CHAPTER XI. A LEAP IN THE DARK
Colonel Sewell received the Chief Baron’s message with a smothered expression of no benevolent meaning.
“Who said I was here? How did he know I had arrived?” cried he, angrily.
“He saw the carman, sir; and asked for whom he was waiting.”
Another and not less energetic benediction was invoked on the rascally car-driver, whom he had enjoined to avoid venturing in front of the house.
“Say I’m coming; I’ll be with him in an instant,” said be, as he hurriedly pitched some clothes into his portmanteau.
Now it is but fair to own that this demand upon his time came at an inconvenient moment; he had run up to town by an early train, and was bent on going back by the next departure. During his absence, no letter of any kind from his agent O’Reardon had reached him, and, growing uneasy and impatient at this silence, he had come up to learn the reason. At the office he heard that O’Reardon had not been there for the last few days. It was supposed he was ill, but there was no means of ascertaining the fact; none knew his address, as, they said, “he was seldom in the same place for more than a week or two.” Sewell had a profound distrust of his friend; indeed, the only reason for confiding in him at all was, that it was less O’Reardon’s interest to be false than true. Since Fossbrooke’s arrival, however, matters might have changed. They might have met and talked together. Had Sir Brook seduced the fellow to take service under him? Had he wormed out of him certain secrets of his (Sewell’s) life, and thus shown how useful he might be in running him to earth? This was far from unlikely. It seemed the easiest and most natural way of explaining the fellow’s absence. At the same time, if such were the case, would he not have taken care to write to him? Would not his letters, calling for some sort of reply, some answer to this or that query, have given him a better standing-ground with his new master, showing how far he possessed Sewell’s confidence, and how able he was to make his treason to him effective? Harassed by these doubts, and fearing he knew not what of fresh troubles, he had passed a miserable week in the country. Debt and all its wretched consequences were familiar enough to him. His whole life had been one long struggle with narrow means, and with the expedients to meet expenses he should never have indulged in. He had acquired, together with a recklessness, a sort of self-reliance in these emergencies which positively seemed to afford him a species of pleasure, and made him a hero to himself by his successes; but there were graver troubles than these on his heart, and with the memory of these Fossbrooke was so interwoven that to recall them was to bring him up before him.
Besides these terrors, he had learned, during his short stay at the Nest, a most unwelcome piece of intelligence. The vicar, Mr. Mills, had shown him a letter from Dr. Lendrick, in which he said that the climate disagreed with him, and his isolation and loneliness preyed upon him so heavily that he had all but determined to resign his place and return home. He added that he had given no intimation of this to his children, lest by any change of plan he might inflict disappointment upon them; nor had he spoken of it to his father, in the fear that if the Chief Baron should offer any strenuous objection, he might be unable to carry out his project; while to his old friend the vicar he owned that his heart yearned after a home, and if it could only be that home where he had lived so contentedly, the Nest! “If I could promise myself to get back there again,” he wrote, “nothing would keep me here a month longer.” Now, as Sewell had advertised the place to be let, Mills at once showed him this letter, believing that the arrangement was such as would suit each of them.
It needed all Sewell’s habitual self-command not to show the uneasiness these tidings occasioned him. Lendrick’s return to Ireland might undo – it was almost certain to undo – all the influence he had obtained over the Chief Baron. The old Judge was never to be relied upon from one day to the next. Now it was some impulse of vindictive passion, now of benevolence. Who was to say when some parental paroxysm might not seize him, and he might begin to care for his son?
Here was a new peril, – one he had never so much as imagined might befall him. “I ‘ll have to consult my wife,” said he, hastily, in reply to Mills’s question. “She is not at all pleased at the notion of giving up the place; the children were healthier here: in fact,” added he, in some confusion, “I suspect we shall be back here one of these days.”
“I told him I’d have to consult you,” said Sewell, with an insolent sneer, as he told his wife this piece of news. “I said you were so fond of the country, so domestic, and so devoted to your children, that I scarcely thought you ‘d like to give up a place so suited to all your tastes; – wasn’t I right?”
She continued to look steadily at the book she had been reading, and made no reply.
“I did n’t say, though I might, that the spot was endeared to you by a softer, more tender reminiscence; because, being a parson, there ‘s no saying how he ‘d have taken it.”
