A Duet

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'I beg your pardin', sir,' said he, in the softly insinuating way of
the Cockney, 'but I thought that maybe the lidy would like to see Mr.
Carlyle's statue. That's 'im, sir, a-sittin' in the overcoat with
the book in 'is 'and.'

Frank and Maude got out and entered the small railed garden, in the
centre of which the pedestal rose. It was very simple and plain--an
old man in a dressing-gown, with homely wornout boots, a book upon
his knee, his eyes and thoughts far away. No more simple statue in
all London, but human to a surprising degree. They stood for five
minutes and stared at it.

'Well,' said Frank at last, 'small as it is, I think it is worthy of
the man.'

'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-fashioned 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-fashioned 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 shilling 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-fashioned 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 prick 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 passion 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 fashion 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 fashion 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 passed 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 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 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 know best, and I
should much rather have you at home. As you say, one can never be
certain.'

In a conflict of wits the woman may lose a battle, but the odds are
that she will win the campaign. The man dissipates over many things,
while she concentrates upon the one. Maude had made up her mind
absolutely upon one point, and she meant to attain it. She tried
here, she tried there, through a friend, through her mother, but
Frank was still immovable. The ordeal coming upon herself never
disturbed her for an instant. But the thought that Frank would
suffer was unendurable. She put herself in his place, and realised
what it would be to him if he were in the house at such a time. With
many cunning devices she tried to lure him off, but still, in his
stubborn way, he refused to be misled. And then suddenly she
realised that it was too late.

It was early one morning that the conviction came home to her, but
he, at her side, knew nothing of it. He came up to her before he
left for the City.

'You have not eaten anything, dear.'

'No, Frank, I am not hungry.'

'Perhaps, after you get up--'

'Well, dear, I thought of staying in bed.'

'You are not--?'

'What nonsense, dear! I want to keep very quiet until next week,
when I may need all my strength.'

'Dear girl, I would gladly give ten years of my life to have next
week past.'

'Silly old boy! But I do think it would be wiser if I were to keep
in bed.'

'Yes, yes, do.'

'I have a little headache. Nothing to speak of, but just a little.'

'Don't you think Dr. Jordan had better give you something for it.'

'Do you think so? Well, just as you like. You might call as you
pass, and tell him to step up.'

And so, upon a false mission, the doctor was summoned to her side,
but found a very real mission waiting for him when he got there. She
had written a note for Frank the moment that he had left the house,
and he found both it and a conspiracy of silence waiting for him when
he returned in the late afternoon. The note was upon the hall-table,
and he eagerly tore it open.

'My dear boy,' said this mendacious epistle, 'my head is still rather
bad, and Dr. Jordan thought that it would be wiser if I were to have
an undisturbed rest, but I will send down to you when I feel better.
Until then I had best, perhaps, remain alone. Mr. Harrison sent
round to say that he would come to help you to pot the bulbs, so that
will give you something to do. Don't bother about me, for I only
want a little rest.--MAUDE.'

It seemed very unnatural to him to come back and not to hear the
swift rustle of the dress which followed always so quickly upon the
creak of his latch-key that they might have been the same sound. The
hall and dining-room seemed unhomely without the bright welcoming
face. He wandered about in a discontented fashion upon his tiptoes,
and then, looking through the window, he saw Harrison his neighbour
coming up the path with a straw basket in his hand. He opened the
door for him with his finger upon his lips.

'Don't make a row, Harrison,' said he, 'my wife's bad.'

Harrison whistled softly.

'Not--?'

'No, no, not that. Only a headache, but she is not to be disturbed.
We expect THAT next week. Come in here and smoke a pipe with me. It
was very kind of you to bring the bulbs.'

'I am going back for some more.'

'Wait a little. You can go back presently. Sit down and light your
pipe. There is some one moving about upstairs. It must be that
heavy-footed Jemima. I hope she won't wake Maude up. I suppose one
must expect such attacks at such a time.'

'Yes, my wife was just the same. No, thank you, I've just had some
tea. You look worried, Crosse. Don't take things too hard.'

'I can't get the thought of next week out of my head. If anything
goes wrong--well there, what can I do? I never knew how a man's
nerves may be harrowed before. And she is such a saint, Harrison--
such an absolutely unselfish saint! You'll never guess what she
tried to do.'

'What, then?'

'She knew what it would mean to me--what it will mean to me--to sit
here in impotence while she goes through this horrible business. She
guessed in some extraordinary way what my secret feelings were about
it. And she actually tried to deceive me as to when it was to occur-
-tried to get me out of the house on one pretext or another until it
was all over. That was her plot, and, by Jove, she tried it so
cleverly that she would have managed it if something had not put me
on my guard. She was a little too eager, unnaturally so, and I saw
through her game. But think of it, the absolute unselfishness of it.
To consider ME at such a time, and to face her trouble alone and
unsupported in order to make it easier for me. She wanted me to go
to Norwich and play golf.'

'She must have thought you pretty guileless, Crosse, to be led away
so easily.'

'Yes, it was a hopeless attempt to deceive me on such a point, or to
dream for an instant that my instincts would not tell me when she had
need of me. But none the less it was beautiful and characteristic.
You don't mind my talking of these things, Harrison?'

'My dear chap, it is just what you need. You have been bottling
things up too much. Your health will break down under it. After
all, it is not so serious as all that. The danger is very much
exaggerated.'

'You think so.'

'I've had the experience twice now. You'll go to the City some fine
morning, and when you come back the whole thing will be over.'

'Indeed it won't. I have made arrangements at the office, and from
the hour that she first seems bad I will never stir from the house.
For all she may say, I know very well that it gives her strength and
courage to feel that I am there.'

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