A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (ebook reader web .TXT) 📕

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 shillings 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 God, 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 God 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.

'Nobody 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.

'He was the son of the house and a young aristocrat who had never done a stroke of work before in his life,' said he.

The matron was surprised.

'What makes you say that, sir?'

'What would a workman do with such a name as John Harbel Knowles, or with a diamond ring for that matter? And who would dare to disfigure a window so, if he were not of the family? And why should he be so proud of his work, unless work was a new and wondrous thing to him. To paint PART of the windows also sounds like the amateur and not the workman. So I repeat that it was the first achievement of the son of the house.'

'Well, indeed, I dare say you are right, though I never thought of it before,' said the matron. 'Now this, up here, is Carlyle's own room, in which he slept for forty-seven years. In the case is a cast of his head taken after death.'

It was strange and rather ghastly to see a plaster head in this room where the head of flesh had so often lain. Maude and Frank stood beside it, and gazed long and silently while the matron, half-bored and half-sympathetic, waited for them to move on. It was an aquiline face, very different from any picture which they had seen, sunken cheeks, an old man's toothless mouth, a hawk nose, a hollow eye--the gaunt timbers of what had once been a goodly house. There was repose, and something of surprise also, in the features--also a very subtle serenity and dignity.

'The distance from the ear to the forehead is said to be only equalled by Napoleon and by Gladstone. That's what they SAY,' said the matron, with Scotch caution.

'It's the face of a noble man when all is said and done,' said Frank. 'I believe that the true Thomas Carlyle without the dyspepsia, and the true Jane Welsh without the nerves, are knowing and loving each other in some further life.'

'It is sweet to think so,' cried Maude. 'Oh, I do hope that it is so! How dear death would be if we could only be certain of that!'

The matron smiled complacently in the superior wisdom of the Shorter Catechism. 'There is neither marriage nor giving in marriage,' said she, shaking her head. 'This is the spare bedroom, sir, where Mr. Emerson slept when he was here. And now if you will step this way I will show you the study.'

It was the singular room which Carlyle had constructed in the hopes that he could shut out all the noises of the universe, the crowing of cocks, and the jingling of a young lady's five-finger exercise in particular. It had cost him a hundred odd pounds, and had ended in being unendurably hot in summer, impossibly cold in winter, and so constructed acoustically that it reverberated every sound in the neighbourhood. For once even his wild and whirling words could hardly match the occasion--not all his kraft sprachen would be too much. For the rest it was at least a roomy and lofty apartment, with space for many books, and for an irritable man to wander to and fro. Prints there were of many historical notables, and slips of letters and of memoranda in a long glass case.

'That is one of his clay pipes,' said the matron. 'He had them all sent through to him from Glasgow. And that is the pen with which he wrote Frederick.'

It was a worn, stubby old quill, much the worse for its monstrous task. It at least of all quill pens might rest content with having done its work in the world. Some charred paper beside it caught Frank's eye.

'Oh look, Maude,' he cried. 'This is a little bit of the burned French Revolution.'

'Oh, I remember. He lent the only copy to a friend, and it was burned by mistake.'

'What a blow! What a frightful blow! And to think that his first comment to his wife was, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is very much cut up about this." There is Carlyle at his best. And here is actually a shred of the old manuscript. How beautifully he wrote in those days!'

'Read this, sir,' said the matron.

It was part of a letter from Carlyle to his publisher about his ruined work. 'Do not pity me,' said he; 'forward me rather as a runner that is tripped but will not lie there, but run and run again.'

'See what positive misfortune can do for a man,' said Frank. 'It raised him to a hero. And yet he could not stand the test of a crowing cock. How infinitely complex is the human soul--how illimitably great and how pitiably small! Now, if ever I have a study of my own, this is what I want engraved upon the wall. This alone is well worth our pilgrimage to Chelsea.'

It was a short exclamation which had caught his eye.

'Rest! Rest! Shall I not have all eternity to rest in!' That serene plaster face down yonder gave force to the brave words. Frank copied them down onto the back of one of Maude's cards.

And now they had finished the rooms, but the matron, catching a glow from these enthusiastic pilgrims, had yet other things to show them. There was the back garden. Here was the green pottery seat upon which the unphilosophic philosopher had smoked his pipe--a singularly cold and uncomfortable perch. And here was where Mrs. Carlyle had tried to build a tent and to imagine herself in the country. And here was the famous walnut tree--or at least the stumpy bole thereof. And here was where the dog Nero was buried, best known of small white mongrels.

And last of all there was the subterranean and gloomy kitchen, in which there had lived that long succession of serving-maids of whom we gain shadowy glimpses in the Letters and in the Journal. Poor souls, dwellers in the gloom, working so hard for others, so bitterly reviled when by chance some weakness of humanity comes to break, for an instant, the routine of their constant labour, so limited in their hopes and in their pleasures, they are of all folk upon this planet those for whom a man's heart may most justly soften. So said Frank as he gazed around him in the dark-cornered room. 'And never one word of sympathy for them, or of anything save scorn in all his letters. His pen upholding human dignity, but where was the dignity of these poor girls for whom he has usually one bitter line of biography in his notes to his wife's letters? It's the worst thing I have against him.'

'Jemima