1Editor.
"And now I see with eyes sereneThe very pulse of the machine;A being breathing thoughtful breath,A traveller betwixt life and death;The reason firm, the temperate will,Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;A perfect woman, nobly plannedTo warn and comfort and command;And yet a spirit too and brightWith something of an angel-light."—Wordsworth.
"And now I see with eyes sereneThe very pulse of the machine;A being breathing thoughtful breath,A traveller betwixt life and death;The reason firm, the temperate will,Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;A perfect woman, nobly plannedTo warn and comfort and command;And yet a spirit too and brightWith something of an angel-light."—Wordsworth.
When Barty had been six months in England, poor Mr. Gibson's affairs went suddenly smash. My father saved him from absolute bankruptcy, and there was lamentation and wailing for a month or so in Conduit Street; but things were so managed that Mr. Gibson was able to keep on the "West End firm," and make with it a new start.
He had long been complaining of his cashier, and had to dismiss him and look out for another; but here his daughter came in and insisted on being cashier herself—(to her mother's horror).
So she took her place at a railed-in desk at the back of the shop, and was not only cashier and bookkeeper, but overseer of all things in general, and was not above seeing any exacting and importunate customer whom the shopmen couldn't manage.
She actually liked her work, and declared she hadfound her real vocation, and quite ceased to regret Tavistock Square.
Her authority in the emporium was even greater than her father's, who was too fond of being funny. She awed the shopmen into a kind of affectionate servility, and they were prostrate as before a goddess, in spite of her never-failing politeness to them.
Customers soon got into a way of asking to see Miss Gibson, especially when they were accompanied by husbands or brothers or male friends; and Miss Gibson soon found she sold better than any shopman, and became one of the notables in the quarter.
All Mr. Gibson's fun came back, and he was as proud of his daughter as if she'd been proposed to by an earl. But Mrs. Gibson couldn't help shedding tears over Leah's loss of caste—Leah, on whose beauty and good breeding she had founded such hopes; it is but fair to add that she was most anxious to keep the books herself, so that her daughter might be spared this degradation; for no "gentleman," she felt sure, would ever propose to her daughter now.
But she was mistaken.
One night Barty and I dined at a little cagmag he used to frequent, where he fared well—so he said—for a shilling, which included a glass of stout. It was a disgusting little place, but he liked it, and therefore so did I.
Then we called for Mrs. Gibson and Leah, and took them to the Princess's to see Fechter in Ruy Blas, and escorted them home, and had supper with them, a very good supper—nothing ever interfered with the luxuriously hospitable instincts of the Gibsons—and a very merry one. Barty imitated Fechter to the life.
"I 'av ze garrb of alacquais—you 'av ze sôle ofwawn!"
This he said to Mr. Gibson, who was in fits of delight. Mr. Gibson had just come home from his club, and the cards had been propitious; Leah was more reserved than usual, and didn't laugh at Barty, for a wonder, but gazed at him with love in her eyes.
When we left them, Barty took my arm and walked home with me, down Oxford Street and up Southampton Row, and talked of Ruy Blas and Fechter, whom he had often seen in Paris.
Just where a little footway leads from the Row to Queen Square and Great Ormond Street, he stopped and said:
"Bob, do you remember how we tossed up for Leah Gibson at this very spot?"
"I should think I did," said I.
"Well, you had a fair field and no favor, old boy, didn't you?"
"Oh yes, I've long resigned any pretensions, as I wrote you more than a year ago; you may go in and win—si le cœur t'en dit!"
"Well, then, your congratulations, please. I asked her to marry me as we crossed Regent Circus, Oxford Street, on the way home; a hansom came by and scattered and splashed us. Then we came together again, and just opposite Peter Robinson's, she asked me if my mind was quite made up—if I was sure I wouldn't ever change. I swore by the eternal gods, and she said she would be my wife; so there we are, an engaged couple."
I must ask the reader to believe that I was equal to the occasion, and said what I ought to have said.
Mrs. Gibson was happy at last; she was satisfied that Barty was a "gentleman," in spite of the kink in his birth; and as for his prospects, money was a thing thatnever entered Mrs. Gibson's head, and she loved Barty as a son—was a little bit in love with him herself, I believe; she was not yet forty, and as pretty as she could be.
