brought you. We’ve said everything; it’s over; you’ll lose all patience with me, and I’d rather you shouldn’t see the rest.’ I sent him some money, in a letter, the next day, but I saw the rest only in the light of a barren sequel.
A whole year after my visit to him I became aware once, in dining out, that Brooksmith was one of the several servants who hovered behind our chairs. He had not opened the door of the house to me, and I had not recognised him in the cluster of retainers in the hall. This time I tried to catch his eye, but he never gave me a chance, and when he handed me a dish I could only be careful to thank him audibly. Indeed I partook of two entrées of which I had my doubts, subsequently converted into certainties, in order not to snub him. He looked well enough in health, but much older, and wore, in an exceptionally marked degree, the glazed and expressionless mask of the British domestic de race.[36] I saw with dismay that if I had not known him I should have taken him, on the showing of his countenance, for an extravagant illustration of irresponsive servile gloom. I said to myself that he had become a reactionary, gone over to the Philistines,[37] thrown himself into religion, the religion of his ‘place,’ like a foreign lady sur le retour.[38] I divined moreover that he was only engaged for the evening — he had become a mere waiter, had joined the band of the white-waistcoated who ‘go out.’ There was something pathetic in this fact, and it was a terrible vulgarisation of Brooksmith. It was the mercenary prose of butlerhood; he had given up the struggle for the poetry. If reciprocity was what he had missed, where was the reciprocity now? Only in the bottoms of the wine glasses and the five shillings (or whatever they get), clapped into his hand by the permanent man. However I supposed he had taken up a precarious branch of his profession because after all it sent him less downstairs. His relations with London society were more superficial, but they were of course more various. As I went away, on this occasion, I looked out for him eagerly among the four or five attendants whose perpendicular persons, fluting the walls of London passages, are supposed to lubricate the process of departure; but he was not on duty. I asked one of the others if he were not in the house, and received the prompt answer: ‘Just left, sir. Anything I can do for you, sir?’ I wanted to say ‘Please give him my kind regards;’ but I abstained; I didn’t want to compromise him, and I never came across him again.
