When Lord Northmore died public reference to the event
took for the most part rather a ponderous and embarrassed form. A great
political figure had passed away. A great light of our time had been
quenched in mid-career. A great usefulness had somewhat anticipated its
term, though a great part, none the less, had been signally played. The note
of greatness, all along the line, kept sounding, in short, by a force of its
own, and the image of the departed evidently lent itself with ease to
figures and flourishes, the poetry of the daily press. The newspapers and
their purchasers equally did their duty by it – arranged it neatly and
impressively, though perhaps with a hand a little violently expeditious,
upon the funeral
car,
saw the conveyance properly down the avenue, and then, finding the subject
suddenly quite exhausted, proceeded to the next item on their list. His
lordship had been a person, in fact, in connection with whom there was
almost nothing but the fine monotony of his success to mention. This
success had been his profession, his means as well as his end; so that
his career
admitted of no other description and demanded, indeed suffered, no further
analysis. He had made politics, he had made literature, he had made land, he
had made a bad manner and a great many mistakes, he had made a gaunt, foolish
wife, two extravagant sons and four awkward daughters – he had made everything,
as he could have made almost anything, thoroughly pay. There had
been something deep down in him that did it, and his old friend Warren Hope,
the person knowing him earliest and probably, on the whole, best, had never,
even to the last, for curiosity, quite made out what it was. The secret was
one that this distinctly distanced competitor had in fact mastered as little
for intellectual relief as for emulous use; and there was quite a kind of
tribute to it in the way that, the night before the obsequies and addressing
himself to his wife, he said after some silent thought: “Hang it, you
know, I must see the old boy through. I must go to the grave.”
Mrs Hope looked at her husband at first in anxious
silence. “I’ve no patience with you. You’re much more ill
than he ever was.”
“Ah, but if that qualifies me but for the funerals
of others—!”
“It qualifies you to break my heart by your
exaggerated chivalry, your renewed refusal to consider your interests. You
sacrificed them to him, for thirty years, again and again, and from this
supreme sacrifice – possibly that of your life – you might, in
your condition, I think, be absolved.” She indeed lost patience.
“To the grave – in this weather – after his treatment of
you!”
“My dear girl,” Hope replied, “his
treatment of
me is a figment of your ingenious mind – your too-passionate, your
beautiful loyalty. Loyalty, I mean, to me.”
“I certainly leave it to you,” she declared,
“to have any to him!”
“Well, he was, after all, one’s oldest,
one’s earliest friend. I’m not in such bad case – I do go
out; and I want to do the decent thing. The fact remains that we never broke
– we always kept together.”
“Yes indeed,” she laughed in her bitterness,
“he always took care of that! He never recognised you, but he never let
you go. You kept him up, and he kept you down. He used you, to the last drop
he could squeeze, and left you the only one to wonder, in your incredible
idealism and your incorrigible modesty, how on earth such an idiot made his
way. He made his way on your back. You put it candidly to others –
‘What in the world was his gift?’ And others are such gaping
idiots that they too haven’t the least idea. You were his
gift!”
“And you’re mine, my dear!” her husband,
pressing her to him, more resignedly laughed. He went down the next day by
‘special’;
to the interment, which took place on the great
man’s own property, in the great man’s own church. But he went
alone – that is in a numerous and distinguished party, the flower of
the unanimous, gregarious demonstration; his wife had no wish to accompany
him, though she was anxious while he was absent. She passed the time
uneasily, watching the weather and fearing the cold; she roamed from room to
room, pausing vaguely at dull windows, and before he came back she had
thought of many things. It was as if, while he saw the great man buried, she
also, by herself, in
the contracted home of their later years, stood before an open grave. She
lowered into it, with her weak hands, the heavy past and all their common
dead dreams and accumulated ashes. The pomp surrounding Lord
Northmore’s extinction made her feel more than ever that it was not
Warren who had made anything pay. He had been always what he was still, the
cleverest man and the hardest worker she knew; but what was there, at
fifty-seven, as the vulgar said, to ‘show’ for it all but his
wasted genius, his ruined health and his paltry pension? It was the term of
comparison conveniently given her by his happy rival’s now
foreshortened splendour that fixed these things in her eye. It was as happy
rivals to their own flat union that she always had thought of the Northmore
pair; the two men, at least, having started together, after the University,
shoulder to shoulder and with – superficially speaking – much the
same outfit of preparation, ambition and opportunity. They had begun at the
same point and wanting the same things – only wanting them in such
different ways. Well, the dead man had wanted them in the way that got them;
had got too, in his peerage, for instance, those Warren had never wanted:
there was nothing else to be said. There was nothing else, and yet, in her
sombre, her strangely apprehensive solitude at this hour, she said much more
than I can tell. It all came to this – that there had been, somewhere
and somehow, a wrong. Warren was the one who should have succeeded. But she
was the one person who knew it now, the single other person having
descended, with his knowledge, to the tomb.