Besides, a week after, who should call upon her over the shop—there was a private entrance of course—but the Right Honorable Lady Caroline Grey and her niece, Miss Daphne Rohan, granddaughter of the late and niece of the present Marquis of Whitby!
And Mrs. Gibson felt as much at home with them in five minutes as if she'd known them all her life.
Leah was summoned from below, and kissed and congratulated by the two aristocratic relatives of Barty's, and relieved of her shyness in a very short time indeed.
As a matter of fact, Lady Caroline, who knew her nephew well, and thoroughly understood his position, was really well pleased; she had never forgotten her impression of Leah when she met her in the park with Ida and me a year back, and we all walked by the Serpentine together—a certain kind of beauty seems to break down all barriers of rank; and she knew Leah's character both from Barty and me, and from her own native shrewdness of observation. She had been delighted to hear from Barty of Leah's resolute participation in her father's troubles, and in his attempt—so successful through her—to rehabilitate his business. To her old-fashioned aristocratic way of looking at things, there was little to choose between a respectable West End shopkeeper and a medical practitioner or dentist or solicitor or architect—or even an artist, like Barty himself. Once outside the Church, the Army and Navy, or a Government office, what on earth did it matterwhoorwhatone was, or wasn't? The only thing she couldn't stand was that
"LEAH WAS SUMMONED FROM BELOW"
horrid form of bourgeois gentility, the pretension to seem something better than you really are. Mrs. Gibson was so naïvely honest in her little laments over her lost grandeur that she could hardly be called vulgar about it.
Mr. Gibson didn't appear; he was overawed, and distrusted himself. I doubt if Lady Caroline would have liked anything in the shape of jocose familiarity; and I fear her naturalness and simplicity and cordiality of manner, and the extreme plainness of her attire, might have put him at his ease almost a trifle too much.
Whether her ladyship would have been so sympathetic about this engagement if Barty had been a legitimate Rohan—say a son of her own—is perhaps to be doubted; but anyhow she had quite made up her mind that Leah was a quite exceptional person, both in mind and manners. She has often said as much to me, and has always had as high a regard for Barty's wife as for any woman she knows, and has still—the Rohans are a long-lived family. She has often told me she never knew a better, sincerer, nobler, or more sensible woman than Barty's wife.
Besides which, as I have been told, the ancient Yorkshire house of Rohan has always been singularly free from aristocratic hauteur; perhaps their religion may have accounted for this, and also their poverty.
This memorable visit, it must be remembered, happened nearly forty years ago, when social demarcations in England were far more rigidly defined than at present; then, the wife of a costermonger with a donkey did not visit the wife of a costermonger who had to wheel his barrow himself.
We are more sensible in these days, as all who like Mr. Chevalier's admirable coster-songs are aware. Old Europe itself has become less tolerant of distinctions of rank;even Austria is becoming so. It is only in southeastern Bulgaria—and even of this I am not absolutely sure—that the navvy who happens to be of noble birth refuses to work in the same gang with the navvy who isn't; and that's what I call real "esprit de corps," without which no aristocracy can ever hope to hold its own in these degenerate days.
Noblesse oblige!
Why, I've got a Lord Arthur in my New York agency, and two Hon'bles in Barge Yard, and another at Cape Town; and devilish good men of business they are, besides being good fellows all round. They hope to become partners some day; and, by Jove! they shall. Now I've said it, I'll stick to it.
The fact is, I'm rather fond of noble lords: why shouldn't I be? I might have been one myself any day these last ten years; I might now, if I chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord—he, a mere man of letters!—but he refused every honor and distinction that was ever offered to him, either here or abroad—even the Prussian order of Merit!
Alfred Tennyson was a lord, so what is there to make such a fuss about. Give me lords who can't help themselves, because they were born so, and the stupider the better; and the older—for the older they are the grander their manners and the manners of their womankind.
