“Of course, I’m joking, Edward. Isn’t papa thoughtful? I don’t suppose you’d have thought of it yourself.”
“I don’t suppose I should,” conceded Edward. “I thought only of you.”
CHAPTER VI.
Dulce est desipere in loco—a Latin tag that assures us we may on occasions pleasantly unbend. Edward Beaumont, as we have seen, was dreaming love’s young dream, than which we are all convinced there is nothing sweeter in this brief life of ours, and seeing visions of a glorious future rounded by the woolsack, and I know not what other suggestions of a lively imagination. Sam Storth, the partner whom he was fool enough to at the same time trust implicitly and regard with a sort of good-humoured contempt, was essaying the gentle art, desipere in loco, after a fashion of his own, in a word, combining business with pleasure. The Long Vacation, beloved of lawyers of ample means, bemoaned by those members of the junior bar to whom briefs—briefs lightly “marked” at that—are as angels’ visits, few and far between, was now dragging its weary course—and Mr. Storth had time enough and to spare on his hands. He would have liked to don that much-prized shooting-jacket and those knickerbockers that so fittingly displayed a calf whose proportions Sam surveyed with a proper pride, and to which he rightly conceived the costume of the courts failed to do adequate justice. But here was he doomed to the treadmill, whilst his partner dangled at the petticoats of an Archdeacon’s daughter, and had the confounded impudence to stretch his legs under an earl’s mahogany.
“There’s Beaumont,” the irate junior partner thus unburthened himself, “doing the la-di-da in baronial halls, whilst I’m expected to moil and toil trying to find work for a set of idle clerks in the deadest season of the legal year. How Beaumont, with the principles he professes can cheek to make himself so very much at home, as I’m sure from his letters he has done, in gremio ecclesiae, in the very bosom of the Church, or, what is more scandalous still, of the Church’s daughter, passes my comprehension. But I suppose Beaumont’s not such a fool as a fellow’d take him to be by his talk. These Radicals are all alike. They rail against aristocrats, but give me a Radical for kow-towing to a duke; they gibe at the Church as by law established, but trust ’em to be uncommon deferential to a bishop; they declaim against pensions and annuities, but wouldn’t they just like a soft job themselves. Oh, no, I don’t think. There’s Beaumont, whose grandfather, I verily believe, used to wear clogs and a blue smock, and take his twopenny-ha’penny pieces to market on a donkey’s back, quaffing the vintages of Burgundy in the baronial halls aforesaid, whilst I, forsooth, whose father was a——”
“Was a what?” queried the fair damsel to whom Master Sam had opened the floodgates of his eloquence.
“Well, he wasn’t a damned poverty-knocker anyway,” said Charles hurriedly; “whilst I, as I was saying, must content myself with a tankard of bitter in a——”
“In a what, sir?” asked the lady, tartly.
“In a place that I much refer to baronial halls,” quoth Sam gallantly.
The place so honoured was the snug of the Royal Albert in Huddersfield, and the lady to whom Mr. Storth was confiding his grievances was Miss Amelia Wrigley, the very comely daughter of the landlord of that old-established hostelry, a lady not only well-dowered by Nature with a good figure, a pleasing face, and a sprightly wit, but reputed to be likely in the years to come to be well-dowered by the worthy but gouty sire, whose ales and liquors Mr. Storth so vastly appreciated.