Works of Grant Allen, page 236
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
HIS FIRST BRIEF.
Basil Maclaine, Esquire, of the Board of Trade, laid down the World with the air of a man who has refreshed his soul with the pleasures of good company. And, indeed, he had been revelling, at the cheap rate of sixpence, in the very highest society this realm affords. ‘Great dance at the Simpsons’ last night, I see,’ he said, taking up his coffee-cup in his other hand; ‘and Bertie Montgomery’s lost a cool thousand again over that good-for-nothing two-year-old he entered for Ascot.’
‘Who are the Simpsons?’ his companion asked, by way of reply, helping himself as he spoke to a third large slice of toast, and looking up with an innocently frigid smile at Basil’s handsome countenance.
Basil twisted his black moustache gingerly between finger and thumb in a preoccupied way as he answered offhand, with the easy, knowing air of the young man about town, ‘Why, Lady Simpson’s, of course. There’s only one Lady Simpson in London, isn’t there? Sir Theodore’s wife, you know — the great gout and gravel doctor.’
‘Oh, ah!’ his companion replied, shutting his mouth very firmly. ‘I don’t know them.’ Then, after a short pause, pointedly, ‘Do you, Maclaine?’
The young man about town, thus seized at a disadvantage, took a large piece of kidney and a crisp bite of toast, both which esculents he thoroughly chewed with slow deliberateness (in a way that would have satisfied even Sir Theodore himself, that rigid advocate of complete mastication), before he answered, somewhat crestfallen, and with a forced smile, ‘Well, I don’t precisely know them, you know; not quite exactly what you may call know them; though I see them about sometimes, Harrison, at “At Homes,” and so forth. But one likes to hear what’s going on in the world, any way, of course, doesn’t one?’
‘Of course,’ Douglas Harrison answered, with prompt acquiescence, glancing at his own hastily-read morning paper on the easy-chair close by. ‘One likes to keep count of how the world wags. Seen that remarkable compromise in the tailors’ strike yesterday, by the way? The men seem to have behaved extremely well, and they’ve got the extra half-hour they were fighting for at last out of those wretched sweaters.’
‘Oh, indeed, have they?’ Basil Maclaine echoed, half stifling a yawn. ‘How very interesting!’ It was his turn to shut his mouth tight with a snap now, and look profoundly unmoved. For you may take it as a general principle in life that whenever a man says to you, ‘How very interesting!’ he wishes to give you to understand, in the politest possible way, that the subject on which you are speaking bores him ineffably.
‘Yes, they’ve got the half-hour at last,’ his friend went on, musing. ‘And Bertie Montgomery’s thousand would have got it for them a week ago, and saved these poor souls, with their wives and children, seven long days and nights of suspense and misery. Bertie Montgomery’s thousand! Gone on a racehorse! By the way,’ he continued suddenly, pulling himself up short against a new-laid egg, ‘who is Bertie Montgomery, now I come to think of it?’
The young man about town winced visibly. ‘Why, Lord Adalbert Montgomery, don’t you know,’ he answered, with a testy little snort. ‘Of course you’ve heard of him — the Duke of Powysland’s younger brother.’
‘And do you know him, too?’ Harrison went on, smiling.
‘No, I don’t,’ Basil Maclaine replied, cornered once more. ‘What a fellow you are to nail a man down! I’ve only met him.’
‘Where?’
The lover of good company paused and hesitated. ‘At Goodwood,’ he answered at last, after a short mental struggle.
‘Then why the dickens do you call him Bertie?’ his friend asked mercilessly. For Basil was quite right. If ever there was a man for getting you down and sitting firmly on top of your vanquished head, that man was certainly Douglas Harrison.
‘Well, everybody calls him Bertie,’ the young man about town remarked, on the defensive now. ‘He’s universally known as Bertie in Society.’
‘But I’m not in Society,’ Harrison interposed, with bland persistence.
