LAURENCE O'BOYNEVILLE'S FIRST HEARING.
To the dowager Mr. O'Boyneville had been very confidential. He was
as frank and ingenuous as some lovesick schoolboy in his revelation
of that sudden affection with which Cecil Chudleigh's pensive face
had inspired him. The unconscious audacity which was one of the chief
attributes of his character supported him in a position in which
another man of his age and habits would have suffered an agony of
self-consciousness, a torturing sense of his own foolishness. He was
close upon forty years of age. His childhood had been spent on the
greensward of Irish hills and valleys, among the wildest of Hibernian
agriculturists; his boyhood had been passed in an Irish city, far south
of the brilliant capital; his manhood had been a long, scrambling,
helter-skelter journey upon one of the dustiest and most toilsome
roads of modern life. His habits were not the habits of the men who
were to be met in Cecil Chudleigh's world; his cleverness was not
their cleverness; and those graces and accomplishments which, in their
education, had been the first consideration, were just the very points
which in his rough schooling had been neglected or ignored.
Another man, under such circumstances--and even another Irishman--might
have regarded Lady Cecil from afar with fond admiring glances, and
returned to his law-library in Bloomsbury, or his dusty chambers in
the Temple, not scatheless, but hopeless: and despair being a fever of
but brief duration--it is your intermittent sickness of alternate hope
and fear that hangs so long about the sufferer--the victim might have
speedily recovered the wound inflicted by a flying Cupid's random shot.
But it was not thus with Laurence O'Boyneville. He knew that he was
eight-and-thirty, and that he looked five years older; nor was it long
since the tailor, who made those garments which the barrister insisted
should be constructed after the fashion of his youth, had sighed as
he look his patron's measure, murmuring plaintively, "Another inch
round the waist, Mr. O'Boyneville! and, bless my heart, it seems only
yesterday when twenty-five inches was your figure!"
The barrister, contemplating himself in the glass during the process of
shaving, and scowling--not at himself, but at the visionary countenance
of the sarcastic Valentine or the unctuous O'Smea, with whom he was to
do battle before the day was done--might have perceived, had he chosen
to consider the matter, that he was by no means the sort of person whom
women call handsome. The strongly-marked eyebrows, so quick to contract
above the cold blue eyes; the aquiline nose, the firmly-set lips, the
massive chin, and the broad square brow, with its prominent range of
perceptive organs overshadowing the eyes--these were not the component
parts of a countenance on which women care to dwell with admiring
glances.
But that which would most likely have discomfited other men had
no power to abash or to disturb the resolute spirit of Laurence
O'Boyneville. Perhaps the secret of his audacity was that he had never
failed in any thing. From the boyish days when he had breasted the
falls of the Shannon and done battle with the power of the waters,
his career had been one long hand-to-hand struggle with difficulties.
Penniless, he had succeeded where other men's money had been powerless
to win them success. Friendless, he had trampled upon the fallen hopes
of rivals who could boast of kindred and friendship with the mighty
ones of the earth. A stranger and an alien, he had won for himself
wealth and renown in a country in which vulgar prejudice had made the
very name of his people a byword and a reproach.
Was this a man to be turned aside from his purpose because the woman
with whom he had fallen in love happened to be above him in rank, and
the daughter of a world with which his world had nothing in common? No.
After seeing Cecil Chudleigh for the first time, Laurence O'Boyneville
decided that he would never marry any other woman. On seeing her for
the second time, he determined to marry _her_. The most presuming of
coxcombs could scarcely have been more sublimely assured of his own
invincibility. And yet the barrister had nothing in common with a
coxcomb. He was only accustomed to succeed. If he wanted to do any
thing, he did it; and opposition or difficulty only gave a keener zest
to the process of achievement. He wanted to marry Lady Cecil Chudleigh,
and he meant to marry her. She might object at first, of course. People
almost always did object to his doing what he wanted to do; but he
always did it. Had not his professional rivals objected to his success,
and banded themselves together to keep him down, and had he not
succeeded in spite of them?
In his native wilds Mr. O'Boyneville might have twirled his shillalah
and screamed horoo! so light were his spirits as he set forth to call
on the lady of his love. In civilised and crowded London he could only
swing his stick loosely in his hand as he strode triumphantly from the
hall of the wasted footsteps; whereby he drew down upon himself the
maledictions of an elderly gentleman whose shins the weapon had smitten
in descending. That the pavements of the metropolis had _not_ been laid
down for his sole accommodation was a side of the question which Mr.
O'Boyneville had never taken the trouble to contemplate.