She raised her book higher, so as to conceal her face, but still said nothing.
“At all events,” said he, in a more careless tone, “we are not going to add to the inducements which attract this gentleman to return home, and we must not forget that our host here may turn us out at any moment.”
“I think it will be our fault whenever he does so,” said she, quietly.
“Fault and misfortune are pretty much alike, to my thinking. There is one thing, however, I have made up my mind on, – I ‘ll bolt. When he gives notice to quit, he shall be obliged to provide for you and the brats out of sheer necessity. He cannot turn you out on the streets, he can’t send you to the Union; you have no friends to whom he can pack you off; so let him storm as he likes: something he must do.”
To this speech she seemed to give no attention whatever. Whether the threat was an oft-repeated one, or that she was inured to coarseness of this nature, or that silence was the best line to take in these emergencies, she never appeared to notice his words.
“What about that money he promised you? Has he given it?” said he suddenly, when about to leave the room.
“No; he said something about selling out some mining-shares, – scrip he called it. I forget exactly what he said, but the purport was that he was pressed just now.”
“I take it he is. My mother’s allowance is in arrear, and she is not one to bear the delay very patiently. So you ‘ve got nothing?”
“Nothing, except ten pounds he gave Cary yesterday for her birthday.”
“Where is it?”
“In that work-box, – no, in the upper part. Do you want it?”
“What a question! Of course I want it, somewhat more than Gary does, I promise you. I was going off to-day with just five sovereigns in my pocket. By-bye. I shall be late if I don’t hurry myself.” As he reached the door he turned round. “What was it I had to tell you, – some piece of news or other, – what could it have been?”
“Nothing pleasant, I ‘m sure, so it’s as well unremembered.”
“Polite, certainly,” said he, walking slowly back while he seemed trying to recall something. “Oh, I have it. The transport that took out the – th has been wrecked somewhere off Sardinia. Engine broken down, paddle-wheels carried away, quarter-boats smashed, and, in fact, total wreck. I have no time to tell you more;” and so saying, he hurried away, but, opening the door noiselessly, he peeped in, and saw her with her head buried in her hands, leaning on the table; and, stealing stealthily down the corridor, he hastened to his room to pack up for his journey; and it was while thus occupied the Chief’s message reached him.
When the Chief Baron asked Haire to call at the Police Office and inquire if he might not be permitted to see the person who had been arrested that morning at Howth, he had not the very vaguest idea what step he should next take, nor what proceedings institute, if his demand might be acceded to. The indignant anger he felt at the slight put upon him by the Government in passing him over on the Commission, had got such entire possession of him that he only thought of a reprisal without considering how it was to be effected. “I am not one to be insulted with impunity. Are these men such ignorant naturalists as not to know that there is one species of whale that the boldest never harpoons? Swift was a Dean, but he never suffered his cassock to impede the free use of his limbs. I am a Judge, but they shall see that the ermine embarrasses me just as little. They have provoked the conflict, and it is not for me to decline it. They are doing scores of things every day in Ireland that, if there was one man of ability and courage opposed to them, would shake the Cabinet to its centre. I will make Pemberton’s law a proverb and a byword. The public will soon come to suspect that the reason I am not on the Bench at these trials is not to be looked for in the spiteful malignity of the Castle, but in the conscientious scruples of one who warned the Crown against these prosecutions. They were not satisfied with native disaffection, and they have invented a new crime for Ireland, which they call treason-felony; but they have forgotten to apprise the people, who go on blunderingly into treason as of old, too stupid to be taught by a statute! The Act is a new one. It would give me scant labor to show that it cannot be made law, that its clauses are contradictory, its provisions erroneous, its penalties evasive. What is to prevent me introducing, as a digression, into my next charge to a grand jury, my regrets or sorrows over such bungling legislation? Who is to convict me for arraigning the wisdom of Parliament, or telling the country, You are legislated for by ignorance! your statutes are made by incompetence! The public press is always open, and it will soon be bruited about that the letter signed ‘Lycurgus’ was written by William Lendrick. I will take Barnewell or Perrin, or some other promising young fellow of the junior bar, and instruct him for the defence. I will give him law enough to confute, and he shall furnish the insolence to confront this Attorney-General. There never was a case better suited to carry the issue out of the Queen’s Bench and arraign the Queen’s advisers. Let them turn upon me if they dare: I was a citizen before I was a lawyer, I was an Irishman before I became a judge. There was a bishop who braved the Government in the days of the volunteers. They shall find that high station in Ireland is but another guarantee for patriotism.” By such bursts of angry denunciation had he excited himself to such a degree that when Sewell entered the room the old man’s face was flushed, his eye flashing, and his lip quivering with passion.
