A Duet (with an occasional chorus) by Arthur Conan Doyle (best classic books to read .txt) 📕

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 wouldn’t have stood it,’ said Maude.

It was pleasant to be out in the open air once more, but they were in the pine groves of Woking before Maude had quite shaken off the gloom of that dark, ghost-haunted house. ‘After all, you are only twenty-seven,’ she remarked as they walked up from the station. She had a way of occasionally taking a subject by the middle in that way.

‘What then, dear?’

‘When Carlyle was only twenty-seven I don’t suppose he knew he was going to do all this.’

‘No, I don’t suppose so.’

‘And his wife—if he were married then—would feel as I do to you.’

‘No doubt.’

‘Then what guarantee have I that you won’t do it after all?’

‘Do what?’

‘Why, turn out a second Carlyle.’

‘Hear me swear!’ cried Frank, and they turned laughing into their own little gateway at the Lindens.

CHAPTER XXI—THE LAST NOTE OF THE DUET

Our young married couples may feel that two is company and three is none, but there comes a little noisy intruder to break into their sweet intimacy. The coming of the third is the beginning of a new life for them as well as for it—a life which is more useful and more permanent, but never so concentrated as before. That little pink thing with the blinking eyes will divert some of the love and some of the attention, and the very trouble which its coming has caused will set its mother’s heart yearning over it. Not so the man. Some vague resentment mixes with his pride of paternity, and his wife’s sufferings rankle in his memory when she has herself forgotten them. His pity, his fears, his helplessness, and his discomfort, give him a share in the domestic tragedy. It is not without cause that in some societies it is the man and not the woman who receives the condolence and the sympathy.

There came a time when Maude was bad, and there came months when she was better, and then there were indications that a day was approaching, the very thought of which was a shadow upon her husband’s life. For her part, with the steadfast, gentle courage of a woman, she faced the future with a sweet serenity. But to him it was a nightmare—an actual nightmare which brought him up damp and quivering in those gray hours of the dawn, when dark shadows fall upon the spirit of man. He had a steady nerve for that which affected himself, a nerve which would keep him quiet and motionless in a dentist’s chair, but what philosophy or hardihood can steel one against the pain which those whom we love have to endure. He fretted and chafed, and always with the absurd delusion that his fretting and chafing were successfully concealed. A hundred failures never convince a man how impossible it is to deceive a woman who loves him. Maude watched him demurely, and made her plans.

‘Do you know, dear,’ said she, one evening, ‘if you can get a week of your holidays now, I think it would be a very good thing for you to accept that invitation of Mr. Mildmay’s, and spend a few days in golfing at Norwich.’

Frank stared at her open-eyed.

‘What! Now!’

‘Yes, dear, now—at once.’

‘But NOW of all times.’

Maude looked at him with that glance of absolute obvious candour which a woman never uses unless she has intent to deceive.

‘Yes, dear—but only next week. I thought it would brace you up for- -well, for the week afterwards.’

‘You think the week afterwards?’

‘Yes, dear. It would help me so, if I knew that you were in your best form.’

‘I! What can it matter what form I am in. But in any case, it is out of the question.’

‘But you could get leave.’

‘Oh yes, easily enough.’

‘Then do go.’

‘And leave you at such a time!’

‘No, no, you would be back.’

‘You can’t be so sure of that. No, Maude, I should never forgive myself. Such an idea would never enter my head.’

‘But for my sake—!’

‘That’s enough, Maude. It is settled.’

Master Frank had a heavy foot when he did bring it down, and his wife recognised a decisive thud this time. With a curious double current of feeling, she was pleased and disappointed at the same time, but more pleased than disappointed, so she kissed the marrer of her plots.

‘What an obstinate old boy it is! But of course you