Take, for instance, that splendid old dow, Penelope, Duchess of Rumtifoozleland—I always give nicknames to my grand acquaintances; not that she's particularly old herself, but she belongs to an antiquated order of things that is passing away—for she was a Fitztartan, a daughter of theducal house of Comtesbois (pronounced County Boyce); and she's very handsome still.
Have you ever been presented to her Grace, O reader?
If so, you must have been struck by the grace of her Grace's manner, as with a ducal gesture and a few courtly words she recognizes the value of whatever immense achievements yours must have been to have procured you such an honor as such an introduction, and expresses her surprise and regret that she has not known you before. The formula is always the same, on every possible occasion. I ought to know, for I've had the honor of being presented to her Grace seven times this year.
Now this lofty forgetting of your poor existence—or mine—is not aristocratic hauteur or patrician insolence; it isbêtise pure et simple, as they call it in France. She was a daughter of the house of Comtesbois, and the Fitztartans were not the inventors of gunpowder, nor was she.
But for a stately, magnificent Grande Dame of the ancient régime, to meet for the seventh time, and be presented to—for the seventh time—with all due ceremony in the midst of a distinguished conservative crowd—say at a ball at Buckingham Palace—give me Penelope, Dowager Duchess of Rumtifoozleland!
(This seems a somewhat uncalled-for digression. But, anyhow, it shows that when it pleases me to do so I move in the very best society—just like Barty Josselin.)
So here was Mr. Nobody of Nowhere taking unto himself a wife from among the daughters of Heth; from the class he had always disliked, the buyers cheap and the sellers dear—whose sole aim in life is the making of money, and who are proud when they succeed and ashamed when they fail—and getting actually fond of his future father and mother in law, as I was!
When I laughed to him about old Gibson—John Gilpin, as we used to call him—being a tradesman, he said:
"Yes; but what anunsuccessfultradesman, my dear fellow!" as if that in itself atoned or made amends for everything.
"Besides, he's Leah's father! And as for Mrs. Gilpin, she's adear, although she's always on pleasure bent; at all events, she's not of a frugal mind; and she's so pretty and dresses so well—and what a foot!—and she's got such easy manners, too; she reminds me of dear Lady Archibald! that's a mother-in-law I shall get on with.... I wish she didn't make such a fuss about living over the shop; I call that being above one's business in every way."
"Je suis au-dessus de mes affaires," as old Bonzig proudly said when he took a garret over the Mont de Piété, in the Rue des Averses.
Barty's courtship didn't last long—only five or six months—during which he made lots of money by sketching little full-length portraits of people in outline and filling up with tints in water-color. He thus immortalized my father and mother, and Ida Scatcherd and her husband, and the old Scatcherds, and lots of other people. It was not high art, I suppose; he was not a high artist; but it paid well, and made him more tolerant of trade than ever.
He took the upper part of a house in Southampton Row, and furnished it almost entirely with wedding-gifts; among other things, a beautiful semi-grand piano by Érard—the gift of my father. Everything was charming there and in the best taste.
Leah was better at furnishing a house than at drawing and music-making; it was an occupation she revelled in.
It is not perhaps for me to say that their cellar might hold its own with that of any beginners in their rank of life!
Well, and so they were married at Marylebone Church, and I was Barty's best man (he was to have been mine, and for that very bride). Nobody else was there but the family, and Ida, whose husband was abroad; the sun shone, though it was not yet May—and then we breakfasted; and John Gilpin made a very funny speech, though with tears in his voice; and as for poor Maman-belle-mère, as Barty called her, she was a very Niobe.
They went for a fortnight to Boulogne. I wished them joy from the bottom of my heart, and flung a charming little white satin slipper of Mrs. Gibson's; it alighted on the carriage—ourcarriage, by-the-way; we had just started one, and now lived at Lancaster Gate.
It was a sharp pang—almost unbearable, but, also, almost the last. The last was when she came back and I saw how radiant she looked. And as for Barty, he was like
"the herald Mercury,New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill!"
and he had shaved off his beard and mustache to please his wife.
