MR., MRS., AND MISS FURNIVAL.
I will now ask my readers to come with me up to London, in order
that I may introduce them to the family of the Furnivals. We shall
see much of the Furnivals before we reach the end of our present
undertaking, and it will be well that we should commence our
acquaintance with them as early as may be done.
Mr. Furnival was a lawyer--I mean a barrister--belonging to Lincoln's
Inn, and living at the time at which our story is supposed to
commence in Harley Street. But he had not been long a resident in
Harley Street, having left the less fashionable neighbourhood of
Russell Square only two or three years before that period. On his
marriage he had located himself in a small house in Keppel Street,
and had there remained till professional success, long waited for,
enabled him to move further west, and indulge himself with the
comforts of larger rooms and more servants. At the time of which I am
now speaking Mr. Furnival was known, and well known, as a successful
man; but he had struggled long and hard before that success had come
to him, and during the earliest years of his married life had found
the work of keeping the wolf from the door to be almost more than
enough for his energies.
Mr. Furnival practised at the common law bar, and early in life had
attached himself to the home circuit. I cannot say why he obtained no
great success till he was nearer fifty than forty years of age. At
that time I fancy that barristers did not come to their prime till
a period of life at which other men are supposed to be in their
decadence. Nevertheless, he had married on nothing, and had kept the
wolf from the door. To do this he had been constant at his work in
season and out of season, during the long hours of day and the long
hours of night. Throughout his term times he had toiled in court,
and during the vacations he had toiled out of court. He had reported
volumes of cases, having been himself his own short-hand writer,--as
it is well known to most young lawyers, who as a rule always fill
an upper shelf in their law libraries with Furnival and Staples'
seventeen volumes in calf. He had worked for the booksellers, and for
the newspapers, and for the attorneys,--always working, however, with
reference to the law; and though he had worked for years with the
lowest pay, no man had heard him complain. That no woman had heard
him do so, I will not say; as it is more than probable that into the
sympathising ears of Mrs. Furnival he did pour forth plaints as to
the small wages which the legal world meted out to him in return for
his labours. He was a constant, hard, patient man, and at last there
came to him the full reward of all his industry. What was the special
case by which Mr. Furnival obtained his great success no man could
say. In all probability there was no special case. Gradually it
began to be understood that he was a safe man, understanding his
trade, true to his clients, and very damaging as an opponent. Legal
gentlemen are, I believe, quite as often bought off as bought up. Sir
Richard and Mr. Furnival could not both be required on the same side,
seeing what a tower of strength each was in himself; but then Sir
Richard would be absolutely neutralized if Mr. Furnival were employed
on the other side. This is a system well understood by attorneys, and
has been found to be extremely lucrative by gentlemen leading at the
bar.
Mr. Furnival was now fifty-five years of age, and was beginning
to show in his face some traces of his hard work. Not that he was
becoming old, or weak, or worn; but his eye had lost its fire--except
the fire peculiar to his profession; and there were wrinkles in his
forehead and cheeks; and his upper lip, except when he was speaking,
hung heavily over the lower; and the loose skin below his eye was
forming into saucers; and his hair had become grizzled; and on his
shoulders, except when in court, there was a slight stoop. As seen in
his wig and gown he was a man of commanding presence,--and for ten
men in London who knew him in this garb, hardly one knew him without
it. He was nearly six feet high, and stood forth prominently, with
square, broad shoulders and a large body. His head also was large;
his forehead was high, and marked strongly by signs of intellect; his
nose was long and straight, his eyes were very gray, and capable to
an extraordinary degree both of direct severity and of concealed
sarcasm. Witnesses have been heard to say that they could endure
all that Mr. Furnival could say to them, and continue in some sort
to answer all his questions, if only he would refrain from looking
at them. But he would never refrain; and therefore it was now well
understood how great a thing it was to secure the services of Mr.
Furnival. "Sir," an attorney would say to an unfortunate client
doubtful as to the expenditure, "your witnesses will not be able to
stand in the box if we allow Mr. Furnival to be engaged on the other
side." I am inclined to think that Mr. Furnival owed to this power of
his eyes his almost unequalled perfection in that peculiar branch of
his profession. His voice was powerful, and not unpleasant when used
within the precincts of a court, though it grated somewhat harshly on
the ears in the smaller compass of a private room. His flow of words
was free and good, and seemed to come from him without the slightest
effort. Such at least was always the case with him when standing
wigged and gowned before a judge. Latterly, however, he had tried his
eloquence on another arena, and not altogether with equal success. He
was now in Parliament, sitting as member for the Essex Marshes, and
he had not as yet carried either the country or the House with him,
although he had been frequently on his legs. Some men said that
with a little practice he would yet become very serviceable as an
honourable and learned member; but others expressed a fear that he
had come too late in life to these new duties.
