Sir Brook Fossbrooke, Volume II.

“I ‘ve no time for chaff,” said Balfour, impatiently. “I am leaving my company too long, besides. Just come over here to-morrow to breakfast, and we ‘ll talk the whole thing over.”

“No, I ‘ll not come to breakfast; I breakfast in bed: and if we are to come to any settlement of this matter, it shall be here and now.”

“Very peremptory all this, considering that the question is not of your retirement.”

“Quite true. It is not my retirement we have to discuss, but it is, whether I shall choose to hand you the Chief Baron’s, which I hold here,” – and he produced the packet as he spoke, – “or go back and induce him to reconsider and withdraw it. Is not that a very intelligible way to put the case, Balfour? Did you expect such a business-like tone from an idle dog like me?”

“And I am to believe that the document in your hand contains the Chief Baron’s resignation?”

“You are to believe it or not, – that’s at your option. It is the fact, at all events.”

“And what power have you to withhold it, when he has determined to tender it?”

“About the same power I have to do this,” said Sewell, as, taking up a sheet of note-paper from the table, he tore it into fragments, and threw them into the fire. “I think you might see that the same influence by which I induced him to write this would serve to make him withhold it. The Judge condescends to think me a rather shrewd man of the world, and takes my advice occasionally.”

“Well, but – another point,” broke in Balfour, hurriedly. “What if he should recall this to-morrow or the day after? What if he were to say that on reconsideration he felt unwilling to retire? It is clear we could not well coerce him.”

“You know very little of the man when you suggest such a possibility. He ‘d as soon think of suicide as doubt any decision he had once formally announced to the world. The last thing that would ever occur to him would be to disparage his infallibility.”

“I declare I am quite ashamed of being away so long; could n’t you come down to the office to-morrow, at your own hour, and talk the whole thing over quietly?”

“Impossible. I ‘ll be very frank with you. I lost a pot of money last night to Langton, and have n’t got it to pay him. I tried twenty places during the day, and failed. I tossed over a score of so-called securities, not worth sixpence in a time of pressure, and I came upon this, which has been in my hands since Monday last, and I thought, Now Balfour would n’t exactly give me five hundred pounds for it, but there’s no reason in life that he might not obtain that sum for me in some quarter. Do you see?”

“I see, – that is, I see everything but the five hundred.”

“If you don’t, then you’ll never see this,” said Sewell, replacing it in his pocket.

“You won’t comprehend that I’ve no fund to go to; that there ‘s no bank to back me through such a transaction. Just be a little reasonable, and you ‘ll see that I can’t do this out of my own pocket. It is true I could press your claim on the party. I could say, what I am quite ready to say, that we owe the whole arrangement to you, and that, especially as it will cost you the loss of your Registrarship, you must not be forgotten.”

“There’s the mistake, my dear fellow. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be made supervisor of mad-houses, or overlooker of light-ships. Until office hours are comprised between five and six o’clock of the afternoon, and some of the cost of sealing-wax taken out in sandwiches, I don’t mean to re-enter public life. I stand out for cash payment. I hope that’s intelligible.”

“Oh, perfectly so; but as impossible as intelligible.”

“Then, in that case, there ‘s no more to be said. All apologies for having taken you so long from your friends. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Balfour. “I ‘m sorry we can’t come to some arrangement. Good-night.”

“As this document will now never see the light, and as all action in the matter will be arrested,” said Sewell, gravely, “I rely upon your never mentioning our present interview.”

“I declare I don’t see why I am precluded from speaking of it to my friends, – confidentially, of course.”

“You had better not.”

“Better not! better in what sense? As regards the public interests, or my personal ones?”

“I simply repeat, you had better not.” He put on his hat as he spoke, and without a word of leave-taking moved towards the door.

“Stop one moment, – a thought has just struck me. You like a sporting offer. I ‘ll bet you twenty pounds even, you ‘ll not let me read the contents of that paper; and I ‘ll lay you long odds – two hundred to one, in pounds – that you don’t give it to me.”

“You certainly do like a good thing, Balfour. In plain words, you offer me two hundred and twenty. I ‘ll be shot if I see why they should have higgled so long about letting the Jews into Parliament when fellows like you have seats there.”