"From George du Maurier, Esqre., A.R.W.S., Hampstead Heath,to the Right Honble. Sir Robert Maurice, Bart., M.P.:
"My Dear Maurice,—In answer to your kind letter, I shall be proud and happy to illustrate your biography of Barty Josselin; but as for editing it,vous plaisantez, mon ami; un amateur comme moi!who'll edit the editor?Quis custodiet?...
"You're mistaken about Malines. I only got back there a week or two before he left it. I remember often seeing him there, armin arm with his aunt, Lady Caroline Grey, and being told that he was amonsieur anglais, qui avait mal aux yeux(like me); but in Düsseldorf, during the following winter, I knew him very well indeed.
"We, and the others you tell me you mention, had a capital time in Düsseldorf. I remember the beautiful Miss Royce they were all so mad about, and also Miss Gibson, whom I admired much the most of the two, although she wasn't quite so tall—you know my craze for lovely giantesses.
"Josselin and I came to London at about the same time, and there again I saw much of him, and was immensely attracted by him, of course—as we all were, in the very pleasant little artistic clique you tell me you describe; but somehow I was never very intimate with him—none of us were, except, perhaps, Charles Keene.
"He went a great deal into smart society, and a little of the guardsman still clung to him, and this was an unpardonable crime in those Bohemian days.
"He was once seen walking between two well-known earls, in the Burlington Arcade, arm in arm!
"Z—— (to whom a noble lord was as a red rag to a bull) all but cut him for this, and we none of us approved of his swell friends, Guardsmen and others. How we've all changed, especially Z——, who hasn't missed a levée for twenty years, nor his wife a drawing-room!
"Josselin and I acted in a little French musical farce together at Cornelys's; he had a charming voice and sang beautifully, as you know.
"Then he married, and a year after I did the same; and though we lived near each other for a little while, we didn't meet very often, beyond dining together once or twice at each other's houses. They lived very much in the world.
"It will be very difficult to draw his wife. I really think Mrs. Josselin was the most beautiful woman I ever saw; but she used to be very reserved in those early days, and I never felt quite at my ease with her. I'm sure she was sweetness and kindness itself; she was certainly charming at her own dinner-table, where she was less shy.
"Millais's portrait of her is very good, and so is Watts's; but the best idea of her is to be got from Josselin's little outlines in 'TheDiscreet Princess,' and these are out of print. If you have any, please lend them to me, and I will faithfully return them. I have more than once tried to draw her inPunch, from memory, but never with success.
"I used to call her 'La belle dame sans merci.'
"I've often, however, drawn Josselin, as you must remember, and people have recognized him at once. Thanks for all his old sketches of school, etc., which will be very useful.
"I wish I had known the Josselins better. But when one lives in Hampstead one has to forego many delightful friendships; and then he grew to be such a tremendous swell! Good heavens!—Sardonyx, etc. I never could muster courage even to write and congratulate him.
"It never occurred to any of us, either in Düsseldorf or London, to think him what is calledclever; he never said anything very witty or profound. But he was always funny in a good-natured, jovial manner, and made me laugh more than any one else.
"As for satire, good heavens! that seemed not in him. He was always well dressed, always in high spirits and a good temper, and very demonstrative and caressing; putting his arm round one, and slapping one on the back or lifting one up in the air; a kind of jolty, noisy, boisterous boon-companion—rather uproarious, in fact, and with no disdain for a good bottle of wine or a good bottle of beer. His artistic tastes were very catholic, for he was prostrate in admiration before Millais, Burne-Jones, Fred Walker, and Charles Keene, with the latter of whom he used to sing old English duets. Oddly enough, Charles Keene had for Josselin's little amateur pencillings the most enthusiastic admiration—probably because they were the very antipodes of his own splendid work. I believe he managed to get some little initial letters of Josselin's intoPunchandOnce a Week; but they weren't signed, and made no mark, and I've forgotten them.
"Josselin didn't really get his foot in the stirrup till a year or two after his marriage.
"And that was by his illustrations to his ownSardonyx, which are almost worthy of the letter-press, I think; though still somewhat lacking in freedom and looseness, and especially in the sense of tone. The feeling for beauty and character in them (especially that of women and children) is so utterly beyond anything else of the kind that has ever been attempted, that technical considerations
"BETWEEN TWO WELL-KNOWN EARLS"
no longer count. I think you will find all of us, in or outside the Academy, agreed upon this point.
