CHAPTER IX.
LAURENCE O'BOYNEVILLE'S FIRST HEARING.
To the dowager Mr. O'Boyneville had been very confidential. He was as frank and ingenuous as some lovesick schoolboy in his revelation of that sudden affection with which Cecil Chudleigh's pensive face had inspired him. The unconscious audacity which was one of the chief attributes of his character supported him in a position in which another man of his age and habits would have suffered an agony of self-consciousness, a torturing sense of his own foolishness. He was close upon forty years of age. His childhood had been spent on the greensward of Irish hills and valleys, among the wildest of Hibernian agriculturists; his boyhood had been passed in an Irish city, far south of the brilliant capital; his manhood had been a long, scrambling, helter-skelter journey upon one of the dustiest and most toilsome roads of modern life. His habits were not the habits of the men who were to be met in Cecil Chudleigh's world; his cleverness was not their cleverness; and those graces and accomplishments which, in their education, had been the first consideration, were just the very points which in his rough schooling had been neglected or ignored.
Another man, under such circumstances—and even another Irishman—might have regarded Lady Cecil from afar with fond admiring glances, and returned to his law-library in Bloomsbury, or his dusty chambers in the Temple, not scatheless, but hopeless: and despair being a fever of but brief duration—it is your intermittent sickness of alternate hope and fear that hangs so long about the sufferer—the victim might have speedily recovered the wound inflicted by a flying Cupid's random shot. But it was not thus with Laurence O'Boyneville. He knew that he was eight-and-thirty, and that he looked five years older; nor was it long since the tailor, who made those garments which the barrister insisted should be constructed after the fashion of his youth, had sighed as he look his patron's measure, murmuring plaintively, "Another inch round the waist, Mr. O'Boyneville! and, bless my heart, it seems only yesterday when twenty-five inches was your figure!"
The barrister, contemplating himself in the glass during the process of shaving, and scowling—not at himself, but at the visionary countenance of the sarcastic Valentine or the unctuous O'Smea, with whom he was to do battle before the day was done—might have perceived, had he chosen to consider the matter, that he was by no means the sort of person whom women call handsome. The strongly-marked eyebrows, so quick to contract above the cold blue eyes; the aquiline nose, the firmly-set lips, the massive chin, and the broad square brow, with its prominent range of perceptive organs overshadowing the eyes—these were not the component parts of a countenance on which women care to dwell with admiring glances.
But that which would most likely have discomfited other men had no power to abash or to disturb the resolute spirit of Laurence O'Boyneville. Perhaps the secret of his audacity was that he had never failed in any thing. From the boyish days when he had breasted the falls of the Shannon and done battle with the power of the waters, his career had been one long hand-to-hand struggle with difficulties. Penniless, he had succeeded where other men's money had been powerless to win them success. Friendless, he had trampled upon the fallen hopes of rivals who could boast of kindred and friendship with the mighty ones of the earth. A stranger and an alien, he had won for himself wealth and renown in a country in which vulgar prejudice had made the very name of his people a byword and a reproach.
Was this a man to be turned aside from his purpose because the woman with whom he had fallen in love happened to be above him in rank, and the daughter of a world with which his world had nothing in common? No. After seeing Cecil Chudleigh for the first time, Laurence O'Boyneville decided that he would never marry any other woman. On seeing her for the second time, he determined to marry her. The most presuming of coxcombs could scarcely have been more sublimely assured of his own invincibility. And yet the barrister had nothing in common with a coxcomb. He was only accustomed to succeed. If he wanted to do any thing, he did it; and opposition or difficulty only gave a keener zest to the process of achievement. He wanted to marry Lady Cecil Chudleigh, and he meant to marry her. She might object at first, of course. People almost always did object to his doing what he wanted to do; but he always did it. Had not his professional rivals objected to his success, and banded themselves together to keep him down, and had he not succeeded in spite of them?
In his native wilds Mr. O'Boyneville might have twirled his shillalah and screamed horoo! so light were his spirits as he set forth to call on the lady of his love. In civilised and crowded London he could only swing his stick loosely in his hand as he strode triumphantly from the hall of the wasted footsteps; whereby he drew down upon himself the maledictions of an elderly gentleman whose shins the weapon had smitten in descending. That the pavements of the metropolis had not been laid down for his sole accommodation was a side of the question which Mr. O'Boyneville had never taken the trouble to contemplate.
