taking him into my own service had died away: my service wasn’t worth his being taken into. My offer could only be to help him to find another place, and yet there was an indelicacy, as it were, in taking for granted that his thoughts would immediately be fixed on another. I had a hope that he would be able to give his life a different form—though certainly not the form, the frequent result of such bereavements, of his setting up a little shop. That would have been dreadful; for I should have wished to forward any enterprise he might embark in, yet how could I have brought myself to go and pay him shillings and take back coppers, over a counter? My visit then was simply an intended compliment. He took it as such, gratefully and with all the tact in the world. He knew I really couldn’t help him and that I knew he knew I couldn’t; but we discussed the situation—with a good deal of elegant generality—at the foot of the stairs, in the hall already dismantled, where I had so often discussed other situations with him. The executors were in possession, as was still more apparent when he made me pass for a few minutes into the dining-room, where various objects were muffled up for removal.
Two definite facts, however, he had to communicate; one being that he was to leave the house for ever that night (servants, for some mysterious reason, seem always to depart by night), and the other— he mentioned it only at the last and with hesitation—that he was already aware his late master had left him a legacy of eighty pounds. “I’m very glad,” I said, and Brooksmith was of the same mind: “It was so like him to think of me.” This was all that passed between us on the subject, and I know nothing of his judgement of Mr. Offord’s memento. Eighty pounds are always eighty pounds, and no one has ever left ME an equal sum; but, all the same, for Brooksmith, I was disappointed. I don’t know what I had expected, but it was almost a shock. Eighty pounds might stock a small shop—a VERY small shop; but, I repeat, I couldn’t bear to think of that. I asked my friend if he had been able to save a little, and he replied: “No, sir; I’ve had to do things.” I didn’t inquire what things they might have been; they were his own affair, and I took his word for them as assentingly as if he had had the greatness of an ancient house to keep up; especially as there was something in his manner that seemed to convey a prospect of further sacrifice.
“I shall have to turn round a bit, sir—I shall have to look about me,” he said; and then he added indulgently, magnanimously: “If you should happen to hear of anything for me—”
I couldn’t let him finish; this was, in its essence, too much in the really grand manner. It would be a help to my getting him off my mind to be able to pretend I COULD find the right place, and that help he wished to give me, for it was doubtless painful to him to see me in so false a position. I interposed with a few words to the effect of how well aware I was that wherever he should go, whatever he should do, he would miss our old friend terribly—miss him even more than I should, having been with him so much more. This led him to make the speech that has remained with me as the very text of the whole episode.
“Oh sir, it’s sad for YOU, very sad indeed, and for a great many gentlemen and ladies; that it is, sir. But for me, sir, it is, if I may say so, still graver even than that: it’s just the loss of something that was everything. For me, sir,” he went on with rising tears, “he was just ALL, if you know what I mean, sir. You have others, sir, I daresay—not that I would have you understand me to speak of them as in any way tantamount. But you have the pleasures of society, sir; if it’s only in talking about him, sir, as I daresay you do freely—for all his blest memory has to fear from it—with gentlemen and ladies who have had the same honour. That’s not for me, sir, and I’ve to keep my associations to myself. Mr. Offord was MY society, and now, you see, I just haven’t any. You go back to conversation, sir, after all, and I go back to my place,” Brooksmith stammered, without exaggerated irony or dramatic bitterness, but with a flat unstudied veracity and his hand on the knob of the street-door. He turned it to let me out and then he added: “I just go downstairs, sir, again, and I stay there.”
“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 such in the world,” Brooksmith said 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: he proved on trial so very difficult a case. 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 strangers— strangers to his past when not to his present. I spoke to many of our old friends about him and found them all governed by the odd mixture of feelings of which I myself was conscious—as well as 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 hadn’t 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 quite immense in the City—who lived on the Bayswater 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, calling one day 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 judgement he would have passed on his actual patrons if my relative hadn’t been their friend; but in view of that connexion 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 wasn’t a word said about Byron, or even about a minor bard then much in view. 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 degree 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 had helped on my overcoat, as I was going away, we parted, for the first time since the earliest days of Mansfield Street, in silence. I thought he looked lean and wasted, and I guessed that his new place wasn’t 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 wouldn’t have been “How many footmen are kept?” but “How much imagination?”
The next time I went to the house—I confess it wasn’t 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 that worthy 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
