CHAPTER III IN TOUCH WITH THE LAW
The party was not a large one only twelve and it was entirely legal in character. Besides host and hostess there were three couples two barrister couples and one solicitor couple. One of the couples brought a daughter, who fell to Arthur's lot. Arthur got on very well with his girl, who was fortunately an enthusiast about lawn-tennis; she interested without absorbing him; he was able to be polite without ceasing to watch the two people who really arrested his attention, his hostess and most strangely, most wonderfully! Mr. Justice Lance. For at half-past eight the old Judge, by his arrival, completed the party.
A catalogue of Mrs. Norton Ward's personal attractions would sound commonplace enough. She had small features, was fair, rather pretty, rather pale, and rather short; there seemed no more to say. But she possessed a gracious candour of manner, an extreme friendliness and simplicity, a ready merriment, and together with these a complete freedom from self-consciousness. Somehow she struck Arthur as a highly refined, feminised, etherealised counterpart of Joe Halliday they were both such good human creatures, so superlatively free from 'nonsense' of all sorts. He took to her immensely from the first moment and hoped very much that she would talk to him a little after dinner. He felt sure that he could get on with her; she did not alarm or puzzle him; he knew that he had "got her right."
When Norton Ward moved, according to ritual, into his wife's vacant place beside Mr. Justice Lance, he beckoned to Arthur to come and sit on the Judge's other side and introduced him. "You just missed the pleasure of hearing his maiden argument the other morning, Judge," he added, laughing slyly at Arthur, who had not got over the surprise of encountering Lance, j., as a private and harmless individual.
"Ah, I remember a case of yours! But O'Sullivan wouldn't give Mr. Lisle a chance!"
He spoke in the same soft, rather weary voice that he had used in court; with his sparse white hair he looked older than when he was in his wig;
he was very carefully dressed, and his thin fine hands wore a couple of rather ornate rings. He had keen blue eyes and a large well-shaped nose.
"I don't know that Lisle was altogether sorry! The first time! Even you remember the feeling, I dare say?"
"Nervous? Was that it, Mr. Lisle?" He smiled faintly. "You must remember that we're much inured to imperfection." He looked on the young man with a pleasant indulgence, and, at the same time, a certain attention.
"You always remember our frailty, but there are others!" said the host.
"Ah, ah! I sat with my Brother Pretyman, so I did! Perhaps he does forget sometimes that one side must be wrong. Hence the unpopularity of litigation, by the way."
Arthur was gaining his ease; the friendliness of both his companions helped him; towards the Judge he was particularly drawn; he felt that he would be all right before Lance, j., in future if only Pretyman, j., were elsewhere! But, alas, a question was enough to plunge him back into trouble. Norton Ward had turned to talk to his other neighbour, but Sir Christopher Lance spoke to him again.
"Are you any relation to Godfrey Lisle? Lisle of Hilsey, you know."
"Yes, Sir Christopher, I'm I'm a distant cousin."
"Well, I thought you had something of the family look. I've not had the pleasure of seeing you at his house in town, I mean I haven't been to Hilsey lately."
"I I've never been there," Arthur stammered. He was blushing very red. Here he was, up against this terrible business of the Godfrey Lisles again and just as he had begun to get along so nicely!
His confusion, nay, his distress, could not escape the Judge. "I hope I haven't made a faux pas , Mr. Lisle? No quarrel, or anything of that sort, I hope?"
"No, sir, but I don't know them. I haven't called yet," Arthur blurted out; he seemed to himself to be always having to blurt it out.
Sir Christopher's eyes twinkled, as, following the host's example, he rose from the table.
"If I were you, I should. You don't know what you're missing."
Upstairs Mrs. Norton Ward was better than Arthur's hopes. She showed him at once that she meant to talk to him and that she expected to like doing it.
"I'm always friends with everybody in Frank's chambers," she said, as she made him sit by her. "I consider them all part of the family, and all the glory they win belongs to the family; so you must make haste and win glory, if you can, for us!"
"I'm afraid I can't win glory," laughed Arthur. "At least it doesn't look like it at the Bar."
"Oh, win it anyhow we're not particular how law, politics, literature, what you like! Why, Milton Longworth was Frank's pupil once for a month! He did no work and got tipsy, but he's a great poet now well, isn't he? and we're just as proud as if he'd become Attorney-General."
"Or well at all events, a County Court Judge!" Arthur suggested.
"So just you do it somehow, Mr. Lisle, won't you?"