Some Short Stories | Page 9

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