"I saw very little of him after he bought Marsfield; but I sometimes meet his sons and daughters,de par le monde.
"And what a pleasure that is to an artist of my particular bent you can readily understand. I would go a good way to see or talk to any daughter of Josselin's; and to hear Mrs. Trevor sing, what miles! I'm told the grandchildren are splendid—chips of the old block too.
"And now, my dear Maurice, I will do my best; you may count upon that, for old-times' sake, and for Josselin's, and for that of 'La belle dame sans merci,' whom I used to admire so enthusiastically. It grieves me deeply to think of them both gone—and all so sudden!
"Sincerely yours,
"George du Maurier.
"P. S.—Very many thanks for the Château Yquem and the Steinberger Cabinet;je tâcherai de ne pas en abuser trop!
"I send you a little sketch of Graham-Reece (Lord Ironsides), taken by me on a little bridge in Düsselthal, near Düsseldorf. He stood for me there in 1860. It was thought very like at the time."
When the Josselins came back from their honeymoon and were settled in Southampton Row many people of all kinds called on the newly married pair; invitations came pouring in, and they went very much into the world. They were considered the handsomest couple in London that year, and became quite the fashion, and were asked everywhere, and made much of, and raved about, and had a glorious time till the following season, when somebody else became the fashion, and they had grown tired of being lionized themselves, and discovered they were people of no social importance whatever, as Leah had long perceived; and it did them good.
Barty was in his element. The admiration his wife excited filled him with delight; it was a kind of reflectedglory, that pleased him more than any glory he could possibly achieve for himself.
I doubt if Leah was quite so happy. The grand people, the famous people, the clever, worldly people she met made her very shy at first, as may be easily imagined.
She was rather embarrassed by the attentions many smart men paid her as to a very pretty woman, and not always pleased or edified. Her deep sense of humor was often tickled by this new position in which she found herself, and which she put down entirely to the fact that she was Barty's wife.
She never thought much of her own beauty, which had never been made much of at home, where beauty of a very different order was admired, and where she was thought too tall, too pale, too slim, and especially too quiet and sedate.
Dimpled little rosy plumpness for Mr. and Mrs. John Gilpin, and the never-ending lively chatter, and the ever-ready laugh that results from an entire lack of the real sense of humor and a laudable desire to show one's pretty teeth.
Leah's only vanity was her fondness for being very well dressed; it had become a second nature, especially her fondness for beautiful French boots and shoes, an instinct inherited from her mother.
For these, and for pretty furniture and hangings, she had the truly æsthetic eye, and was in advance of her time by at least a year.
She shone most in her own home—by her great faculty of making others at home there, too, and disinclined to leave it. Her instinct of hospitality was a true inheritance; she was good at the ordering of all such things—food, wines, flowers, waiting, every little detail of the dinner-table, and especially who should be asked to meetwhom, and which particular guests should be chosen to sit by each other. All things of which Barty had no idea whatever.
I remember their first dinner-party well, and how pleasant it was. How good the fare, and how simple; and how quick the hired waiting—and the wines! how—(but I won't talk of that); and how lively we all were, and how handsome the women. Lady Caroline and Miss Daphne Rohan, Mr. and Mrs. Graham-Reece, Scatcherd and my sister; G. du Maurier (then a bachelor) and myself—that was the party, a very lively one.
After dinner du Maurier and Barty sang capital songs of the quartier latin, and told stories of the atelier, and even danced a kind of cancan together—an invention of their own—which they called "le dernier des Abencerrages." We were in fits of laughter, especially Lady Caroline and Mrs. Graham-Reece. I hope D. M. has not forgotten that scene, and will do justice to it in this book.
There was still more of the Bohemian than the Guardsman left in Barty, and his wife's natural tastes were far more in the direction of Bohemia than of fashionable West End society, as it was called by some people who were not in it, whatever it consists of; there was more of her father in her than her mother, and she was not sensitive to the world's opinion of her social status.