He had been to Westminster, had heard the opening of a case in which he
was concerned, and had given his brief and whispered his instructions
to Hodger, a painstaking junior, who was very glad to do suit and
service to the great O'Boyneville. The great O'Boyneville's client--a
soap-boiler in Lambeth, who was at war with his parish upon the
question of whether he did or did not consume his own smoke--was by
no means gratified by the substitution, and looked as black as if he
had indeed, in his own proper person, consumed all the smoke of his
furnaces. But the distinguished Irishman strode away from Westminster
heedless of his client's rage. It was very rarely that Laurence
O'Boyneville gave his work to another man. The solicitors who swore by
him told their clients that if O'Boyneville undertook a case, he would
see it through to the very end.
"There never was such a resolute beggar," said a fast young attorney,
who had witnessed one of the Q.C.'s triumphs; "the more desperate a
case is, the sweeter O'Boyneville is upon it. He has all the Hibernian
love of fighting; and if any body says 'Pease,' he's ready to spill his
blood in the cause of 'Beans.' Egad! if there were a Victoria Cross for
desperate valour exhibited in the law courts, Larry O'Boyneville's silk
gown ought to be decorated with it."
But to-day, for the first time in his life, the barrister neglected
his work for his own pleasure. That solemn crisis, which for some
butterfly creatures comes once or twice in every London season, came
to this man for the first time after twenty years of manhood. He was
in love, and he was going to ask the woman he loved to be his wife. He
was going to ask her to marry him--and he had met her on Dr. Molyneux's
staircase--and he had watched her at a dinner-party as she talked to
her aunt's guests! He knew her so little, and yet was eager to win her
for his wife. "Good Heavens!" exclaims Common Sense, "what a fool the
man must be!" And yet for once, dear, simple, straightforward Common
Sense is out of her reckoning; for Laurence O'Boyneville knew Cecil
Chudleigh better than she was known by her most intimate friends. It
was a gift with him, this intuitive knowledge of human character, this
rapid perception of human motive; and it was by the possession of this
gift, quite as much as by his cool audacity of showy eloquence, that
the Irish barrister had made for himself a name and a position. Before
a witness had kissed the Book and answered a preliminary question
or two, Laurence O'Boyneville knew what manner of man the witness
was. Show him the most trumpery photograph that was ever bought for
eighteenpence, and he would penetrate the inmost depths of that man's
mind whose face was dimly shadowed in the smudgy portrait. It was
doubtful if he had ever read Lavater--and yet more doubtful if he had
waded through the big volumes of George Combe; and yet he was in his
own person an unconscious Lavater, and to him the teaching of the
great Combe could have imparted no new wisdom. A man's eyes are not
overshadowed by a bumpy ridge for nothing; and to Laurence O'Boyneville
had been given in excess that wondrous faculty called perception.
He had scrutinised Lady Cecil with eyes that were experienced in
the reading of every expression the human countenance is capable of
assuming. He knew that she was pure, and true, and generous, and
high-minded. A little proud, perhaps, but only just as proud as a good
woman has need to be in a bad world. He knew that she was a prize worth
winning, and he meant to win her. No apprehension of failure troubled
the serenity of his mind. He did not expect to win her all at once. Had
it not cost him fifteen years of hard labour to obtain his silk gown?
and could he expect that Providence would give him this far higher
prize without inflicting on him some interval for the exercise of his
patience--some manner of probationary ordeal for the trial of his faith
and devotion? Mr. O'Boyneville did not believe in that French proverb
which asserts that happiness comes to the sleeper.
"I will serve my seven years' apprenticeship--and my seven years after
that, if necessary--but she shall be my wife before I die," thought
Laurence. But it may be that Mr. O'Boyneville's fourteen years was only
a figurative expression, for he said to himself presently:
"If I play my cards well, we may be married in the long vacation: and
then I'll take my wife to Ireland, and get a glimpse of the Shannon for
the first time these twenty years."
Arrived in Dorset Square, Mr. O'Boyneville did not endanger his
prospects by any untimely modesty. He told the servant who opened the
door that he came by appointment; and when the dowager's own maid
emerged from some dusky back-parlour, whence issued that odour of
heated iron and singed blanket which attends the getting-up of feminine
muslins and laces, he brushed unceremoniously by that prim young
person, and made his way up stairs. Fortune favoured him. She seems but
a craven-spirited divinity, after all, and always places herself on the
side of the audacious. Cecil Chudleigh was sitting at the piano, not
playing, but leaning over the keyboard in a thoughtful attitude, with
her head resting on one hand while the listless fingers of the other
trifled with the leaves of her music-book.
She looked up as the door opened, and her face betrayed any thing but
pleasure as she recognised her visitor. He had prepared her to expect
such an intrusion, but she had not expected him so early, and had
engaged an ally in the person of Florence Crawford, who had promised
to come to her dearest Cecil directly after breakfast. Unfortunately,
Flo's "directly after breakfast" meant any time between ten and two;
and as the dowager rarely made her appearance before luncheon, poor
Cecil had to encounter the great O'Boyneville alone.
