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, with hesitation — that he had already been informed his late master had left him a legacy of eighty pounds. ‘I’m very glad,’ I said, and Brooksmith rejoined: ‘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 judgment 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 — in short I was disappointed. Eighty pounds might stock a little shop — a very little 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 have had to do things.’ I didn’t inquire what things he had had to do; they were his own affair, and I took his word for them 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 so false a position. I interposed with a few words to the effect that I was well aware 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 I have always remembered 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 blessed memory has to fear from it — with gentlemen and ladies who have had the same honour. That’s not for me, sir, and I have to keep my associations to myself. Mr. Offord was