She sat there, she roamed there, in the waiting greyness
of her small London house, with a deepened
sense of the several odd knowledges that had flourished in their
company of three. Warren had always known everything and, with his easy
power – in nothing so high as for indifference – had never cared.
John Northmore had known, for he had, years and years before, told her so;
and thus had had a reason the more – in addition to not believing her
stupid – for guessing at her view. She lived back; she lived it over;
she had it all there in her hand. John Northmore had known her first, and
how he had wanted to marry her the fat little bundle of his love-letters
still survived to tell. He had introduced Warren Hope to her – quite by
accident and because, at the time they had
chambers
together, he couldn’t help it: that was the one thing he had done
for them. Thinking of it now, she perhaps saw how much he might conscientiously
have considered that it disburdened him of more. Six months later she had
accepted Warren, and for just the reason the absence of which had determined
her treatment of his friend. She had believed in his future. She held that
John Northmore had never afterwards remitted the effort to ascertain the
degree in which she felt herself ‘sold’. But, thank God, she had
never shown him.
Her husband came home with a chill, and she put him
straight to bed. For a week, as she hovered near him, they only looked deep
things at each other; the point was too quickly passed at which she could
bearably have said ‘I told you so!’ That his late patron should
never have had difficulty in making him pay was certainly no
marvel. But it was indeed a little too much, after all, that he should have
made him pay with his life. This was what it
had come to – she was sure, now, from the first.
Congestion of the lungs, that night, declared itself, and on the morrow,
sickeningly, she was face to face with pneumonia. It was more than –
with all that had gone before – they could meet. Warren Hope ten days
later succumbed. Tenderly, divinely as he loved her, she felt his surrender,
through all the anguish, as an unspeakable part of the sublimity of
indifference into which his hapless history had finally flowered. ‘His
easy power, his easy power!’ – her passion had never yet found
such relief in that simple, secret phrase for him. He was so proud, so fine
and so flexible, that to fail a little had been as bad for him as to fail
much; therefore he had opened the flood-gates wide – had thrown, as the
saying was,
the helve after the hatchet.
He had amused himself with seeing what the devouring world would take. Well,
it had taken all.
But it was after he had gone that his name showed as
written in water. What had he left? He had only left her and her
grey desolation, her lonely piety and her sore, unresting rebellion.
Sometimes, when a man died, it did something for him that life had not done;
people, after a little, on one side or the other, discovered and named him,
annexing him to their flag. But the sense of having lost Warren Hope
appeared not in the least to have quickened the world’s wit; the
sharper pang for his widow indeed sprang just from the commonplace way in
which he was spoken of as known. She received
letters enough, when it came to that, for of course,
personally, he had been liked; the newspapers were fairly copious and
perfectly stupid; the three or four societies, ‘learned’ and
other, to which he had belonged, passed resolutions of regret and
condolence, and the three or four colleagues about whom he himself used to
be most amusing stammered eulogies; but almost anything, really, would have
been better for her than the general understanding that the occasion had
been met. Two or three solemn noodles in ‘administrative circles’
wrote her that she must have been gratified at the unanimity of regret, the
implication being clearly that she was ridiculous if she were not. Meanwhile
what she felt was that she could have borne well enough his not being
noticed at all; what she couldn’t bear was this treatment of him as a
minor celebrity. He was, in economics, in the higher politics, in
philosophic history, a splendid unestimated genius, or he was nothing. He
wasn’t, at any rate – heaven forbid! – a ‘notable
figure’. The waters, none the less, closed over him as over Lord
Northmore; which was precisely, as time went on, the fact she found it
hardest to accept. That personage, the week after his death, without an hour
of reprieve, the place swept as clean of him as a hall, lent for a charity,
of the tables and booths of a three-days’ bazaar – that personage
had gone straight to the bottom, dropped like a crumpled circular into the
waste-basket. Where then was the difference? – if the end was
the end for each alike? For Warren it should have been properly the
beginning.
During the first six months she wondered what she could
herself do, and had much of the time the sense of walking by some swift stream
on which an
object dear to her was floating out to sea.
