Moulder would allow me to suggest that the | Mr. Dockwrath alone in his glory which apcommercial gentlemen should take their wine in peased the spirit of the great Moulder. He had the large drawing-room up stairs this evening, Mrs. C. will do her best to make it comfortable for them in five minutes. There of course they can be private." known Crump, moreover, for many years, and was aware that it would be a dangerous, and probably an expensive proceeding to thrust out the attorney by violence. "If the other gentleThere was something in the idea of leaving men are agreeable, I am," said he. The other gentlemen were agreeable, and, with the exception of Kantwise, they all rose from their chairs. "I must say I think you ought to leave the room as you don't choose to abide by the rules," said Johnson, addressing himself to Dockwrath. "That's your opinion," said Dockwrath. "Yes, it is," said Johnson. opinion." "That's my Mr. Furnival was a lawyer-I mean a barrister-belonging to Lincoln's Inn, and living at the time at which our story is supposed to commence in Harley Street. But he had not been long a resident in Harley Street, having left the less fashionable neighborhood of Russell Square only two or three years before that period. On his marriage he had located himself in a small "My own happens to be different," said Dock- house in Keppel Street, and had there remained wrath; and so he kept his chair. "There, Mr. Crump," said Moulder, taking half a crown from his pocket, and throwing it on the table. "I sha'n't see you at a loss." "Thank you, Sir," said Mr. Crump; and he very humbly took up the money. till professional success, long waited for, enabled him to move further west, and indulge himself with the comforts of larger rooms and more servants. At the time of which I am now speaking Mr. Furnival was known, and well known, as a successful man; but he had struggled long and "I keep a little account for charity at home," hard before that success had come to him, and said Moulder. during the earliest years of his married life had "It don't run very high, do it ?" asked Sneng- found the work of keeping the wolf from his keld, jocosely. door to be almost more than enough for his energies. "Not out of the way, it don't. But now I shall have the pleasure of writing down in it that I paid half a crown for a lawyer who couldn't afford to settle his own dinner bill. Sir, we have the pleasure of wishing you a good-night." "I hope you'll find the large drawing-room up stairs quite comfortable," said Dockwrath. And then they all marched out of the room, each with his own glass-Mr. Moulder leading the way with stately step. It was pleasant to see them as they all followed their leader across the open passage of the gate-way, in by the bar, and so up the chief staircase. Mr. Moulder walked slowly, bearing the bottle of port and his own glass, and Mr. Snengkeld and Mr. Gape followed in line, bearing also their own glasses, and maintaining the dignity of their profession under circumstances of some difficulty. "Gentlemen, I really am sorry for this little accident," said Mr. Crump, as they were passing the bar; "but a lawyer, you know—” er. "And such a lawyer, eh, Crump?" said Mould Mr. Furnival practiced at the common law bar, and early in life had attached himself to the home circuit. I can not say why he obtained no great success till he was nearer fifty than forty years of age. At that time I fancy that barristers did not come to their prime till a period of life at which other men are supposed to be in their decadence. Nevertheless, he had married on nothing, and had kept the wolf from the door. To do this he had been constant at his work in season and out of season, during the long hours of day and the long hours of night. Throughout his term times he had toiled in court, and during the vacations he had toiled out of court. He had reported volumes of cases, having been himself his own short-hand writeras it is well known to most young lawyers, who as a rule always fill an upper shelf in their law libraries with Furnival and Staples's seventeen volumes in calf. He had worked for the booksellers, and for the newspapers, and for the attorneys-always working, however, with refer "It might be five-and-twenty pound to me to ence to the law; and though he had worked for lay a hand on him!" said the landlord. When the time came for Mr. Kantwise to move, he considered the matter well. The chances, however, as he calculated them, were against any profitable business being done with the attorney, so he also left the room. "Goodnight, Sir," he said as he went. "I wish you a very good-night." "Take care of yourself," said Dockwrath; and then the attorney spent the rest of the evening alone. CHAPTER X. MR., MRS., AND MISS FURNIVAL. I WILL now ask my readers to come with me up to London, in order that I may introduce them to the family of the Furnivals. We shall see much of the Furnivals before we reach the end of our present undertaking, and it will be well that we should commence our acquaintance with them as early as may be done. In years with the lowest pay, no man had heard him complain. That no woman had heard him do so, I will not say; as it is more than probable that into the sympathizing ears of Mrs. Furnival he did pour forth plaints as to the small wages which the legal world meted out to him in return for his labors. He was a constant, hard, patient man, and at last there came to him the full reward of all his industry. What was the special case by which Mr. Furnival obtained his great success no man could say. all probability there was no special case. Gradually it began to be understood that he was a safe man, understanding his trade, true to his clients, and very damaging as an opponent. Legal gentlemen are, I believe, quite as often bought off as bought up. Sir Richard and Mr. Furnival could not both be required on the same side, seeing what a tower of