“I was not aware of your absence, sir!” said he, sternly; “and a mere accident informed me that you were going away again.”
“A sudden call required my presence at Killaloe, my Lord; and I found when I had got there I had left some papers behind here.”
“The explanation would be unexceptionable, sir, if this house were an inn to which a man comes and returns as he pleases; but if I err not, you are my guest here, and I hope if a host has duties he has rights.”
“My Lord, I attached so very little importance to my presence that I never flattered myself by thinking I should be missed.”
“I seldom flatter, sir, and I never do so where I intend to censure!” Sewell bowed submissively, but the effort to control his temper cost him a sharp pang and a terrible struggle. “Enough of this, at least for the present; though I may mention, passingly, that we must take an early opportunity of placing our relations towards each other on some basis that may be easily understood by each of us. The law of contracts will guide us to the right course. My object in sending for you now is to ask a service at your hands, if your other engagements will leave you at liberty to render it.”
“I am entirely at your Lordship’s orders.”
“Well, sir, I will be very brief. I must needs be so, for I have fatigued myself by much talking already. The papers will have informed you that I am not to sit on this Commission. The Ministers who cannot persuade me by their blandishments are endeavoring to disgust me by insult. They have read the fable of the sun and the wind backwards, and inverted the moral. It had been whispered abroad that if I tried these men there would have been no convictions. They raked up some early speeches of mine – youthful triumphs they were – in defence of Wolfe Tone, and Jackson, and others; and they argued – no, I am wrong – they did not argue, they imagined, that the enthusiasm of the advocate might have twined itself around the wisdom of the Judge. They have quoted, too, in capital letters, – it is there on the table, – the peroration of my speech in Neilson’s case, where I implored the jury to be cautious and circumspect, for so deeply had the Crown advisers compromised themselves in the pursuit of rebellion, it needed the most careful sifting not to include the law-officers of the Castle, and to avoid placing the Attorney-General side by side with his victim.”
“How sarcastic! how cutting!” muttered Sewell, in praise.
“It was more than sarcastic, sir. It stung the Orange jury to the quick; and though they convicted my client, they trembled at the daring of his defender.
“But I turn from the past to the present,” said he, after a pause. “They have arrested this morning, at Howth, a man who is said to be of rank and station. The examination, conducted in secret, has concealed his name; and all that we know is that bail has not been accepted, if offered, for him. So long as these arrests concerned the vulgar fellows who take to rebellion for its robberies, no case can be made. With the creatures of rusty pikes and ruffian natures I have no sympathy. It matters little whether they be transported for treason or for theft. With the gentleman it is otherwise. Some speculative hope, some imaginative aspiration of serving his country, some wild dream begotten of the great Revolution of France, dashed not impossibly with some personal wrong, drives men from their ordinary course in life, and makes them felons where they meant to be philanthropists. I have often thought if this movement now at work should throw up to the surface one of this stamp, what a fine occasion it might afford to test the wisdom of those who rule us, to examine the machinery by which they govern, and to consider the advantage of that system, – such a favorite system in Ireland, by which rebellion is fostered as a means of subsequent concession, as though it were necessary to manure the loyalty of the land by the blood of traitors.
“I weary you, sir, and I am sorry for it. No, no, make no protestations. It is a theme cannot have the same interest for you as for me. What I would ask of you is, to go down to the head-office and see Mr. Spencer, and learn from him if you might have an order to see the prisoner, – your pretext being the suspicion that he is personally known to you. If you succeed in getting the order, you will proceed to the Richmond Bridewell and have an interview with him. You are a man of the world, sir, and I need not give you any instructions how to ascertain his condition, his belongings, and his means of defence. If he be a gentleman, in the sense we use that term when applying its best attributes to it, you will be frank and outspoken, and will tell him candidly that your object is to make his case the groundwork of an attack on the Government, and the means by which all the snares that have led men to rebellion may be thoroughly exposed, and the craft of the Crown lawyer be arraigned beside the less cold-blooded cruelty of the traitor. Do you fully comprehend me, sir?”
