Had Scanlan been waiting for the few words which from a jury-box determine a man's fate forever, he could not have suffered more acute anxiety than he felt while contemplating the other's calm and unmoved countenance. A bold, open rejection of his plan, a defiant repudiation of his presumption, would not probably have pained him more, if as much as the impassive quietness of Jack's demeanor.
“If you think that this is a piece of impudence on my part, Mr. Massingbred,—if it's your opinion that in aspiring to be connected with the Martins I'm forgetting my place and my station, just say so at once. Tell it to me frankly, and I'll know how to bear it,” said he, at last, when all further endurance had become impossible.
“Nothing of the kind, my dear Scanlan,” said Jack, smiling blandly. “Whatever snobbery once used to prevail on these subjects, we have come to live in a more generous age. The man of character, the man who unites an untarnished reputation to very considerable abilities, with talent to win any station, and virtues to adorn it, such a man wants no blazonry to illustrate his name, and it is mainly by such accessions that our English aristocracy, refreshed and invigorated as it is, preserves its great acknowledged superiority.”
It would have required a more acute critic than Maurice Scanlan to have detected the spirit in which this rhapsody was uttered. The apparent earnestness of the manner did not exactly consort with a certain pomposity of enunciation and an over-exactness in the tone of the declamation. On the whole Maurice did not like it. It smacked to his ears very like what he had often listened to in the Four Courts at the close of a “junior's” address; and there was a Nisi Prius jingle in it that sounded marvellously unlike conviction.
“If, then,” resumed Massingbred, “they who by the accidents of fortune, or the meritorious services of their forefathers, represent rather in their elevation the gratitude of their country than—”
“I 'm sorry to interrupt you, sir,—indeed, I'm ashamed of myself for doing it,—for your remarks are beautiful, downright eloquent; but the truth is, this is a case touches me too closely to make me care for a grand speech about it. I 'd rather have just a few words—to the evidence, as one might say,—or a simple answer to a plain question, Can this thing be done?”
“There's where you beat us, Scanlan. There's where we cannot approach you. You are practical. You reduce a matter at once to the simple dimension of efficacy first, then possibility, and with these two conditions before you you reject the fifty extraneous considerations, outlying contingencies, that distract and embarrass such fellows as me.
“I have no pretension to abilities like yours, Mr. Massingbred,” said Scanlan, with unassumed modesty.
“Ah, Scanlan, yours are the true gifts, take my word for it!—the recognized currency by which a man obtains what he seeks for; and there never was an era in which such qualities bore a higher value. Our statesmen, our diplomatists, our essay-writers,—nay, our very poets, addressing themselves as they do to the correction of social wrongs and class inequalities,—they are all 'practical'! That is the type of our time, and future historians will talk of this as the 'Age of Fact'!”
If one were to judge from Maurice Scanlan's face during the delivery of this peroration, it might be possibly inferred that he scarcely accepted the speech as an illustration in point, since anything less practical he had never listened to.