“Be good enough to remember,” said Balfour, with an easy smile, “that I ‘m the only bidder, and if the article be not knocked down to me there’s no auction.”

“I was certain I’d hear that from you! I never yet knew a fellow do a stingy thing, that he had n’t a shabbier reason to sustain it.”

“Come, come, there’s no need of this. You can say no to my offer without a rudeness to myself.”

“Ay, that’s all true, if one only had temper for it, but I have n’t; and I have my doubts that even you would if you were to be tried as sorely as I am.”

“I never do get angry; a man shows his hand when he loses his temper, and the fellow who keeps cool can always look at the other’s cards.”

“Wise precepts, and worth coming out here to listen to,” said Sewell, whose thoughts were evidently directed elsewhere. “I take your offer; I only make one condition, – you keep the negotiation a secret, or only impart it where it will be kept secret.”

“I think that’s all fair. I agree to that. Now for the document”

“There it is,” said Sewell, as he threw the packet on the table, while he seated himself in a deep chair, and crossed his arms on his chest.

Balfour opened the paper and began to read, but soon burst forth with – “How like him – how like him! – ‘Less oppressed, indeed, by years than sustained by the conscious sense of long services to the State.’ I think I hear him declaiming it.

“This is not bad: ‘While at times afflicted by the thought, that to the great principles of the law, of which I had made this Court the temple and the sanctuary, there will now succeed the vague decisions and imperfect judgments of less learned expositors of justice, I am comforted by remembering that I leave behind me some records worthy of memory, – traditions that will not easily die.’”

“That’s the modest note; hear him when he sounds the indignant chord,” said Sewell.

“Ay, here we have it: ‘If I have delayed, my Lord, in tendering to you this my resignation, it is that I have waited till, the scurrilous tongues of slander silenced, and the smaller, but not less malevolent, whisperings of jealousy subdued, I might descend from the Bench amidst the affectionate regrets of those who regard me as the last survivor of that race which made Ireland a nation.’ The liquor is genuine,” cried Balfour, laughing. “There’s no disputing it, you have won your money.”

“I should think so,” was Sewell’s cool reply. “He has the same knack in that sort of thing that the girl in the well-known shop in Seville has in twisting a cigarette.”

Balfour took out his keys to open his writing-desk, and, pondering for a moment or two, at last said, “I wish any man would tell me why I am going to give you this money, – do you know, Sewell?”

“Because you promised it, I suppose.”

“Yes; but why should I have promised it? What can it possibly signify to me which of our lawyers presides in Her Majesty’s Irish Exchequer? I ‘m sure you ‘d not give ten pounds to insure this man or that, in or out of the Cabinet.”

“Not ten shillings. They ‘re all dark horses to me, and if you offered me the choice of the lot, I ‘d not know which to take; but I always heard that you political fellows cared so much for your party, and took your successes and failures so much to heart, that there was no sacrifice you were not ready to make to insure your winning.”

“We now and then do run a dead-heat, and one would really give something to come in first; but what’s that? – I declare there ‘s a carriage driving off – some one has gone. I ‘ll have to swear that some alarming news has come from the South. Good-night – I must be off.”

“Don’t forget the cash before you go.”

“Oh, to be sure, here you are – crisp and clean, ain’t they? I got them this morning, and certainly never intended to part with them on such an errand.”

Sewell folded up the notes with a grim smile, and said, “I only wish I had a few more big-wigs to dispose of, – you should have them cheap; as Stag and Mantle say, ‘articles no longer in great vogue.’”

“There’s another departure!” cried Balfour. “I shall be in great disgrace!” and hurried away without a “goodbye.”

CHAPTER XX. ON THE DOOR-STEPS AT NIGHT

It was late at night when Sewell arrived at the Priory. He had had another disastrous night of play, and had scattered his “acknowledgments” for various sums on every side. Indeed, he had not the vaguest idea of how much he had lost. Disputes and hot discussions, too, almost verging on personal quarrels, dashed with all their irritating influences the gloom of his bad luck; and he felt, as he arose to go home, that he had not even that sorry consolation of the unfortunate gambler, – the pitying sympathy of the looker-on.

