The following paragraph appeared in the Irish, and was speedily copied
into some of the English papers: “An intrigue, which involves the
character of more than one individual of rank, and whose object was to
compel the Chief Baron of her Majesty's Exchequer in Ireland to resign
his seat on the Bench, has at length been discovered, and, it is said,
will soon be made matter of Parliamentary explanation. We hope, for the
reputation of our public men, that the details which have reached us of
the transaction may not be substantiated; but the matter is one which
demands, and must have, the fullest and most searching inquiry.”
“So, sir,” said the old Chief to Haire, who had read this passage to him
aloud as they sat at breakfast, “they would make political capital of
my case, and, without any thought for me or for my feelings, convert the
conduct displayed towards me into a means of attacking a fallen party.
What says Sir Brook Fossbrooke to this? or how would he act were he in
my place?”
“Just as you mean to act now,” said Fossbrooke, promptly.
“And how may that be, sir?”
“By refusing all assistance to such party warfare; at least, my Lord
Chief Baron, it is thus that I read your character.”
“You do me justice, sir; and it is my misfortune that I have not earlier
had the inestimable benefit of your friendship. I trust,” added he,
haughtily, “I have too much pride to be made the mere tool of a party
squabble; and, fortunately, I have the means to show this. Here, sir, is
a letter I have just received from the Prime Minister. Read it,--read it
aloud, Haire and my son will like to hear its contents also.”
“Downing Street, Tuesday evening.
“My dear Lord Chief Baron,--It is with much pleasure I have to
communicate to you that my colleagues unanimously agree with me in the
propriety of submitting your name to the Queen for the Peerage. Your
long and distinguished services and your great abilities will confer
honor on any station; and your high character will give additional
lustre to those qualities which have marked you out for her Majesty's
choice. I am both proud and delighted, my Lord, that it has fallen to my
lot to be the bearer of these tidings to you; and with every assurance
of my great respect and esteem, I am, most sincerely yours,
“Ellerton.”
“At last,” cried Haire,--“at last! But I always knew that it would
come.”
“And what answer have you returned?” cried Lendrick, eagerly.
“Such an answer as will gladden your heart, Tom. I have declined the
proffered distinction.”
“Declined it! Great God! and why?” cried Haire.
“Because I have passed that period in which I could accommodate myself
to a new station, and show the world that I was not inferior to my
acquired dignity. This for my first reason; and for my second, I have a
son whose humility would only be afflicted if such greatness were forced
upon him. Ay, Tom, I have thought of all it would cost you, my poor
fellow, and I have spared you.”
“I thank you with my whole heart,” cried Lendrick, and he pressed the
old man's hand to his lips.
“And what says Lucy?” said the Judge. “Are you shocked at this epidemic
of humility amongst us, child? Or does your woman's heart rebel against
all our craven fears about a higher station?”
“I am content, sir; and I don't think Tom, the miner, will fret that he
wears a leather cap instead of a coronet.”
“I have no patience with any of you,” muttered Haire. “The world will
never believe you have refused such a splendid offer. The correspondence
will not get abroad.”
“I trust it will not, sir,” said the Chief. “What I have done I have
done with regard to myself and my own circumstances, neither meaning
to be an example nor a warning. The world has no more concern with the
matter than with what we shall have for dinner to-day.”
“And yet,” said Sir Brook, with a dry ripple at the angle of his
mouth, “I think it is a case where one might forgive the indiscreet
friend”--here he glanced at Haire--“who incautiously gave the details to
a newspaper.”
“Indiscreet or not, I'll do it,” said Haire, resolutely.
“What, sir!” cried the Chief, with mock sternness of eye and
manner,--“what, sir! if I even forbade you?”
“Ay, even so. If you told me you'd shut your door against me, and never
see me here again, I 'd do it.”
“Look at that man, Sir Brook,” said the Judge, with well-feigned
indignation; “he was my schoolfellow, my chum in college, my colleague
at the Bar, and my friend everywhere, and see how he turns on me in my
hour of adversity!”
“If there be adversity, it is of your own making,” said Haire. “It is
that you won't accept the prize when you have won it.”
“I see it all now,” cried the Chief, laughing, “and stupid enough of
me not to see it before. Haire has been a bully all his life; he is the
very terror of the Hall; he has bullied sergeants and silk gowns, judges
and masters in equity, and his heart is set upon bullying a peer of the
realm. Now, if I will not become a lord, he loses this chance; he stands
to win or lose on me. Out with it, Haire; make a clean confession, and
own, have I not hit the blot?”
“Well,” said Haire, with a sigh, “I have been called sly, sarcastic,
witty, and what not, but I never thought to hear that I was a bully, or
could be a terror to any one.”
The comic earnestness of this speech threw them all into a roar of
laughing, in which even Haire himself joined at last.
“Where is Lucy?” cried the old Judge. “I want her to testify how this
man has tyrannized over me.”
“Lucy has gone into the garden to read a letter Trafford brought her.”
Sir Brook did not add that Trafford had gone with her to assist in the
interpretation.
“I have told Lord Ellerton,” said the Chief, referring once more to the
Minister's letter, “that I will not lend myself in any way to the attack
on the late Government. The intrigue which they planned towards me could
not have ever succeeded if they had not found a traitor in the garrison;
but of him I will speak no more. The old Greek adage was, 'Call no man
happy till he dies.' I would say, he is nearer happiness when he has
refused some object that has been the goal of all his life, than he is
ever like to be under other circumstances.”
Tom looked at his father with wistful eyes, as though he owed him
gratitude for the speech.