He had been to Westminster, had heard the opening of a case in which he was concerned, and had given his brief and whispered his instructions to Hodger, a painstaking junior, who was very glad to do suit and service to the great O'Boyneville. The great O'Boyneville's client—a soap-boiler in Lambeth, who was at war with his parish upon the question of whether he did or did not consume his own smoke—was by no means gratified by the substitution, and looked as black as if he had indeed, in his own proper person, consumed all the smoke of his furnaces. But the distinguished Irishman strode away from Westminster heedless of his client's rage. It was very rarely that Laurence O'Boyneville gave his work to another man. The solicitors who swore by him told their clients that if O'Boyneville undertook a case, he would see it through to the very end.
"There never was such a resolute beggar," said a fast young attorney, who had witnessed one of the Q.C.'s triumphs; "the more desperate a case is, the sweeter O'Boyneville is upon it. He has all the Hibernian love of fighting; and if any body says 'Pease,' he's ready to spill his blood in the cause of 'Beans.' Egad! if there were a Victoria Cross for desperate valour exhibited in the law courts, Larry O'Boyneville's silk gown ought to be decorated with it."
But to-day, for the first time in his life, the barrister neglected his work for his own pleasure. That solemn crisis, which for some butterfly creatures comes once or twice in every London season, came to this man for the first time after twenty years of manhood. He was in love, and he was going to ask the woman he loved to be his wife. He was going to ask her to marry him—and he had met her on Dr. Molyneux's staircase—and he had watched her at a dinner-party as she talked to her aunt's guests! He knew her so little, and yet was eager to win her for his wife. "Good Heavens!" exclaims Common Sense, "what a fool the man must be!" And yet for once, dear, simple, straightforward Common Sense is out of her reckoning; for Laurence O'Boyneville knew Cecil Chudleigh better than she was known by her most intimate friends. It was a gift with him, this intuitive knowledge of human character, this rapid perception of human motive; and it was by the possession of this gift, quite as much as by his cool audacity of showy eloquence, that the Irish barrister had made for himself a name and a position. Before a witness had kissed the Book and answered a preliminary question or two, Laurence O'Boyneville knew what manner of man the witness was. Show him the most trumpery photograph that was ever bought for eighteenpence, and he would penetrate the inmost depths of that man's mind whose face was dimly shadowed in the smudgy portrait. It was doubtful if he had ever read Lavater—and yet more doubtful if he had waded through the big volumes of George Combe; and yet he was in his own person an unconscious Lavater, and to him the teaching of the great Combe could have imparted no new wisdom. A man's eyes are not overshadowed by a bumpy ridge for nothing; and to Laurence O'Boyneville had been given in excess that wondrous faculty called perception.
He had scrutinised Lady Cecil with eyes that were experienced in the reading of every expression the human countenance is capable of assuming. He knew that she was pure, and true, and generous, and high-minded. A little proud, perhaps, but only just as proud as a good woman has need to be in a bad world. He knew that she was a prize worth winning, and he meant to win her. No apprehension of failure troubled the serenity of his mind. He did not expect to win her all at once. Had it not cost him fifteen years of hard labour to obtain his silk gown? and could he expect that Providence would give him this far higher prize without inflicting on him some interval for the exercise of his patience—some manner of probationary ordeal for the trial of his faith and devotion? Mr. O'Boyneville did not believe in that French proverb which asserts that happiness comes to the sleeper.
"I will serve my seven years' apprenticeship—and my seven years after that, if necessary—but she shall be my wife before I die," thought Laurence. But it may be that Mr. O'Boyneville's fourteen years was only a figurative expression, for he said to himself presently:
"If I play my cards well, we may be married in the long vacation: and then I'll take my wife to Ireland, and get a glimpse of the Shannon for the first time these twenty years."
Arrived in Dorset Square, Mr. O'Boyneville did not endanger his prospects by any untimely modesty. He told the servant who opened the door that he came by appointment; and when the dowager's own maid emerged from some dusky back-parlour, whence issued that odour of heated iron and singed blanket which attends the getting-up of feminine muslins and laces, he brushed unceremoniously by that prim young person, and made his way up stairs. Fortune favoured him. She seems but a craven-spirited divinity, after all, and always places herself on the side of the audacious. Cecil Chudleigh was sitting at the piano, not playing, but leaning over the keyboard in a thoughtful attitude, with her head resting on one hand while the listless fingers of the other trifled with the leaves of her music-book.
She looked up as the door opened, and her face betrayed any thing but pleasure as she recognised her visitor. He had prepared her to expect such an intrusion, but she had not expected him so early, and had engaged an ally in the person of Florence Crawford, who had promised to come to her dearest Cecil directly after breakfast. Unfortunately, Flo's "directly after breakfast" meant any time between ten and two; and as the dowager rarely made her appearance before luncheon, poor Cecil had to encounter the great O'Boyneville alone.