strength each was in himself; but then Sir Richard would be absolutely neutralized if Mr. Furnival were employed on the other side. This is a system well understood by attorneys, and has been found to be ex tremely lucrative by gentlemen leading at the talents to the brow-beating of witnesses-greatly bar. Mr. Furnival was now fifty-five years of age, and was beginning to show in his face some traces of his hard work. Not that he was becoming old, or weak, or worn; but his eye had lost its fire-except the fire peculiar to his profession; and there were wrinkles in his forehead and cheeks; and his upper lip, except when he was speaking, hung heavily over the lower; and the loose skin below his eye was forming itself into saucers; and his hair had become grizzled; and on his shoulders, except when in court, there was a slight stoop. As seen in his wig and gown he was a man of commanding presence, and for ten men in London who knew him in this garb hardly one knew him without it. He was nearly six feet high, and stood forth prominently, with square, broad shoulders and a large body. His head also was large; his forehead was high, and marked strongly by signs of intellect; his nose was long and straight, his eyes were very gray, and capable to an extraordinary degree both of direct severity and of concealed sarcasm. Witnesses have been heard to say that they could endure all that Mr. Furnival could say to them, and continue in some sort to answer all his questions, if only he would refrain from looking at them. But he would never refrain; and therefore it was now well understood how great a thing it was to secure the services of Mr. Furnival. "Sir," an attorney would say to an unfortunate client doubtful as to the expenditure, "your witnesses will not be able to stand in the box if we allow Mr. Furnival to be engaged on the other side." I am inclined to think that Mr. Furnival owed to this power of his eyes his almost unequaled perfection in that peculiar branch of his profession. His voice was powerful, and not unpleasant when used within the precincts of a court, though it grated somewhat harshly on the ears in the smaller compass of a private room. His flow of words was free and good, and seemed to come from him without the slightest effort. Such at least was always the case with him when standing wigged and gowned before a judge. Latterly, however, he had tried his eloquence on another arena, and not altogether with equal success. He was now in Parliament, sitting as member for the Essex Marshes, and he had not as yet carried either the country or the House with him, although he had been frequently on his legs. Some men said that with a little practice he would yet become very serviceable as an honorable and learned member; but others expressed a fear that he had come too late in life to these new duties. I have spoken of Mr. Furnival's great success in that branch of his profession which required from him the examination of evidence, but I would not have it thought that he was great only in this, or even mainly in this. There are gentlemen at the bar, among whom I may perhaps notice my old friend Mr. Chaffanbrass as the most conspicuous, who have confined their to their own profit, and no doubt to the advantage of society. But I would have it understood that Mr. Furnival was by no means one of these. He had been no Old Bailey lawyer, devoting himself to the manumission of murderers, or the security of the swindling world in general. He had been employed on abstruse points of law, had been great in will cases, very learned as to the rights of railways, peculiarly apt in enforcing the dowries of married women, and successful above all things in separating husbands and wives whose lives had not been passed in accordance with the recognized rules of Hymen. deed there is no branch of the Common Law in which he was not regarded as great and powerful, though perhaps his proficiency in damaging the general characters of his opponents has been recognized as his especial forte. Under these circumstances I should grieve to have him confounded with such men as Mr. Chaffanbrass, who is hardly known by the profession beyond the precincts of his own peculiar court in the City. Mr. Furnival's reputation has spread itself wherever stuff gowns and horse-hair wigs are held in estimation. In Mr. Furnival, when clothed in his forensic habiliments, certainly possessed a solemn and severe dignity which had its weight even with the judges. Those who scrutinized his appearance critically might have said that it was in some respects pretentious; but the ordinary jurymen of this country are not critical scrutinizers of appearance, and by them he was never held in light estimation. When in his addresses to them, appealing to their intelligence, education, and enlightened justice, he would declare that the property of his clients was perfectly safe in their hands, he looked to be such an advocate as a litigant would fain possess when dreading the soundness of his own cause. Any cause was sound to him when once he had been feed for its support, and he carried in his countenance his assurance of this soundness-and the assurance of unsoundness in the cause of his opponent. Even he did not always win; but on the occasion of his losing, those of the uninitiated who had heard the pleadings would express their astonishment that he should not have been successful. When he was divested of his wig his appearance was not so perfect. There was then a hard, long, straightness about his head and face, giving to his countenance the form of a parallelogram, to which there belonged a certain meanness of expression. He wanted the roundness of forehead, the short lines, and the graceful curves of face which are necessary to unadorned manly comeliness. His whiskers were small, grizzled, and ill-grown, and required the ample relief of his wig. In no guise did he look other than a clever man; but