But in spite of the special manner in which the popular barrister
had announced his coming, Cecil had no suspicion that the visit
itself was to be of any special nature. No eccentricity could have
surprised her in the wearer of that tight-sleeved frock-coat and those
exploded shirt-collars, in which Mr. O'Boyneville exhibited himself
for the edification of modern society. His solemn announcement of
course only referred to the conventional morning call of the grateful
diner-out--the stamped receipt for an agreeable entertainment. Lady
Cecil was prepared to be a little bored by the eccentric Irishman's
visit, and "there an end."
"I wish Flo had been here to talk to him," she thought wearily; "Flo
could receive a deputation of aldermen, or a Church-commission,
whatever that is."
Mr. O'Boyneville murmured some feeble truism in reference to the
weather. In spite of his audacity--in spite of his calm assurance and
unfaltering faith in ultimate victory--his ease of manner, his popular
swagger, and his ready flow of language abandoned him for the moment
when he found himself in the presence of that unconscious enchantress
who had awakened the soul of a middle-aged barrister from its twenty
years' torpor.
But the paralysis called bashfulness was a very temporary affliction
with Mr. O'Boyneville. Before he had been talking ten minutes to Lady
Cecil, he had drawn his chair close to the piano by which she was
still seated; before he had been talking to her twenty minutes, he had
asked her to be his wife.
She looked at him with a smile of utter incredulity.
"Mr. O'Boyneville," she exclaimed, "you must surely intend this for a
jest! and believe me it is a very foolish one."
"A jest, Lady Cecil! What, don't you know sincerity when you meet with
it? Well, I confess it was foolish of me to come to you like this, and
to tell you I'd fallen over head and ears in love with you, before a
fine gentleman of the modern school would presume to ask you how you
are. But you see, Lady Cecil, I'm not a fine gentleman. For the first
seventeen years of my life I lived amongst people almost as simple and
primitive as those happy savages Columbus found in Hispaniola. For the
last twenty years I have been too hard a worker in my own world to
have any leisure in which to acquire the thoughts and ways of yours.
I never thought that any break would come in the rapid current of my
busy life, but--I suppose there is one fateful hour in every man's
existence. I, who so seldom go to parties, went to Molyneux's ball; I,
who so seldom talk to young ladies, talked to you; and before I turned
the corner of Harley Street that night, my destiny was a settled thing.
'She has come,' said I, 'and she brings my fate in her hand.' To my
mind, Lady Cecil, that which your romance-writer and your poet call
love at sight--'if not an Adam at his birth, he is no love at all;'
and so on--is rather an intuitive consciousness, which a man has in
the hour that brings him face to face with the woman who is to be the
happiness or the misery of his life. I am not going to use high-flown
language, Lady Cecil. Eloquence is my stock-in-trade elsewhere. The
words cannot be too plain in which I tell you that I love you. There is
very little to be said in my favour. I am what people call well off;
but you might reasonably expect to marry a much richer man. I come of
a good old Irish family; but proscription has diminished its lands to
a single farm, and the taint of treason has blotted its name. I am
nearly twenty years your senior, and I have few of the accomplishments
which distinguish the young men of the present day. It is the cause of
the leaden casket which I am pleading, Lady Cecil; and against all the
outward splendour of gold and silver which my rivals can boast, I can
set nothing except the unselfishness of my love, the strength of my
devotion."
Cecil had listened very patiently to this address. She could not
doubt the depth of feeling which was breathed in every accent of the
barrister's voice, subdued and grave in tone, and altogether different
from the sonorous thunder which so often awoke the echoes of the
law-courts. She was touched by his appeal, though it stirred no warmer
feeling than a gentle thrill of womanly pity. It is not in the nature
of a woman to feel unkindly to the lowest of human beings who reveals
to her a pure and noble affection. A Miranda will pardon and pity a
Caliban if his devotion is instinct with the divinity of innocent love.
"Are you really in earnest, Mr. O'Boyneville?" asked Lady Cecil.
"I was never more in earnest in my life."
"I am very sorry for it--I am very sorry," answered Cecil, gently. "I
am sure I need not tell you that I am touched and flattered by your
preference for me, eccentric as it may be; but you must be indeed a
stranger to the society of women if you can imagine that any woman,
knowing as little of you as I do, could reply otherwise than in the
negative to such an offer as you have made me."
"Yes, I dare say it's very absurd," murmured Mr. O'Boyneville,
despondingly; "it's my headlong way of doing things--a national
characteristic, I suppose, Lady Cecil. I ought to have waited a week
or two--till we knew each other--intimately--and then----Would there
have been any hope for me if I had waited a week or two?" asked the
barrister, in that soft insinuating tone to which he had been known
to drop after a burst of loud and lofty declamation, with a sudden
transition of style that had often proved irresistible with an
impressionable jury.