All her instinct was to keep up with it, not to
lose sight of it, to hurry along the bank and reach in advance some point
from which she could stretch forth and catch and save it. Alas, it only
floated and floated; she held it in sight, for the stream was long, but no
convenient projection offered itself to the rescue. She ran, she watched,
she lived with her great fear; and all the while, as the distance to the sea
diminished, the current visibly increased: At the last, to do anything, she
must hurry. She went into his papers, she ransacked his drawers; something
of that sort, at least, she might do. But there were difficulties, the case
was special; she lost herself in the labyrinth, and her competence was
questioned; two or three friends to whose judgment she appealed struck her
as tepid, even as cold, and publishers, when sounded – most of all in
fact the house through which his three or four important volumes had been
given to the world – showed an absence of eagerness for a collection of
literary remains. It was only now that she fully understood how remarkably
little the three or four important volumes had ‘done’. He had
successfully kept that from her, as he had kept other things she might have
ached at: to handle his notes and memoranda was to come at every turn, in
the wilderness, the wide desert, upon the footsteps of his scrupulous soul.
But she had at last to accept the truth that it was only for herself, her
own relief, she must follow him. His work, unencouraged and interrupted,
failed of a final form: there would have been nothing to offer but fragments
of fragments. She felt, all the same, in recognising this, that she
abandoned him; he died for her at that hour over again.
The hour moreover happened to coincide with another
hour, so that the two mingled their bitterness. She received a note from
Lady Northmore, announcing a desire to gather in and publish his late
lordship’s letters, so numerous and so interesting, and inviting
Mrs Hope, as a more than probable depositary, to be so good as to
contribute to the project those addressed to her husband. This gave her a
start of more kinds than one. The long comedy of his late lordship’s
greatness was not then over? The monument was to be built to him
that she had but now schooled herself to regard as impossible for his
defeated friend? Everything was to break out afresh, the comparisons, the
contrasts, the conclusions so invidiously in his favour? – the business
all cleverly managed to place him in the light and keep every one else in
the shade? Letters? – had John Northmore indited three lines that
could, at that time of day, be of the smallest consequence? Whose idea was
such a publication, and what infatuated editorial patronage could the family
have secured? She of course didn’t know, but she should be surprised if
there were material. Then it came to her, on reflection, that editors and
publishers must of course have flocked – his star would still rule. Why
shouldn’t he make his letters pay in death as he had made them pay in
life? Such as they were they had paid. They would be a tremendous
success. She thought again of her husband’s rich, confused relics
– thought of the loose blocks of marble that could only lie now where
they had fallen; after which, with one of her deep and frequent sighs, she
took up anew Lady Northmore’s communication.
His letters to Warren, kept or not kept, had never so
much as occurred to her. Those to herself were buried and safe – she
knew where her hand would find them; but those to herself her correspondent
had carefully not asked for and was probably unaware of the existence of.
They belonged moreover to that phase of the great man’s career that was
distinctly – as it could only be called – previous: previous to
the greatness, to the proper subject of the volume, and, in especial, to
Lady Northmore. The faded fat packet lurked still where it had lurked for
years; but she could no more to-day have said why she had kept it than why
– though he knew of the early episode – she had never mentioned
her preservation of it to Warren. This last circumstance certainly absolved
her from mentioning it to Lady Northmore, who, no doubt, knew of the episode
too. The odd part of the matter was, at any rate, that her retention of
these documents had not been an accident. She had obeyed a dim instinct or a
vague calculation. A calculation of what? She couldn’t have told: it
had operated, at the back of her head, simply as a sense that, not
destroyed, the complete little collection made for safety. But for whose,
just heaven? Perhaps she should still see; though nothing, she trusted,
would occur requiring her to touch the things or to read them over. She
wouldn’t have touched them or read them over for the world.
