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 fashion. 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 document 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 passion 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.”

“There's no talk of treachery here. I was merely uttering an abstract truth about the value of old papers, and regretting how late I came to the knowledge. There's that bundle of letters of that fool Trafford, for instance, to Lucy. I can't get a divorce on them, it's true; but I hope to squeeze a thousand pounds out of him before he has them back again.”

“I hope in my heart that the world does not know you!” said she, bitterly.

“Do you know, mother, I rather suspect it does? The world is aware that a great many men, some of whom it could ill spare, live by what is called their wits,—that is to say, that they play the game entitled 'Life' with what Yankees call 'the advantages;' and the world no more resents my living by the sharp practice long experience has taught me, than it is angry with this man for being a lawyer, and that one for being a doctor.”

“You know in your heart that Trafford never thought of stealing Lucy's affections.”

“Perhaps I do; but I don't know what were Lucy's intentions towards Trafford.”

“Oh, fie, fie!”

“Be shocked if you like. It's very proper, perhaps, that you should be shocked; but nature has endowed me with strong nerves or coarse feelings, whichever you like to call them, and consequently I can talk of these things with as little intermixture of sentiment as I would employ in discussing a protested bill. Lucy herself is not deficient in this cool quality, and we have discussed the social contract styled Marriage with a charming unanimity of opinion. Indeed, when I have thought over the marvellous agreement of our sentiments, I have been actually amazed why we could not live together without hating each other.”

“I pity her—from the bottom of my heart I pity her.”

“So do I, mother. I pity her, because I pity myself. It was a stupid bargain for each of us. I thought I was marrying an angel with sixty thousand pounds. She fancied she was getting a hero, with a peerage in the distance. Each made a 'bad book.' It is deuced hard, however,” continued he, in a fiercer strain, “if one must go on backing the horse that you know will lose, staking your money where you see you cannot win. My wife and myself awoke from our illusions years ago; but to please the world, to gratify that amiable thing called Society, we must go on still, just as if we believed all that we know and have proved to be rotten falsehoods. Now I ask you, mother, is not this rather hard? Would n't it be hard for a good-tempered, easy-going fellow? And is it not more than hard for a hasty, peevish, irritable dog like myself? We know and see that we are bad company for each other, but you—I mean the world—you insist that we should go on quarrelling to the end, as if there was anything edifying in the spectacle of our mutual dislike.”

“Too much of this. I beseech you, drop the subject, and talk of something else.”

“I declare, mother, if there was any one I could be frank and outspoken with on this theme, I believed it to be yourself. You have had 'your losses' too, and know what it is to be unhappily mated.”

“Whatever I may have suffered, I have not lost self-respect,” said she, haughtily.

“Heigho!” cried he, wearily, “I always find that my opinions place me in a minority, and so it must ever be while the world is the hypocritical thing we see it. Oh dear, if people could only vote by ballot, I'd like to see marriage put to the test.”

“What did Sir William say about my going to the picnic?” asked she, suddenly.

“He said you were quite right to obtain as many attentions as you could from the Castle, on the same principle that the vicar's wife stipulated for the sheep in the picture,—'as many as the painter would put in for nothing.'”

“So that he is firmly determined not to resign?”

“Most firmly; nor will he be warned by the example of the well-bred dog, for he sees, or he might see, all the preparations on foot for kicking him out.”

“You don't think they would compel him to resign?”

“No; but they'll compel him to go, which amounts to the same. Balfour says they mean to move an address to the Queen, praying her Majesty to superannuate him.”

“It would kill him,—he 'd not survive it.”

“So it is generally believed,—all the more because it is a course he has ever declared to be impossible,—I mean constitutionally impossible.”

“I hope he may be spared this insult.”

“He might escape it by dying first, mother; and really, under the circumstances, it would be more dignified.”

“Your morals were not, at any time, to boast of, but your manners used to be those of a gentleman,” said she, in a voice thick with passion.

“I am afraid, mother, that both morals and manners, like this hat of mine, are a little the worse for wear; but, as in the case of the hat too, use has made them pleasanter to me than spick-and-span new ones, with all the gloss on. At all events, I never dreamed of offending when I suggested the possibility of your being a widow. Indeed, I fancied it was feminine for widower, which I imagined to be no such bad thing.”