Sometimes Leah and Barty and I would dine together and go to the gallery of the opera, let us say, or to see Fechter and Miss Kate Terry in theDuke's Motto, or Robson in Shylock, or thePorter's Knot, or whatever was good. Then on the way home to Southampton Row Barty would buy a big lobster, and Leah would make a salad of it, with innovations of her own devising which were much appreciated; and then we would feast, and
"LE DERNIER DES ABENCERRAGES"
afterwards Leah would mull some claret in a silver saucepan, and then we (Barty and I) would drink and smoke and chat of pleasant things till it was very late indeed and I had to be turned out neck and crop.
And the kindness of the two dear people! Once, when my father and mother were away in the Isle of Wight and the Scatcherds in Paris, I felt so seedy I had to leave Barge Yard and go home to Lancaster Gate. I had felt pretty bad for two or three days. Like all people who are never ill, I was nervous and thought I was going to die, and sent for Barty.
In less than twenty minutes Leah drove up in a hansom. Barty was in Hampton Court for the day, sketching. When she had seen me and how ill I looked, off she went for the doctor, and brought him back with her in no time. He saw I was sickening for typhoid, and must go to bed at once and engage two nurses.
Leah insisted on taking me straight off to Southampton Row, and the doctor came with us. There I was soon in bed and the nurses engaged, and everything done for me as if I'd been Barty himself—all this at considerable inconvenience to the Josselins.
And I had my typhoid most pleasantly. And I shall never forget the joys of convalescence, nor what an angel that woman was in a sick-room—nor what a companion when the worst was over; nor how she so bore herself through all this forced intimacy that no unruly regrets or jealousies mingled in my deep affection and admiration for her, and my passionate gratitude. She was such a person to tell all one's affairs to, even dry business affairs! such a listener, and said such sensible things, and sometimes made suggestions that were invaluable; and of a discretion! a very tomb for momentous secrets.
How on earth Barty would have ever managed to get through existence without her is not to be conceived. Upon my word, I hardly see how I should have got on myself without these two people to fill my life with; and in all matters of real importance to me she was the nearest of the two, for Barty was so light about things, and couldn't listen long to anything that was at all intricate. Such matters bored him, and that extraordinary good sense which underlies all his brilliant criticism of life was apt to fail him in practical matters; he was too headstrong and impulsive, and by no means discreet.
It was quite amusing to watch the way his wife managed him without ever letting him suspect what she was doing, and how, after his raging and fuming and storming and stamping—for all his old fractiousness had come back—she would gradually make him work his way round—of his own accord, as he thought—to complete concession all along the line, and take great credit to himself in consequence; and she would very gravely and slowly give way to a delicate little wink in my direction, but never a smile at what was all so really funny. I've no doubt she often got me to do what she thought right in just the same way—à mon insu—and shot her little wink at Barty.
In due time—namely, late in the evening of December 31, 1862—Barty hailed a hansom, and went first to summon his good friend Dr. Knight, in Orchard Street; and then he drove to Brixton, and woke up and brought back with him a very respectable, middle-aged, and motherly woman whose name was Jones; and next morning, which was a very sunny, frosty one, my dear little god-daughter was ushered into this sinful world, afact which was chronicled the very next day in Leah's diary by the simple entry:
"Jan. 1.—Roberta was born and the coals came in."
When Roberta was first shown to her papa by the nurse, he was in despair and ran and shut himself up in his studio, and, I believe, almost wept. He feared he had brought a monster into the world. He had always thought that female babies were born with large blue eyes framed with long lashes, a beautiful complexion of the lily and the rose, and their shining, flaxen curls already parted in the middle. And this little bald, wrinkled, dark-red, howling lump of humanity all but made him ill. But soon the doctor came and knocked at the door, and said:
"I congratulate you, old fellow, on having produced the most magnificent little she I ever saw in my life—bar none; she might be shown for money."
And it turned out that this was not the coarse, unfeeling chaff poor Barty took it for at first, but the pure and simple truth.
So, my blessed Roberta, pride of your silly old godfather's heart and apple of his eye, mother of Cupid and Ganymede and Aurora and the infant Hercules, think of your poor young father weeping in solitude at the first sight of you, because you were so hideous in his eyes!