She had not as yet, at all events, overhauled those
receptacles in which the letters Warren kept would have accumulated; and she
had her doubts of their containing any of Lord Northmore’s. Why should
he have kept any? Even she herself had had more reasons. Was his
lordship’s later epistolary
manner supposed to be good, or of the kind that, on any grounds, prohibited
the waste-basket or the fire? Warren had lived in a deluge of documents, but
these perhaps he might have regarded as contributions to contemporary
history. None the less, surely, he wouldn’t have stored up many. She
began to look, in cupboards, boxes, drawers yet unvisited, and she had her
surprises both as to what he had kept and as to what he hadn’t. Every
word of her own was there – every note that, in occasional absence, he
had ever had from her. Well, that matched happily enough her knowing just
where to put her finger on every note that, on such occasions, she herself
had received. Their correspondence at least was complete. But so,
in fine, on one side, it gradually appeared, was Lord Northmore’s. The
superabundance of these missives had not been sacrificed by her husband,
evidently, to any passing convenience; she judged more and more that he had
preserved every scrap; and she was unable to conceal from herself that she
was – she scarce knew why – a trifle disappointed. She had not
quite unhopefully, even though vaguely, seen herself writing to Lady
Northmore that, to her great regret and after an exhausting search, she
could find nothing at all.
She found, alas, in fact, everything. She was
conscientious and she hunted to the end, by which time one of the tables
quite groaned with the fruits of her quest. The letters appeared moreover to
have been cared for and roughly classified – she should be able to
consign them to the family in excellent order. She made sure, at the last,
that she had overlooked nothing, and then, fatigued and distinctly
irritated, she prepared to answer in a
sense so different from the answer she had, as might have been said,
planned. Face to face with her note, however, she found she couldn’t
write it; and, not to be alone longer with the pile on the table, she
presently went out of the room. Late in the evening – just before going
to bed – she came back, almost as if she hoped there might have been
since the afternoon some pleasant intervention in the interest of her
distaste. Mightn’t it have magically happened that her discovery was a
mistake? – that the letters were either not there or were, after all,
somebody’s else? Ah, they were there, and as she raised her
lighted candle in the dusk the pile on the table squared itself with
insolence. On this, poor lady, she had for an hour her temptation.
It was obscure, it was absurd; all that could be said of
it was that it was, for the moment, extreme. She saw herself, as she circled
round the table, writing with perfect impunity: ‘Dear Lady Northmore, I
have hunted high and low and have found nothing whatever. My husband
evidently, before his death, destroyed everything. I’m so
sorry – I should have liked so much to help you. Yours most
truly.’ She should have only, on the morrow, privately and resolutely
to annihilate the heap, and those words would remain an account of the
matter that nobody was in a position to challenge. What good it would do
her? – was that the question? It would do her the good that it
would make poor Warren seem to have been just a little less used and duped.
This, in her mood, would ease her off. Well, the temptation was real; but so,
she after a while felt, were other things. She sat down at midnight to her note.
‘Dear Lady Northmore, I am happy to say I have found a great deal –
my husband appears to have been so careful to keep everything. I have a mass at
your disposition if you can conveniently send. So glad to be able to help your
work. Yours most truly.’ She stepped out as she was and dropped the
letter into the nearest pillar-box. By noon the next day the table had, to
her relief, been cleared. Her ladyship sent a responsible servant – her
butler, in a four-wheeler, with a large
japanned box.
After this, for a twelvemonth, there were frequent
announcements and allusions. They came to her from every side, and there
were hours at which the air, to her imagination, contained almost nothing
else. There had been, at an early stage, immediately after Lady
Northmore’s communication to her, an official appeal, a circular
urbi et orbi,
reproduced, applauded, commented in every newspaper,
desiring all possessors of letters to remit them without delay to the
family. The family, to do it justice, rewarded the sacrifice freely –
so far as it was a reward to keep the world informed of the rapid progress
of the work. Material had shown itself more copious than was to have been
conceived. Interesting as the imminent volumes had naturally been expected
to prove, those who had been favoured with a glimpse of their contents
already felt warranted in promising the public an unprecedented treat. They
would throw upon certain sides of the writer’s mind and career lights
hitherto unsuspected. Lady Northmore,
deeply indebted for favours received, begged to renew her solicitation;
gratifying as the response had been, it was believed that, particularly in
connection with several dates, which were given, a residuum of buried
treasure might still be looked for.
Mrs Hope saw, she felt, as time went on, fewer and
fewer people; yet her circle was even now not too narrow for her to hear it
blown about that Thompson and Johnson had ‘been asked’.
Conversation in the London world struck her for a time as almost confined to
such questions and such answers. “Have you been asked?”