“I think so, my Lord, Your intention is, if I take you correctly, to make the case, if it be suitable, the groundwork for an attack on the Government of Ireland.”
“In which I am not to appear.”
“Of course, my Lord; though possibly with no objection that it should be known how far your sympathy is with a free discussion of the whole state of Ireland?”
“You apprehend me aright, sir, – a free discussion of the whole state of Ireland.”
“I go, therefore, without any concert with your Lordship at present. I take this step entirely at my own instance?”
“You do, sir. If matters eventually should take the turn which admits of any intervention on my part – any expression of opinion – any elucidation of sentiments attributed to me – I will be free to make such in the manner I deem suitable.”
“In case this person should prove one, either from his character or the degree in which he has implicated himself, unfitted for your Lordship’s object, I am to drop the negotiation?”
“Rather, I should say, sir, you are not to open it.”
“I meant as much,” said Sewell, with some irritation.
“It is an occasion, sir, for careful action and precise expression. I have no doubt you will acquit yourself creditably in each of these respects. Are you already acquainted with Mr. Spencer?”
“We have met at the Club, my Lord; he at least knows who I am.”
“That will be quite sufficient. One point more – I have no need to caution you as to secrecy – this is a matter which cannot be talked of.”
“That you may rely on, my Lord; reserve is so natural to me, that I have to put no strain upon my manner to remember it.”
“I shall be curious to hear the result of your visit, – that is, if you be permitted to visit the Bridewell. Will you do me the favor to come to me at once?”
Sewell promised this faithfully, and withdrew.
“If ever an old fool wanted to run his head into a noose,” muttered he, “here is one; the slightest blunder on my part, intentional or not, and this great Baron of the Exchequer might be shown up as abetting treason. To be sure, he has given me nothing under his hand – nothing in writing – I wonder was that designedly or not; he is so crafty in the middle of all his passion.” Thus meditating, he went on his mission.
CHAPTER XII. SOME OF SEWELL’S OPINIONS
Sewell was well received by the magistrate, and promised that he should be admitted to see the prisoner on the next morning; having communicated which tidings to the Chief Baron, he went off to dine with his mother in Merrion Square.
“Isn’t Lucy coming?” said Lady Lendrick, as he entered the drawing-room alone.
“No. I told her I wanted a long confidential talk with you; I hinted that she might find it awkward if one of the subjects discussed should happen to be herself, and advised her to stay at home, and she concurred with me.”
“You are a great fool, Dudley, to treat her in that fashion. I tell you there never was a woman in the world who could forgive it.”
“I don’t want her to forgive it, mother; there ‘s the mistake you are always making. The way she baffles me is by non-resistance. If I could once get her to resent something – anything – I could win the game.”
“Perhaps some one might resent for her,” said she, dryly.
“I ask nothing better. I have tried to bring it to that scores of times, but men have grown very cautious latterly. In the old days of duelling a fellow knew the cost of what he was doing; now that we have got juries and damages, a man thinks twice about an entanglement, without he be a very young fellow.”
“It is no wonder that she hates you,” said she, fiercely.
“Perhaps not,” said he, languidly; “but here comes dinner.”
For a while the duties of the table occupied them, and they chatted away about indifferent matters; but when the servants left the room, Sewell took up the theme where they had left it, and said: “It’s no use to either of us, mother, to get what is called judicial separation. It’s the chain still, only that the links are a little longer – and it’s the chain we hate! We began to hate it before we were a month tied to each other, and time, somehow, does not smooth down these asperities. As to any other separation, the lawyers tell me it is hopeless. There’s a functionary called the ‘Queen’s’ something or other, who always intervenes in the interests of morality, and compels people who have proved their incompatibility by years of dissension to go back and quarrel more.”
“I think if it were only for the children’s sake – ”
“For the children’s sake!” broke he in. “What can it possibly matter whether they be brought up by their mother alone, or in a house where their father and mother are always quarrelling? At all events, they form no element in the question so far as I am concerned.”