Over and over, as he went, he asked himself what Fate could possibly intend by this persistent persecution of him? Other fellows had their “innings” now and then. Their fortune came checkered with its bright and dark days. He never emerged, not even passingly, from his ill-luck. “I suppose,” muttered he, “the whole is meant to tempt me – but to what? I need very little temptation if the bait be only money. Let me but see gold enough, and my resistance will not be very formidable. I ‘ll not risk my neck; short of that I ‘m ready for anything.” Thus thinking, he plodded onward through the dark night, vaguely wishing at times that no morning was ever to break, and that existence might prolong itself out to one long dark autumn night, silent and starless.

As he reached the hall-door, he found his wife seated on the steps as on a former night. It had become a favorite spot with her to taste the cool refreshing night-air, and rally her from the feverish closeness of the sick-room.

“How is he? Is it over yet?” cried he, as he came up.

“He is better; he slept calmly for some hours, and woke much refreshed.”

“I could have sworn it!” burst he in, vehemently. “It is the one way Fate could have rescued me, and it is denied me. I believe there is a curse on me! Eh – what?”

“I did n’t speak,” said she, meekly.

“You muttered, though. I heard you mumble something below your breath, as if you agreed with what I said. Say it out, Madam, if you think it.”

She heaved a weary sigh, but said nothing.

“Has Beattie been here?” asked he, hastily.

“Yes; he stayed for above an hour, but was obliged to go at last to visit another patient. He brought Dr. Lendrick out with him; he arrived this evening.”

“Lendrick! Do you mean the man from the Cape?”

“Yes.”

“That completes it!” burst he, as he flung his arms wildly up. “I was just wondering what other malignant piece of spite Fortune could play me, and there it is! Had you any talk with this man?”

“Yes; he remained with me all the time Dr. Beattie was upstairs.”

“And what was his tone? Has he come back to turn us out? – that of course he has – but does he avow it?”

“He shows no such intentions. He asked whether you held much to the Nest, if it was a place that you liked, or if you could relinquish it without any regret?”

“Why so?”

“Because Sir Brook Fossbrooke has just purchased it.”

“What nonsense! you know as well as I do that he could n’t purchase a dog-kennel. That property was valued at sixteen thousand pounds four years ago, – it is worth twenty now; and you talk to me of this beggar buying it!”

“I tell you what he told me, and it was this: Some mine that Sir Brook owned in Sardinia has turned out to be all silver, and in consequence he has suddenly become immensely rich, – so rich, indeed, that he has already determined to settle this estate on Lucy Lendrick; and intends, if he can induce Lord Drumcarran to part with ‘The Forest,’ to add it to the grounds.”

Sewell grasped his hair with both hands, and ground his teeth together with passion as he listened.

“You believe this story, I suppose?” said he at last.

“Yes; why should I not believe it?”

“I don’t believe a word of it. I see the drift – I saw the drift of it before you had told me ten words. This tale is got up to lull us into security, and to quiet our suspicions. Lendrick knows well the alarm his unexpected return is likely to give us, and to allay our anxieties they have coined this narrative, as though to imply they will be rich enough not to care to molest us, nor stand between us and this old man’s money. Don’t you see that?”

“I do not. It did not occur to me before, and I do not admit it now.”

“I ought not to have asked you. I ought to have remembered what old Fossbrooke once called ‘the beautiful trustfulness of your nature.’”

“If had it once, it has left me many a long day ago!”

“But I deny that you ever had it. You had the woman’s trick of affecting to believe, and thus making out what you assumed to think, to be a pledge given by another, – a bit of female craft that you all trade on so long as you are young and good-looking?”

“And what supplies the place of this ingenious device when we are neither young nor good-looking?”

“I don’t know, for the simple reason that I never much interested myself in the sex after that period.”

“That’s a very sad thing for us. I declare I never had an idea how much we ‘re to be pitied before.”

“You would be to be pitied if you knew how we all think of you;” and he spoke with a spiteful malignity almost demoniac.

“It’s better, then, for each of us that we should not know this. The trustfulness that you sneer at does us good service, after all.”

“And it was this story of the mine that induced Lendrick to come home from the Cape, wasn’t it?”

“No; he only heard of the mine since he arrived here.”