‘Well, then, hang it all! I’m sure I’m not,’ Basil Maclaine answered, half nettled at his friend’s quiet rebuffs. ‘But I talk of people as I hear them talked of.’
‘I don’t think it’s good form to talk of people one doesn’t know by their Christian names — above all, in an abbreviated shape, especially when they happen to belong to the great and the mighty,’ Harrison remarked decisively.
‘You think it snobbish?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have put such a hard name as that to it exactly, myself; but if you choose to suggest it, I think it might possibly be mistaken for snobbishness by a casual observer. It leads people to think you’re pretending to an acquaintance that, as Kant would say, has no objective reality answering to it anywhere.’
Basil Maclaine went on chewing away at his kidney with most meritorious vigour. Sir Theodore would have voted him a gold Gladstone medal in open competition for the prize masticator. But he said nothing. The fact was, he had a profound respect for Douglas Harrison’s opinion on all matters affecting the etiquette of the world; for, to Basil Maclaine, human life envisaged itself as a sort of organized quadrille, which you must walk through decorously according to a fixed measure; and, being himself a well-to-do Birmingham tradesman’s son, of very remote Scotch descent, he felt he was less acquainted with the steps in that polite gavotte than his friend Harrison, who was a gentleman born, the produce of an established country rectory. He had no great opinion of Harrison’s views on subjects generally, to be sure, for Harrison was what he called eccentric. Basil thought him a trifle too sentimental and ‘soft in the head,’ as he himself would have phrased it, in his ideas at large; but in all matters pertaining to the established quadrille of human life he recognised at once that Harrison, so to speak, knew the figures. Was he not a scion of the beneficed clergy, nursed at Rugby, polished at Christ Church, and learned in all the learning of the Inner Temple? On any other question, therefore, the young man about town would have fought it out to the bitter end; but on a question of manners he knocked under on the nail, and solaced himself for his defeat by taking another stewed kidney.
‘They’re very well cooked,’ he observed, with a critical air, ladling out a mushroom or two on to his plate at the same time. ‘But then she always does cook well. She’s a perfect treasure of a housekeeper, in her way, that girl is.’
‘You don’t mean to say you think she cooks them herself, though, do you?’ Douglas Harrison exclaimed, with a face aghast at the bare thought of such desecration.
‘Who? The girl?’
‘What girl? Not Miss Figgins?’
Basil Maclaine laughed outright at his neighbour’s outraged look. ‘Well, I suppose she does,’ he said, twirling his moustache once more, this time complacently. ‘I’ve always taken it for granted. Anyhow, they’re devilish well cooked, I know that much. If she doesn’t stew them herself, she most efficiently superintends the subordinate who does them.’
‘The stipendiary?’
‘Yes, the stipendiary. Though I should think that creature far too stupid to do anything right, even under the most efficient supervision on earth — say Miss Figgins’s.’
The two young men were breakfasting together, as was their wont, in their own hired house (or rather chambers), situated in that commodious and central thoroughfare known as Clandon Street, Bloomsbury. Their sitting-room, which they shared together, was neither large nor luxurious; but it was gracefully and tastefully furnished throughout, and daintily papered, in a way very rare indeed in London lodging-houses. When casual visitors observed to Basil Maclaine, with an approving smile, ‘How awfully pretty your rooms are!’ the young man about town used to draw himself up consciously, cast about him a careless eye, and drawl out in answer, ‘Well, yes, they are pretty. One can do so much nowadays, you see, with very little money or even trouble if one only has a spark of native taste in the way of decorating.’ But when they made the same remark to Douglas Harrison, that too candid young counsel learned in the law would answer enthusiastically, with a glance towards the door, ‘Oh yes; aren’t they just nice! Our landlady’s such a clever, deft-handed body. She’s a lady by nature, you know, with real instinctive artistic feeling, and she makes everything she touches look so bright and beautiful!’
