[CHAPTER XXXVI]
IN THE SPRING
Yes, it was all true! The events of that Red Letter Day had really happened. When Arthur awoke the next morning, he had a queer feeling of its all being a dream, a mirage born of ambition. No. The morning paper proved it; a glance at his own table added confirmation.
Revolving Time had brought round the Easter vacation again. The last case heard in the Court of Appeal that sittings was Crewdson v. The Great Southern Railway Company, on appeal from Knaresby, j.'s, judgment on the findings of the jury. (The subsequent history of the great Dog Case lay still in the future.) It was a time of political excitement; Sir Humphrey Fynes, k.c., m.p., had chanced the case being reached, and gone off to rouse the country to a proper sense of its imminent peril if the Government continued so much as a day longer in office. Consequently he was not there to argue Miss Crewdson's case. Mr. Tracy Darton, k.c., was there, but he was also in the fashionable divorce case of the moment, and had to address the jury on the respondent's behalf. He cut his argument before the Court of Appeal suspiciously short, and left to his learned friend Mr. Lisle the task of citing authorities bearing on tricky points relating to the subject of Common Carriers. Arthur was in a tremor when he rose—nearly as much frightened as he had been before Lance and Pretyman, jj., a year ago—but his whole heart was with his dog; he grew excited, he stuck to his guns; they should have those authorities if he died for it! He was very tenacious—and in the end rather long perhaps. But the Court listened attentively, smiling now and then at his youthful ardour, but letting him make his points. When they came to give judgment against his contention, they went out of the way to compliment him. The Master of the Rolls said the Court was indebted to Mr. Lisle for his able argument. Leonard, l.j., confessed that he had been for a moment shaken by Mr. Lisle's ingenious argument. Pratt, l.j., quite agreed with what had fallen from My Lord and his learned Brother concerning Mr. Lisle's conduct of his case. Even Miss Crewdson herself, whose face had been black as thunder at Sir Humphrey's desertion and Mr. Darton's unseemly brevity, and whose shoulders had shrugged scornfully when Arthur rose, found a smile for him in the hour of temporary defeat; that she would lose in the end never entered the indomitable woman's head. Then—out in the corridor, when all was over—Tom Mayne patted him on the back, and almost danced round him for joy and pride—it was impossible to recognise in him the melancholy Mr. Beverley—Norton Ward, hurrying off to another case, called out, "Confound your cheek!" and, to crown all, the august solicitor of the Great Southern Railway Company, his redoubtable opponents, gave him a friendly nod, saying, "I was afraid you were going to turn 'em at the last moment, Mr. Lisle!" That his appreciation was genuine Arthur's table proved. There, newly deposited by triumphant Henry, lay a case to advise the Great Southern Railway Company itself.
"Once you get in with them, sir——!" Henry had said, rubbing his hands together and leaving the rest to the imagination.
Such things come seldom to any man, but once or twice in their careers to many. They came to Arthur as the crown of a term's hard work, mostly over Norton Ward's briefs—for Norton Ward had come to rely on him now and kept him busy 'devilling'—but with some little things of his own too; for Wills and Mayne were faithful, and another firm had sent a case also. His neck was well in the collar; his fee book had become more than a merely ornamental appurtenance. Long and hard, dry and dusty, was the road ahead. Never mind! His feet were on it, and if he walked warily he need fear no fatal slip. Letting the case to advise wait—his opinion would not be needed before the latter part of the vacation, Henry said—he sat in his chair, smoking and indulging in pardonably rosy reflections.
"Rather different from what it was this time last year!" said Honest Pride with a chuckle.
A good many things had been rather different with him a year ago, he might have been cynically reminded; for instance the last Easter vacation he had dedicated to Miss Marie Sarradet, and he was not dedicating this coming one to Mrs. Sidney Barslow; and other things, unknown a year ago, had figured on the moving picture of his life, and said their say to him, and gone their way. But to-day he was looking forward and not back, seeing beginnings, not endings, not burying the past with tears or smiles, but hailing the future with a cheery cry of welcome for its hazards and its joys.
Henry put his head in at the door. "Sir Christopher Lance has rung up, sir, and wants to know if you'll lunch with him to-day at one-thirty—at his house."