“If the Chief Baron should be compelled to leave the Bench, will it affect your tenure of the Registrarship?”

“That is what nobody seems to know. Some opine one way, some another; and though all ask me what does the Chief himself say on the matter, I have never had the courage to ask the question.”

“You are quite right It would be most indiscreet to do so.”

“Indeed, if I were rash enough to risk the step, it would redound to nothing, since I am quite persuaded that he believes that whenever he retires from public life or quits this world altogether, a general chaos will ensue, and that all sorts of ignorant and incompetent people will jostle the clever fellows out of the way, just because the one great directing mind of the age has left the scene and departed.”

“All his favors to you have certainly not bought your gratitude, Dudley.”

“I don't suspect it is a quality I ever laid up a large stock of, mother,—not to say that I have always deemed it a somewhat unworthy thing to swallow the bad qualities of a man simply because he was civil to you personally.”

“His kindness might at least secure your silence.”

“Then it would be a very craven silence. But I 'll join issue with you on the other counts. What is this great kindness for which I am not to speak my mind about him? He has housed and fed me: very good things in their way, but benefits which never cost him anything but his money. Now, what have I repaid him with? My society, my time, my temper, I might say my health, for he has worried me to that degree some days that I have been actually on the verge of a fever. And if his overbearing insolence was hard to endure, still harder was it to stand his inordinate vanity without laughter. I ask you frankly, isn't he the vainest man, not that you ever met, but that you ever heard of?”

“Vain he is, but not without some reason. He has had great triumphs, great distinctions in life.”

“So he has told me. I have listened for hours long to descriptions of the sensation he created in the House—it was always the Irish House, by the way—by his speech on the Regency Bill, or some other obsolete question; and how Flood had asked the House to adjourn and recover their calm and composure, after the overwhelming power of the speech they had just listened to; and how, at the Bar, Plunkett once said to a jury, 'Short of actual guilt, there is no such misfortune can befall a man as to have Sergeant Lendrick against him.' I wish I was independent,—I mean, rich enough, to tell him what I think of him; that I had just five minutes—I 'd not ask more—to convey my impression of his great and brilliant qualities! and to show him that, between the impulses of his temper and his vanity together, he is, in matters of the world, little better than a fool! What do you think he is going to do at this very moment? I had not intended speaking of it, but you have pushed me to it. In revenge for the Government having passed him over on the Commission, he is going to supply some of these 'Celt' rascals with means to employ counsel, and raise certain questions of legality, which he thinks will puzzle Pemberton to meet. Of course, rash and indiscreet as he is, this is not to be done openly. It is to be accomplished in secret, and through me! I am to go to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock to the Richmond Jail. I have the order for my admission in my pocket. I am there to visit Heaven knows whom; some scoundrel or other,—just as likely a Government spy as a rebel, who will publish the whole scheme to the world. At all events, I am to see and have speech of the fellow, and ascertain on what evidence he was committed to prison, and what kind of case he can make as to his innocence. He is said to be a gentleman,—the very last reason, to my thinking, for taking him up; for whenever a gentleman is found in any predicament beneath him, the presumption is that he ought to be lower still. The wise judge, however, thinks otherwise, and says, 'Here is the very opportunity I wanted.'”

“It is a most disagreeable mission, Dudley. I wish sincerely you could have declined it.”

“Not at all. I stand to win, no matter how it comes off: if all goes right, the Chief must make me some acknowledgment on my success; if it be a failure, I 'll take care to be so compromised that I must get away out of the country, and I leave to yourself to say what recompense will be enough to repay a man for the loss of his home, and of his wife and his children.”

The laugh with which he concluded this speech rang out with something so devilish in its cadence that she turned away sickened and disgusted.

“If I thought you as base as your words bespeak you, I'd never see you again,” said she, rising and moving towards the door.

“I'll have one cigar, mother, before I join you in the drawing-room,” said he, taking it out as he spoke. “I'd not have indulged if you had not left me. May I order a little more sherry?”

“Ring for whatever you want,” said she, coldly, and quitted the room.