“I think your best hold on the Chief Baron is his liking for the children; he is very fond of Reginald.”
“What’s the use of a hold on an old man who has more caprices than he has years? He has made eight wills to my own knowledge since May last. You may fancy how far afield he strays in his testamentary dispositions when in one of them he makes you residuary legatee.”
“Me! Me!”
“You; and what’s more, calls you his faithful and devoted wife, ‘who – for five-and-twenty years that we lived apart – contributed mainly to the happiness of my life.’”
“The parenthesis, at least, is like him,” said she, smiling.
“To the children he has bequeathed I don’t know what, sometimes with Lucy as their guardian, sometimes myself. The Lendrick girl was always handsomely provided for till lately, when he scratched her out completely; and in the last document which I saw there were the words, ‘To my immediate family I bequeath my forgiveness for their desertion of me, and this free of all legacy duty and other charges.’ I am sure, mother, he’s a little mad.”
“Nothing of the kind, – no more than you are.”
“I don’t know that. I always suspect ‘that the marvellous vigor’ of old age gets its prime stimulus from an overexcited brain. He sat up a whole night last week – I know it to my cost, for I had to copy it out – writing a letter to the ‘Times’ on the Land Tenure Bill, and he nearly went out of his mind on seeing it in small type.”
“He is vain, if you like; but not mad certainly.”
“For a while I thought one of his fits of passion would do for him, – he gets crimson, and then lividly pale, and then flushed again, and his nails are driven into his palms, and he froths at the mouth; but somehow the whole subsides at last, and his voice grows gentle, and his manner courteous, – you ‘d think him a lamb, if you had never seen him as a tiger. In these moods he becomes actually humble, so that the other night he sat down and wrote his resignation to the Home Office, stating, amidst a good deal of bombast, that the increasing burden of years and infirmity left him no other choice than that of descending from the Bench he had occupied so long and so unworthily, and begging her Majesty would graciously accord a retreat to one ‘who had outlived everything but his loyalty.’”
“What became of this?”
“He asked me about it next morning, but I said I had burned it by his orders; but I have it this moment in my desk.”
“You have no right to keep it. I insist on your destroying it.”
“Pardon me, mother. I’d be a rich man to-day if I had n’t given way to that foolish habit of making away with papers supposed to be worthless. The three lines of a man’s writing, that the old Judge said he could hang any man on, might, it strikes me, be often used to better purpose.”
“I wish you would keep your sharp practices for others and spare him,” said she, severely.
“It’s very generous of you to say so, mother, considering the way he treats you and talks of you.”
“Sir William and I were ill-met and ill-matched, but that is not any reason that I should like to see him treacherously dealt with.”
“There’s no talk of treachery here. I was merely uttering an abstract truth about the value of old papers, and regretting how late I came to the knowledge. There’s that bundle of letters of that fool Trafford, for instance, to Lucy. I can’t get a divorce on them, it’s true; but I hope to squeeze a thousand pounds out of him before he has them back again.”
“I hope in my heart that the world does not know you!” said she, bitterly.
“Do you know, mother, I rather suspect it does? The world is aware that a great many men, some of whom it could ill spare, live by what is called their wits, – that is to say, that they play the game entitled ‘Life’ with what Yankees call ‘the advantages;’ and the world no more resents my living by the sharp practice long experience has taught me, than it is angry with this man for being a lawyer, and that one for being a doctor.”
“You know in your heart that Trafford never thought of stealing Lucy’s affections.”
“Perhaps I do; but I don’t know what were Lucy’s intentions towards Trafford.”
“Oh, fie, fie!”
“Be shocked if you like. It’s very proper, perhaps, that you should be shocked; but nature has endowed me with strong nerves or coarse feelings, whichever you like to call them, and consequently I can talk of these things with as little intermixture of sentiment as I would employ in discussing a protested bill. Lucy herself is not deficient in this cool quality, and we have discussed the social contract styled Marriage with a charming unanimity of opinion. Indeed, when I have thought over the marvellous agreement of our sentiments, I have been actually amazed why we could not live together without hating each other.”
“I pity her – from the bottom of my heart I pity her.”
