IN TOUCH WITH THE LAW
Arthur Lisle arrived on the pavement in front of Norton Ward's house in
Manchester Square five minutes before the time for which he was invited,
and fifteen before that at which he would be expected to arrive.
Painfully conscious of this fact, he walked first down Duke Street, and
then back up Manchester Street, trying to look as if he were going
somewhere else. Nor did he venture to arrive at his real destination
until he had seen three vehicles deposit their occupants at the door.
Then he presented himself with the air of having hurried a little, lest
he should be late. None of this conduct struck him as at all unusual or
ridiculous; not only now but for long afterwards it was his habit--the
habit of a nervous imaginative man.
The party was not a large one--only twelve--and it was entirely legal in
character. Besides host and hostess there were three couples--two
barrister couples and one solicitor couple. One of the couples brought a
daughter, who fell to Arthur's lot. Arthur got on very well with his
girl, who was fortunately an enthusiast about lawn-tennis; she
interested without absorbing him; he was able to be polite without
ceasing to watch the two people who really arrested his attention, his
hostess and--most strangely, most wonderfully!--Mr. Justice Lance. For
at half-past eight the old Judge, by his arrival, completed the party.
A catalogue of Mrs. Norton Ward's personal attractions would sound
commonplace enough. She had small features, was fair, rather pretty,
rather pale, and rather short; there seemed no more to say. But she
possessed a gracious candour of manner, an extreme friendliness and
simplicity, a ready merriment, and together with these a complete
freedom from self-consciousness. Somehow she struck Arthur as a highly
refined, feminised, etherealised counterpart of Joe Halliday--they were
both such good human creatures, so superlatively free from 'nonsense' of
all sorts. He took to her immensely from the first moment and hoped very
much that she would talk to him a little after dinner. He felt sure that
he could get on with her; she did not alarm or puzzle him; he knew that
he had "got her right."
When Norton Ward moved, according to ritual, into his wife's vacant
place beside Mr. Justice Lance, he beckoned to Arthur to come and sit on
the Judge's other side and introduced him. "You just missed the pleasure
of hearing his maiden argument the other morning, Judge," he added,
laughing slyly at Arthur, who had not got over the surprise of
encountering Lance, J., as a private--and harmless--individual.
"Ah, I remember--a case of yours! But O'Sullivan wouldn't give Mr. Lisle
a chance!"
He spoke in the same soft, rather weary voice that he had used in court;
with his sparse white hair he looked older than when he was in his wig;
he was very carefully dressed, and his thin fine hands wore a couple of
rather ornate rings. He had keen blue eyes and a large well-shaped nose.
"I don't know that Lisle was altogether sorry! The first time! Even you
remember the feeling, I dare say?"
"Nervous? Was that it, Mr. Lisle?" He smiled faintly. "You must remember
that we're much inured to imperfection." He looked on the young man with
a pleasant indulgence, and, at the same time, a certain attention.
"You always remember our frailty, but there are others!" said the host.
"Ah, ah! I sat with my Brother Pretyman, so I did! Perhaps he does
forget sometimes that one side must be wrong. Hence the unpopularity of
litigation, by the way."
Arthur was gaining his ease; the friendliness of both his companions
helped him; towards the Judge he was particularly drawn; he felt that he
would be all right before Lance, J., in future--if only Pretyman, J.,
were elsewhere! But, alas, a question was enough to plunge him back into
trouble. Norton Ward had turned to talk to his other neighbour, but Sir
Christopher Lance spoke to him again.
"Are you any relation to Godfrey Lisle? Lisle of Hilsey, you know."
"Yes, Sir Christopher, I'm--I'm a distant cousin."
"Well, I thought you had something of the family look. I've not had the
pleasure of seeing you at his house--in town, I mean--I haven't been to
Hilsey lately."
"I--I've never been there," Arthur stammered. He was blushing very red.
Here he was, up against this terrible business of the Godfrey Lisles
again--and just as he had begun to get along so nicely!
His confusion, nay, his distress, could not escape the Judge. "I hope I
haven't made a _faux pas_, Mr. Lisle? No quarrel, or anything of that
sort, I hope?"
"No, sir, but I don't know them. I haven't called yet," Arthur blurted
out; he seemed to himself to be always having to blurt it out.
Sir Christopher's eyes twinkled, as, following the host's example, he
rose from the table.
"If I were you, I should. You don't know what you're missing."
Upstairs Mrs. Norton Ward was better than Arthur's hopes. She showed him
at once that she meant to talk to him and that she expected to like
doing it.
"I'm always friends with everybody in Frank's chambers," she said, as
she made him sit by her. "I consider them all part of the family, and
all the glory they win belongs to the family; so you must make haste and
win glory, if you can, for us!"
