by Cyril Hare
Your lordship’s obedient servants
FARADAY, FOTHERGILL, CRISP & CO.
Lady Barber was some time in commenting on the letter. It was as if she were debating what attitude to take up towards her husband’s latest misdemeanour. When she spoke, it was evident that she had decided upon that of one more in sorrow than in anger.
“Really, William, you are incorrigible!” she said. “You were driving the car, I suppose?”
“Yes, I was.”
“And I suppose you were entirely to blame?”
“Well, as to that——”
“Of course you were!” she interrupted impatiently. “I’ve told you often enough that you are not fit to drive at night. It really is lamentable for anybody in your position. Thank Heaven, your name hasn’t got into the papers about it. I saw a paragraph to say that Sebald-Smith had been knocked down by a car, but of course I never associated it with you. You never go to concerts, I know, but this escapade of yours is going to make a nasty hole in the musical life of London, whenever that revives again. Sebald-Smith! He’s the sort of man who insures his hands for thousands of pounds.”
At this reference to insurance the Judge winced.
“Don’t you think we had better discuss this after dinner?” he said.
“I don’t see that there is anything to discuss,” said his wife, sweeping out of the room in front of him, with glorious disregard of circuit convention.
*
Derek, who had come down to dinner eager to resume the sparkling conversation that he had enjoyed so much at tea, had to confess himself by the end of the evening somewhat disappointed. The fault, so far as he could see, lay with the Judge. Not only had he nothing to say for himself, but his silence succeeded in throwing a gloom over the whole table. Her ladyship, indeed, seemed to be as vivacious as usual. If anything, her colour was a trifle higher, her eyes even brighter than before. But on this occasion her talkativeness seemed to be the result of a deliberate effort and not the delightfully natural ebullience that had so charmed him. Moreover, he observed that she was making no attempt to draw her husband into the conversation. She addressed herself exclusively to the Marshal and for much of the time appeared to be talking at random, with her mind elsewhere. Once or twice he suspected her of talking at the silent figure on the other side of the table. Altogether it was an uncomfortable meal. Derek, oppressed with the uneasy feeling that something was “up”, found himself relapsing into tongue-tied awkwardness, and was thoroughly glad when Savage placed the port on the table and Lady Barber left the room.
The Judge drank three glasses of port. As he filled each glass, he looked towards Derek and made as though he were about to say something of importance. Each time, he balked at the fence and ended by making some trivial observation about the work of the forthcoming assize. Finally, as though surrendering to the inevitable, he threw his napkin on the table, observed, “Well, I suppose we had better join my wife,” and made for the door.
In the drawing-room, the atmosphere was even more oppressive than at table. There were long periods of silence, broken only by the vicious click of her ladyship’s knitting needles. She appeared to be sulky, and her husband to be nervously awaiting something to happen. For all his inexperience, it was not difficult for Derek to guess what that something was. He was waiting to be alone with his wife, and he was not looking forward with any pleasure to the experience. Derek took the hint, though he would have been hard put to it to say exactly how the hint had been conveyed. Pleading the necessity of writing his long-promised letter home, he left the drawing-room as early as he could with decency.
As the door closed behind him, Lady Barber looked up from her knitting and remarked:
“That’s a nice boy. Was he with you in the car the other night?”
“Yes, he was,” said the Judge, snatching eagerly at the opportunity thus presented to him. “And while we are on that subject, there were one or two matters I wanted to discuss with you, Hilda.”
“If he was with you, and knows all about it,” went on her ladyship, still pursuing her own line of thought, “I don’t see why you had to send him out of the room beforehand.”
“I did nothing of the sort, so far as I am aware.”
“My dear, I never saw anything done more blatantly in my life. However, that’s your affair and not mine. As I said before dinner, I don’t see that there is anything to discuss about this business. Goodness knows, I’m the last person to wish to make a mountain out of this rather unfortunate little molehill.”
The Judge remained silent, and she went on:
“If you give me the letter, I’ll deal with it for you. There’s no earthly reason why you should bother yourself about it, and you know how unpractical you always are about your own affairs. You’ve sent in your claim to the insurance people, I suppose? It’s the Empyrean, isn’t it?”
Still silence.
“Isn’t it?”
The Judge cleared his throat.
“That”, he croaked, “was the matter I wanted to discuss with you.”
Nobody could say that Lady Barber was not quick in the uptake. She laid down her knitting, opened her fine eyes very wide, and sat up straight in her armchair.
“William!” she said in an ominously quiet voice, “are you trying to tell me that you are not insured at all?”
“I—I’m afraid that that is the fact, Hilda.”
There was a silence during which it was only too apparent that Lady Barber was several times on the point of saying something and thought better of it each time. Finally she rose to her feet, moved to the fireplace, took a cigarette from the mantelpiece, lighted it, and stood for a moment or two with her back to her husband, looking down into the fire. When she turned round he had begun to speak but she took no notice.
“Have you considered,” she asked, “exactly what this is likely to mean to you—to us?”
