[CHAPTER XII.]
A CONQUEST.
It is the end of August, and society has gone out of town. Sporting people have gone to Goodwood; and the Lawn, at the period of our story, as yet uninvaded by objectionable persons, promises to present, as it hitherto has always presented, a parterre of aristocratic beauty. There is no "limited mail" in these days; but they could tell you at Euston Square of seats for the North booked many days in advance. And there are no Cook's tourists; and yet it would seem impossible that the boats leaving Dover twice a day for the great continental routes vid Calais and Ostend, could possibly carry more passengers. That was before the contemptible German system of battues was allowed among us, when dreib-jagds were almost unknown in England, and when a day's shooting meant exercise, trouble, and skill, not warm corners and wholesale slaughter; but Purdays and Lancasters, though mere muzzle-loaders, did their work, and Grant's gaiters were to be found on most of the right sort throughout the English counties.
The physicians and the great surgeons have struck work--it is no good remaining in a place where there are no patients--and having delegated their practice pro tem. to some less fortunate brother--who devoutly prays that chance may bring some rich or celebrated person unexpectedly to town, then and there to be stricken with illness, and left in his, the substitute's, hands--they are away shooting in the Highlands, swarming up Swiss mountains, lounging at German Brunnen, but never losing the soft placid manner and the dulcet tone which seem to imbue their every speech and action with a certain professional air, as though they were saying, "Hum! ha! ye-es, certainly; show me the tongue, please--ah!" and wherever they may be, the scent of the hospital is over them still.
Passing through Edinburgh, on his way to his shooting in Aberdeenshire, Mr. Fleem, President of the College of Surgeons, gives up a week of his hard-earned holiday to the society of Sir Annis Thettick, the great Scotch operator, and the pair indulge in many a sanguinary colloquy; little Dr. Payne leaves Mrs. Payne to be escorted up and down the allées of Baden-Baden by trim-waisted Prussian and Austrian officers, or by such of her compatriot acquaintances as she may find there (all of whom are too glad to pay court to so charming a woman), while he is closeted with Herr Doctor Von Glauber, Hof-Arzt to his Effulgency the reigning Duke of Schweinerei, with whom he exchanges the most confidential communications, resulting on both sides in a belief that the real knowledge of either of them is extremely limited.
In those charming courts and groves dedicated to the study and practice of the law there is also tranquillity, not to say stagnation, for the long vacation has commenced, and the Law is out of town.
Read the fact in the closed courts of Westminster Hall--in the Hall itself, no longer filled with the anxious faces of suitors, the flying forms of bewigged barristers, or fragrant with the sprinkled snuff of agitated attorneys, but now given up to marchings and counter-marchings of newly-fledged volunteers, who--it is the first year of the movement--are longing to be taking martial exercise in the wilds of Wimbledon or on the plains of Putney, but, deterred by the rain, are fain to put up with the large area of Westminster Hall, and to undergo the torture of the professional drill-sergeant before the eyes of a gaping and a grinning audience.
Read the fact in the closed oaks of every set of chambers, each door bearing its coffin-plate-like announcement that messages and parcels are to be left at the porter's lodge; in the sounds of revelry that proceed from the attorneys' offices, where the scrubs left in town are amusing themselves with effervescing drinks and negro minstrelsy, oblivious of executors, and administrators, and hereditaments; while the "chief" is at Bognor with his wife and children, the "Chancery" is geologising at Staffa, and the "Common-law" is living up at Laleham Ferry, and washing off all reminiscence of John Doe and Richard Roe in daily matutinal plunges off the bar at Penton Hook.
All the members of the Bar, great and small, are away. Heaven alone knows where the Great Seal may be hidden, but it is certain that the keeper of it and the Sovereign's conscience--a tall, straggling-whiskered, gray-haired gentleman--has been seen, with a wideawake hat on his head and a gun in his hand, "potting" rabbits on a Wiltshire common, and has been pointed out seated in a dog-cart at a little railway-station as the "Lar' Chance'lar" to the wondering bumpkins, who fully expected to see him in full-bottomed wig and gold-fringed robes, and who were consequently wofully disappointed, and thought his lordship of but "little 'count." Tocsin, the great gladiator, who wrestles with his professional opponents and flings them heavily, cross-buttocks the jury, and has been known, metaphorically, to give that peculiar British blow known as "one" to the judge himself--Tocsin, whose arrival at the Old Bailey (never appearing there unless specially retained) arouses interest in the languid ushers and door-porters, used up with constant criminal details, but sure of some excitement when Tocsin leads--Tocsin is at Broadstairs, swimming and walking with his boys during the day, and of an evening very much interested, and not unfrequently affected to tears, by the Minerva-Press novels, obtained from the little library, which he reads aloud to his wife. Mr. Serjeant Slink, leader at the Parliamentary Bar, whose professional life is passed in denouncing the aristocracy of this country as stifling all freedom of political opinion by threats or bribery, is staying with the Duke and Duchess of Potiphar at their villa on the Lake of Como; and Mr. Moss, of Thavies Inn, 'cutest and cleverest of criminal attorneys, is at Venice, occupying the moments which his valet de place allows him to have to himself in working out the outline of the defence in a case of gigantic fraud, the trial of which is coming off next sessions, in his room at Danieli's Hotel.
Lethargy and languor in the public offices, where the chiefs are away on leave, and the juniors left in town appear, from the medical certificates they are sending in, to be suffering from every kind of mortal illness, and where the "immediate attention" promised to your communication becomes more vague and shadowy than ever; in merchants' establishments, where the clerks, finding it impossible to get "regularly away," compromise the matter by taking lodgings at Gravesend or in up-the-river villages, and running to and fro daily; in large shops, where the assistants bless the early-closing movement, and bound away on Saturday afternoon with an agility which argues well for their jumping many other things besides counters.