Some Short Stories | Page 8

I shan't be
able to stand it." What he wasn't able to stand was not what Mr. Offord
said about him, but what he wasn't able to say in return. His idea of
conversation for himself was giving you the convenience of speaking to
him; and when he went to "see" Lady Kenyon for instance it was to
carry her the tribute of his receptive silence. Where would the speech of
his betters have been if proper service had been a manifestation of
sound? In that case the fundamental difference would have had to be
shown by their dumbness, and many of them, poor things, were dumb
enough without that provision. Brooksmith took an unfailing interest in
the preservation of the fundamental difference; it was the thing he had
most on his conscience.
What had become of it however when Mr. Offord passed away like any
inferior person--was relegated to eternal stillness after the manner of a
butler above-stairs? His aspect on the event--for the several successive
days--may be imagined, and the multiplication by funereal observance
of the things he didn't say. When everything was over--it was late the
same day--I knocked at the door of the house of mourning as I so often
had done before. I could never call on Mr. Offord again, but I had come
literally to call on Brooksmith. I wanted to ask him if there was
anything I could do for him, tainted with vagueness as this inquiry
could only be. My presumptuous dream of 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