“Naturally,” said the Judge in a somewhat peevish tone, “I have considered the matter in all its aspects. But I must admit that what you told me before dinner does put rather a different complexion on the case. I mean, the fact that this fellow is a pianist.”
“Sebald-Smith!” exclaimed her ladyship, allowing her feelings to break through her self-control for the first time. “Why if you must run somebody down with a motor-car you should go and select Sebald-Smith, of all people——”
“It is unfortunate,” Barber admitted. “It has—quite frankly—rather upset my calculations as to how—that is——”
“It means that he will want about ten times as much in the way of damages as any ordinary person would,” his wife cut in.
“Precisely. I am afraid his demands for an injured finger may be somewhat exorbitant.”
Neither spoke for a time, and then Lady Barber said, somewhat pointlessly:
“I cannot understand how you came to be so foolish, William!”
The Judge wisely said nothing, and her ladyship, realizing perhaps that her remark was rather beneath her usual level, tried again.
“I suppose the accident was your fault?” she said. “You couldn’t plead contributory negligence, by any chance?”
“My dear Hilda, we need hardly consider that aspect of the case. In my position, I can’t afford to fight it. That is obvious. I shall have to settle on the best terms I can.”
“But, William, this may ruin us!”
“We should be very much more thoroughly ruined if by reason of this matter being litigated I had to resign my appointment.”
“Resign!”
“Well, Hilda, we must face facts.”
There was another rather bleak silence before Lady Barber spoke again.
“William, just how much money have you in the world, apart from your salary?” she asked.
“My dear, we went into that subject very fully only a month or two ago.”
“I know we did, but then it was only a question of paying a few wretched bills of mine. This is serious.”
The Jud
ge unexpectedly uttered a loud, creaking laugh.
“You imagined that I was painting things blacker than they really were for your benefit, I suppose,” he said. “That in fact I had a few thousands tucked away which I had never told you about?”
“Of course,” replied her ladyship simply. “It seemed only common sense.”
“Common sense or not, I was perfectly honest with you. The position is now exactly as I explained it to you then—as, indeed, I have explained it at intervals throughout our married life. For many years past we have been spending practically every penny I have earned.” There was a slight emphasis on the contrasted pronouns which was not lost on his hearer. “Apart from my modest insurance policy there is nothing to fall back on. Apart from my still more modest pension—if I am permitted to earn it—there is nothing to look forward to. If anything were to happen to me——”
“Thank you, I have heard that bit before,” said Lady Barber hastily. “The question is, where are you going to find the ten thousand pounds or so which Sebald-Smith will certainly expect for his finger?”
The Judge gulped. At the worst, he had not envisaged such a sum as this. It was on the tip of his tongue to remind his wife that she knew less about awarding damages than he did, but he remembered in time that she certainly knew a great deal more than he about the earning capacities of pianists.
“We shall have to cut down our scale of expenditure very drastically, I am afraid,” he said.
Her ladyship looked at her elegant reflection in the glass over the mantelpiece and made a face. “It’s a grim prospect,” she remarked. Then, pulling herself together, she went on in a crisp, practical manner: “Well! Faraday’s letter will have to be answered, I suppose, and it had better be done professionally. Shall I write to Michael and ask him to do it on your behalf? You will want him to act for you, I suppose?”
“I suppose so,” said the Judge without enthusiasm. He did not greatly care for his brother-in-law, but he was unquestionably a competent solicitor.
“I shall tell him just to acknowledge the letter formally, and then when I can find time I’ll go up to London and explain the whole thing to him,” she went on. “The longer we can keep Sebald-Smith hanging about, the better. People like him haven’t any staying-power. After a month or two he’ll be much more reasonable in his ideas than he is now, I’m sure. Besides”—she smiled a delightful unexpected smile—“it will give us time to start saving.”
*
Shortly afterwards Judge and Lady went to bed, both in somewhat better temper than had seemed probable half an hour before. Hilda’s active mind, though fully aware of the extent of the disaster that loomed over them, was almost happy in the prospect of employment in urgent practical affairs. As for the Judge, he was conscious of the relief which he always felt whenever, as so often happened, he allowed some personal problem of his own to be taken into his wife’s competent hands. He felt too the virtuous pleasure which comes from confession, now that he had made a clean breast of his escapade. This latter feeling, however, was not unalloyed. It occurred to him, as he made his way upstairs, that so far he had said nothing to his wife about the threatening letters which had reached him at Markhampton. With the unquenchable optimism that always marked his behaviour in these matters, he decided that he would save trouble by saying nothing to her about the question. Barber’s habit of concealing things from his wife was as instinctive as that of the dog who hides bones under a sofa cushion, and about as effective.
