A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus Part 46

'It is so natural.'

'You can see him think. By Jove, it is splendid!' Frank had enough of the true artist to be able to feel that rush of enthusiasm which adequate work should cause. That old man, with his head shamefully defiled by birds, was a positive joy to him. Among the soulless, pompous, unspeakable London statues, here at last there was one over which it is pleasant to linger.

'What other one is there?'

'Gordon in Trafalgar Square.'

'Well, Gordon, perhaps. But our Nelsons and Napiers and Havelocks-- to think that we could do no better than that for them! Now, dear, we have seen the man--let us look at the house!'

It had evidently been an old-fas.h.i.+oned building when first they came to it. 1708 was the date at the corner of the street. Six or seven drab-coloured, flat-chested, dim-windowed houses stood in a line-- theirs wedged in the middle of them. A poor medallion with a profile head of him had been clumsily let into the wall. Several worn steps led to the thin high door with an old-fas.h.i.+oned fanlight above it.

Frank rang the bell, and a buxom cheerful matron came at the call.

'Names in this book, sir--AND address, if you please,' said the cheery matron. 'One s.h.i.+lling each--thank you, sir. First door to the left, sir! This was the dining-room, sir--'

But Frank had come to a dead stop in the dim, dull, wood-panelled hall. In front of them rose the stairs with old-fas.h.i.+oned banisters, cracked, warped, and dusty.

'It's awful to think of, Maude--awful! To think that she ran up those stairs as a youngish woman--that he took them two at a time as an active man, and then that they hobbled and limped down them, old and weary and broken, and now both dead and gone for ever, and the stairs standing, the very rails, the very treads--I don't know that I ever felt so strongly what bubbles of the air we are, so fragile, so utterly dissolved when the p.r.i.c.k comes.'

'How COULD they be happy in such a house?' said Maude. 'I can feel that there have been sorrow and trouble here. There is an atmosphere of gloom.'

The matron-attendant approved of emotion, but in its due order. One should be affected in the dining-room first, and then in the hall.

And so at her summons they followed her into the long, low, quaint room in which this curious couple had lived their everyday life.

Little of the furniture was left, and the walls were lined with collected pictures bearing upon the life of the Carlyles.

'There's the fireplace that he smoked his pipe up,' said Frank.

'Why up the fireplace?'

'She did not like the smell in the room. He often at night took his friends down into the kitchen.'

'Fancy my driving you into the kitchen.'

'Well, the habit of smoking was looked upon much less charitably at that time.'

'And besides, he smoked clay pipes,' said the matron. 'This is considered a good print of Mrs. Carlyle.'

It was a peaky eager face, with a great spirit looking out of it, and possibilities of pa.s.sion both for good and evil in the keen, alert features. Just beside her was the dour, grim outline of her husband.

Their life-histories were in those two portraits.

'Poor dear!' said Maude.

'Ay, you may say so,' said the matron, whose accent showed that she was from the north of the Tweed. 'He was gey ill to live wi'. His own mither said so. Now, what think you that room was for?'

It was little larger than a cupboard, without window or skylight, opening out of the end of the dining-room.

'I can't imagine.'

'Well, sir, it was the powdering-room in the days when folk wore wigs. The powder made such a mess that they just had a room for nothing else. There was a hole in the door, and the man put his head through the hole, and the barber on the other side powdered him out of the flour-dredger.'

It was curious to be brought back in this fas.h.i.+on to those far-off days, and to suddenly realise how many other people had played their tragi-comedies within these walls. Wigs! Only the dressy people wore wigs. So people of fas.h.i.+on in the days of the early Georges trod these same rooms where Carlyle grumbled and his wife fretted.

And they too had grumbled and fretted--or worse perhaps. It was a ghostly old house.

'This,' said the matron, when they had pa.s.sed up the stair, 'used to be the drawing-room. That's their sofa.'

'Not THE sofa,' said Frank.

'Yes, sir, the sofa that is mentioned in the letters.'

'She was so proud of it, Maude. Gave eighteen s.h.i.+llings for it, and covered and stuffed it herself. And that, I suppose, is THE screen.

She was a great housekeeper--brought up a spoiled child, according to her own account, but a great housekeeper all the same. What's that writing in the case?'

'It is the history that he was at work on when he died--something about the kings of Norway, sir. Those are his corrections in blue.'

'I can't read them.'

'No more could any one else, sir. Perhaps that's why the book has never been published. Those are the portraits of the kings of Prussia, about whom he wrote a book.'

Frank looked with interest at the old engravings, one of the schoolmaster face of the great Frederick, the other of the frog-like features of Frederick William, the half-mad recruiter of the big Potsdam grenadiers. When he had finished, the matron had gone down to open the door, and they were alone. Maude's hand grasped his.

'Is it not strange, dear?' she said. 'Here they lived, the most talented couple in the world, and yet with all their wisdom they missed what we have got--what perhaps that good woman who showed us round has got--the only thing, as it seems to me, that is really worth living for. What are all the wit and all the learning and all the insight into things compared to love.'

'By Jove, little woman, in all this house of wise sayings, no wiser or deeper saying has been said than that. Well, thank G.o.d, we have that anyhow!' And he kissed his wife, while six grand electors of Brandenburg and kings of Prussia looked fiercely out upon them from the wall.

They sat down together in two old chairs in the window, and they looked out into the dingy street, and Frank tried to recount all the great men--'the other great men, as Maude said, half chaffing and half earnest--who had looked through those panes. Tennyson, Ruskin, Emerson, Mill, Froude, Mazzini, Leigh Hunt--he had got so far when the matron returned.

There was a case in the corner with some of the wreckage from those vanished vessels. Notes from old Goethe in a singularly neat boyish writing inscribed upon little ornamented cards. Here, too, were small inscriptions which had lain upon presents from Carlyle to his wife. It was pleasant among all that jangling of the past to think of the love which had written them, and that other love which had so carefully preserved them. On one was written: 'All good attend my darling through this gulf of time and through the long ocean it is leading to. Amen. Amen. T. C.' On another, dated 1850, and attached evidently to some birthday present, was: 'Many years to my poor little Jeannie, and may the worst of them be past. No good that is in me to give her shall ever be wanting while I live. May G.o.d bless her.' How strange that this apostle of reticence should have such privacies as these laid open before the curious public within so few years of his death!

'This is her bedroom,' said the matron.

'And here is the old red bed,' cried Frank. It looked bare and gaunt and dreary with its uncurtained posts.

'The bed belonged to Mrs. Carlyle's mother,' the matron explained.

'It's the same bed that Mrs. Carlyle talks about in her letters when she says how she pulled it to pieces.'

'Why did she pull it to pieces?' asked Maude.

'Better not inquire, dear.'

'Indeed you're right, sir. If you get them into these old houses, it is very hard to get them out. A cleaner woman than Mrs. Carlyle never came out of Scotland. This little room behind was his dressing-room. There's his stick in the corner. Look what's written upon the window!'

Decidedly it was a ghostly house. Scratched upon one of the panes with a diamond was the following piece of information--'John Harbel Knowles cleaned all the windows in this house, and painted part, in the eighteenth year of age. March 7th, 1794.'

'Who was HE?' asked Maude.

'n.o.body knows, miss!' It was characteristic of Maude that she was so gentle in her bearing that every one always took it for granted that she was Miss. Frank examined the writing carefully.