“Oh yes – rather. Months ago. And you?” The whole place was
under contribution, and the striking thing was that being asked had been
clearly accompanied, in every case, with the ability to respond. The spring
had but to be touched – millions of letters flew out. Ten volumes, at
such a rate, Mrs Hope mused, would not exhaust the supply. She mused a
great deal – did nothing but muse; and, strange as this may at first
appear, it was inevitable that one of the final results of her musing should
be a principle of doubt. It could only seem possible, in view of such
unanimity, that she should, after all, have been mistaken. It was
then, to the general sense, the great departed’s, a reputation sound
and safe. It wasn’t he who had been at fault – it was her silly
self, still burdened with the fallibility of Being. He had been a giant
then, and the letters would triumphantly show it. She had looked only at the
envelopes of those she had surrendered, but she was prepared for anything.
There was the fact, not to be blinked, of Warren’s own marked testimony.
The attitude of others was but his attitude; and she sighed as she
perceived him in this case, for the only time in his life, on the side of the
chattering crowd.
She was perfectly aware that her obsession had run away
with her, but as Lady Northmore’s publication really loomed into view
– it was now definitely announced for March, and they were in January
– her pulses quickened so that she found herself, in the long nights,
mostly lying awake. It was in one of these vigils that, suddenly, in the
cold darkness, she felt the brush of almost the only thought that, for many
a month, had not made her wince; the effect of which was that she bounded
out of bed with a new felicity. Her impatience flashed, on the spot, up to
its maximum – she could scarce wait for day to give herself to action.
Her idea was neither more nor less than immediately to collect and put forth
the letters of her hero. She would publish her husband’s own
– glory be to God! – and she even wasted none of her time in
wondering why she had waited. She had waited – all too long;
yet it was perhaps no more than natural that, for eyes sealed with tears and
a heart heavy with injustice, there should not have been an instant vision
of where her remedy lay. She thought of it already as her remedy –
though she would probably have found an awkwardness in giving a name,
publicly, to her wrong. It was a wrong to feel, but not, doubtless, to talk
about. And lo, straightway, the balm had begun to drop: the balance would so
soon be even. She spent all that day in reading over her own old letters,
too intimate and too sacred – oh, unluckily! – to figure in her
project, but pouring wind, nevertheless, into its sails and
adding magnificence to her presumption. She had
of course, with separation, all their years, never frequent and never
prolonged, known her husband as a correspondent much less than others;
still, these relics constituted a property – she was surprised at their
number – and testified hugely to his inimitable gift.
He was a letter-writer if you liked –
natural, witty, various, vivid, playing, with the idlest, lightest hand, up
and down the whole scale. His easy power – his easy power: everything
that brought him back brought back that. The most numerous were of course
the earlier, and the series of those during their engagement, witnesses of
their long probation, which were rich and unbroken; so full indeed and so
wonderful that she fairly groaned at having to defer to the common measure
of married modesty. There was discretion, there was usage, there was taste;
but she would fain have flown in their face. If there were pages too
intimate to publish, there were too many others too rare to suppress.
Perhaps after her death—! It not only pulled her up, the happy thought
of that liberation alike for herself and for her treasure, making her
promise herself straightway to arrange: it quickened extremely her
impatience for the term of her mortality, which would leave a free field to
the justice she invoked. Her great resource, however, clearly, would be the
friends, the colleagues, the private admirers to whom he had written for years,
to whom she had known him to write, and many of whose own letters, by no means
remarkable, she had come upon in her recent sortings and siftings. She drew up
a list of these persons and immediately wrote to them or, in cases in which
they had passed away, to their widows, children, representatives; reminding
herself in the process not disagreeably, in fact quite inspiringly, of Lady
Northmore. It had struck her that Lady Northmore took, somehow, a good deal
for granted; but this idea failed, oddly enough, to occur to her in regard
to Mrs Hope. It was indeed with her ladyship she began, addressing her
exactly in the terms of this personage’s own appeal, every word of
which she remembered.
