society, and now I have no more. 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 in the world,’ said Brooksmith 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; for he proved indeed, on trial, a very difficult case. In a word 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 people who didn’t know him. I spoke to many of our old friends about him, and I found them all governed by the odd mixture of feelings of which I myself was conscious, and 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 had not 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 very large in the City), who lived on the Bayswater[34] 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
