become of Brooksmith?’ Even my private answer to this question left me still unsatisfied. No doubt Mr. Offord would provide for him, but
what would he provide? that was the great point. He couldn’t provide society; and society had become a necessity of Brooksmith’s nature. I must add that he never showed a symptom of what I may call sordid solicitude — anxiety on his own account. He was rather livid and intensely grave, as befitted a man before whose eyes the ‘shade of that which once was great’ was passing away. He had the solemnity of a person winding up, under depressing circumstances, a long established and celebrated business; he was a kind of social executor or liquidator. But his manner seemed to testify exclusively to the uncertainty of
our future. I couldn’t in those days have afforded it — I lived in two rooms in Jermyn Street and didn’t ‘keep a man;’ but even if my income had permitted I shouldn’t have ventured to say to Brooksmith (emulating Mr. Offord), ‘My dear fellow, I’ll take you on.’ The whole tone of our intercourse was so much more an implication that it was
I who should now want a lift. Indeed there was a tacit assurance in Brooksmith’s whole attitude that he would have me on his mind.
One of the most assiduous members of our circle had been Lady Kenyon, and I remember his telling me one day that her ladyship had, in spite of her own infirmities, lately much aggravated, been in person to inquire. In answer to this I remarked that she would feel it more than any one. Brooksmith was silent a moment; at the end of which he said, in a certain tone (there is no reproducing some of his tones), ‘I’ll go and see her.’ I went to see her myself, and I learned that he had waited upon her; but when I said to her, in the form of a joke but with a core of earnest, that when all was over some of us ought to combine, to club together to set Brooksmith up on his own account, she replied a trifle disappointingly: ‘Do you mean in a public-house?’ I looked at her in a way that I think Brooksmith himself would have approved, and then I answered: ‘Yes, the Offord Arms.’ What I had meant, of course, was that, for the love of art itself, we ought to look to it that such a peculiar faculty and so much acquired experience should not be wasted. I really think that if we had caused a few black-edged cards to be struck off and circulated — ‘Mr. Brooksmith will continue to receive on the old premises from four to seven; business carried on as usual during the alterations’ — the majority of us would have rallied.
