The old Judge was very sad after Lucy's departure from the Priory. While she lived there they had not seen much of each other, it is true. They met at meal-times, and now and then Sir William would send up the housekeeper to announce a visit from him; but there is a sense of companionship in the consciousness that under the same roof with you dwells one upon whose affection you can draw, whose sympathy will be with you in your hour of need; and this the old man now felt to be waiting; and he wandered restlessly about the house and the garden, tenacious to see that nothing she liked or loved was threatened with any change, and repeating to all that she must find everything as she left it when she came back again.
Sewell had been recalled to the country by the illness of his child, and they were not expected at the Priory for at least a week or two longer. Haire had gone on circuit, and even Beattie the Judge only saw hurriedly and at long intervals. With Lady Lendrick he had just had a most angry correspondence, ending in one of those estrangements which, had they been nations instead of individuals, would have been marked by the recall of their several envoys, but which they were satisfied to signalize by an order at the Priory gate-lodge not to admit her Ladyship's carriage, and an equally determined command at Merrion Square for the porter to take in no letters that came from the Chief Baron.
Lest the world should connect this breach with any interest in my story, I may as well declare at once the incident had no possible bearing upon it. It was a little episode entirely self-contained, and consisted in Lady Lendrick having taken advantage of Sir William's illness and confinement to house to send for and use his carriage-horses,—a liberty which he resented by a most furious letter, to which the rejoinder begot another infinitely more sarcastic,—the correspondence ending by a printed notice which her Ladyship received in an envelope, that the Chief Baron's horses would be sold on the ensuing Saturday at Dycer's to the highest bidder, his Lordship having no further use for them.
Let me own that the old Judge was sincerely sorry when this incident was concluded. So long as the contest lasted, while he was penning his epistle or waiting for the reply, his excitement rallied and sustained him. He used to sit after the despatch of one of his cutting letters calculating with himself the terror and consternation it produced, just as the captain of a frigate might have waited with eager expectancy that the smoke might drift away and show him the shattered spars or the yawning bulwarks of his enemy. But when his last missive was returned unopened, and the messenger reported that the doctor's carriage was at her Ladyship's door as he came away, the Judge collapsed at once, and all the dreariness of his deserted condition closed in upon him.
Till Sewell returned to-town, Sir William resolved not to proceed farther with respect to the registrarship. His plan, long determined upon, was to induct him into the office, administer the oaths, and leave him to the discharge of the duties. The scandal of displacing an official would, he deemed, be too great a hazard for any government to risk. At all events, if such a conflict came, it would be a great battle, and with the nation for spectators.
“The country shall ring with it,” was the phrase he kept repeating over and over as he strolled through his neglected garden or his leafy shrubberies; but as he plodded along, alone and in silence, the dreary conviction would sometimes shoot across his mind that he had run his race, and that the world had wellnigh forgotten him. “In a few days more,” sighed he out, “it will be over, and I shall be chronicled as the last of them.” And for a moment it would rally him to recall the glorious names with which he claimed companionship, and compare them—with what disparagement!—with the celebrities of the time.
It was strange how bright the lamp of intellect would shine out as the wick was fast sinking in the socket. His memory would revive some stormy scene in the House, some violent altercation at the Bar, and all the fiery eloquence of passion would recur to him, stirring his heart and warming his blood, till he half forgot his years, and stood forth, with head erect and swelling chest, strong with a sense of power and a whole soul full of ambition.
“Beattie would not let me take my Circuit,” would he say. “I wish he saw me to-day. Decaying powers! I would tell them that the Coliseum is grander in its ruin than all their stuccoed plastering in its trim propriety. Had he suffered me to go, the grand jury would have heard a charge such as men's ears have not listened to since Avonmore! Avon-more! what am I saying?—Yelverton had not half my law, nor a tenth part of my eloquence.”
In his self-exaltation he began to investigate whether he was greater as an advocate or as prosecutor. How difficult to decide! After all, it was in the balance of the powers thus displayed that he was great as a judge. He recalled the opinions of the press when he was raised to the bench, and triumphantly asked aloud, had he not justified every hope and contradicted every fear that was entertained of him? “Has my learning made me intolerant, or my brilliancy led me into impatience? Has the sense of superiority that I possess rendered me less conciliatory? Has my 'impetuous genius'—how fond they were of that phrase!—carried me away into boundless indiscretions? and have I, as one critic said, so concentrated the attention of the jury on myself that the evidence went for nothing and the charge was everything?”
It was strange how these bursts of inordinate vanity and self-esteem appeared to rally and invigorate the old man, redressing, as it were, the balance of the world's injustice—such he felt it—towards him. They were like a miser's hoard, to be counted and re-counted in secret with that abiding assurance that he had wealth and riches, however others might deem him poor.