Several times he took me upstairs — always by his own proposal — and our dear old friend, in bed, in a curious flowered and brocaded casaque[31] which made him, especially as his head was tied up in a handkerchief to match, look, to my imagination, like the dying Voltaire,[32] held for ten minutes a sadly shrunken little salon. I felt indeed each time, as if I were attending the last coucher[33] of some social sovereign. He was royally whimsical about his sufferings and not at all concerned — quite as if the Constitution provided for the case — about his successor. He glided over our sufferings charmingly, and none of his jokes — it was a gallant abstention, some of them would have been so easy — were at our expense. Now and again, I confess, there was one at Brooksmith’s, but so pathetically sociable as to make the excellent man look at me in a way that seemed to say: ‘Do exchange a glance with me, or I shan’t be able to stand it.’ What he was not able to stand was not what Mr. Offord said about him, but what he wasn’t able to say in return. His notion 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 like a butler upstairs? His aspect for several days after the expected event 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 wild dream of taking him into my own service had died away: my service was not worth his being taken into. My offer to him 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 further any enterprise that 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.