Then she waited, but she had not, in connection with
that quarter, to wait long. ‘Dear Mrs Hope, I have hunted high and
low and have found nothing whatever. My husband evidently, before his death,
destroyed everything. I’m so sorry – I should have liked so much
to help you. Yours most truly.’ This was all Lady Northmore wrote,
without the grace of an allusion to the assistance she herself had received;
though even in the first flush of amazement and resentment our friend
recognised the odd identity of form between her note and another that had
never been written. She was answered as she had, in the like case, in her
one evil hour, dreamed of answering. But the answer was not over with this
– it had still to flow in, day after day, from every other source
reached by her question. And day after day, while amazement and resentment
deepened, it consisted simply of three lines of regret. Everybody had
looked, and everybody had looked in vain. Everybody would have been so glad,
but everybody was reduced to being, like Lady Northmore, so sorry. Nobody
could find anything, and nothing, it was therefore to be gathered, had been
kept. Some of these informants were more prompt than others, but
all replied in time, and the business went on
for a month, at the end of which the poor woman, stricken, chilled to the
heart, accepted perforce her situation and turned her face to the wall. In
this position, as it were, she remained for days, taking heed of nothing and
only feeling and nursing her wound. It was a wound the more cruel for having
found her so unguarded. From the moment her remedy had been whispered to
her, she had not had an hour of doubt, and the beautiful side of it had
seemed that it was, above all, so easy. The strangeness of the issue was
even greater than the pain. Truly it was a world
pour rire,
the world in which John Northmore’s letters were classed and labelled for
posterity and Warren Hope’s kindled fires. All sense, all measure of
anything, could only leave one – leave one indifferent and dumb. There
was nothing to be done – the show was upside-down. John Northmore was
immortal and Warren Hope was damned. And for herself, she was finished. She
was beaten. She leaned thus, motionless, muffled, for a time of which, as I
say, she took no account; then at last she was reached by a great sound that
made her turn her veiled head. It was the
report
of the appearance of Lady Northmore’s volumes.
This was a great noise indeed, and all the papers, that
day, were particularly loud with it. It met the reader on the threshold, and
the work was everywhere the subject of a ‘leader’ as well as of a
review. The reviews moreover, she saw at a glance, overflowed
with quotation; it was enough to look at two or
three sheets to judge of the enthusiasm. Mrs Hope looked at the two or
three that, for confirmation of the single one she habitually received, she
caused, while at breakfast, to be purchased; but her attention failed to
penetrate further; she couldn’t, she found, face the contrast between
the pride of the Northmores on such a morning and her own humiliation. The
papers brought it too sharply home; she pushed them away and, to get rid of
them, not to feel their presence, left the house early. She found pretexts
for remaining out; it was as if there had been a cup prescribed for her to
drain, yet she could put off the hour of the ordeal. She filled the time as
she might; bought things, in shops, for which she had no use, and called on
friends for whom she had no taste. Most of her friends, at present, were
reduced to that category, and she had to choose, for visits, the houses
guiltless, as she might have said, of her husband’s blood. She
couldn’t speak to the people who had answered in such dreadful terms
her late circular; on the other hand the people out of its range were such
as would also be stolidly unconscious of Lady Northmore’s publication
and from whom the sop of sympathy could be but circuitously extracted. As
she had lunched at a pastrycook’s, so she stopped out to tea, and the
March dusk had fallen when she got home. The first thing she then saw in her
lighted hall was a large neat package on the table; whereupon she knew
before approaching it that Lady Northmore had sent her the book. It had
arrived, she learned, just after her going out; so that, had she not done
this, she might have spent the day with it. She now quite understood her
prompt instinct of flight. Well, flight had helped her, and the touch of the
great indifferent general life. She would at last face the music.
She faced it, after dinner, in her little closed
drawing-room, unwrapping the two volumes – The Public and Private
Correspondence of the Right Honourable &c., &c. – and looking
well, first, at the great escutcheon on the purple cover and at the various
portraits within, so numerous that wherever she opened she came on one. It
had not been present to her before that he was so perpetually
‘sitting’, but he figured in every phase and in every style, and
the gallery was enriched with views of his successive residences, each one
a little grander than the last. She had ever, in general, found that, in
portraits, whether of the known or the unknown, the eyes seemed to seek and
to meet her own; but John Northmore everywhere looked straight away from
her, quite as if he had been in the room and were unconscious of
acquaintance. The effect of this was, oddly enough, so sharp that at the end
of ten minutes she found herself sinking into his text as if she had been a
stranger and beholden, vulgarly and accidentally, to one of the libraries.
She had been afraid to plunge, but from the moment she got in she was –
to do every one, all round, justice – thoroughly held. She sat there
late, and she made so many reflections and discoveries that – as the
only way to put it – she passed from mystification to stupefaction. Her
own contribution had been almost exhaustively used; she had counted
Warren’s letters before sending them and perceived now that scarce a
dozen were not all there – a circumstance explaining to her Lady
Northmore’s present. It was to these pages she had
turned first, and it was as she hung over them that
her stupefaction dawned. It took, in truth, at the outset, a particular form
– the form of a sharpened wonder at Warren’s unnatural piety. Her
original surprise had been keen – when she had tried to take reasons
for granted; but her original surprise was as nothing to her actual
bewilderment. The letters to Warren had been practically, she judged, for
the family, the great card; yet if the great card made only that figure,
what on earth was one to think of the rest of the pack?