But in spite of the special manner in which the popular barrister had announced his coming, Cecil had no suspicion that the visit itself was to be of any special nature. No eccentricity could have surprised her in the wearer of that tight-sleeved frock-coat and those exploded shirt-collars, in which Mr. O'Boyneville exhibited himself for the edification of modern society. His solemn announcement of course only referred to the conventional morning call of the grateful diner-out—the stamped receipt for an agreeable entertainment. Lady Cecil was prepared to be a little bored by the eccentric Irishman's visit, and "there an end."
"I wish Flo had been here to talk to him," she thought wearily; "Flo could receive a deputation of aldermen, or a Church-commission, whatever that is."
Mr. O'Boyneville murmured some feeble truism in reference to the weather. In spite of his audacity—in spite of his calm assurance and unfaltering faith in ultimate victory—his ease of manner, his popular swagger, and his ready flow of language abandoned him for the moment when he found himself in the presence of that unconscious enchantress who had awakened the soul of a middle-aged barrister from its twenty years' torpor.
But the paralysis called bashfulness was a very temporary affliction with Mr. O'Boyneville. Before he had been talking ten minutes to Lady Cecil, he had drawn his chair close to the piano by which she was still seated; before he had been talking to her twenty minutes, he had asked her to be his wife.
She looked at him with a smile of utter incredulity.
"Mr. O'Boyneville," she exclaimed, "you must surely intend this for a jest! and believe me it is a very foolish one."
"A jest, Lady Cecil! What, don't you know sincerity when you meet with it? Well, I confess it was foolish of me to come to you like this, and to tell you I'd fallen over head and ears in love with you, before a fine gentleman of the modern school would presume to ask you how you are. But you see, Lady Cecil, I'm not a fine gentleman. For the first seventeen years of my life I lived amongst people almost as simple and primitive as those happy savages Columbus found in Hispaniola. For the last twenty years I have been too hard a worker in my own world to have any leisure in which to acquire the thoughts and ways of yours. I never thought that any break would come in the rapid current of my busy life, but—I suppose there is one fateful hour in every man's existence. I, who so seldom go to parties, went to Molyneux's ball; I, who so seldom talk to young ladies, talked to you; and before I turned the corner of Harley Street that night, my destiny was a settled thing. 'She has come,' said I, 'and she brings my fate in her hand.' To my mind, Lady Cecil, that which your romance-writer and your poet call love at sight—'if not an Adam at his birth, he is no love at all;' and so on—is rather an intuitive consciousness, which a man has in the hour that brings him face to face with the woman who is to be the happiness or the misery of his life. I am not going to use high-flown language, Lady Cecil. Eloquence is my stock-in-trade elsewhere. The words cannot be too plain in which I tell you that I love you. There is very little to be said in my favour. I am what people call well off; but you might reasonably expect to marry a much richer man. I come of a good old Irish family; but proscription has diminished its lands to a single farm, and the taint of treason has blotted its name. I am nearly twenty years your senior, and I have few of the accomplishments which distinguish the young men of the present day. It is the cause of the leaden casket which I am pleading, Lady Cecil; and against all the outward splendour of gold and silver which my rivals can boast, I can set nothing except the unselfishness of my love, the strength of my devotion."
Cecil had listened very patiently to this address. She could not doubt the depth of feeling which was breathed in every accent of the barrister's voice, subdued and grave in tone, and altogether different from the sonorous thunder which so often awoke the echoes of the law-courts. She was touched by his appeal, though it stirred no warmer feeling than a gentle thrill of womanly pity. It is not in the nature of a woman to feel unkindly to the lowest of human beings who reveals to her a pure and noble affection. A Miranda will pardon and pity a Caliban if his devotion is instinct with the divinity of innocent love.
"Are you really in earnest, Mr. O'Boyneville?" asked Lady Cecil.
"I was never more in earnest in my life."
"I am very sorry for it—I am very sorry," answered Cecil, gently. "I am sure I need not tell you that I am touched and flattered by your preference for me, eccentric as it may be; but you must be indeed a stranger to the society of women if you can imagine that any woman, knowing as little of you as I do, could reply otherwise than in the negative to such an offer as you have made me."
"Yes, I dare say it's very absurd," murmured Mr. O'Boyneville, despondingly; "it's my headlong way of doing things—a national characteristic, I suppose, Lady Cecil. I ought to have waited a week or two—till we knew each other—intimately—and then——Would there have been any hope for me if I had waited a week or two?" asked the barrister, in that soft insinuating tone to which he had been known to drop after a burst of loud and lofty declamation, with a sudden transition of style that had often proved irresistible with an impressionable jury.