You were not so in mine. Next day—you had improved, no doubt—I took you in my arms and thought well of you, especially your little hands that were very prehensile, and your little feet turned in, with rosy toes and little pink nails like shiny gems; and I was complimented by Mrs. Jones on the skill with which I dandled you. I have dandled your sons and daughters, Roberta, and may I live to dandle theirs!
So then Barty dried his tears, if he really shed them—and he swears he did—and went and sat by his wife's bedside, and felt unutterably, as I believe all good men do under similar circumstances; and lo!—proh!—to his wonderment and delight, in the middle of it all, the sense of the north came back like a tide, like an overwhelming avalanche. He declared he all but fainted in the double ineffability of his bliss.
That night he arranged by his bedside writing materials chosen with extra care, and before he went to bed he looked out of window at the stars, and filled his lungs with the clean, frozen, virtuous air of Bloomsbury, and whispered a most passionate invocation to Martia, and implored her forgiveness, and went to sleep hugging the thought of her to his manly breast, now widowed for quite a month to come.
Next morning there was a long letter in bold, vigorous Blaze:
"My more than ever beloved Barty,—It is for me to implore pardon, not foryou! Your first-born is proof enough to me how right you were in letting your own instinct guide you in the choice of a wife.
"Ah! and well now I know her worth and your good-fortune. I have inhabited her for many months, little as she knows it, dear thing!
"Although she was not the woman I first wanted for you, and had watched so many years, she is all that I could wish, in body and mind, in beauty and sense and goodness of heart and intelligence, in health and strength, and especially in the love with which she has so easily, and I trust so lastingly, filled your heart—for that is the most precious thing of all to me, as you shall know some day, and why; and you will then understand andforgive me for seeming such a shameless egotist and caring so desperately for my own ends.
"Barty, I will never doubt you again, and we will do great things together. They will not be quite what I used to hope, but they will be worth doing, and all the doing will be yours. All I can do is to set your brains in motion—those innocent brains that don't know their own strength any more than a herd of bullocks which any little butcher boy can drive to the slaughter-house.
"As soon as Leah is well enough you must tell her all about me—all you know, that is. She won't believe you at first, and she'll think you've gone mad; but she'll have to believe you in time, and she's to be trusted with any secret, and so will you be when once you've shared it with her.
"(By-the-way, I wish you weren't so slipshod and colloquial in your English, Barty—Guardsman's English, I suppose—which I have to use, as it's yours; your French is much more educated and correct. You remember dear M. Durosier at the Pension Brossard? he taught you well. You must read, and cultivate a decent English style, for the bulk of our joint work must be in English, I think; and I can only use your own words to make you immortal, and your own way of using them.)
"We will be simple, Barty—as simple as Lemuel Gulliver and the good Robinson Crusoe—and cultivate a fondness for words of one syllable, and if that doesn't do we'll try French.
"Now listen, or, rather, read:
"First of all, I will write out for you a list of books, which you must study whenever you feel I'm inside you—and this more for me than for yourself. Those marked with a cross you must read constantly and carefully at home, the others you must read at the British Museum.
"Get a reading ticket at once, and read the books in the order I put down. Never forget to leave paper and pencil by your bedside. Leah will soon get accustomed to your quiet somnambulism; I will never trouble your rest for more than an hour or so each night, but you can make up for it by staying in bed an hour or two longer. You will have to work during the day from the pencil notes in Blaze you will have written during the night, and in the evening, or at any time you are conscious of my presence, read what you have written during the day, and leave it by your bedside when you go to bed, that I may make you correct and alter and suggest—during your sleep.
"Only write on one side of a page, leaving a margin and plenty of space between the lines, and let it be in copybooks, so that the page on the left-hand side be left for additions and corrections from my Blaze notes, and so forth; you'll soon get into the way of it.
"Then when each copybook is complete—I will let you know—get Leah to copy it out; she writes a very good, legible business hand. All will arrange itself....
"And now, get the books and begin reading them. I shall not be ready to write, nor will you, for more than a month.
