Chapter III: Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee

From the earliest period of which I can remember, I had fixed upon pursuing the career of a soldier. Notwithstanding the grim specimens I had seen of it, during my father's service in the States, I deemed it a life of glitter, change, and jollity--a chain of pleasures--a long and romantic panorama. I saw only scarlet and feathers, gold lace, the glitter of epaulettes and the flash of steel, with music and sunshine; and from amid this chaos came forth those airy castles and brilliant visions, which the mind of every imaginative and impulsive boy can fashion so readily--and too readily at times for his own peace; as such fragile creations are but ill calculated to stand the rough shock of awakening, or the stern realities of every-day life.

So it was with me. My new occupation, with its intolerable monotony, seemed a death-blow to all my hopes and romantic fancies; while the manner and bearing of Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee, were in no way calculated to reconcile me to my lot, or to enhance the value of the dog's pittance they doled out me, and a few other drudges of the quill. If, after a trial, I liked (ugh!) the law, I was to be indentured for five years, and to commence my legal studies at the college--to dive deep into "Stair's Institutes," "Dirlton's Doubts," and other light literature of a similar kind: money was to be raised to enable me pass muster; but my growing repugnance to a civil life caused many delays in making the final arrangements.

It was my misfortune to have to do with three of the worst specimens of those legal and religious charlatans who bring discredit on a profession which, for three hundred years, has shed a brilliance over Scottish literature and Scottish society. If any such, now living, recognize themselves in my delineation, the resemblance is entirely fortuitous, and they had better not boast of it.

They had, I have said, a vast amount of "sharp practice," and law proved a dear commodity to those who dealt with them.

The first partner was a wealthy idler, who gave himself insufferable airs, and affected to be "a man about town;" but then he brought business to the firm, and gave it an air of respectability; the second was a legal bully, miserly and underbred, longheaded and narrow-hearted; for Mr. Quirky had been educated in one of the many charitable institutions with which the city abounds, and had come forth into the world a master in the science of subtlety, and without an emotion of sympathy for anything human or divine.

Macfarisee was one of the most amusing of rogues. With the vanity of the first and the subtlety of the second, he covered his many failings by a bland aspect of meek sanctity, and that entire garb of accurate blackcloth which, with a long visage and a white necktie, go far to impose upon the simple in Scotland.

He was an elder, and reputed an upright pillar of the Church, and on each successive Sunday might be seen, with hands meekly folded, standing behind the brass platter wherein the offerings of the charitable were dropped. He never hid his holy candle under a bushel, but subscribed only to charities which published lists of the donors; he outwardly and vehemently eschewed strong waters, laughter, gaiety, the world, the flesh, and the devil; and yet, withal, had privately the reputation of being on the best possible terms with the latter.

He presided at all meetings for the conversion of Jews, Sepoys, and Ojibbeways; he inveighed against Sunday travelling, and the laxity of the present age; he harangued most feelingly on the benefit that must accrue from the moral, social, intellectual, and religious improvement of Caffres and Hottentots; while his unfortunate _employés_ were reduced to the veriest of all white slavery, and, toiling fourteen hours out of the four-and-twenty, wrote their eyes blind and dim, during the dreary watches of many a winter night, long after all were hushed in sleep, and the nightly psalms and prayers, with which (in the way of business) he edified the neighbourhood, were ended. On one hand he patronized Bible Societies, and gave flannels to the poor; on the other, he had ungodly yearnings towards the possessions of the rich, whom he spoiled, to use his own phraseology, "even as the Egyptians were spoiled by the Jews of old;" for, as a conveyancer of other people's property into his own breeches pocket, Macfarisee had few equals in Scotland. He was one of a knot of small provincial notorities, who hovered about the Lord Advocate and the city M.P.'s, who got up public dinners and testimonials for their own "glorification," for the purpose of hearing themselves speak, and getting their otherwise very obscure names into the local journals.

Harpy, our first partner, was suave and gentlemanly in manner; thus, his chief occupation was to soothe, flatter, or, as he phrased it, "to talk over" those clients whom his compatriots had offended by insolence, or disgusted by hypocrisy, and who threatened to transfer their business and their papers elsewhere--_i.e._ to go out of the frying-pan into the fire.

