was a tradition of a summer-house on the spot in Curran's day, and it was referred to more than once in the diaries and letters of his friends; and the old Chief loved the place, as sacred to great memories.

He had just toiled up the ascent, and gained the top, when a servant came to present him with a card and a letter, saying that the gentleman who gave them was then at the house. The card bore the name, "Captain Trafford,--th Regiment." The letter was of a few lines, and ran thus:--

"My dear Sir William,--I had promised my friend and late patient Captain Trafford to take him over to the Priory this morning and present him to you. A sudden call has, however, frustrated the arrangement; and as his time is very brief, I have given him this as a credential to your acquaintance, and I hope you will permit him to stroll through the garden and the shrubberies, which he will accept as a great favor.

I especially beg that you will lay no burden on your own strength to become his entertainer: he will be amply gratified by a sight of your belongings, of which he desires to carry the memory beyond seas.--Believe me very sincerely yours,

"J. Beattie."

"If the gentleman who brought this will do me the favor to come up here, say I shall be happy to see him."

As the servant went on his message, the old man lay back on his seat, and, closing his eyes, muttered some few dropping words, implying his satisfaction at this act of reverential homage. "A young soldier too; it speaks well for the service when the men of action revere the men of thought. I am glad it is a good day with me; he shall carry away other memories than of woods and streams. Ah! here he comes."

Slowly, and somewhat feebly, Trafford ascended the hill, and with a most respectful greeting approached the Judge.

"I thank you for your courtesy in coming here, sir," said the Chief; "and when we have rested a little, I will be your _Cicerone_ back to the house." The conversation flowed on pleasantly between them, Sir William asking where Traflford had served, and what length of time he had been in Ireland,--his inquiries evidently indicating that he had not heard of him before, or, if he had, had forgotten him.

"And now you are going to Malta?"

"Yes, my Lord; we sail on the 12th."

"Well, sir, Valetta has no view to rival that. See what a n.o.ble sweep the bay takes here, and mark how well the bold headlands define the limits! Look at that stretch of yellow beach, like a golden fillet round the sea; and then mark the rich woods waving in leafy luxuriance to the sh.o.r.e! Those ma.s.sive shadows are to landscape what times of silent thought are to our moral natures. Do you like your service, sir?"

"Yes, my Lord; there is much in it that I like. I would like it all if it were in 'activity.'"

"I have much of the soldier in myself, and the qualities by which I have gained any distinction I have won are such as make generals,--quick decision, rapid intelligence, prompt action."

Traflford bowed to this pretentions summary, but did not speak.

The old Judge went on to describe what he called the military mind, reviewing in turn the generals of note from Hannibal down to Marlborough. "What have they left us by way of legacy, sir? The game, lost or won, teaches us as much! Is not a letter of Cicero, is not an ode of Horace worth it all? And as for battle-fields, it is the painter, not the warrior, has made them celebrated. Wouvermans has done more for war than Turenne!"