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.
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 neighbourhood of russell square only two or three years before that period. on his marriage he had located himself in a small house in keppel street, and had there remained 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 hard before that success had come to him, and during the earliest years of his married life had found the work of keeping the wolf from the door to be almost more than enough for his energies.
mr. furnival practised at the common law bar, and early in life had attached himself to the home circuit. i cannot 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 writer,—as 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' seventeen volumes in calf. he had worked for the booksellers, and for the newspapers, and for the attorneys,—always working, however, with reference to the law; and though he had worked for 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 sympathising 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 labours. 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. in 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 extremely lucrative by gentlemen leading at the 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 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 unequalled 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 honourable 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 talents to the browbeating of witnesses,—greatly 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 recognised rules of hymen. indeed 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 recognised 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 horsehair wigs are held in estimation.
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 scrutinised his appearance critically might have said that it was in some respects pretentious; but the ordinary jurymen of this country are not critical scrutinisers 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.
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 sometimes found herself not quite so happy as she had been when watching beside him in the days of their poverty.
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 than this,—much worse behind. he, who in the heyday of his youth would spend night after night poring over his books, copying out reports, and never asking to see a female habiliment brighter or more attractive than his wife's sunday gown, he, at the age of fifty-five, was now running after strange goddesses! the member for the essex marshes, in these his latter days, was obtaining for himself among other successes the character of a lothario; and mrs. furnival, sitting at home in her genteel drawing-room near cavendish square, would remember with regret the small dingy parlour in keppel street.
mrs. furnival in discussing her grievances would attribute them mainly to port wine. in his early days mr. furnival had been essentially an abstemious man. young men who work fifteen hours a day must be so. but now he had a strong opinion about certain portuguese vintages, was convinced that there was no port wine in london equal to the contents of his own bin, saving always a certain green cork appertaining to his own club, which was to be extracted at the rate of thirty shillings a cork. and mrs. furnival attributed to these latter studies not only a certain purple hue which was suffusing his nose and cheeks, but also that unevenness of character and those supposed domestic improprieties to which allusion has been made. it may, however, be as well to explain that mrs. ball, the old family cook and housekeeper, who had ascended with the furnivals in the world, opined that made-dishes did the mischief. he dined out too often, and was a deal too particular about his dinner when he dined at home. if providence would see fit to visit him with a sharp 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 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 general comeliness might be more free from all taint 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 vigour,—to mrs. furnival's great sorrow and disturbance.
mrs. furnival herself was a stout, solid woman, sensible on most points, but better adapted, perhaps, to the life in keppel street than that to which she had now been promoted. as kitty blacker she had possessed feminine charms which would have been famous had they been better known. mr. furnival had fetched her from farther east—from the region of great ormond street and the neighbourhood of southampton buildings. her cherry cheeks, and her round eye, and her full bust, and her fresh lip, had conquered the hard-tasked lawyer; and so they 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 off there; nor will i say that her lip had lost its freshness. but the bloom of her charms had passed away, and she was now a solid, stout, motherly woman, not bright in converse, but by no means deficient in mother-wit, recognizing well the duties which she owed to others, but recognizing equally well those which others owed to her. all the charms of her youth—had they not been given to him, and also all her solicitude, all her anxious fighting with the hard world? when they had been poor together, had she not patched and turned and twisted, sitting silently by his side into the long nights, because she would not ask him for the price of a new dress? and yet now, now that they were rich—? mrs. furnival, when she put such questions within her own mind, could hardly answer this latter one with patience. others might be afraid of the great mr. furnival in his wig and gown; others might be struck dumb by his power of eye and mouth; but she, she, the wife of his bosom, she could catch him without his armour. 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.
