Had a mere stranger been a guest on that Sunday when the Chief
Baron entertained at dinner Lady Lendrick, the Sewells, and his old
schoolfellow Haire, he might have gone away under the impression that he
had passed an evening in the midst of a happy and united family.
Nothing could be more perfect than the blending of courtesy and
familiarity. The old Chief himself was in his best of humors, which
means that, with the high polish of a past age, its deference, and its
homage, he combined all the readiness and epigrammatic smartness of a
later period. Lady Lendrick was bland, courteous, and attentive. Colonel
Sewell took the part assigned him by his host, alternate talker and
listener; and Mrs. Sewell herself displayed, with true woman's wit, that
she knew how to fall in with the Judge's humor, as though she had known
him for years, and that, in each sally of his wit and each flash of
his repartee he was but reviving memories of such displays in long-past
years. As for Haire, no enchantment could be more complete; he found
himself not only listened to but appealed to. The Chief asked him to
correct him about some fact or other of recent history; he applied
to him to relate some incident in a trial he had taken part in; and,
greatest triumph of all, he was called on to decide some question about
the dressing of Mrs. Sewell's hair, his award being accepted as the last
judgment of connoisseurship.
Lucy talked little, but seemed interested by all around her. It was
a bit of high-life comedy, really amusing, and she had that mere
suspicion--it was no more--of the honesty and loyalty of the talkers
to give an added significance to all she saw and heard. This slight
distrust, however, gave way, when Mrs. Sewell sat down beside her in the
drawing-room, and talked to her of her father. Oh, how well she appeared
to know him; how truly she read the guileless simplicity of his noble
nature; how she distinguished--it was not all who did so--between his
timid reserve and pride; how she saw that what savored of haughtiness
was in reality an excess of humility shrouding itself from notice; how
she dwelt on his love for children, and the instantaneous affection
he inspired in them towards himself. Last of all, how she won the poor
girl's heart as she said, “It will never do to leave him there, Lucy; we
must have him here, at home with us. I think you may intrust it to me; I
generally find my way in these sort of things.”
Lucy could have fallen at her feet with gratitude as she heard these
words, and she pressed her hand to her lips and kissed it fervently.
“Why isn't your brother here? Is he not in Dublin?” asked Mrs. Sewell,
suddenly.
“Yes, he is in town,” stammered out Lucy, “but grandpapa scarcely knows
him, and when they did meet, it was most unfortunate. I 'll tell you all
about it another time.”
“We have many confidences to make each other,” said Mrs. Sewell, with
a sigh so full of sorrow that Lucy instinctively pressed her hand with
warmth, as though to imply her trustfulness would, not be ill deposited.
At last came the hour of leave-taking, and the Judge accompanied his
guests to the door, and even bareheaded handed Lady Lendrick to her
carriage. To each, as they said “Good-night,” he had some little
appropriate speech,--a word or two of gracious compliment, uttered with
all his courtesy.
“I call this little dinner a success, Lucy,” said he, as he stood to say
“Good-night” on the stairs. “Lady Lendrick was unusually amiable, and
her daughter-in-law is beyond praise.”
“She is indeed charming,” said Lucy, fervently.
“I found the Colonel also agreeable,--less dictatorial than men of
his class generally are. I suspect we shall get on well together with
further acquaintance; but, as Haire said, I was myself to-night, and
would have struck sparks out of the dullest rock, so that I must not
impute to him what may only have been the reflex of myself. Ah, dear!
there was a time when these exertions were the healthful stimulants
of my life; now they only weary and excite,--good-night, dear child,
good-night.”
As Lady Lendrick and her party drove homeward, not a word was uttered
for some minutes after they had taken their seats. It was not till after
they had passed out of the grounds, and gained the high-road, that she
herself broke silence. “Well, Dudley,” said she at last, “is he like my
description? Was my portrait too highly colored?”
“Quite the reverse. It was a faint weak sketch of the great original.
In all my life I never met such inordinate vanity and such overweening
pretension. I give him the palm as the most conceited man and the
greatest bore in Christendom.”
“Do you wonder now if I could n't live with him?” asked she, half
triumphantly.
“I 'll not go that far. I think I could live with him if I saw my way to
any advantage by it.”
“I'm certain you could not! The very things you now reprobate are the
few endurable traits about him. It is in the resources of his intense
conceit he finds whatever renders him pleasant and agreeable. I wish you
saw his other humor.”
“I can imagine it may not be all that one would desire; but still--”
“It comes well from you to talk of submitting and yielding,” burst out
Lady Lendrick. “I certainly have not yet detected these traits in your
character; and I tell you frankly, you and Sir William could not live a
week under the same roof together. Don't you agree with me, Lucy?”
“What should she know about it?” said he, fiercely; and before she could
reply, “I don't suspect she knows a great deal about me,--she knows
nothing at all about _him_.”
“Well, would you like to live with him yourself, Lucy?” asked Lady
Lendrick.
“I don't say I 'd _like_ it, but I think it might be done,” said she,
faintly, and scarcely raising her eyes as she spoke.
“Of course, then, my intractable temper is the cause of all our
incompatibility; my only consolation is that I have a son and a
daughter-in-law so charmingly endowed that their virtues are more than
enough to outweigh my faults.”
“What I say is this,” said the Colonel, sternly,--“I think the man is a
bore or a bully, but that he need n't be both if one does n't like
it. Now I 'd consent to be bored, to escape being bullied, which is
precisely the reverse of what you appear to have done.”
“I am charmed with the perspicuity you display. I hope, Lucy, that it
tends to the happiness of your married life to have a husband so well
able to read character.”
