Augustus Staveley, who could be very prudent for his friend, declared that marriage would set him right. If Felix would marry he would quietly slip his neck into the collar and work along with the team, as useful a horse as ever was put at the wheel of a coach. But Felix did not seem inclined to marry. He had notions about that also, and was believed by one or two who knew him intimately to cherish an insane affection for some unknown damsel, whose parentage, education, and future were not likely to assist his views in the outer world. Some said that he was educating this damsel for his wife—moulding her, so that she might be made fit to suit his taste; but Augustus, though he knew the secret of all this, was of opinion that it would come right at last. “He’ll meet some girl in the world with a hatful of money, a pretty face, and a sharp tongue; then he’ll bestow his moulded bride on a neighbouring baker with two hundred pounds for her fortune;—and everybody will be happy.”
Felix Graham was by no means a handsome man. He was tall and thin, and his face had been slightly marked with the smallpox. He stooped in his gait as he walked, and was often awkward with his hands and legs. But he was full of enthusiasm, indomitable, as far as pluck would make him so, in contests of all kinds, and when he talked on subjects which were near his heart there was a radiance about him which certainly might win the love of the pretty girl with the sharp tongue and the hatful of money. Staveley, who really loved him, had already selected the prize, and she was no other than our friend, Sophia Furnival. The sharp tongue and the pretty face and the hatful of money would all be there; but then Sophia Furnival was a girl who might perhaps expect in return for these things more than an ugly face which could occasionally become radiant with enthusiasm.
The two men had got away from the thickness of the Birmingham smoke, and were seated on the top rung of a gate leading into a stubble field. So far they had gone with mutual consent, but further than this Staveley refused to go. He was seated with a cigar in his mouth. Graham also was smoking, but he was accommodated with a short pipe.
“A walk before breakfast is all very well,” said Staveley, “but I am not going on a pilgrimage. We are four miles from the inn this minute.”
“And for your energies that is a good deal. Only think that you should have been doing anything for two hours before you begin to feed.”
“I wonder why matutinal labour should always be considered as so meritorious. Merely, I take it, because it is disagreeable.”
“It proves that the man can make an effort.”
“Every prig who wishes to have it believed that he does more than his neighbours either burns the midnight lamp or gets up at four in the morning. Good wholesome work between breakfast and dinner never seems to count for anything.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“Yes; I am trying now, here at Birmingham.”
“Not you.”
“That’s so like you, Graham. You don’t believe that anybody is attending to what is going on except yourself. I mean today to take in the whole theory of Italian jurisprudence.”
“I have no doubt that you may do so with advantage. I do not suppose that it is very good, but it must at any rate be better than our own. Come, let us go back to the town; my pipe is finished.”
“Fill another, there’s a good fellow. I can’t afford to throw away my cigar, and I hate walking and smoking. You mean to assert that our whole system is bad, and rotten, and unjust?”
“I mean to say that I think so.”
“And yet we consider ourselves the greatest people in the world—or at any rate the honestest.”
“I think we are; but laws and their management have nothing to do with making people honest. Good laws won’t make people honest, nor bad laws dishonest.”
“But a people who are dishonest in one trade will probably be dishonest in others. Now, you go so far as to say that all English lawyers are rogues.”
“I have never said so. I believe your father to be as honest a man as ever breathed.”
“Thank you, sir,” and Staveley lifted his hat.
“And I would fain hope that I am an honest man myself.”
“Ah, but you don’t make money by it.”
“What I do mean is this, that from our love of precedent and ceremony and old usages, we have retained a system which contains many of the barbarities of the feudal times, and also many of its lies. We try our culprit as we did in the old days of the ordeal. If luck will carry him through the hot ploughshares, we let him escape though we know him to be guilty. We give him the advantage of every technicality, and teach him to lie in his own defence, if nature has not sufficiently so taught him already.”
“You mean as to his plea of not guilty.”
“No, I don’t; that is little or nothing. We ask him whether or no he confesses his guilt in a foolish way, tending to induce him to deny it; but that is not much. Guilt seldom will confess as long as a chance remains. But we teach him to lie, or rather we lie for him during the whole ceremony of his trial. We think it merciful to give him chances of escape, and hunt him as we do a fox, in obedience to certain laws framed for his protection.”
“And should he have no protection?”
“None