I have spoken of Mr. Furnival's great success in that branch of
his profession which required from him the examination of evidence,
but I would not have it thought that he was great only in this, or
even mainly in this. There are gentlemen at the bar, among whom
I may perhaps notice my old friend Mr. Chaffanbrass as the most
conspicuous, who have confined their talents to the browbeating
of witnesses,--greatly to their own profit, and no doubt to the
advantage of society. But I would have it understood that Mr.
Furnival was by no means one of these. He had been no Old Bailey
lawyer, devoting himself to the manumission of murderers, or the
security of the swindling world in general. He had been employed on
abstruse points of law, had been great in will cases, very learned as
to the rights of railways, peculiarly apt in enforcing the dowries of
married women, and successful above all things in separating husbands
and wives whose lives had not been passed in accordance with the
recognised rules of Hymen. Indeed there is no branch of the Common
Law in which he was not regarded as great and powerful, though
perhaps his proficiency in damaging the general characters of his
opponents has been recognised as his especial forte. Under these
circumstances I should grieve to have him confounded with such men
as Mr. Chaffanbrass, who is hardly known by the profession beyond
the precincts of his own peculiar court in the City. Mr. Furnival's
reputation has spread itself wherever stuff gowns and horsehair wigs
are held in estimation.
Mr. Furnival when clothed in his forensic habiliments certainly
possessed a solemn and severe dignity which had its weight even with
the judges. Those who scrutinised his appearance critically might
have said that it was in some respects pretentious; but the ordinary
jurymen of this country are not critical scrutinisers of appearance,
and by them he was never held in light estimation. When in his
addresses to them, appealing to their intelligence, education, and
enlightened justice, he would declare that the property of his
clients was perfectly safe in their hands, he looked to be such an
advocate as a litigant would fain possess when dreading the soundness
of his own cause. Any cause was sound to him when once he had been
feed for its support, and he carried in his countenance his assurance
of this soundness,--and the assurance of unsoundness in the cause of
his opponent. Even he did not always win; but on the occasion of his
losing, those of the uninitiated who had heard the pleadings would
express their astonishment that he should not have been successful.
When he was divested of his wig his appearance was not so perfect.
There was then a hard, long straightness about his head and face,
giving to his countenance the form of a parallelogram, to which there
belonged a certain meanness of expression. He wanted the roundness of
forehead, the short lines, and the graceful curves of face which are
necessary to unadorned manly comeliness. His whiskers were small,
grizzled, and ill grown, and required the ample relief of his wig.
In no guise did he look other than a clever man; but in his dress as
a simple citizen he would perhaps be taken as a clever man in whose
tenderness of heart and cordiality of feeling one would not at first
sight place implicit trust.
As a poor man Mr. Furnival had done his duty well by his wife and
family,--for as a poor man he had been blessed with four children.
Three of these had died as they were becoming men and women, and now,
as a rich man, he was left with one daughter, an only child. As a
poor man Mr. Furnival had been an excellent husband, going forth
in the morning to his work, struggling through the day, and then
returning to his meagre dinner and his long evenings of unremitting
drudgery. The bodily strength which had supported him through his
work in those days must have been immense, for he had allowed himself
no holidays. And then success and money had come,--and Mrs. Furnival
sometimes found herself not quite so happy as she had been when
watching beside him in the days of their poverty.
The equal mind,--as mortal Delius was bidden to remember, and as Mr.
Furnival might also have remembered had time been allowed him to
cultivate the classics,--the equal mind should be as sedulously
maintained when things run well, as well as when they run hardly;
and perhaps the maintenance of such equal mind is more difficult in
the former than in the latter stage of life. Be that as it may, Mr.
Furnival could now be very cross on certain domestic occasions, and
could also be very unjust. And there was worse than this,--much worse
behind. He, who in the heyday of his youth would spend night after
night poring over his books, copying out reports, and never asking to
see a female habiliment brighter or more attractive than his wife's
Sunday gown, he, at the age of fifty-five, was now running after
strange goddesses! The member for the Essex Marshes, in these his
latter days, was obtaining for himself among other successes the
character of a Lothario; and Mrs. Furnival, sitting at home in her
genteel drawing-room near Cavendish Square, would remember with
regret the small dingy parlour in Keppel Street.
Mrs. Furnival in discussing her grievances would attribute them
mainly to port wine. In his early days Mr. Furnival had been
essentially an abstemious man. Young men who work fifteen hours a day
must be so. But now he had a strong opinion about certain Portuguese
vintages, was convinced that there was no port wine in London equal
to the contents of his own bin, saving always a certain green cork
appertaining to his own club, which was to be extracted at the rate
of thirty shillings a cork. And Mrs. Furnival attributed to these
latter studies not only a certain purple hue which was suffusing his
nose and cheeks, but also that unevenness of character and those
supposed domestic improprieties to which allusion has been made. It
may, however, be as well to explain that Mrs. Ball, the old family
cook and housekeeper, who had ascended with the Furnivals in the
world, opined that made-dishes did the mischief. He dined out too
often, and was a deal too particular about his dinner when he dined
at home. If Providence would see fit to visit him with a sharp attack
of the gout, it would--so thought Mrs. Ball--be better for all
parties.