"I'm afraid I can't win glory," laughed Arthur. "At least it doesn't
look like it--at the Bar."
"Oh, win it anyhow--we're not particular how--law, politics, literature,
what you like! Why, Milton Longworth was Frank's pupil once--for a
month! He did no work and got tipsy, but he's a great poet now--well,
isn't he?--and we're just as proud as if he'd become Attorney-General."
"Or--well--at all events, a County Court Judge!" Arthur suggested.
"So just you do it somehow, Mr. Lisle, won't you?"
"I'll try," he promised, laughing. "The other day I heard of you in your
glory. You sounded very splendid," he added.
Then he had to tell her all about how he had heard, about Mildred Quain,
and so about the rest of the circle in Regent's Park. His shyness
vanished; he gave humorous little sketches of his friends. Of course she
knew Sarradet's shop, and was amused at this lifting of the veil which
had hidden the Sarradet private life. But being the entirely natural
creature she was, talking and thinking just as one of her class
naturally would, she could not help treating the Sarradets as something
out of her ordinary experience, as something rather funny--perhaps also
instructive--to hear about, as social phenomena to be observed and
studied. Without her own volition or consciousness her mind naturally
assumed this attitude and expressed it in her questions and comments;
neither were cruel, neither malicious, but both were absolutely from the
outside--comments and questions about a foreign country addressed to a
traveller who happened to have paid a visit there; for plainly she
assumed, again instinctively, that Arthur Lisle was no more a native of
that country than herself. Or he might almost have been an author
presenting to an alert and sympathetic reader a realistic and vivacious
picture of the life of a social class not his own, be it what is called
higher or lower, or just quite different.
Whatever the gulf, the difference, might be--broad or narrow, justly
felt or utterly exaggerated--Arthur Lisle would have been (at
twenty-four) more than human not to be pleased to find himself, for Mrs.
Norton Ward, on the same side of it as Mrs. Norton Ward. She was
evidently quite genuine in this, as she seemed to be in everything. She
was not flattering him or even putting him at his ease. She talked to
him as "one of ourselves" simply because that seemed to her what he
undoubtedly was--and what his friends undoubtedly, though of course
quite blamelessly, were not.
They were thus in the full swing of talk--Arthur doing most of it--when
the Judge came across the room and joined them. Arthur at once rose, to
make way, and the lady too seemed to treat his audience as finished,
although most graciously. But the Judge took hold of his arm and
detained him.
"Do you know, Esther," he said, "that this young man has, by right of
kinship, the _entrée_ to the Shrine? And he doesn't use it!"
"What?" she cried with an appearance of lively interest. "Oh, are you
related to the Godfreys, Mr. Lisle?"
Arthur blushed, but this time less acutely; he was getting, as the Judge
might have put it, much inured to this matter of the Godfrey Lisles.
"Don't ask him questions about it; for some reason or another he doesn't
like that."
"I don't really think my cousin Godfrey would care about----"
"Not the least the point, is it, Esther?" said the Judge with a twinkle.
"Not the least, Sir Christopher. But what's to be done if he won't go?"
"Oh, you must manage that." He squeezed Arthur's arm and then let it go.
Here, plainly, though no less graciously than from the hostess, was his
dismissal. Not knowing any of the other women, he drifted back to the
girl who was enthusiastic about lawn-tennis.
The Judge sat down and stretched out his shapely thin hands towards the
fire; his rings gleamed, and he loved the gleam of them. To wear them
had been, from his youth, one of his bits of daring; he had, as it were,
backed himself to wear them and not thereby seem himself, or let them
seem, vulgar. And he had succeeded; he had been called vain often, never
vulgar. By now his friends, old and young, would have missed them sadly.
"What do you make of that boy, Esther?" he asked.
"I like him--and I think he's being wasted," she answered promptly.
"At our honourable profession?"
"You and Frank are better judges of that."
"I don't know. Hardly tough enough, perhaps. But Huntley was just such a
man, and he got pretty well to the top. Died, though, not much past
fifty. The climb killed him, I think."
"Yes, Frank's told me about him. But I meant wasted in his own life, or
socially, or however you like to put it. He's told me about his friends,
and----"
"Well, if you like him enough, you can put that right, Esther."
"I like him, but I haven't much time for young men, Sir Christopher.
I've a husband, you may remember."
"Then turn him over where he belongs--to Bernadette."
She raised her brows a little, as she smiled at him.
"Oh, the young fellow's got to get his baptism of fire. It'll do him
good."
"How easily you Judges settle other people's fortunes!"
"In the end, his not going to his cousin's house is an absurdity."