“When it is the second horse claims the cup, Haire,” cried the old
Judge, with a burst of his instinctive vanity, “it is because the first
is disqualified by previous victories. And now let us talk of those
whose happiness can be promoted without the intrigues of a Cabinet or a
debate in the House. Sir Brook tells me that Lady Trafford has made her
submission. She is at last willing to see that in an alliance with us
there is no need to call condescension to her aid.”
“Trafford's account is most satisfactory,” said Foss-brooke, “and I
trust the letter of which he was the bearer from his mother will amply
corroborate all he says.”
“I like the young man,” said the Judge, with that sort of authoritative
tone that seems to say, The cause is decided,--the verdict is given.
“There's always good stuff in a fellow when he is not afraid of
poverty,” said Fossbrooke. “There are scores of men will rough it for
a sporting tour on the Prairies or a three months' lion-shooting on the
Gaboon; but let me see the fellow bred to affluence and accustomed to
luxury, who will relinquish both, and address himself to the hard work
of life rather than give up the affection of a girl he loves. That's the
man for me.”
“I have great trust in him,” said Lendrick, thoughtfully.
“All the Bench has pronounced but one,” cried the Chief. “What says our
brother Haire?”
“I 'm no great judge of men. I 'm no great judge of anything,” muttered
Haire; “but I don't think one need be a sphinx to read that he is a
right good fellow, and worthy of the dearest girl in Christendom.”
“Well summed up, sir; and now call in the prisoner.”
Fossbrooke slipped from the room, but was speedily back again. “His
sentence has been already pronounced outside, my Lord, and he only begs
for a speedy execution.”
“It is always more merciful,” said the Chief, with mock solemnity; “but
could we not have Tom over here? I want to have you all around me.”
“I 'll telegraph to him to come,” said Fossbrooke. “I was thinking of it
all the morning.”
About three weeks after this, Chief Baron Lendrick opened the Commission
at Limerick, and received from the grand jury of the county a most
complimentary address on his reappearance upon the Bench, to which he
made a suitable and dignified reply. Even the newspapers which had so
often censured the tenacity with which he held to office, and inveighed
against the spectacle of an old and feeble man in the discharge of
laborious and severe duties, were now obliged to own that his speech was
vigorous and eloquent; and though allusion had been faintly made in the
address to the high honor to which the Crown had desired to advance him
and the splendid reward which was placed within his reach, yet, with
a marked delicacy, had he forborne from any reference to this passage
other than his thankfulness at being so far restored to health that he
could come back again to those functions, the discharge of which formed
the pride and the happiness of his life.
“Never,” said the journal which was once his most bitter opponent,
“has the Chief Baron exhibited his unquestionable powers of thought and
expression more favorably than on this occasion. There were no artifices
of rhetoric, no tricks of phrase, none of those conceits by which so
often he used to mar the wisdom of his very finest displays; he was
natural for once, and they who listened to him might well have regretted
that it was not in this mood he had always spoken. _Si sic omnia_,--and
the press had never registered his defects nor railed at his vanities.
“The celebrated Sir Brook Fossbrooke, so notorious in the palmy days of
the Regency, sat on the Bench beside his Lordship, and received a very
flattering share of the cheers which greeted the party as they drove
away to Killaloe, to be present at the wedding of Miss Lendrick, which
takes place to-morrow.”
Much-valued reader, has it ever occurred to you, towards the close of a
long, possibly not very interesting discourse, to experience a sort of
irreverent impatience when the preacher, appearing to take what rowing
men call “second wind,” starts off afresh, and seems to threaten you
with fully the equal of what he has already given? At such a moment it
is far from unlikely that all the best teachings of that sermon are not
producing upon you their full effect of edification, and that, even as
you sat, you meditated ignoble thoughts of stealing away.
I am far from desiring to expose either you or myself to this painful
position. I want to part good friends with you; and if there may have
been anything in my discourse worth carrying away, I would not willingly
associate it with weariness at the last. And yet I am very loath to say
good-bye. Authors are, _par excellence_, button-holders, and they cannot
relinquish their grasp on the victim whose lapel they have caught. Now
I would like to tell you of that wedding at the Swan's Nest. You 'd read
it if in the “Morning Post,” but I'm afraid you'd skip it from _me_. I
'd like to recount the events of that breakfast, the present Sir Brook
made the bride, and the charming little speech with which the Chief
proposed her health. I 'd like to describe to you the uproar and
joyous confusion when Tom, whose costume bore little trace of a wedding
garment, fought his way through the servants into the breakfast-room.
And I 'd like to grow moral and descriptive, and a bit pathetic perhaps,
over the parting between Lucy and her father; and, last of all, I 'd
like to add a few words about him who gives his name to this story, and
tell how he set off once more on his wanderings, no one well knowing
whither bent, but how, on reaching Boulogne, he saw from the steamer's
deck, as he landed, the portly figure of Lady Lendrick walking beside
her beautiful daughter-in-law, Sewell bringing up the rear, with
a little child holding his hand on either side,--a sweet picture,
combining, to Boulogne appreciation, the united charm of fashion,
beauty, and domestic felicity; and finally, how, stealing by back
streets to the hotel where these people stopped, he deposited to their
address a somewhat weighty packet, which made them all very happy, or at
least very merry, that evening as they opened it and induced Sewell to
order a bottle of Cliquot, if not, as he said, “to drink the old buck's
health,” at least to wish him many returns of the same good dispositions
of that morning.
If, however, you are disposed to accept the will for the deed, I need
say no more. They who have deserved some share of happiness in this tale
are likely to have it. They who have little merited will have to meet a
world which, neither over cruel nor over generous, has a rough justice
that generally gives people their deserts.
THE END.