Whence it may be inferred by a wise reader that in the struggle for existence, where the fittest survive, Mr. Basil Maclaine had been far better endowed with natural gifts for the fray by his progenitors and predecessors than that poor simple-minded young off-set of the beneficed clergy, Mr. Douglas Harrison, who gave others their due with such quixotic generosity.
After finishing his kidneys Maclaine rose and looked at his watch — a bran-new gold hunter. ‘Ha, a quarter past nine!’ he said, with a put-upon air; ‘I must be off at once. It’s a terrific bore having to be down at the office at ten every morning. I wish to goodness I was a man of leisure like you, my dear fellow — nobody’s beck and call to attend to but your own! That’s the way for a man to live! Why on earth didn’t Providence make me into a barrister, I wonder!’
Douglas Harrison smiled. ‘Because it preferred to pitchfork you straight into a jolly good appointment at the Board of Trade,’ he answered lightly. ‘I only wish I had half your complaint and half your salary. The Board of Trade’s a very good place indeed for a man to find himself in.’
‘Well, it’s gentlemanly, any way,’ Maclaine observed, with philosophic resignation, going over to the mantelpiece in search of a match. ‘There’s no denying that. It’s gentlemanly, any way. It gives one so many points of contact, you see, with the Very Best People.’
By which phrase Mr. Basil Maclaine always consistently designated the members of our aristocratic and official hierarchy.
‘And, my dear fellow, it’s a certainty; that’s the great point about it,’ Harrison answered with warmth. ‘You’ve got your work in life cut out, and you’ve got your bread and cheese always safely provided for you. Whereas here am I, after all the money my poor governor’s spent on me, still one of the great house of Briefless, hanging on by the skin of my teeth ineffectually from day to day, in the vain hope that the attorneys — on whose knees, like Greek gods, all promotion lies — will be graciously pleased one morning to wake up, of their goodness, and generously recognise my humble existence. Oh, it’s sickening work, this waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, with nothing to come of it. It makes a man feel like a log in the world — of no use to himself and of no good to humanity. What am I, after all? A mere idle mouth at the feast of life — a drone in the hive — a purposeless existence.’
Maclaine lighted his cigar at the match he had struck, and puffed away contentedly. ‘Rank socialism,’ he retorted, blowing out a long column of thick white smoke with an epicure’s enjoyment. ‘Rank socialism, my dear fellow, every blessed word of it. I call you a jolly lucky dog myself: plenty of time to look about you and reflect; a good allowance from the dear old archdeacon meanwhile; the entrée of ever so many first-class houses; and in the end, some day, you’ll get a splendid big case, and wake up next morning to find yourself famous. All you want’s a fair start in life, a chance of being heard; that’s where it is, Harrison. Once rise erect on your hind-legs in court and put them through their paces, and you’ll astonish the judges, I’ll bet you a sovereign.’
‘I shall astonish myself a good deal more, then, I’m sure,’ Harrison answered, laughing. ‘I don’t believe I’ve got the cheek to make a speech, if it came to the push. My law’s all right, I admit, but it’s my legs that are shaky. I should hum and haw, I know, with my knees trembling under me. Was that a knock at the door? Come in, Miss Figgins.’
The door opened, and Miss Figgins came in.
A casual observer would have noted first, as she glided into the room, that Miss Figgins was tall, dark, and extremely graceful. In another moment that hypothetical person would also have remarked that Miss Figgins’s face belied her name, for instead of being in the democratic or tip-tilted style of beauty, it was clear-cut and regular, and very distinguished-looking. Not, to be sure, precisely what is called an aristocratic face; it had too much originality and boldness of outline about it for that; the pronounced chin and the calm, large eyes didn’t mark so much the caste of Vere de Vere as the best outcome of the capable artisan type in our modern community. And, indeed, at a third glance, the casual observer in point would probably have concluded that capability was Miss Figgins’s most characteristic attribute. She looked, in short, like a thoroughly competent person — competent to rule a household well or to deliberate seriously on the affairs of a nation.