Cecil Chudleigh shook her head gently.
"I might have been less surprised by your flattering proposal, Mr. O'Boyneville," she said; "but no circumstances could possibly arise under which I could give you any other answer than that I have given you to-day.
"And that answer is 'No'?"
"It is, Mr. O'Boyneville."
"Irrevocably no?"
"Irrevocably."
"Lady Cecil, forgive me if I ask you a question. Is there any one—any one who occupies the place in your heart that it would be my dearest hope to win for myself? Ah, you don't know how patiently I would bide my time if there were ever so distant a gleam of sunshine to lure me on! Is there any one else, Lady Cecil?"
"No, there is no one else."
"Ah, then that's bad indeed," said the Irishman, with a sigh; "if there'd been any one else, I might have hoped—" Mr. O'Boyneville's habit of subduing the stolidity of a jury by a happy colloquialism, when all grandiloquence of language had failed to produce an effect, very nearly betrayed him into saying, "to punch his head." He pulled himself up with an effort, and concluded, "I might have hoped to prove myself the worthier man of the two. But if there is no one, Lady Cecil, and you say the answer is irrevocable, my doom is sealed. I will not tell you that I shall die broken-hearted; for in this bustling nineteenth century men have no time to break their hearts in the old-fashioned way. They can only overwork their brains and die of some commonplace heart-disease. The effect of your rejection will be that I shall work, if any thing, harder than I have been accustomed to work, and go down to my grave a single man. And now I'll not bore you any longer, Lady Cecil, and I hope you'll forget that I've talked about any thing that isn't appropriate conversation for an ordinary morning call."
He held out his hand as frankly as if he had shaken off all sense of mortification or disappointment. Lady Cecil had received her due share of matrimonial proposals, and had been accustomed to see a rejected swain depart with an air of dignified sulkiness. There seemed to be something almost magnanimous in the Irishman's simple heartiness of manner. It appeared as if he were rather anxious to relieve Cecil from any natural embarrassment, than oppressed by a sense of his own humiliation. She shook hands with him very cordially, and thought better of him in this moment of parting than she had thought yet. But she did not make him any conventional speech about her desire to retain his friendship, or her anxiety respecting his ultimate happiness. She fancied that his sudden passion was only the folly of an overgrown schoolboy, and she had little fear of the consequences of her rejection.
"I dare say he falls in love with some one every week of his life, and passes his existence in making offers that are refused," she thought, as she sat down to the piano after he had left her.
But even after thinking thus of her departed admirer, Cecil could not altogether dismiss him from her mind. She might smile at the remembrance of his folly, but she could not question his sincerity. For the moment, at least, he had been in earnest. But then it is the nature of an Irishman to be desperately in earnest about trifles. The arrival of a bloom-coloured coat from Mr. Filby the tailor seems as great an event to Goldsmith as the grant of a pension can appear to the calmer mind of Johnson.
Mr. O'Boyneville walked away from Dorset Square vanquished, but not disheartened. He had been prepared for a rejection of his suit; but for him Cecil's irrevocable no was not entirely appalling. His experience had shown him many a verdict set aside, many a decision appealed against. And are there not courts of appeal in the kingdom of lovers, as well as in the vulgar every-day world of lawyers? In spite of what the barrister had said to Lady Cecil, he had been much relieved by her assurance that her heart and hand were alike disengaged. He had affected the resignation of despair, while a glow of hope had gently warmed his breast; and as he swaggered along the pavement of Baker Street on the watch for a passing hansom, he had by no means the appearance of a rejected and desponding lover.
"I dare say she'll think me a fool for my pains, but at any rate she will think of me, and that's something," mused Mr. O'Boyneville. "How prettily her eyelids drooped when she gave me her irrevocable answer—just as if she shrank from seeing the disappointment in my face! And how good and true and pure she is! There'd be little need for divorce-courts, and less work for the lawyers, if all women were like her; and I don't despair of calling her Lady Cecil O'Boyneville yet. There never was a good woman who wasn't to be won by the love of an honest man, provided there's no mistake about his love or his honesty. There's not a day of one's life but one hears of oddly-matched couples. What could pretty Mrs. Green have seen in that awkward lout Green? says Gossip. Why, what should she see except that he loved her better than any other man in creation? And then, if Fate is the master of men, Circumstance is the tyrant of women. A man may marry the woman he wishes to marry: a woman can only marry the man who wishes to marry her."
And at this point the barrister espied an approaching hansom, and beckoned to the driver.
"I may be in time to see the soap-boiler through his troubles yet," he thought, as he sprang into the vehicle. "Westminster Hall, cabby, and lose no time about it."