She pressed on, at random, with a sense of rising fever;
she trembled, almost panting, not to be sure too soon; but wherever she
turned she found the prodigy spread. The letters to Warren were an abyss of
inanity; the others followed suit as they could; the book was surely then a
sandy desert, the publication a theme for mirth. She so lost herself, as her
perception of the scale of the mistake deepened, in uplifting visions, that
when her parlour-maid, at eleven o’clock, opened the door she almost
gave the start of guilt surprised. The girl, withdrawing for the night, had
come but to say so, and her mistress, supremely wide-awake and with
remembrance kindled, appealed to her, after a blank stare, with intensity.
“What have you done with the papers?”
“The papers, ma’am?”
“All those of this morning – don’t tell
me you’ve destroyed them! Quick, quick – bring them back.”
The young woman, by a rare chance, had not destroyed them; she presently
reappeared with them, neatly folded; and Mrs Hope, dismissing her with
benedictions, had at last, in a few minutes, taken the
time of day. She saw her impression portentously
reflected in the public prints. It was not then the illusion of her jealousy
– it was the triumph, unhoped for, of her justice. The reviewers
observed a decorum, but, frankly, when one came to look, their stupefaction
matched her own. What she had taken in the morning for enthusiasm proved
mere perfunctory attention, unwarned in advance and seeking an issue for its
mystification. The question was, if one liked, asked civilly, but it was
asked, none the less, all round: ‘What could have made Lord
Northmore’s family take him for a letter-writer?’ Pompous and
ponderous, yet loose and obscure, he managed, by a trick of his own, to be
both slipshod and stiff. Who, in such a case, had been primarily
responsible, and under what strangely belated advice had a group of persons
destitute of wit themselves been thus deplorably led thus astray? With fewer
accomplices in the preparation, it might almost have been assumed that they
had been dealt with by practical jokers.
They had at all events committed an error of which the
most merciful thing to say was that, as founded on loyalty, it was touching.
These things, in the welcome offered, lay perhaps not quite on the face, but
they peeped between the lines and would force their way through on the
morrow. The long quotations given were quotations marked Why? –
‘Why,’ in other words, as interpreted by Mrs Hope, ‘drag
to light such helplessness of expression? why give the text of his dulness
and the proof of his fatuity?’ The victim of the error had certainly
been, in his way and day, a useful and remarkable person, but almost any
other evidence of the fact
might more happily have been adduced. It rolled over her, as she paced her room
in the small hours, that the wheel had come full circle. There was after all a
rough justice. The monument that had over-darkened her was reared, but it
would be within a week the opportunity of every humourist, the derision of
intelligent London. Her husband’s strange share in it continued, that
night, between dreams and vigils, to puzzle her, but light broke with her
final waking, which was comfortably late. She opened her eyes to it, and, as
it stared straight into them, she greeted it with the first laugh that had
for a long time passed her lips. How could she, idiotically, not have
guessed? Warren, playing insidiously the part of a guardian, had done what
he had done on purpose! He had acted to an end long foretasted, and the end
– the full taste – had come.
It was after this, none the less – after the other
organs of criticism, including the smoking-rooms of the clubs, the
lobbies of the House
and the dinner-tables of everywhere, had duly embodied their
reserves and vented their irreverence, and the unfortunate two volumes had
ranged themselves, beyond appeal, as a novelty insufficiently curious and
prematurely stale – it was when this had come to pass that
Mrs Hope really felt how beautiful her own chance would now have been
and how sweet her revenge. The success of her volumes, for the
inevitability of which nobody had had an instinct,
would have been as great as the failure of Lady
Northmore’s, for the inevitability of which everybody had had one. She
read over and over her letters and asked herself afresh if the confidence
that had preserved them might not, at such a crisis, in spite of
everything, justify itself. Did not the discredit to English wit, as it
were, proceeding from the uncorrected attribution to an established public
character of such mediocrity of thought and form, really demand, for that
matter, some such redemptive stroke as the appearance of a collection of
masterpieces gathered from a similar walk? To have such a collection under
one’s hand and yet sit and see one’s self not use it was a torment
through which she might well have feared to break down.
But there was another thing she might do, not redemptive
indeed, but perhaps, after all, as matters were going, apposite. She fished
out of their nook, after long years, the packet of John Northmore’s
epistles to herself, and, reading them over in the light of his later style,
judged them to contain to the full the promise of that inimitability; felt
that they would deepen the impression and that, in the way of the
inédit,
they constituted her supreme treasure. There was
accordingly a terrible week for her in which she itched to put them forth.