"Well, yes, so it is, in the end, of course," she agreed. "It shall be
done, Sir Christopher."
While his fortunes were thus being settled for him--more or less, and as
the future might reveal--Arthur was walking home, well pleased with
himself. The lady's friendliness delighted him; if he did not prize the
old Judge's so highly, he had the sense to perceive that it was really a
more valuable testimonial and brought with it more substantial
encouragement. From merely being kind to him the Norton Wards had come
to like him, as it seemed, and their liking was backed by Sir
Christopher's endorsement. He did not regard these things from a worldly
point of view; he did not think of them as stepping-stones, or at any
rate only quite indirectly. They would no doubt help him to get rid of,
or at least to hold in subjection, his demon of self-distrust; but still
more would they comfort him and make him happy. The pleasure he derived
from Mrs. Norton Ward's liking, and the Judge's approval, was in quality
akin to the gratification which Marie Sarradet's bearing had given him a
few nights ago in Regent's Park; just as that had roused in him a keener
sense of Marie's attractiveness, so now he glowed with a warm
recognition of the merits of his new friends.
Walking home along Oxford Street, he had almost reached the corner of
Tottenham Court Road when his complacent musings were interrupted by the
sight of a knot of people outside the door of a public-house. It was the
sort of group not unusual at half-past eleven o'clock at night--a man, a
woman on his arm, a policeman, ten or a dozen interested spectators,
very ready with advice as Londoners are. As he drew near, he heard what
was passing, though the policeman's tall burly figure was between him
and the principal actor in the scene.
"Better do as she says and go 'ome, sir," said the policeman soothingly.
"'Ome, _Sweet_ 'Ome!" murmured somebody in tones of fond reminiscence.
"Yes, do now. You don't really want it, you know you don't," urged the
lady in her turn.
"Whether I want it or not----"
At the sound of this last voice Arthur started into quick attention and
came to a halt. He recognised the full tones, now somewhat thickened,
with their faint but unmistakable suggestion of the Cockney twang.
"Whether I want it or not----" The man spoke slowly, with an effort
after distinctness which was obvious but not unsuccessful--"I've a right
to have it. He's bound to serve the public. I'm--I'm member of the
public."
"'Ad enough for two members, _I_ should sye," came in comment from the
fringe of the group.
"That's it! Go 'ome now," the policeman suggested again, infinitely
patient and persuasive.
The man made a sudden move towards the door of the public-house where an
official, vulgarly known as the 'chucker out,' stood smiling on the
threshold.
"No, sir, you _don't_!" said the policeman, suave but immensely firm,
laying a hand on his arm.
"The officer's quite right. Do come along," again urged the lady.
But the movement towards the public-house door, which revealed to Arthur
the face of the obstinate lingerer, showed him to the lingerer
also--showed Arthur in his evening uniform of tall hat, white scarf, and
silk-faced coat to Sidney Barslow in his 'bowler' hat of rakish cut, and
his sporting fawn-coloured coat, with the big flower in his buttonhole
and his stick with a huge silver knob. The stick shot out--vaguely in
Arthur's direction.
"I'm a gentleman, and, what's more, I can prove it. Ask that
gentleman--my friend there----"
Arthur's face was a little flushed. His mind was full of those terrible
quick visions of his--a scuffle on the pavement, going bail for Sidney
Barslow, giving evidence at the Police Court. "A friend of the prisoner,
Mr. Arthur Lisle, Barrister, of Garden Court, Middle Temple"--visions
most terrible! But he stood his ground, saying nothing, not moving a
limb, and meeting Barslow's look full in the eyes. All the rest were
staring at him now. If he remained as he was they would take it as a
denial of Barslow's claim to acquaintance. Could he deny it if Barslow
challenged him? He answered--No.
But some change of mood came over Sidney Barslow's clouded mind. He let
his stick fall back to his side again, and with an angry jerk of his
head said:
"Oh, damn it, all right, I'm going! I--I was only pulling your leg."
"That's right now!" applauded the policeman. "You'd better take 'im in a
taxi, miss."
"And put a ticket on 'im, in case 'e falls out, miss," some friendly
adviser added.
Arthur did not wait to see the policeman's excellent suggestion carried
into effect. The moment that Sidney Barslow's eyes were off him, he
turned quickly up a by-street, and took a roundabout way home.
He had much to be thankful for. The terrible visions were dissipated.
And--he had not run away. Oh, how he had wanted to run away from the
danger of being mixed up in that dirty job. He thanked heaven that he
had stood his ground and looked Barslow in the face.
But what about the next time they had to look one another in the
face--at the Sarradets' in Regent's Park?