Sir Brook Fossbrooke Volume Ii Part 15

It is a theme cannot have the same interest for _you_ as for _me_.

What I would ask of you is, to go down to the head-office and see Mr. Spencer, and learn from him if you might have an order to see the prisoner,--your pretext being the suspicion that he is personally known to you. If you succeed in getting the order, you will proceed to the Richmond Bridewell and have an interview with him. You are a man of the world, sir, and I need not give you any instructions how to ascertain his condition, his belongings, and his means of defence. If he be a gentleman, in the sense we use that term when applying its best attributes to it, you will be frank and outspoken, and will tell him candidly that your object is to make his case the groundwork of an attack on the Government, and the means by which all the snares that have led men to rebellion may be thoroughly exposed, and the craft of the Crown lawyer be arraigned beside the less cold-blooded cruelty of the traitor. Do you fully comprehend me, sir?"

"I think so, my Lord, Your intention is, if I take you correctly, to make the case, if it be suitable, the groundwork for an attack on the Government of Ireland."

"In which I am not to appear."

"Of course, my Lord; though possibly with no objection that it should be known how far your sympathy is with a free discussion of the whole state of Ireland?"

"You apprehend me aright, sir,--a free discussion of the whole state of Ireland."

"I go, therefore, without any concert with your Lords.h.i.+p at present. I take this step entirely at my own instance?"

"You do, sir. If matters eventually should take the turn which admits of any intervention on my part--any expression of opinion--any elucidation of sentiments attributed to me--I will be free to make such in the manner I deem suitable."

"In case this person should prove one, either from his character or the degree in which he has implicated himself, unfitted for your Lords.h.i.+p's object, I am to drop the negotiation?"

"Rather, I should say, sir, you are not to open it."

"I meant as much," said Sewell, with some irritation.

"It is an occasion, sir, for careful action and precise expression.

I have no doubt you will acquit yourself creditably in each of these respects. Are you already acquainted with Mr. Spencer?"

"We have met at the Club, my Lord; he at least knows who I am."

"That will be quite sufficient. One point more--I have no need to caution you as to secrecy--this is a matter which cannot be talked of."

"That you may rely on, my Lord; reserve is so natural to me, that I have to put no strain upon my manner to remember it."

"I shall be curious to hear the result of your visit,--that is, if you be permitted to visit the Bridewell. Will you do me the favor to come to me at once?"

Sewell promised this faithfully, and withdrew.

"If ever an old fool wanted to run his head into a noose," muttered he, "here is one; the slightest blunder on my part, intentional or not, and this great Baron of the Exchequer might be shown up as abetting treason. To be sure, he has given me nothing under his hand--nothing in writing--I wonder was that designedly or not; he is so crafty in the middle of all his pa.s.sion." Thus meditating, he went on his mission.

CHAPTER XII. SOME OF SEWELL'S OPINIONS

Sewell was well received by the magistrate, and promised that he should be admitted to see the prisoner on the next morning; having communicated which tidings to the Chief Baron, he went off to dine with his mother in Merrion Square.

"Isn't Lucy coming?" said Lady Lendrick, as he entered the drawing-room alone.

"No. I told her I wanted a long confidential talk with you; I hinted that she might find it awkward if one of the subjects discussed should happen to be herself, and advised her to stay at home, and she concurred with me."

"You are a great fool, Dudley, to treat her in that fas.h.i.+on. I tell you there never was a woman in the world who could forgive it."

"I don't want her to forgive it, mother; there 's the mistake you are always making. The way she baffles me is by non-resistance. If I could once get her to resent something--anything--I could win the game."

"Perhaps some one might resent for her," said she, dryly.

"I ask nothing better. I have tried to bring it to that scores of times, but men have grown very cautious latterly. In the old days of duelling a fellow knew the cost of what he was doing; now that we have got juries and damages, a man thinks twice about an entanglement, without he be a very young fellow."

"It is no wonder that she hates you," said she, fiercely.

"Perhaps not," said he, languidly; "but here comes dinner."

For a while the duties of the table occupied them, and they chatted away about indifferent matters; but when the servants left the room, Sewell took up the theme where they had left it, and said: "It's no use to either of us, mother, to get what is called judicial separation. It's the chain still, only that the links are a little longer--and it's the chain we _hate!_ We began to hate it before we were a month tied to each other, and time, somehow, does not smooth down these asperities. As to any other separation, the lawyers tell me it is hopeless. There's a functionary called the 'Queen's' something or other, who always intervenes in the interests of morality, and compels people who have proved their incompatibility by years of dissension to go back and quarrel more."

"I think if it were only for the children's sake--"

"For the children's sake!" broke he in. "What can it possibly matter whether they be brought up by their mother alone, or in a house where their father and mother are always quarrelling? At all events, they form no element in the question so far as I am concerned."

"I think your best hold on the Chief Baron is his liking for the children; he is very fond of Reginald."

"What's the use of a hold on an old man who has more caprices than he has years? He has made eight wills to my own knowledge since May last.

You may fancy how far afield he strays in his testamentary dispositions when in one of them he makes _you_ residuary legatee."

"Me! Me!"

"You; and what's more, calls you his faithful and devoted wife, 'who--for five-and-twenty years that we lived apart--contributed mainly to the happiness of my life.'"

"The parenthesis, at least, is like him," said she, smiling.

"To the children he has bequeathed I don't know what, sometimes with Lucy as their guardian, sometimes myself. The Lendrick girl was always handsomely provided for till lately, when he scratched her out completely; and in the last doc.u.ment which I saw there were the words, 'To my immediate family I bequeath my forgiveness for their desertion of me, and this free of all legacy duty and other charges.' I am sure, mother, he's a little mad."

"Nothing of the kind,--no more than you are."

"I don't know that. I always suspect 'that the marvellous vigor' of old age gets its prime stimulus from an overexcited brain. He sat up a whole night last week--I know it to my cost, for I had to copy it out--writing a letter to the 'Times' on the Land Tenure Bill, and he nearly went out of his mind on seeing it in small type."

"He is vain, if you like; but not mad certainly."

"For a while I thought one of his fits of pa.s.sion would do for him,--he gets crimson, and then lividly pale, and then flushed again, and his nails are driven into his palms, and he froths at the mouth; but somehow the whole subsides at last, and his voice grows gentle, and his manner courteous,--you 'd think him a lamb, if you had never seen him as a tiger. In these moods he becomes actually humble, so that the other night he sat down and wrote his resignation to the Home Office, stating, amidst a good deal of bombast, that the increasing burden of years and infirmity left him no other choice than that of descending from the Bench he had occupied so long and so unworthily, and begging her Majesty would graciously accord a retreat to one 'who had outlived everything but his loyalty.'"

"What became of this?"

"He asked me about it next morning, but I said I had burned it by his orders; but I have it this moment in my desk."

"You have no right to keep it. I insist on your destroying it."

"Pardon me, mother. I'd be a rich man to-day if I had n't given way to that foolish habit of making away with papers supposed to be worthless.

The three lines of a man's writing, that the old Judge said he could hang any man on, might, it strikes me, be often used to better purpose."

"I wish you would keep your sharp practices for others and spare _him_,"

said she, severely.

"It's very generous of you to say so, mother, considering the way he treats you and talks of you."

"Sir William and I were ill-met and ill-matched, but that is not any reason that I should like to see him treacherously dealt with."