"Keep this from everybody but Leah; don't even mention it to Maurice until I give you leave—not but what's he's to be thoroughly trusted. You are fortunate in your wife and your friend—I hope the day will come when you will find you have been fortunate in your
"Martia."
Here follows a list of books, but it has been more or less carefully erased; and though some of the names arestill to be made out, I conclude that Barty did not wish them to be made public.
Before Roberta was born, Leah had reserved herself an hour every morning and every afternoon for what she called the cultivation of her mind—the careful reading of good standard books, French and English, that she might qualify herself in time, as she said, for the intellectual society in which she hoped to mix some day; she built castles in the air, being somewhat of a hero-worshipper in secret, and dreamt of meeting her heroes in the flesh, now that she was Barty's wife.
But when she became a mother there was not only Roberta who required much attention, but Barty himself made great calls upon her time besides.
To his friends' astonishment he had taken it into his head to write a book. Good heavens! Barty writing a book! What on earth could the dear boy have to write about?
He wrote much of the book at night in bed, and corrected and put it into shape during the daytime; and finally Leah had to copy it all out neatly in her best handwriting, and this copying out of Barty's books became to her an all but daily task for many years—a happy labor of love, and one she would depute to no one else; no hired hand should interfere with these precious productions of her husband's genius. So that most of the standard works, English and French, that she grew to thoroughly master were of her husband's writing—not a bad education, I venture to think!
Besides, it was more in her nature and in the circumstances of her life that she should become a woman of business and a woman of the world rather than a reader of books—one who grew to thoroughly understand lifeas it presented itself to her; and men and women, and especially children; and the management of a large and much frequented house; for they soon moved away from Southampton Row.
She quickly arrived at a complete mastery of all such science as this—and it is a science; such a mastery as I have never seen surpassed by any other woman, of whatever world. She would have made a splendid Marchioness of Whitby, this daughter of a low-comedy John Gilpin; she would have beaten the Whitby record!
She developed into a woman of the world in the best sense—full of sympathy, full of observation and quick understanding of others' needs and thoughts and feelings; absolutely sincere, of a constant and even temper, and a cheerfulness that never failed—the result of her splendid health; without caprice, without a spark of vanity, without selfishness of any kind—generous, open-handed, charitable to a fault; always taking the large and generous view of everything and everybody; a little impulsive perhaps, but not often having to regret her impulses; of unwearied devotion to her husband, and capable of any heroism or self-sacrifice for his sake; of that I feel sure.
No one is perfect, of course. Unfortunately, she was apt to be somewhat jealous at first of his singularly catholic and very frankly expressed admiration of every opposite type of female beauty; but she soon grew to see that there was safety in numbers, and she was made to feel in time that her own type was the arch-type of all in his eyes, and herself the arch-representative of that type in his heart.
She was also jealous in her friendships, and was not happy unless constantly assured of her friends' warmlove—Ida's, mine, even that of her own father and mother. Good heavens! had ever a woman less cause for doubt or complaint on that score!
Then, like all extremely conscientious people who always know their own mind and do their very best, she did not like to be found fault with; she secretly found such fault with herself that she thought that was fault-finding enough. Also, she was somewhat rigid in sticking to the ways she thought were right, and in the selection of these ways she was not always quite infallible.On a les défauts de ses qualités; and a little obstinacy is often the fault of a very noble quality indeed!
Though somewhat shy and standoffish during the first year or two of her married life, she soon became "joliment dégourdie," as Barty called it; and I can scarcely conceive any position in which she would have been awkward or embarrassed for a moment, so ready was she always with just the right thing to say—or to withhold, if silence were better than speech; and her fit and proper place in the world as a great man's wife—and a good and beautiful woman—was always conceded to her with due honor, even by the most impertinent among the highly placed of her own sex, without any necessity for self-assertion on her part whatever—without assumption of any kind.
It was a strange and peculiar personal ascendency she managed to exert with so little effort, an ascendency partly physical, no doubt; and the practice of it had begun in the West End emporium of the "Universal Fur Company, Limited."
How admirably she filled the high and arduous position of wife to such a man as Barty Josselin is well known to the world at large. It was no sinecure! But