“I had just been called. I was engaged. I wanted to get married.”
“You rapidly acquired an extensive practice——”
“No—no. That is where the deception stepped in. My dear nephew, I never had any practice at all. If any cases had been sent to me I could not have taken them, because, you see, I never opened a law-book in my whole life.”
“You—never—opened—a law-book? Then—how——”
“I loathed the sight of a law-book. But I was engaged—I wanted to be married—I wanted to live, too, without falling back on your mother.”
“Pray go on.”
“I knew a man who wanted to get a reputation for an after-dinner speaker. He heard me make one or two burlesque speeches, and he came to me. After a little conversation, we talked business. I wrote him a speech. It succeeded. I wrote him another. That succeeded. He leaped into fame—leaped, so to speak, over my back—oratorical leap-frog—by those two speeches. Then my price ran up. And then I conceived the idea of opening out a new profession. For five-and-twenty years I have pretended to go to chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, and I have gone to an office in Chancery Lane, where, under another name, I have carried on the business of providing speeches for all occasions.”
“Good Heavens!” cried Leonard. “And this is the man of whom we were proud!” His face had been darkening from the beginning, and it was now very hard and dark. “I understand, I suppose. The beginning of the story I had heard already. You got through your fortune in company with your brother—in riotous living.”
“Was there not something about a cheque?”