“So do I, mother. I pity her, because I pity myself. It was a stupid bargain for each of us. I thought I was marrying an angel with sixty thousand pounds. She fancied she was getting a hero, with a peerage in the distance. Each made a ‘bad book.’ It is deuced hard, however,” continued he, in a fiercer strain, “if one must go on backing the horse that you know will lose, staking your money where you see you cannot win. My wife and myself awoke from our illusions years ago; but to please the world, to gratify that amiable thing called Society, we must go on still, just as if we believed all that we know and have proved to be rotten falsehoods. Now I ask you, mother, is not this rather hard? Would n’t it be hard for a good-tempered, easy-going fellow? And is it not more than hard for a hasty, peevish, irritable dog like myself? We know and see that we are bad company for each other, but you – I mean the world – you insist that we should go on quarrelling to the end, as if there was anything edifying in the spectacle of our mutual dislike.”
“Too much of this. I beseech you, drop the subject, and talk of something else.”
“I declare, mother, if there was any one I could be frank and outspoken with on this theme, I believed it to be yourself. You have had ‘your losses’ too, and know what it is to be unhappily mated.”
“Whatever I may have suffered, I have not lost self-respect,” said she, haughtily.
“Heigho!” cried he, wearily, “I always find that my opinions place me in a minority, and so it must ever be while the world is the hypocritical thing we see it. Oh dear, if people could only vote by ballot, I’d like to see marriage put to the test.”
“What did Sir William say about my going to the picnic?” asked she, suddenly.
“He said you were quite right to obtain as many attentions as you could from the Castle, on the same principle that the vicar’s wife stipulated for the sheep in the picture, – ‘as many as the painter would put in for nothing.’”
“So that he is firmly determined not to resign?”
“Most firmly; nor will he be warned by the example of the well-bred dog, for he sees, or he might see, all the preparations on foot for kicking him out.”
“You don’t think they would compel him to resign?”
“No; but they’ll compel him to go, which amounts to the same. Balfour says they mean to move an address to the Queen, praying her Majesty to superannuate him.”
“It would kill him, – he ‘d not survive it.”
“So it is generally believed, – all the more because it is a course he has ever declared to be impossible, – I mean constitutionally impossible.”
“I hope he may be spared this insult.”
“He might escape it by dying first, mother; and really, under the circumstances, it would be more dignified.”
“Your morals were not, at any time, to boast of, but your manners used to be those of a gentleman,” said she, in a voice thick with passion.
“I am afraid, mother, that both morals and manners, like this hat of mine, are a little the worse for wear; but, as in the case of the hat too, use has made them pleasanter to me than spick-and-span new ones, with all the gloss on. At all events, I never dreamed of offending when I suggested the possibility of your being a widow. Indeed, I fancied it was feminine for widower, which I imagined to be no such bad thing.”
“If the Chief Baron should be compelled to leave the Bench, will it affect your tenure of the Registrarship?”
“That is what nobody seems to know. Some opine one way, some another; and though all ask me what does the Chief himself say on the matter, I have never had the courage to ask the question.”
“You are quite right It would be most indiscreet to do so.”
“Indeed, if I were rash enough to risk the step, it would redound to nothing, since I am quite persuaded that he believes that whenever he retires from public life or quits this world altogether, a general chaos will ensue, and that all sorts of ignorant and incompetent people will jostle the clever fellows out of the way, just because the one great directing mind of the age has left the scene and departed.”
“All his favors to you have certainly not bought your gratitude, Dudley.”
“I don’t suspect it is a quality I ever laid up a large stock of, mother, – not to say that I have always deemed it a somewhat unworthy thing to swallow the bad qualities of a man simply because he was civil to you personally.”
“His kindness might at least secure your silence.”
“Then it would be a very craven silence. But I ‘ll join issue with you on the other counts. What is this great kindness for which I am not to speak my mind about him? He has housed and fed me: very good things in their way, but benefits which never cost him anything but his money. Now, what have I repaid him with? My society, my time, my temper, I might say my health, for he has worried me to that degree some days that I have been actually on the verge of a fever. And if his overbearing insolence was hard to endure, still harder was it to stand his inordinate vanity without laughter. I ask you frankly, isn’t he the vainest man, not that you ever met, but that you ever heard of?”