Some Short Stories | Page 6

Brooksmith's following
them. I know Mr. Offord used to read passages to him from Montaigne
and Saint-Simon, for he read perpetually when alone- -when THEY
were alone, that is--and Brooksmith was always about. Perhaps you'll
say no wonder Mr. Offord's butler regarded him as "rather mad."
However, if I'm not sure what he thought about Montaigne I'm
convinced he admired Saint-Simon. A certain feeling for letters must
have rubbed off on him from the mere handling of his master's books,
which he was always carrying to and fro and putting back in their
places.
I often noticed that if an anecdote or a quotation, much more a lively
discussion, was going forward, he would, if busy with the fire or the
curtains, the lamp or the tea, find a pretext for remaining in the room
till the point should be reached. If his purpose was to catch it you
weren't discreet, you were in fact scarce human, to call him off, and I
shall never forget a look, a hard stony stare--I caught it in its
passage--which, one day when there were a good many people in the
room, he fastened upon the footman who was helping him in the
service and who, in an undertone, had asked him some irrelevant
question. It was the only manifestation of harshness I ever observed on
Brooksmith's part, and I at first wondered what was the matter. Then I
became conscious that Mr. Offord was relating a very curious anecdote,

never before perhaps made so public, and imparted to the narrator by an
eye-witness of the fact, bearing on Lord Byron's life in Italy. Nothing
would induce me to reproduce it here, but Brooksmith had been in
danger of losing it. If I ever should venture to reproduce it I shall feel
how much I lose in not having my fellow auditor to refer to.
The first day Mr Offord's door was closed was therefore a dark date in
contemporary history. It was raining hard and my umbrella was wet,
but Brooksmith received it from me exactly as if this were a
preliminary for going upstairs. I observed however that instead of
putting it away he held it poised and trickling over the rug, and I then
became aware that he was looking at me with deep acknowledging
eyes--his air of universal responsibility. I immediately
understood--there was scarce need of question and answer as they
passed between us. When I took in that our good friend had given up as
never before, though only for the occasion, I exclaimed dolefully:
"What a difference it will make--and to how many people!"
"I shall be one of them, sir!" said Brooksmith; and that was the
beginning of the end.
Mr. Offord came down again, but the spell was broken, the great sign
being that the conversation was for the first time not directed. It
wandered and stumbled, a little frightened, like a lost child--it had let
go the nurse's hand. "The worst of it is that now we shall talk about my
health--c'est la fin de tout," Mr. Offord said when he reappeared; and
then I recognised what a note of change that would be--for he had never
tolerated anything so provincial. We "ran" to each other's health as little
as to the daily weather. The talk became ours, in a word--not his; and as
ours, even when HE talked, it could only be inferior. In this form it was
a distress to Brooksmith, whose attention now wandered from it
altogether: he had so much closer a vision of his master's intimate
conditions than our superficialities represented. There were better hours,
and he was more in and out of the room, but I could see he was
conscious of the decline, almost of the collapse, of our great institution.
He seemed to wish to take counsel with me about it, to feel responsible
for its going on in some form or other. When for the second period--the

first had lasted several days--he had to tell me that his employer didn't
receive, I half expected to hear him say after a moment "Do you think I
ought to, sir, in his place?"--as he might have asked me, with the return
of autumn, if I thought he had better light the drawing-room fire.
He had a resigned philosophic sense of what his guests--our guests, as I
came to regard them in our colloquies--would expect. His feeling was
that he wouldn't absolutely have approved of himself as a substitute for
Mr. Offord; but he was so saturated with the religion of habit that he
would have made, for our friends, the necessary sacrifice to the divinity.
He would take them on a little further and till they could look about
them. I think I saw him also mentally confronted with