in his dress as a simple citizen he would perhaps be taken as a clever man in whose tenderness of heart and cordiality of feeling one would not at first sight place implicit trust. attack of the gout, it would-so thought Mrs. Ball-be better for all parties. Whether or no it may have been that Mrs. Furnival at fifty-five-for she and her lord were of the same age-was not herself as attractive in her husband's eyes as she had been at thirty, I will not pretend to say. There can have been no just reason for any such change in feeling, seeing that the two had grown old together. She, poor woman, would still have been quite content with the attentions of Mr. Furnival, though his hair was grizzled and his nose was blue; nor did she ever think of attracting to herself the admiration of any swain whose gen As a poor man Mr. Furnival had done his duty well by his wife and family-for as a poor man he had been blessed with four children. Three of these had died as they were becoming men and women; and now, as a rich man, he was left with one daughter, an only child. As a poor man Mr. Furnival had been an excellent husband, going forth in the morning to his work, struggling through the day, and then returning to his meagre dinner and his long evenings of unremitting drudgery. The bodily strength which had supported him through his work in those days must have been immense, for he had allowed himself no holidays. And then success and money had come-and Mrs. Furnival some-eral comeliness might be more free from all taint times found herself not quite so happy as she had been when watching beside him in the days of their poverty. of age. Why, then, should he wander afield— at the age of fifty-five? That he did wander afield, poor Mrs. Furnival felt in her agony convinced; and among those ladies whom on this account she most thoroughly detested was our friend Lady Mason of Orley Farm. Lady Mason and the lawyer had first become acquainted in the days of the trial, now long gone by, on which occasion Mr. Furnival had been employed as the junior counsel; and that acquaintance had ripened into friendship, and now flourished in full vigor-to Mrs. Furnival's great sorrow and disturbance. The equal mind—as mortal Delius was bidden to remember, and as Mr. Furnival might also have remembered had time been allowed him to cultivate the classics-the equal mind should be as sedulously maintained when things run well as well as when they run hardly; and perhaps the maintenance of such equal mind is more difficult in the former than in the latter stage of life. Be that as it may, Mr. Furnival could now be very cross on certain domestic occasions, and could also be very unjust. And there was worse Mrs. Furnival herself was a stout, solid wothan this-much worse behind. He, who in the man, sensible on most points, but better adapted, heyday of his youth would spend night after perhaps, to the life in Keppel Street than that night poring over his books, copying out reports, to which she had now been promoted. As Kitty and never asking to see a female habiliment Blacker she had possessed feminine charms which brighter or more attractive than his wife's Sun- would have been famous had they been better day gown-he, at the age of fifty-five, was now known. Mr. Furnival had fetched her from farrunning after strange goddesses! The member ther East-from the region of Great Ormond for the Essex Marshes, in these his latter days, Street and the neighborhood of Southampton was obtaining for himself, among other success- Buildings. Her cherry cheeks, and her round es, the character of a Lothario; and Mrs. Fur-eye, and her full bust, and her fresh lip, had nival, sitting at home in her genteel drawing-conquered the hard-tasked lawyer; and so they room near Cavendish Square, would remember with regret the small dingy parlor in Keppel Street. had gone forth to fight the world together. Her eye was still round, and her cheek red, and her bust full-there had certainly been no falling Mrs. Furnival, in discussing her grievances, off there; nor will I say that her lip had lost all would attribute them mainly to port wine. In its freshness. But the bloom of her charms had his early days Mr. Furnival had been essentially passed away, and she was now a solid, stout, an abstemious man. Young men who work fif- motherly woman, not bright in converse, but by teen hours a day must be so. But now he had no means deficient in mother-wit, recognizing a strong opinion about certain Portuguese vint- well the duties which she owed to others, but ages, was convinced that there was no port wine recognizing equally well those which others owed in London equal to the contents of his own bin, to her. All the charms of her youth-had they saving always a certain green cork appertaining not been given to him, and also all her solicitude, to his own club, which was to be extracted at all her anxious fighting with the hard world? the rate of thirty shillings a cork. And Mrs. When they had been poor together, had she not Furnival attributed to these latter studies not patched and turned and twisted, sitting silently only a certain purple hue which was suffusing by his side into the long nights, because she his nose and cheeks, but also that unevenness would not ask him for the price of a new dress? of character and those supposed domestic im- And yet now, now that they were rich-? Mrs. proprieties to which allusion has been made. It Furnival, when she put such questions within may, however, be as well to explain that Mrs. her own mind, could hardly answer this latter Ball, the old family cook and housekeeper, who one with patience. Others might be afraid of had ascended with the Furnivals in the world, the great Mr. Furnival in his wig and gown; opined that made-dishes did the mischief. He others might be struck dumb by his power of dined out too often, and was a deal too particu- eye and mouth; but she, she, the wife of