Apparently this was a double-headed shot, for neither spoke for several
minutes.
“I declare I almost wish he would put you to the test,” said Lady
Lendrick. “I mean, I wish he'd ask you to the Priory.”
“I fancy it is what he means to do,” said Mrs. Sewell, in the same
low tone,--“at least he came to me when I was standing in the small
drawing-room, and said, 'How would you endure the quiet stillness and
uniformity of such a life as I lead here? Would its dulness overpower
you?'”
“Of course, you said it would be paradise,” broke in her Ladyship; “you
hinted all about your own resources, and such-like.”
“She did no such thing; she took the pathetic line, put her handkerchief
to her eyes, and implied how she would love it, as a refuge from the
cruel treatment of a bad husband,--eh, am I right?” Harsh and insolent
as the words were, the accents in which they were uttered were far more
so. “Out with it, Madam! was it not something like that you said?”
“No,” said she, gently. “I told Sir William I was supremely happy,
blessed in every accident and every relation of my life, and that
hitherto I had never seen the spot which could not suit the glad temper
of my heart.”
“You keep the glad temper confoundedly to yourself then,” burst he out.
“I wish you were not such a niggard of it.”
“Dudley, Dudley, I say,” cried Lady Lendrick, in a tone of reproof.
“I have learned not to mind these amenities,” said Mrs. Sewell, in a
quiet voice, “and I am only surprised that Colonel Sewell thinks it
worth while to continue them.”
“If it be your intention to become Sir William's guest, I must say such
habits will require to be amended,” said her Ladyship, gravely.
“So they shall, mother. Your accomplished and amiable husband, as you
once called him in a letter to me, shall only see us in our turtle
moods, and never be suffered to approach our cage save when we are
billing and cooing.”
The look of aversion he threw at his wife as he spoke was something
that words cannot convey; and though she never raised eyes to meet it, a
sickly pallor crept over her cheek as the blight fell on her.
“I am to call on him to-morrow, by appointment. I wish he had not said
twelve. One has not had his coffee by twelve; but as he said, 'I hope
that will not be too early for you,' I felt it better policy to reply,
'By no means;' and so I must start as if for a journey.”
“What does he mean by asking you to come at that hour? Have you any
notion what his business is?”
“Not the least. We were in the hall. I was putting on my coat, when he
suddenly turned round and asked me if I could without inconvenience drop
in about twelve.”
“I wonder what it can be for.”
“I'll tell you what I hope it may not be for! I hope it may not be to
show me his conservatory, or his Horatian garden, as he pedantically
called it, or his fish-ponds. If so, I think I 'll invite him some
fine morning to turn over all my protested bills, and the various writs
issued against me. Bore for Bore, I suspect we shall come out of the
encounter pretty equal.”
“He has some rare gems. I'd not wonder if it was to get you to select a
present for Lucy.”
“If I thought so, I'd take a jeweller with me, as though my friend, to
give me a hint as to the value.”
“He admires you greatly, Lucy; he told me so as he took me downstairs.”
“She has immense success with men of that age: nothing over eighty seems
able to resist her.”
This time she raised her eyes, and they met his, not with their former
expression, but full of defiance, and of an insolent meaning, so that
after a moment he turned away his gaze, and with a seeming struggle
looked abashed and ashamed. “The first change I will ask you to make in
that house,” said Lady Lendrick, who had noticed this by-play, “if ever
you become its inmates, will be to dismiss that tiresome old hanger-on,
Mr. Haire. I abhor him.”
“My first reform will be in the sherry,--to get rid of that vile sugary
compound of horrid nastiness he gives you After soup. The next will be
the long-tailed black coach-horses. I don't think a man need celebrate
his own funeral every time he goes out for a drive.”
“Haire,” resumed Lady Lendrick, in a tone of severity, meant, perhaps,
to repress all banter on a serious subject,--“Haire not only supplies
food to his vanity, but stimulates his conceit by little daily stories
of what the world says of him. I wish he would listen to _me_ on that
subject,--I wish he would take _my_ version of his place in popular
estimation.”
“I opine that the granddaughter should be got rid of,” said the Colonel.
“She is a fool,--only a fool,” said Lady Lendrick.
“I don't think her a fool,” said Mrs. Sewell, slowly.
“I don't exactly mean so much; but that she has no knowledge of life,
and knows nothing whatever of the position she is placed in, nor how to
profit by it.”
“I'd not even go that far,” said Mrs. Sewell, in the same quiet tone.
“Don't pay too much attention to _that_,” said the Colonel to his
mother. “It's one of her ways always to see something in every one that
nobody else has discovered.”
“I made that mistake once too often for my own welfare,” said she, in a
voice only audible to his ear.
“She tells me, mother, that she made that same mistake once too often
for her own welfare; which being interpreted, means in taking me for her
husband,--a civil speech to make a man in presence of his mother.”
“I begin to think that politeness is not the quality any of us are eager
about,” said Lady Lendrick; “and I must say I am not at all sorry that
the drive is over.”
“If I had been permitted to smoke, you'd not have been distressed by any
conversational excesses on my part,” said the Colonel.
“I shall know better another time, Dudley; and possibly-it would be
as well to be suffocated with tobacco as half-choked with anger. Thank
heaven we are at the door!”
“May I take your horses as far as the Club?” asked Sewell, as he handed
her out.
“Yes, but not to wait. You kept them on Tuesday night till past four
o'clock.”
“On second thought, I'll walk,” said he, turning away. “Good-night;”
and leaving his wife to be assisted down the steps by the footman, he
lighted his cigar, and walked away.