Der Praefekt

unless other
    provision could be made for him; and then the furniture:—the most of
    that must be sold to pay Sir Abraham Haphazard for sitting up till
    twelve at night.  Mr Harding was strangely ignorant as to lawyers’
    bills; he had no idea, from twenty pounds to two thousand, as to the
    sum in which he was indebted for legal assistance.  True, he had
    called in no lawyer himself; true, he had been no consenting party to
    the employment of either Cox and Cummins, or Sir Abraham; he had never
    been consulted on such matters;—the archdeacon had managed all this
    himself, never for a moment suspecting that Mr Harding would take upon
    him to end the matter in a way of his own.  Had the lawyers’ bills
    been ten thousand pounds, Mr Harding could not have helped it; but
    he was not on that account disposed to dispute his own liability.
    The question never occurred to him; but it did occur to him that he
    had very little money at his banker’s, that he could receive nothing
    further from the hospital, and that the sale of the furniture was his
    only resource.
     
    “Not all, papa,” said Eleanor pleadingly.
     
    “Not quite all, my dear,” said he; “that is, if we can help it. We
    must have a little at Crabtree,—but it can only be a little; we
    must put a bold front on it, Nelly; it isn’t easy to come down from
    affluence to poverty.”
     
    And so they planned their future mode of life; the father taking
    comfort from the reflection that his daughter would soon be freed from
    it, and she resolving that her father would soon have in her own house
    a ready means of escape from the solitude of the Crabtree vicarage.
     
    When the archdeacon left his wife and father-in-law at the Chapter
    Coffee House to go to Messrs Cox and Cummins, he had no very defined
    idea of what he had to do when he got there.  Gentlemen when at law,
    or in any way engaged in matters requiring legal assistance, are very
    apt to go to their lawyers without much absolute necessity;—gentlemen
    when doing so, are apt to describe such attendance as quite
    compulsory, and very disagreeable.  The lawyers, on the other hand,
    do not at all see the necessity, though they quite agree as to the
    disagreeable nature of the visit;—gentlemen when so engaged are
    usually somewhat gravelled at finding nothing to say to their learned
    friends; they generally talk a little politics, a little weather, ask
    some few foolish questions about their suit, and then withdraw, having
    passed half an hour in a small dingy waiting-room, in company with
    some junior assistant-clerk, and ten minutes with the members of the
    firm; the business is then over for which the gentleman has come up
    to London, probably a distance of a hundred and fifty miles. Um
    sure he goes to the play, and dines at his friend’s club, and has a
    bachelor’s liberty and bachelor’s recreation for three or four days;
    and he could not probably plead the desire of such gratifications as
    a reason to his wife for a trip to London.
     
    Married ladies, when your husbands find they are positively obliged to
    attend their legal advisers, the nature of the duty to be performed is
    generally of this description.
     
    The archdeacon would not have dreamt of leaving London without going
    to Cox and Cummins; and yet he had nothing to say to them. Das Spiel
    was up; he plainly saw that Mr Harding in this matter was not to be
    moved; his only remaining business on this head was to pay the bill
    and have done with it; and I think it may be taken for granted,
    that whatever the cause may be that takes a gentleman to a lawyer’s
    chambers, he never goes there to pay his bill.
     
    Dr Grantly, however, in the eyes of Messrs Cox and Cummins,
    represented the spiritualities of the diocese of Barchester, as Mr
    Chadwick did the temporalities, and was, therefore, too great a man to
    undergo the half-hour in the clerk’s room.  It will not be necessary
    that we should listen to the notes of sorrow in which the archdeacon
    bewailed to Mr Cox the weakness of his father-in-law, and the end
    of all their hopes of triumph; nor need we repeat the various
    exclamations of surprise with which the mournful intelligence was
    empfangen. No tragedy occurred, though Mr Cox, a short and somewhat
    bull-necked man, was very near a fit of apoplexy when he first
    attempted to ejaculate that fatal word—resign!
     
    Over and over again did Mr Cox attempt to enforce on the archdeacon
    the propriety of urging on