This time I tried to catch his eye, but he never gave me a chance, and when he handed me a dish I could only be careful to thank him audibly.Indeed I partook of two entrees of which I had my doubts, subsequently converted into certainties, in order not to snub him.
He looked well enough in health, but much older, and wore in an exceptionally marked degree the glazed and expressionless mask of the British domestic de race.I saw with dismay that if I hadn't known him I should have taken him, on the showing of his countenance, for an extravagant illustration of irresponsive servile gloom.I said to myself that he had become a reactionary, gone over to the Philistines, thrown himself into religion, the religion of his "place," like a foreign lady sur le retour.Idivined moreover that he was only engaged for the evening--he had become a mere waiter, had joined the band of the white-waistcoated who "go out." There was something pathetic in this fact--it was a terrible vulgarisation of Brooksmith.It was the mercenary prose of butlerhood; he had given up the struggle for the poetry.If reciprocity was what he had missed where was the reciprocity now?
Only in the bottoms of the wine-glasses and the five shillings--or whatever they get--clapped into his hand by the permanent man.
However, I supposed he had taken up a precarious branch of his profession because it after all sent him less downstairs.His relations with London society were more superficial, but they were of course more various.As I went away on this occasion I looked out for him eagerly among the four or five attendants whose perpendicular persons, fluting the walls of London passages, are supposed to lubricate the process of departure; but he was not on duty.I asked one of the others if he were not in the house, and received the prompt answer: "Just left, sir.Anything I can do for you, sir?" I wanted to say "Please give him my kind regards";but I abstained--I didn't want to compromise him; and I never came across him again.
Often and often, in dining out, I looked for him, sometimes accepting invitations on purpose to multiply the chances of my meeting him.But always in vain; so that as I met many other members of the casual class over and over again I at last adopted the theory that he always procured a list of expected guests beforehand and kept away from the banquets which he thus learned Iwas to grace.At last I gave up hope, and one day at the end of three years I received another visit from his aunt.She was drearier and dingier, almost squalid, and she was in great tribulation and want.Her sister, Mrs.Brooksmith, had been dead a year, and three months later her nephew had disappeared.He had always looked after her a bit since her troubles; I never knew what her troubles had been--and now she hadn't so much as a petticoat to pawn.She had also a niece, to whom she had been everything before her troubles, but the niece had treated her most shameful.These were details; the great and romantic fact was Brooksmith's final evasion of his fate.He had gone out to wait one evening as usual, in a white waistcoat she had done up for him with her own hands--being due at a large party up Kensington way.But he had never come home again and had never arrived at the large party, nor at any party that any one could make out.No trace of him had come to light--no gleam of the white waistcoat had pierced the obscurity of his doom.This news was a sharp shock to me, for I had my ideas about his real destination.His aged relative had promptly, as she said, guessed the worst.Somehow, and somewhere he had got out of the way altogether, and now I trust that, with characteristic deliberation, he is changing the plates of the immortal gods.As my depressing visitant also said, he never HAD got his spirits up.
I was fortunately able to dismiss her with her own somewhat improved.But the dim ghost of poor Brooksmith is one of those that I see.He had indeed been spoiled.
