第9章
MR ABEL WHARTON Q.C.
Lopez was not a man to let grass grow under his feet when he had anything to do.When he was tired of walking backwards and forwards over the same bit of pavement, subject all the while to a cold east wind, he went home and thought of the same matter while he lay in bed.Even were he to get the girl's assurances of love, without her father's consent he might find himself farther from his object than ever.Mr Wharton was a man of old fashions, who would think himself ill-used and his daughter ill-used, and who would think also that a general offence would have been committed against good social manners, if his daughter were to be asked for her hand without his previous consent.Should he absolutely refuse,--why then the battle, though it would be a desperate battle, might perhaps be fought with other strategy;but, giving to the matter his best consideration, Lopez thought it expedient to go at once to the father.In doing this he would have no silly tremors.Whatever he might feel in speaking to the girl, he had sufficient self-confidence to be able to ask the father, if not with assurance, at any rate without trepidation.
It was, he thought, probable that the father, at the first attack, would neither altogether accede, or altogether refuse.
The disposition of the man was averse to the probability of an absolute reply at the first moment.The lover imagined that it might be possible for him to take advantage of the period of doubt which would be created.
Mr Wharton was and had for a great many years been a barrister practising in the Equity Courts,--or rather in one Equity Court, for throughout a life's work, now extending to nearly fifty years, he had hardly ever gone out of the single Vice-Chancellor's Court which was much better known by Mr Wharton's name than by that of the less eminent judge who now sat there.
His had been a very peculiar, a very toilsome, but yet probably a very satisfactory life.He had begun his practice early, and had worked in a stuff gown till he was nearly sixty.At that time, he had amassed a large fortune, mainly from his profession, but partly also by the careful use of his own small patrimony and by his wife's money.Men knew that he was rich, but no one knew the extent of his wealth.When he submitted to take a silk gown, he declared among his friends that he did so as a step preparatory to his retirement.The altered method of work would not suit him at his age, nor,--as he said,--would it be profitable.He would take his silk, as a honour for his declining years, so that he might become a bencher at his Inn.But he had now been working for the last twelve or fourteen years with his silk gown, --almost as hard as in younger days, and with pecuniary results almost as serviceable; and though from month to month he declared his intention of taking no fresh briefs, and though he did now occasionally refuse work, still he was there with his mind as clear as ever, and with his body apparently as little affected by fatigue.
Mr Wharton had not married till he was forty, and his wife had now been two years dead.He had had six children,--of whom but two were now left to make a household for his old age.He had been nearly fifty years when his youngest daughter was born, and was therefore now an old father of a young child.But he was one of those men who, as in youth they are never very young, so in age are they never very old.He could still ride his cob in the park jauntily; and did so carefully every morning in his life, after an early cup of tea and before his breakfast.And he could walk home from his chambers every day, and on Sundays could to the round of the parks on foot.Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, he dined at that old law club, the Eldon, and played whist after dinner till twelve o'clock.This was the great dissipation and, I think, the chief charm of his life.In the middle of August he and his daughter usually went for a month to Wharton Hall in Hertfordshire, the seat of his cousin Sir Alured Wharton;--and this was the one duty of his life which was a burden to him.But he had been made to believe that it was essential to his health, and to his wife's, and then to his girl's, health, that he should every summer leave town for a time,--and where else was there to go? Sir Alured was a relation and a gentleman.Emily liked Wharton Hall.It was the proper thing.He hated Wharton Hall, but then he did not know any place out of London that he would not hate worse.He had once been induced to go up the Rhine; but had never repeated the experiment of foreign travel.Emily sometimes went abroad with her cousins during which periods it was supposed that the old lawyer spent a good deal of his time at the Eldon.He was a spare, thin, strongly made man, with spare light brown hair, hardly yet grizzled, with small grey whiskers, clear eyes, bushy eyebrows, with a long ugly nose, on which young barristers had been heard to declare that you might hang a small kettle, and with considerable vehemence of talk when he was opposed in argument.For, with all his well-known coolness of temper, Mr Wharton could become very hot in an argument, when the nature of the case in hand required heat.On one subject all who knew him were agreed.He was a thorough lawyer.Many doubted his eloquence, and some declared that he had known well the extent of his own powers in abstaining from seeking the higher honours of his profession; but no one doubted his law.He had once written a book,--on the mortgage of stocks in trade; but that had been in early life, and he had never since dabbled in literature.