“I thought,” rejoined he, with a sneer, “that he ought to have resigned his appointment on account of this sudden wealth, all the more because I have known that he intended to come back this many a day. And what is Fossbrooke going to do for you? Is there a diamond necklace ordered? or is it one of the brats he is going to adopt?”

“By the way, I have been robbed; some one has carried off my gold comb and some pins; they were on my dressing-table last night. Jane saw them when I went into my room.”

“Now ‘s your time to replace the loss! It’s the sort of tale old Fossbrooke always responded to.”

She made no answer; and for several minutes each sat in silence. “One thing is pretty evident,” said he at last, as he made figures with his cane on the ground, – “we ‘ll have to troop off, whether the Lendricks come here or not. The place will not be tenable once they are in the vicinity.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know! Do you mean that the doctor and his daughter will stand the French cook here, and the dinners, and let the old man make a blessed fool of himself, as he has been doing for the last eight or ten months past? or do you pretend that if we were to go back to the leg-of-mutton days, and old Haire for company, that it would be worth holding on to? I don’t; and I tell you frankly that I intend to demand my passports, as the Ministers say, and be off.”

“But I can’t ‘be off.’ I have no such alternative!”

“The worse luck yours, or rather the worse skill; for if you had played your hand better, it would not have been thus with you. By the way, what about Trafford? I take it he ‘ll marry this girl now.”

“I have not heard,” said she, pinching her lips, and speaking with a forced composure.

“If I were you, I ‘d make myself Lucy’s confidante, get up the match, and go and live with them. These are the really happy ménages. If there be such a thing as bliss, perfect bliss, in this world, it is where a wife has a dear friend in the house with her, who listens to all her sorrows, and helps her to manage the tyrant that inflicts them. It was a great mistake of ours not to have known this in early life. Marriage was meant to be a triangle.”

“If you go, as you speak of going, have you any objection to my addressing myself to Sir Brook for some assistance?”

“None whatever. I think it the most natural thing in life; he was your guardian, and you have a right to ask what has become of your fortune.”

“He might refer me to you for the information.”

“Very unmannerly if he should, and very ungallant, too, for an old admirer. I ‘m certain if I were to be – what is the phrase? – removed, yes, removed – he ‘d marry you. Talk of three-volume novels and virtue rewarded, after that.”

“You have been playing to-night,” said she, gravely.

“Yes.”

“And lost?”

“Lost heavily.”

“I thought so. Your courtesies to me have been the measure of your bad luck for many a day. I have often felt that ‘four by honors’ has saved me from a bad headache.”

“Then there has been more sympathy between us than I ever suspected,” said he, rising, and stretching himself; and after a moment or two added, “Must I call on this Dr. Lendrick? – will he expect me to visit him?”

“Perhaps so,” said she, carelessly; “he asked after you.”

“Indeed! – did he ask after Trafford too? Do you remember the day at the Governor’s dinner he mistook you for Trafford’s wife, and explained his mistake by the familiarity of his manner to you in the garden? It was the best bit of awkwardness I ever witnessed.”

“I suppose you felt it so?”

“I—I felt it so! I suspect not! I don’t believe there was a man at table enjoyed the blunder as heartily.”

“I wish – how I wish!” said she, clasping her hands together.

“Well – what?”

“I wish I could be a man for one brief half-hour!” cried she; and her voice rang with a mild but clear resonance, that made it seem louder than it really was.

“And then?” said he, mockingly.

“Oh, do not ask me more!” cried she, as she bent down and hid her face in her hands.

“I think I will call on Lendrick,” said he, after a moment. “It may not be exactly the sort of task a man would best like; but I opine, if he is about to give his daughter in marriage to this fellow, he ought to know more about him. Now I can tell him something, and my wife can tell him more. There’s no indiscretion in saying so much, is there?”

She made no reply; and after a pause he went on: “If Trafford had n’t been a shabby dog, he ‘d not have higgled about buying up those letters. Cane & Kincaid offered them to him for a thousand pounds. I suspect he ‘d like to have the offer repeated now, but he shall not. He believes, or affects to believe, that, for my own sake, I ‘ll not make a public scandal; he doesn’t know his man when he thinks this. You, Madam, might have taught him better, eh?” Still no reply, and he continued: “There ‘s not a man living despises public opinion as I do. If you are rich you trample on it, if poor it tramples on you; but so long as a fellow braves the world, and declares that he shrinks from nothing, – evades nothing, – neither turns right nor left to avoid its judgments, – the coward world gives away and lets him pass. I ‘ll let them see that I don’t care a straw for my own life, when at the price of it I can blow up a magazine.”