Behold me, then, commencing life on the summit of a three-legged stool, in a dreary room, which overlooked a gloomy back-court, abandoned to weeds and a few broken bottles, and where nought living was seen, save an amatory cat or so prowling along the wall. I was intrenched among green boxes and bundles of musty, dusty papers, which had travelled to and fro for years, from the said dreary office to the various courts of law, increasing in bulk and volume on their travels, until each _process_--each fatal heir-loom--at last smothered its proprietor, the fool or knave, who, bitten by the _amor litigandi_ of the modern Scots, and spurred on by a faithless and dishonest "man of business," or lost in a sea of duplicates and rejoinders--borrowing up of processes and paying down fees; fighting before Lords Ordinary and extraordinary--bewildered amid the difficulties, endless repetitions and absurd amplifications, doubts, delays, and expenses of the legal maelstrom into which Macfarisee had lured him, found the "record closed," when his last shilling had gone.

To me, the atmosphere in which I found myself was stifling. It was redolent of wax, red-tape, law-calf, and old parchment; and there was around me an incessant jargon about decrees and decisions, quirks, quibbles, statutes of limitation, judgments by default, writs of error and insolvency, acts of _cessio bonorum_, charges of caption and horning, cases sent through outer and inner houses to avizandum and the devil; and, save a hard-working gentlemanly lad, who died a Lord of Council and Session, and, than whom, no better ever sat upon the Scottish bench, my compeers were selfish, vulgar, and obnoxious to me, as their conversation consisted chiefly of pot-house wit, second-hand jokes, and empty nothings. Save alcohol, all spirit had long since died out of them, and at the voice of Macfarisee, they trembled as if under galvanism. Nothing but my repugnance for them, and daily irritation at the absurd assumption of Harpy and the hypocrisy of Macfarisee, prevented me from sinking into a state of mental atrophy, though exceedingly mercurial in temperament and itinerant in habit.

Hard work, however distasteful to a hero in embryo, I could have endured with patience; but the bearing of the three parvenus whom I served, and who were cold, thankless, consequential as bashaws, and rude at times even to the verge of brutality, soured my temper and maddened my fiery spirit.

On the summit of that legal tripod, the three-legged stool already referred to, I passed the greater portion of the year 1791.

There are times now when I think I viewed the poor ephemeræ, whose drudge I deemed myself, through a false medium; as I considered all who stood between me and the army as the natural enemies of mankind; and, doubtless too often, when I should have been drawing a deed or engrossing an account, I was drawing a phantom sword, engrossed in the pages of a novel, or following the merry drums, the glittering accoutrements, and flaunting cockades of a recruiting party. In short, I believe the reader will already perceive that it was not in human power to make a lawyer out of such quicksilver material as Master Oliver Ellis.

It was towards the close of the year already named, that a change came over the monotonous tenor of my way; and, like many other heroes who have flourished since the days of Mark Antony, I must needs fall in love. The way in which this event--so important in such a narrative as mine--came about was as follows.

One afternoon, when I was indulging in some of my usual day dreams, after reading the gazette which detailed the great treaty by which we prostrated the power of the valiant Tippo Saib, I was roused by the harsh and authoritative voice of Mr. Quirky, commanding me to accompany him and Macfarisee on business a few miles from town, To say _whither_, or what about, would have been too great a condescension in men of their vast consequence; so I snatched my hat gladly (anything active was a change from the monotony of a desk at which I worked like a negro on monkey's allowance), and, after receiving into my custody a legal green bag, filled with papers, on a hackney-coach being called, we drove out of town.

The month was October, and the woods wore the sombre hues of autumn. The wild rose still bloomed in the wayside hedges; the house-martin, the redwing, and the swallow, were still twittering about in search of the red berries, the haw, the hip, the sloe, and the elder, which now furnished a feast for them all. We whirled on amid copsewood and long lines of trees, that bordered or sheltered the bare fields, and exhibited on their dropping leaves all shades of russet, yellow, amber, dark-green, and red. The time was evening, and the dewy gossamer spread its silver web, laden with dew, from tree to tree; and as those persons whom I accompanied never deigned to address me, but conversed together in whispers, I had nothing to draw my attention from the objects visible on each side of the way, through the hackney-coach glasses, after the dusk enabled me to lay aside a canting tract, which Macfarisee had solemnly put into my hand when we started, and which, in politeness rather than hypocrisy, I had been pretending to peruse for some time.

At last we turned into an avenue of fine sycamores, through the waving branches of which the moonlight fell in flaky gleams, and under which were two lines of the flowering arbutus and monthly rose in full bloom. The hoofs and wheels scattered wide the rustling autumn leaves that lay thick in the old avenue, and we speedily drew up on the gravel that lay before the portico of a handsome mansion.