Whether or no it may have been that Mrs. Furnival at fifty-five--for
she and her lord were of the same age--was not herself as attractive
in her husband's eyes as she had been at thirty, I will not pretend
to say. There can have been no just reason for any such change in
feeling, seeing that the two had grown old together. She, poor woman,
would have been quite content with the attentions of Mr. Furnival,
though his hair was grizzled and his nose was blue; nor did she ever
think of attracting to herself the admiration of any swain whose
general comeliness might be more free from all taint of age. Why then
should he wander afield--at the age of fifty-five? That he did wander
afield, poor Mrs. Furnival felt in her agony convinced; and among
those ladies whom on this account she most thoroughly detested was
our friend Lady Mason of Orley Farm. Lady Mason and the lawyer had
first become acquainted in the days of the trial, now long gone
by, on which occasion Mr. Furnival had been employed as the junior
counsel; and that acquaintance had ripened into friendship, and now
flourished in full vigour,--to Mrs. Furnival's great sorrow and
disturbance.
Mrs. Furnival herself was a stout, solid woman, sensible on most
points, but better adapted, perhaps, to the life in Keppel Street
than that to which she had now been promoted. As Kitty Blacker she
had possessed feminine charms which would have been famous had
they been better known. Mr. Furnival had fetched her from farther
East--from the region of Great Ormond street and the neighbourhood of
Southampton Buildings. Her cherry cheeks, and her round eye, and her
full bust, and her fresh lip, had conquered the hard-tasked lawyer;
and so they had gone forth to fight the world together. Her eye
was still round, and her cheek red, and her bust full,--there had
certainly been no falling off there; nor will I say that her lip had
lost its freshness. But the bloom of her charms had passed away, and
she was now a solid, stout, motherly woman, not bright in converse,
but by no means deficient in mother-wit, recognizing well the duties
which she owed to others, but recognizing equally well those which
others owed to her. All the charms of her youth--had they not been
given to him, and also all her solicitude, all her anxious fighting
with the hard world? When they had been poor together, had she not
patched and turned and twisted, sitting silently by his side into the
long nights, because she would not ask him for the price of a new
dress? And yet now, now that they were rich--? Mrs. Furnival, when
she put such questions within her own mind, could hardly answer this
latter one with patience. Others might be afraid of the great Mr.
Furnival in his wig and gown; others might be struck dumb by his
power of eye and mouth; but she, she, the wife of his bosom, she
could catch him without his armour. She would so catch him and let
him know what she thought of all her wrongs. So she said to herself
many a day, and yet the great deed, in all its explosiveness, had
never yet been done. Small attacks of words there had been many, but
hitherto the courage to speak out her griefs openly had been wanting
to her.
I can now allow myself but a small space to say a few words of Sophia
Furnival, and yet in that small space must be confined all the direct
description which can be given of one of the principal personages
of this story. At nineteen Miss Furnival was in all respects a
young woman. She was forward in acquirements, in manner, in general
intelligence, and in powers of conversation. She was a handsome, tall
girl, with expressive gray eyes and dark-brown hair. Her mouth, and
hair, and a certain motion of her neck and turn of her head, had come
to her from her mother, but her eyes were those of her father: they
were less sharp perhaps, less eager after their prey; but they were
bright as his had been bright, and sometimes had in them more of
absolute command than he was ever able to throw into his own.
Their golden days had come on them at a period of her life which
enabled her to make a better use of them than her mother could do.
She never felt herself to be struck dumb by rank or fashion, nor did
she in the drawing-rooms of the great ever show signs of an Eastern
origin. She could adapt herself without an effort to the manners of
Cavendish Square;--ay, and if need were, to the ways of more glorious
squares even than that. Therefore was her father never ashamed to be
seen with her on his arm in the houses of his new friends, though on
such occasions he was willing enough to go out without disturbing the
repose of his wife. No mother could have loved her children with a
warmer affection than that which had warmed the heart of poor Mrs.
Furnival; but under such circumstances as these was it singular that
she should occasionally become jealous of her own daughter?
Sophia Furnival was, as I have said, a clever, attractive girl,
handsome, well-read, able to hold her own with the old as well as
with the young, capable of hiding her vanity if she had any, mild
and gentle to girls less gifted, animated in conversation, and yet
possessing an eye that could fall softly to the ground, as a woman's
eye always should fall upon occasions.
Nevertheless she was not altogether charming. "I don't feel quite
sure that she is real," Mrs. Orme had said of her, when on a certain
occasion Miss Furnival had spent a day and a night at The Cleeve.