Best Short Stories - [21]

‘My poor child,’ I replied, in my emotion, quite as Mr. Offord used to speak, ‘my dear fellow, leave it to me; we’ll look after you, we’ll all do something for you.’

‘Ah, if you could give me some one like him! But there ain’t two in the world,’ said Brooksmith as we parted.

He had given me his address — the place where he would be to be heard of. For a long time I had no occasion to make use of the information; for he proved indeed, on trial, a very difficult case. In a word the people who knew him and had known Mr. Offord, didn’t want to take him, and yet I couldn’t bear to try to thrust him among people who didn’t know him. I spoke to many of our old friends about him, and I found them all governed by the odd mixture of feelings of which I myself was conscious, and disposed, further, to entertain a suspicion that he was ‘spoiled,’ with which I then would have nothing to do. In plain terms a certain embarrassment, a sensible awkwardness, when they thought of it, attached to the idea of using him as a menial: they had met him so often in society. Many of them would have asked him, and did ask him, or rather did ask me to ask him, to come and see them; but a mere visiting-list was not what I wanted for him. He was too short for people who were very particular; nevertheless I heard of an opening in a diplomatic household which led me to write him a note, though I was looking much less for something grand than for something human. Five days later I heard from him. The secretary’s wife had decided, after keeping him waiting till then, that she couldn’t take a servant out of a house in which there had not been a lady. The note had a P. S.: ‘It’s a good job there wasn’t, sir, such a lady as some.’

A week later he came to see me and told me he was ‘suited’ — committed to some highly respectable people (they were something very large in the City), who lived on the Bayswater[34] side of the Park. ‘I daresay it will be rather poor, sir,’ he admitted; ‘but I’ve seen the fireworks, haven’t I, sir? — it can’t be fireworks every night. After Mansfield Street there ain’t much choice.’ There was a certain amount, however, it seemed; for the following year, going one day to call on a country cousin, a lady of a certain age who was spending a fortnight in town with some friends of her own, a family unknown to me and resident in Chester Square, the door of the house was opened, to my surprise and gratification, by Brooksmith in person. When I came out I had some conversation with him, from which I gathered that he had found the large City people too dull for endurance, and I guessed, though he didn’t say it, that he had found them vulgar as well. I don’t know what judgment he would have passed on his actual patrons if my relative had not been their friend; but under the circumstances he abstained from comment.

None was necessary, however, for before the lady in question brought her visit to a close they honoured me with an invitation to dinner, which I accepted. There was a largeish party on the occasion, but I confess I thought of Brooksmith rather more than of the seated company. They required no depth of attention — they were all referable to usual, irredeemable, inevitable types. It was the world of cheerful commonplace and conscious gentility and prosperous density, a full-fed, material, insular world, a world of hideous florid plate and ponderous order and thin conversation. There was not a word said about Byron. Nothing would have induced me to look at Brooksmith in the course of the repast, and I felt sure that not even my overturning the wine would have induced him to meet my eye. We were in intellectual sympathy — we felt, as regards each other, a kind of social responsibility. In short we had been in Arcadia together, and we had both come to this! No wonder we were ashamed to be confronted. When he helped on my overcoat, as I was going away, we parted, for the first time since the earliest days in Mansfield Street, in silence. I thought he looked lean and wasted, and I guessed that his new place was not more ‘human’ than his previous one. There was plenty of beef and beer, but there was no reciprocity. The question for him to have asked before accepting the position would have been not ‘How many footmen are kept?’ but ‘How much imagination?’

The next time I went to the house — I confess it was not very soon — I encountered his successor, a personage who evidently enjoyed the good fortune of never having quitted his natural level. Could any be higher? he seemed to ask — over the heads of three footmen and even of some visitors. He made me feel as if Brooksmith were dead; but I didn’t dare to inquire — I couldn’t have borne his ‘I haven’t the least idea, sir.’ I despatched a note to the address Brooksmith had given me after Mr. Offord’s death, but I received no answer. Six months later, however, I was favoured with a visit from an elderly, dreary, dingy person, who introduced herself to me as Mr. Brooksmith’s aunt and from whom I learned that he was out of place and out of health and had allowed her to come and say to me that if I could spare half-an-hour to look in at him he would take it as a rare honour.