“No, no, no!” muttered she, in a low but clear tone.

“What do you mean by No, no?” cried he, in a voice of passion.

“I mean that you care a great deal for your own life, and a great deal for your own personal safety; and that if your tyranny to a poor, crushed, weak woman has any bounds, it is from your fear, your abject fear, that in her desperation she might seek a protector, and find him.”

“I told you once before, Madam, men don’t like this sort of protectorate. The old bullying days are gone by. Modern decorum ‘takes it out’ in damages.” She sat still and silent; and after waiting some time, he said, in a calm, unmoved voice, “These little interchanges of courtesy do no good to either of us; they haven’t even the poor attraction of novelty; so, as my friend Mr. O’Reardon says, let us ‘be practical.’ I had hoped that the old gentleman upstairs was going to do the polite thing, and die; but it appears now he has changed his mind about it. This, to say the least of it, is very inconvenient to me. My embarrassments are such that I shall be obliged to leave the country; my only difficulty is, I have no money. Are you attending? Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, I hear you,” said she, in a faint whisper.

“You, I know, cannot help me; neither can my mother. Of course the old Judge is out of the question. As for the fellows at the Club, I am deeply in debt to many of them; and Kincaid only reminds me of his unsettled bill of costs when I ask for a loan. A blank look-out, on the whole; isn’t it?”

She muttered something like assent, and he went on. “I have gone through a good many such storms before, but none fully as bad as this; because there are certain things which in a few days must come out – ugly little disclosures – one or two there will be. I inadvertently sold that beech timber to two different fellows, and took the money too.”

She lifted up her face, and stared at him without speaking.

“Fact, I assure you! I have a confoundedly bad memory; it has got me into scores of scrapes all through life. Then, this very evening, thinking that the Chief could n’t rub through, I made a stupid wager with Balfour that the seat on the Bench would be vacant within a week; and finished my bad run of luck by losing – I can’t say how much, but very heavily, indeed – at the Club.”

A low faint sigh escaped her, but not a word.

“As to bills renewed, protested, and to be protested,” said he, in the same easy tone, “they are legion. These take their course, and are no worse than any other man’s bills; I don’t fret myself about them. As in the old days of chivalry one never cared how scurvily he treated the ‘villeins,’ so he behaved like a knight to his equals; so nowadays a man must book up at Tattersall’s though he cheat his tailor. I like the theory too; it keeps ‘the ball rolling,’ if it does nothing else.”

All this he rattled out as though his own fluency gave him a sort of Dutch courage; and who knows, too, – for there is a fund of vanity in these men, – if he was not vain of showing with what levity he could treat dangers that might have made the stoutest heart afraid?

“Taking the ‘tottle of the whole’ of these, – as old Joe Hume used to say, – it’s an ugly balance!”

“What do you mean to do?” said she, quietly.

“Bolt, I suppose. I see nothing else for it.”

“And will that meet the difficulty?”

“No, but it will secure me; secure me from arrest, and the other unpleasant consequences that might follow arrest. To do this, however, I need money, and I have not five pounds – no, nor, I verily believe, five shillings – in the world.”

“There are a few trinkets of mine upstairs. I never wear them – ”

“Not worth fifty pounds, the whole lot; nor would one get half fifty for them in a moment of pressure.”

“We have some plate – ”

“We had, but I sold it three weeks ago; and that reminds me there was a rum old tea-urn got somehow mixed up with our things, and I sold it too, though it has Lendrick’s crest upon it. You ‘ll have to get it back some of these days, – I told the fellow not to break it up till he heard from you.”

“Then what is to be done?” said she, eagerly.

“That’s the question; travelling is the one thing that can’t be done on tick.”

“If you were to go down to the Nest – ”

“But our tenure expires on the seventeenth, just one fortnight hence, – not to say that I couldn’t call myself safe there one hour. No, no; I must manage to get abroad, and instantly, that I may escape from my present troubles; but I must strike out some way of life, – something that will keep me.”