Sir Brook Fossbrooke, Volume II.

“Trafford’s account is most satisfactory,” said Foss-brooke, “and I trust the letter of which he was the bearer from his mother will amply corroborate all he says.”

“I like the young man,” said the Judge, with that sort of authoritative tone that seems to say, The cause is decided, – the verdict is given.

“There’s always good stuff in a fellow when he is not afraid of poverty,” said Fossbrooke. “There are scores of men will rough it for a sporting tour on the Prairies or a three months’ lion-shooting on the Gaboon; but let me see the fellow bred to affluence and accustomed to luxury, who will relinquish both, and address himself to the hard work of life rather than give up the affection of a girl he loves. That’s the man for me.”

“I have great trust in him,” said Lendrick, thoughtfully.

“All the Bench has pronounced but one,” cried the Chief. “What says our brother Haire?”

“I ‘m no great judge of men. I ‘m no great judge of anything,” muttered Haire; “but I don’t think one need be a sphinx to read that he is a right good fellow, and worthy of the dearest girl in Christendom.”

“Well summed up, sir; and now call in the prisoner.”

Fossbrooke slipped from the room, but was speedily back again. “His sentence has been already pronounced outside, my Lord, and he only begs for a speedy execution.”

“It is always more merciful,” said the Chief, with mock solemnity; “but could we not have Tom over here? I want to have you all around me.”

“I ‘ll telegraph to him to come,” said Fossbrooke. “I was thinking of it all the morning.”

About three weeks after this, Chief Baron Lendrick opened the Commission at Limerick, and received from the grand jury of the county a most complimentary address on his reappearance upon the Bench, to which he made a suitable and dignified reply. Even the newspapers which had so often censured the tenacity with which he held to office, and inveighed against the spectacle of an old and feeble man in the discharge of laborious and severe duties, were now obliged to own that his speech was vigorous and eloquent; and though allusion had been faintly made in the address to the high honor to which the Crown had desired to advance him and the splendid reward which was placed within his reach, yet, with a marked delicacy, had he forborne from any reference to this passage other than his thankfulness at being so far restored to health that he could come back again to those functions, the discharge of which formed the pride and the happiness of his life.

“Never,” said the journal which was once his most bitter opponent, “has the Chief Baron exhibited his unquestionable powers of thought and expression more favorably than on this occasion. There were no artifices of rhetoric, no tricks of phrase, none of those conceits by which so often he used to mar the wisdom of his very finest displays; he was natural for once, and they who listened to him might well have regretted that it was not in this mood he had always spoken. Si sic omnia, – and the press had never registered his defects nor railed at his vanities.

“The celebrated Sir Brook Fossbrooke, so notorious in the palmy days of the Regency, sat on the Bench beside his Lordship, and received a very flattering share of the cheers which greeted the party as they drove away to Killaloe, to be present at the wedding of Miss Lendrick, which takes place to-morrow.”

Much-valued reader, has it ever occurred to you, towards the close of a long, possibly not very interesting discourse, to experience a sort of irreverent impatience when the preacher, appearing to take what rowing men call “second wind,” starts off afresh, and seems to threaten you with fully the equal of what he has already given? At such a moment it is far from unlikely that all the best teachings of that sermon are not producing upon you their full effect of edification, and that, even as you sat, you meditated ignoble thoughts of stealing away.

I am far from desiring to expose either you or myself to this painful position. I want to part good friends with you; and if there may have been anything in my discourse worth carrying away, I would not willingly associate it with weariness at the last. And yet I am very loath to say good-bye. Authors are, par excellence, button-holders, and they cannot relinquish their grasp on the victim whose lapel they have caught. Now I would like to tell you of that wedding at the Swan’s Nest. You ‘d read it if in the “Morning Post,” but I’m afraid you’d skip it from me. I ‘d like to recount the events of that breakfast, the present Sir Brook made the bride, and the charming little speech with which the Chief proposed her health. I ‘d like to describe to you the uproar and joyous confusion when Tom, whose costume bore little trace of a wedding garment, fought his way through the servants into the breakfast-room.

And I ‘d like to grow moral and descriptive, and a bit pathetic perhaps, over the parting between Lucy and her father; and, last of all, I ‘d like to add a few words about him who gives his name to this story, and tell how he set off once more on his wanderings, no one well knowing whither bent, but how, on reaching Boulogne, he saw from the steamer’s deck, as he landed, the portly figure of Lady Lendrick walking beside her beautiful daughter-in-law, Sewell bringing up the rear, with a little child holding his hand on either side, – a sweet picture, combining, to Boulogne appreciation, the united charm of fashion, beauty, and domestic felicity; and finally, how, stealing by back streets to the hotel where these people stopped, he deposited to their address a somewhat weighty packet, which made them all very happy, or at least very merry, that evening as they opened it and induced Sewell to order a bottle of Cliquot, if not, as he said, “to drink the old buck’s health,” at least to wish him many returns of the same good dispositions of that morning.

If, however, you are disposed to accept the will for the deed, I need say no more. They who have deserved some share of happiness in this tale are likely to have it. They who have little merited will have to meet a world which, neither over cruel nor over generous, has a rough justice that generally gives people their deserts.

THE END.