Cecil Chudleigh shook her head gently.
"I might have been less surprised by your flattering proposal, Mr.
O'Boyneville," she said; "but no circumstances could possibly arise
under which I could give you any other answer than that I have given
you to-day.
"And that answer is 'No'?"
"It is, Mr. O'Boyneville."
"Irrevocably no?"
"Irrevocably."
"Lady Cecil, forgive me if I ask you a question. Is there any one--any
one who occupies the place in your heart that it would be my dearest
hope to win for myself? Ah, you don't know how patiently I would bide
my time if there were ever so distant a gleam of sunshine to lure me
on! Is there any one else, Lady Cecil?"
"No, there is no one else."
"Ah, then that's bad indeed," said the Irishman, with a sigh; "if
there'd been any one else, I might have hoped--" Mr. O'Boyneville's
habit of subduing the stolidity of a jury by a happy colloquialism,
when all grandiloquence of language had failed to produce an effect,
very nearly betrayed him into saying, "to punch his head." He pulled
himself up with an effort, and concluded, "I might have hoped to prove
myself the worthier man of the two. But if there is no one, Lady Cecil,
and you say the answer is irrevocable, my doom is sealed. I will
not tell you that I shall die broken-hearted; for in this bustling
nineteenth century men have no time to break their hearts in the
old-fashioned way. They can only overwork their brains and die of some
commonplace heart-disease. The effect of your rejection will be that I
shall work, if any thing, harder than I have been accustomed to work,
and go down to my grave a single man. And now I'll not bore you any
longer, Lady Cecil, and I hope you'll forget that I've talked about any
thing that isn't appropriate conversation for an ordinary morning call."
He held out his hand as frankly as if he had shaken off all sense of
mortification or disappointment. Lady Cecil had received her due share
of matrimonial proposals, and had been accustomed to see a rejected
swain depart with an air of dignified sulkiness. There seemed to be
something almost magnanimous in the Irishman's simple heartiness of
manner. It appeared as if he were rather anxious to relieve Cecil
from any natural embarrassment, than oppressed by a sense of his own
humiliation. She shook hands with him very cordially, and thought
better of him in this moment of parting than she had thought yet. But
she did not make him any conventional speech about her desire to retain
his friendship, or her anxiety respecting his ultimate happiness. She
fancied that his sudden passion was only the folly of an overgrown
schoolboy, and she had little fear of the consequences of her rejection.
"I dare say he falls in love with some one every week of his life, and
passes his existence in making offers that are refused," she thought,
as she sat down to the piano after he had left her.
But even after thinking thus of her departed admirer, Cecil could
not altogether dismiss him from her mind. She might smile at the
remembrance of his folly, but she could not question his sincerity. For
the moment, at least, he had been in earnest. But then it is the nature
of an Irishman to be desperately in earnest about trifles. The arrival
of a bloom-coloured coat from Mr. Filby the tailor seems as great an
event to Goldsmith as the grant of a pension can appear to the calmer
mind of Johnson.
Mr. O'Boyneville walked away from Dorset Square vanquished, but not
disheartened. He had been prepared for a rejection of his suit; but for
him Cecil's irrevocable no was not entirely appalling. His experience
had shown him many a verdict set aside, many a decision appealed
against. And are there not courts of appeal in the kingdom of lovers,
as well as in the vulgar every-day world of lawyers? In spite of what
the barrister had said to Lady Cecil, he had been much relieved by
her assurance that her heart and hand were alike disengaged. He had
affected the resignation of despair, while a glow of hope had gently
warmed his breast; and as he swaggered along the pavement of Baker
Street on the watch for a passing hansom, he had by no means the
appearance of a rejected and desponding lover.
"I dare say she'll think me a fool for my pains, but at any rate she
_will_ think of me, and that's something," mused Mr. O'Boyneville.
"How prettily her eyelids drooped when she gave me her irrevocable
answer--just as if she shrank from seeing the disappointment in my
face! And how good and true and pure she is! There'd be little need
for divorce-courts, and less work for the lawyers, if all women were
like her; and I don't despair of calling her Lady Cecil O'Boyneville
yet. There never was a good woman who wasn't to be won by the love
of an honest man, provided there's no mistake about his love or his
honesty. There's not a day of one's life but one hears of oddly-matched
couples. What could pretty Mrs. Green have seen in that awkward lout
Green? says Gossip. Why, what should she see except that he loved her
better than any other man in creation? And then, if Fate is the master
of men, Circumstance is the tyrant of women. A man may marry the woman
he wishes to marry: a woman can only marry the man who wishes to marry
her."
And at this point the barrister espied an approaching hansom, and
beckoned to the driver.
"I may be in time to see the soap-boiler through his troubles yet," he
thought, as he sprang into the vehicle. "Westminster Hall, cabby, and
lose no time about it."