his lar about his dinner when he dined at home. If bosom, she could catch him without his armor. Providence would see fit to visit him with a sharp She would so catch him, and let him know what she thought of all her wrongs. So she said to herself many a day; and yet the great deed, in all its explosiveness, had never yet been done. Small attacks of words there had been many; but hitherto the courage to speak out her griefs openly had been wanting to her. I can now allow myself but a small space to say a few words of Sophia Furnival, and yet in that small space must be confined all the direct description which can be given of one of the principal personages of this story. At nineteen Miss Furnival was in all respects a young woman. She was forward in acquirements, in manner, in general intelligence, and in powers of conversation. She was a handsome, tall girl, with expressive gray eyes and dark-brown hair. Her mouth, and hair, and a certain motion of her neck and turn of her head, had come to her from her mother, but her eyes were those of her father they were less sharp perhaps, less eager after their prey; but they were bright as his had been bright, and sometimes had in them more of absolute command than he was ever able to throw into his own. : Their golden days had come on them at a period of her life which enabled her to make a better use of them than her mother could do. She never felt herself to be struck dumb by rank or fashion, nor did she in the drawing-rooms of the great ever show signs of an Eastern origin. She could adapt herself without an effort to the manners of Cavendish Square-ay, and if need were, to the ways of more glorious squares even than that. Therefore was her father never ashamed to be seen with her on his arm in the houses of his new friends, though on such occasions he was willing enough to go out without disturbing the repose of his wife. No mother could have loved her children with a warmer affection than that which had warmed the heart of poor Mrs. Furnival; but under such circumstances as these was it singular that she should occasionally become jealous of her own daughter? Sophia Furnival was, as I have said, a clever, attractive girl, handsome, well-read, able to hold her own with the old as well as with the young, capable of hiding her vanity if she had any, mild and gentle to girls less gifted, animated in conversation, and yet possessing an eye that could fall softly to the ground, as a woman's eye always should fall upon occasions. Nevertheless she was not altogether charming. "I don't feel quite sure that she is real," Mrs. Orme had said of her, when on a certain occasion Miss Furnival had spent a day and a night at The Cleeve. CHAPTER XI. MRS. FURNIVAL AT HOME. LUCIUS MASON on his road to Liverpool had passed through London, and had found a moment to call in Harley Street. Since his return from Germany he had met Miss Furnival both at home at his mother's house-or rather his own and at the Cleeve. Miss Furnival had been in the neighborhood, and had spent two days with the great people at the Cleeve, and one day with the little people at Orley Farm. Lucius Mason had found that she was a sensible girl, capable of discussing great subjects with him; and had possibly found some other charms in her. Therefore he had called in Harley Street. On that occasion he could only call as he passed through London without delay; but he received such encouragement as induced him to spend a night in town on his return, in order that he might accept an invitation to drink tea with the Furnivals. "We shall be very happy to see you," Mrs. Furnival had said, backing the proposition which had come from her daughter without any very great fervor; "but I fear Mr. Furnival will not be at home. very seldom is at home now.' did not much care for fervor on the part of Sophia's mother, and therefore had accepted the invitation, though he was obliged by so doing to curtail by some hours his sojourn among the guano stores of Liverpool. Mr. Furnival Young Mason It was the time of year at which few people are at home in London, being the middle of October; but Mrs. Furnival was a lady of whom at such periods it was not very easy to dispose. She could have made herself as happy as a queen even at Margate, if it could have suited Furnival and Sophia to be happy at Margate with her. But this did not suit Furnival or Sophia. As regards money, any or almost all other autumnal resorts were open to her, but she could be contented at none of them because Mr. Furnival always pleaded that business-law business or political business-took him elsewhere. Now Mrs. Furnival was a woman who did not like to be deserted, and who could not, in the absence of those social joys which Providence had vouchsafed to her as her own, make herself happy with the society of other women such as herself. Furnival was her husband, and she wanted him to carve for her, to sit opposite to her at the breakfast-table, to tell her the news of the day, and to walk to church with her on Sundays. They had been made one flesh and one bone, for better and worse, thirty years since; and now in her latter days she could not put up with disseveration and dislocation. She had gone down to Brighton in August, soon after the House broke up, and there found that very handsome apartments had been taken for her-rooms that would have made glad the heart of many a lawyer's wife. She had, too, the command of a fly, done up to look like a private brougham, a servant in livery, the run of the public assembly-rooms, a sitting in the centre of the most fashionable church in Brighton—all that the heart of woman could desire. All but the one thing was there; but that one thing being absent she came moodily back to town at the end of September. She would have exchanged them all with a happy heart for very moderate accommodation at Margate, could she have seen Mr. Furnival's blue nose on the other |