Sir Brook Fossbrooke, Volume I.. Lever Charles James
walked moodily up and down the room, his head sunk, and his eyes downcast. “Never to speak of me, – never ask to see me,” muttered he, in a voice of intense sadness.
“I half suspected at one time he was about to do so, and indeed he said, ‘If this attack should baffle you, Beattie, you must not omit to give timely warning. There are two or three things to be thought of.’ When I came away on that morning, I sat down and wrote to you to come up here.”
A servant entered at this moment and presented a note to the doctor, who read it hastily and handed it to Lendrick. It ran thus: —
“Dear Dr. Beattie, – The Chief Baron has had an unfavorable turn, partly brought on by excitement. Lose no time in coming here; and believe me, yours sincerely,
“CONSTANTIA LENDRICK.”
“They’ve had a quarrel; I knew they would. I did my best to prevent their meeting; but I saw he would not go out of the world without a scene. As he said last night, ‘I mean her to hear my “charge.” She must listen to my charge, Beattie;’ and I ‘d not be astonished if this charge were to prove his own sentence.”
“Go to him at once, Beattie; and if it be at all possible, if you can compass it in any way, let me see him once again. Take these with you; who knows but their bright faces may plead better than words for us?” and thus saying, he gave him the miniatuies; and overcome with emotion he could not control, turned away and left the room.
CHAPTER III. A DIFFICULT PATIENT
As Dr. Beattie drove off with all speed to the Chief Baron’s house, which lay about three miles from the city, he had time to ponder as he went over his late interview. “Tom Lendrick,” as he still called him to himself, he had known as a boy, and ever liked him. He had been a patient, studious, gentle-tempered lad, desirous to acquire knowledge, without any of that ambition that wants to make the knowledge marketable. To have gained a professorship would have appeared to have been the very summit of his ambition, and this rather as a quiet retreat to pursue his studies further than as a sphere wherein to display his own gifts. Anything more unlike that bustling, energetic, daring spirit, his father, would be hard to conceive. Throughout his whole career at the bar, and in Parliament, men were never quite sure what that brilliant speaker and most indiscreet talker would do next. Men secured his advocacy with a half misgiving whether they were doing the very best or the very worst for success. Give him difficulties to deal with, and he was a giant; let all go smoothly and well, and he would hunt up some crotchet, – some obsolete usage, – a doubtful point, that in its discussion very frequently led to the damage of his client’s cause, and the defeat of his suit.
Display was ever more to him than victory. Let him have a great arena to exhibit in, and he was proof against all the difficulties and all the casualties of the conflict. Never had such a father a son less the inheritor of his temperament and nature; and this same disappointment rankling on through life – a disappointment that embittered all intercourse, and went so far as to make him disparage the high abilities of his son – created a gulf between them that Beattie knew could never be bridged over. He doubted, too, whether as a doctor he could conscientiously introduce a theme so likely to irritate and excite. As he pondered, he opened the two miniatures, and looked at them. The young man was a fine, manly, daring-looking fellow, with a determined brow and a resolute mouth, that recalled his grandfather’s face; he was evidently well grown and strong, and looked one that, thrown where he might be in life, would be likely to assert his own.
The girl, wonderfully like him in feature, had a character of subdued humor in her eye, and a half-hid laughter in the mouth, which the artist had caught up with infinite skill, that took away all the severity of the face, and softened its traits to a most attractive beauty. Through her rich brown hair there was a sort of golden reflet that imparted great brilliancy to the expression of the head, and her large eyes of gray-blue were the image of candor and softness, till her laugh gave them a sparkle of drollery whose sympathy there was no resisting. She, too, was tall and beautifully formed, with that slimness of early youth that only escapes being angular, but has in it the charm of suppleness that lends grace to every action and every gesture.
“I wish he could see the originals,” muttered Beattie. “If the old man, with his love of beauty, but saw that girl, it would be worth all the arguments in Christendom. Is it too late for this? Have we time for the experiment?”
Thus thinking, he drove along the well-wooded approach, and gained the large ground-space before the door, whence a carriage was about to drive away. “Oh, doctor,” cried a voice, “I’m so glad you ‘re come; they are most impatient for you.” It was the Solicitor-General, Mr. Pemberton, who now came up to the window of Beattie’s carriage.
“He has become quite unmanageable, will not admit a word of counsel or advice, resists all interference, and insists on going out for a drive.”
“I see him at the window,” said Beattie; “he is beckoning to me; good-bye,” and he passed on and entered the house.
In the chief drawing-room, in a deep recess of a window, sat the Chief Baron, dressed as if to go out, with an overcoat and even his gloves on. “Come and drive with me, Beattie,” cried he, in a feeble but harsh voice. “If I take my man Leonard, they ‘ll say it was a keeper. You know that the ‘Post’ has it this morning that it is my mind which has given way. They say they ‘ve seen me breaking for years back. Good heavens! can it be possible, think you, that the mites in a cheese speculate over the nature of the man that eats them? You stopped to talk with Pemberton I saw; what did he say to you?”
“Nothing particular, – a mere greeting, I think.”
“No, sir, it was not; he was asking you how many hours there lay between him and the Attorney-Generalship. They ‘ve divided the carcase already. The lion has to assist at his autopsy, – rather hard, is n’t it? How it embitters death, to think of the fellows who are to replace us!”
“Let me feel your pulse.”
“Don’t trust it, Beattie; that little dialogue of yours on the grass plot has sent it up thirty beats; how many is it?”
“Rapid, – very rapid; you need rest, – tranquillity.”
“And you can’t give me either, sir; neither you nor your craft. You are the Augurs of modern civilization, and we cling to your predictions just as our forefathers did, though we never believe you.”
“This is not flattery,” said Beattie, with a slight smile.
The old man closed his eyes, and passed his hand slowly over his forehead. “I suppose I was dreaming, Beattie, just before you came up; but I thought I saw them all in the Hall, talking and laughing over my death. Burrowes was telling how old I must be, because I moved the amendment to Flood in the Irish Parliament in ‘97; and Eames mentioned that I was Curran’s junior in the great Bagenal record; and old Tysdal set them all in a roar by saying he had a vision of me standing at the gate of heaven, and instead of going in, as St. Peter invited me, stoutly refusing, and declaring I would move for a new trial! How like the rascals!”
“Don’t you think you’d be better in your own room? There’s too much light and glare here.”
“Do you think so?”
“I am sure of it. You need quiet, and the absence of all that stimulates the action of the brain.”
“And what do you, sir, – what does any one, – know about the brain’s operations? You doctors have invented a sort of conventional cerebral organ, which, like lunar caustic, is decomposed by light; and in your vulgar materialism you would make out that what affects your brain must act alike upon mine. I tell you, sir, it is darkness – obscurity, physical or moral, it matters not which – that irritates me, just as I feel provoked this moment by this muddling talk of yours about brain.”
“And yet I ‘m talking about what my daily life and habits suggest some knowledge of,” said Beattie, mildly.
“So you are, sir, and the presumption is all on my side. If you’ll kindly lend me your arm, I’ll go back to my room.”
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