Chapter 6
CIVIL ACTION
Southington assizes took their normal course. The formalities of the opening day were, with a few local variations, the formalities of Markhampton. Derek, who already felt himself to be an old hand at the game, performed his part in the ceremonies with what he felt to be the proper blend of dignity and detachment. The presence of Lady Barber made little or no difference to the proceedings, he observed. She kept herself well in the background and so far as the spectators were concerned was merely an inconspicuous black-clothed figure in a back pew at the church or in a remote corner of the bench. On the second day of the assize, indeed, she did not even appear in court. Crime, she declared, bored her. She had read the depositions and there was nothing in any of the cases of the faintest legal interest. On the other hand, in the civil list that came after there were several actions which she intended to follow. One in particular, which raised for decision for the first time an obscure question of construction in a new Act of Parliament, promised to be fascinating. Hearing her utter this opinion in decided tones at dinner on the second evening in lodgings, Derek understood how the nickname “Father William” came to be attached to the Judge.
Hilda Barber, in fact, was that rare being, a woman with a real talent for law. She had been, she told Derek, called to the Bar, but had never practised. The latter statement was true in the sense that like many other women barristers she had never succeeded in acquiring a practice. Without any exceptional influence behind her she had been unable to overcome the prejudice which has kept the Bar an essentially masculine profession. But for two years she had haunted the Temple, listened to every case of importance—as distinct from cases of mere notoriety—and studied assiduously in the library of her Inn. During this period she read as a pupil in the chambers of William Barber, then at the height of his practice as a junior. It was not long after her term of pupilage expired that Barber celebrated a double event by taking silk and marrying within the same month. It was currently rumoured that both of these important steps had been taken on the initiative of the lady. Certainly, from the professional point of view, he had no cause to regret either of them.
After her marriage, Hilda Barber was seen no more in the Temple. The snowy wig and still glossy gown were put away, monuments to unrealized ambition. Thenceforward she devoted herself to the twin objects of fostering her husband’s career and spending gracefully his steadily increasing earnings. It would be hard to say in which she was the more successful. She brought to Barber the social contacts which he had hitherto lacked and which he needed to put the seal upon his professional reputation. Solicitors who had fought shy of the learned Miss Hilda Matthewson, barrister at law, competed for invitations to the cocktail parties and dinners given by the smart Mrs. Barber. The evening papers which carried in one column the account of a speech by the “eminent K.C.” in the fashionable cause of the day, were sure to report in another that his wife had been prominent at a first night or charity ball, in a dress which would probably be more faithfully described than her husband’s argument; and each piece of publicity reacted favourably on the other.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that because she was now in a position to exercise her social talents to the full, her interest in the law had in any way diminished. Where other women in like case would have taken to charity or politics as an outlet for their superfluous energies, she remained faithful to jurisprudence. The amount of work that she did for Barber behind the scenes as a “devil” was unsuspected by anyone, except perhaps his clerk, but it was undoubtedly considerable. Barber was a man of a mental calibre that would inevitably have carried him to the bench sooner or later, but his wife was probably justified in her belief that her assistance had shortened the period by several years, while at the same time making it possible for him to cope with an enormous pressure of work which would otherwise have overwhelmed him.
Hilda was not unnaturally pleased when Barber K.G. was in due course transformed into Mr. Justice Barber. The elevation, however, was not without its drawbacks. Particularly, she discovered, as many have done before her, that a judicial salary is a poor substitute for the income of a leader in the first flight of his profession. It was agreeable to be announced at parties as “Lady Barber”, but slightly less so to be compelled to greet her hostess in a frock that had already done duty for half a season. The change had another consequence which she had not foreseen, indeed, it is probable that she never became fully aware of it. Judges, if they do not exactly li
ve in the fierce white light that beats upon a throne, are public figures, and within a limited circle there is very little about their lives that fails to become public property sooner or later. Hence it came about that whereas nobody was ever aware how much Barber K.C.’s opinions owed to the criticism and counsel of his wife, it was not long before quite a number of initiates were saying among themselves that Barber J.’s reserved judgments were written by her ladyship. On one occasion, when one of these was the subject of an appeal, the sotto voce question of one Lord Justice to his brother, “Is this one of Hilda’s?” had unluckily reached some quick ears in counsels’ seats. Fortunately for her peace of mind, this episode was not reported to her. She had learned, however, of her husband’s nickname and magnanimously professed to be mildly amused at it. So far as the public at large was concerned, however, she continued to remain well in the background and, except that she was perhaps a shade too decorative, played the role of Judge’s wife to perfection.
*
Derek was quick to observe that Lady Barber’s submissiveness in public did not extend to her private life. She soon took charge of the domestic arrangements in the Lodgings, harried Mrs. Square in a manner to which that autocratic lady was utterly unaccustomed, criticized Greene for lack of proper attention to the Marshal’s top hat, trod the submissive Savage under her feet, and had more than one passage at arms with Beamish himself. Dislike between her ladyship and the clerk was mutual. Beamish had not served the Judge prior to his appointment. Barber’s former clerk had, much to his master’s annoyance, declined to follow him to the bench, preferring to continue to take his chance in the Temple. The new Judge had therefore to content himself with the best man he could find at short notice. Unfortunately his choice had not commended itself to Hilda, and during the period that had since elapsed she had succeeded in making her opinion only too plain.