She composed mentally the preface, brief, sweet, ironic, representing her as
prompted by an anxious sense of duty to a great reputation and acting upon
the sight of laurels so lately gathered. There would naturally be
difficulties; the documents were her own, but the family, bewildered,
scared, suspicious, figured to her fancy as a dog with a dust-pan tied to
its tail and ready for any dash to cover at the sound of the clatter of tin.
They would have, she surmised, to
be consulted, or, if not consulted, would put in an injunction; yet of the
two courses, that of scandal braved for the man she had rejected drew her
on, while the charm of this vision worked, still further than that of
delicacy over-ridden for the man she had married.
The vision closed round her and she lingered on the idea
– fed, as she handled again her faded fat packet, by re-perusals more
richly convinced. She even took opinions as to the interference open to her
old friend’s relatives; took, in fact, from this time on, many
opinions; went out anew, picked up old threads, repaired old ruptures,
resumed, as it was called, her place in society. She had not been for years
so seen of men as during the few weeks that followed the abasement of the
Northmores. She called, in particular, on every one she had cast out after
the failure of her appeal. Many of these persons figured as Lady
Northmore’s contributors, the unwitting agents of the unprecedented
exposure; they having, it was sufficiently clear, acted in dense good faith.
Warren, foreseeing and calculating, might have the benefit of such subtlety,
but it was not for any one else. With every one else – for they did, on
facing her, as she said to herself, look like fools – she made
inordinately free; putting right and left the question of what, in the past
years, they, or their progenitors, could have been thinking of. ‘What
on earth had you in mind, and where, among you, were the rudiments of
intelligence, when you burnt up my husband’s priceless letters and
clung as if for salvation to Lord Northmore’s? You see how you have
been saved!’ The weak explanations, the imbecility, as she judged it,
of the reasons
given, were so much
balm to her wound. The great balm, however, she kept to the last: she would
go to see Lady Northmore only when she had exhausted all other comfort. That
resource would be as supreme as the treasure of the fat packet. She finally
went and, by a happy chance, if chance could ever be happy in such a house,
was received. She remained half an hour – there were other persons
present, and, on rising to go, felt that she was satisfied. She had taken in
what she desired, had sounded what she saw; only, unexpectedly, something
had overtaken her more absolute than the hard need she had obeyed or the
vindictive advantage she had cherished. She had counted on herself for
almost anything but for pity of these people, yet it was in pity that, at
the end of ten minutes, she felt everything else dissolve.
They were suddenly, on the spot, transformed for her by
the depth of their misfortune, and she saw them, the great Northmores, as
– of all things – consciously weak and flat. She neither made nor
encountered an allusion to volumes published or frustrated; and so let her
arranged inquiry die away that when, on separation, she kissed her wan
sister in widowhood, it was not with the kiss of Judas. She had meant to ask
lightly if she mightn’t have her turn at editing; but the
renunciation with which she re-entered her house had formed itself before
she left the room. When she got home indeed she at first only wept –
wept for the commonness of failure and the strangeness of life. Her tears
perhaps brought her a sense of philosophy; it was all as broad as it was
long. When they were spent, at all events, she took out for the last time
the faded fat
packet. Sitting down
by a receptacle daily emptied for the benefit of the dustman, she destroyed,
one by one, the gems of the collection in which each piece had been a gem.
She tore up, to the last scrap, Lord Northmore’s letters. It would
never be known now, as regards this series, either that they had been
hoarded or that they had been sacrificed. And she was content so to let it
rest. On the following day she began another task. She took out her
husband’s and attacked the business of transcription. She copied them
piously, tenderly, and, for the purpose to which she now found herself
settled, judged almost no omissions imperative. By the time they should be
published—! She shook her head, both knowingly and resignedly, as to
criticism so remote. When her transcript was finished she sent it to a
printer to set up, and then, after receiving and correcting proof, and with
every precaution for secrecy, had a single copy struck off and the type,
under her eyes, dispersed. Her last act but one – or rather perhaps but
two – was to put these sheets, which she was pleased to find, would
form a volume of three hundred pages, carefully away. Her next was to add to
her testamentary instrument a definite provision for the issue, after her
death, of such a volume. Her last was to hope that
death would come in time.
THE END
part of an etext edition of
The abasement of the Northmores
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website