Greville Fane | Page 4

"Dearest mamma!"
She stood there under the lamp with her eyes on me; she was very tall,
very stiff, very cold, and always looked as if these things, and some
others beside, in her dress, her manner and even her name, were an
implication that she was very admirable. I had never been able to
follow the argument, but that is a detail. I expressed briefly and frankly
what I felt, while the little mottled maidservant flattened herself against
the wall of the narrow passage and tried to look detached without
looking indifferent. It was not a moment to make a visit, and I was on
the point of retreating when Lady Luard arrested me with a queer,
casual, drawling "Would you--a--would you, perhaps, be WRITING
something?" I felt for the instant like an interviewer, which I was not.
But I pleaded guilty to this intention, on which she rejoined: "I'm so
very glad--but I think my brother would like to see you." I detested her
brother, but it wasn't an occasion to act this out; so I suffered myself to
be inducted, to my surprise, into a small back room which I
immediately recognised as the scene, during the later years, of Mrs.
Stormer's imperturbable industry. Her table was there, the battered and
blotted accessory to innumerable literary lapses, with its contracted
space for the arms (she wrote only from the elbow down) and the
confusion of scrappy, scribbled sheets which had already become
literary remains. Leolin was also there, smoking a cigarette before the
fire and looking impudent even in his grief, sincere as it well might
have been.
To meet him, to greet him, I had to make a sharp effort; for the air that
he wore to me as he stood before me was quite that of his mother's
murderer. She lay silent for ever upstairs--as dead as an unsuccessful
book, and his swaggering erectness was a kind of symbol of his having
killed her. I wondered if he had already, with his sister, been
calculating what they could get for the poor papers on the table; but I

had not long to wait to learn, for in reply to the scanty words of
sympathy I addressed him he puffed out: "It's miserable, miserable, yes;
but she has left three books complete." His words had the oddest effect;
they converted the cramped little room into a seat of trade and made the
"book" wonderfully feasible. He would certainly get all that could be
got for the three. Lady Luard explained to me that her husband had
been with them but had had to go down to the House. To her brother
she explained that I was going to write something, and to me again she
made it clear that she hoped I would "do mamma justice." She added
that she didn't think this had ever been done. She said to her brother:
"Don't you think there are some things he ought thoroughly to
understand?" and on his instantly exclaiming "Oh,
thoroughly--thoroughly!" she went on, rather austerely: "I mean about
mamma's birth."
"Yes, and her connections," Leolin added.
I professed every willingness, and for five minutes I listened, but it
would be too much to say that I understood. I don't even now, but it is
not important. My vision was of other matters than those they put
before me, and while they desired there should be no mistake about
their ancestors I became more and more lucid about themselves. I got
away as soon as possible, and walked home through the great dusky,
empty London--the best of all conditions for thought. By the time I
reached my door my little article was practically composed-- ready to
be transferred on the morrow from the polished plate of fancy. I believe
it attracted some notice, was thought "graceful" and was said to be by
some one else. I had to be pointed without being lively, and it took
some tact. But what I said was much less interesting than what I
thought--especially during the half-hour I spent in my armchair by the
fire, smoking the cigar I always light before going to bed. I went to
sleep there, I believe; but I continued to moralise about Greville Fane. I
am reluctant to lose that retrospect altogether, and this is a dim little
memory of it, a document not to "serve." The dear woman had written a
hundred stories, but none so curious as her own.
When first I knew her she had published half-a-dozen fictions, and I
believe I had also perpetrated a novel. She was more than a dozen years
older than I, but she was a person who always acknowledged her
relativity. It was not so very long ago, but in London, amid the big

waves of the