Both young men assumed instinctively a more deferential attitude as Miss Figgins entered. Maclaine was leaning his elbow on the mantelshelf, in the act of departing, when the knock was heard. He let the elbow drop, and took his cigar from his mouth as Miss Figgins, with quiet dignity, answered the barrister’s summons. Douglas Harrison, on the other hand, was seated, and he rose from his chair hurriedly, with a look as if half of shame that Miss Figgins should have to submit at all to such commonplace drudgery. But the girl herself, all unconscious of their action, walked up in a frank but stately way to the table whence he had just risen, and handed a packet and a note to the blushing barrister. ‘A letter for you, Mr. Harrison,’ she said, with a quiet smile playing on that still strong face of hers. ‘The boy who brought it is waiting for an answer.’
Douglas Harrison turned it over with a look of blank astonishment. ‘This is wonderful!’ he exclaimed, thunderstruck; ‘extraordinary! miraculous!’
‘What is it?’ Maclaine asked, putting his head on one side and looking past Miss Figgins.
Harrison gasped for breath. ‘Why, it’s a brief!’ he cried faintly. ‘A real live brief, legibly marked, in a good legal hand, “Mr. Douglas Harrison.”’
‘A brief!’ Maclaine and the girl both echoed at once. And Miss Figgins, looking across at her lodger with those large brown eyes of hers, exclaimed quite naturally, ‘Oh dear, Mr. Harrison, I am so glad of it!’
For a minute Harrison was too busy examining the impressive document to say anything more about it. Then he added, with a sigh of intense relief, ‘Yes, it’s really for me! Not a doubt of that. It’s a criminal case — a burglar, Morton and Maule say in their private note; or, rather, a client accused of burglary. And they do remark he’s one of the men the police have long been most anxious to catch, for he’s considered almost the most expert thief in all London.’
‘Then of course you won’t defend him?’ Miss Figgins put in promptly.
‘Of course he will,’ the civil servant rejoined with equal readiness. ‘That’s just what a barrister’s for — to give every man, however bad, his even chance of equal justice.’
‘And they want me to call upon him at his present address,’ Harrison continued, reading, ‘at his own request, as a particular favour.’
‘It isn’t usual, is it?’ Basil Maclaine interposed, somewhat scandalized, what was usual being to him the supreme law of existence.
‘No, it isn’t exactly usual,’ with a deprecating cough— ‘not the rule of the profession,’ the barrister answered. ‘But still, as a particular favour, you know, I don’t see that there’s any good reason against it. He’s committed without bail, they say, and he specially desired that I, by name, should be retained to defend him.’
‘Why this unaccountable popularity among expert burglars?’ Maclaine put in, much amused. ‘By Jove! I’ve got it! He must have heard you spouting those rank socialistic ideas of yours somewhere, Harrison, and he thought you’d be just the fellow to defend a man and a brother unjustly accused of what you may call practical or applied communism.’
‘A burglar,’ Harrison went on, rolling the words on his tongue. ‘I suppose I must accept the brief as a matter of business, and go to see him. But I could have wished, I must confess, my first client had been something a little bit more respectable.’
‘You ought to be the last man on earth to admit that he isn’t,’ Maclaine went on, laughing. ‘The perfect advocate believes implicitly in the bland and child-like innocence of his client — till he’s proved to be guilty. But I can fancy the style of innocent you’ll be called upon to defend. I see his portrait in my mind’s eye — a square-headed gentleman with close-cropped hair, a rat-trap jaw, a broken nose rather wide at the wings, a pair of most expansive and expansible nostrils, a black eye, somewhat recently relieved by the application of raw beefsteak, and an engaging expression about his face of general leering blackguardism. If you pull him through, my dear fellow, your fortune’s made. The mere look of the gentleman, probably, ‘ll be enough to condemn him in the minds of twelve intelligent and impartial fellow-countrymen.’
‘Well, I must go at once,’ Harrison cried, undeterred by this fancy sketch, and rushing off for his hat. ‘They say their client desires an immediate interview.’
