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And my father writes that Jasper Trice, upon this pretence of his tenants' dealing with him, is broke up house-keeping, and gone to board with his brother, Naylor, at Offord; which is very sad.
These four days we spent in putting things in order, letting of the crop upon the ground, agreeing with Stankes to have a care of our business in our absence, and we think ourselves in nothing happy but in lighting upon him to be our bayly; in riding to Offord and Sturtlow, and up and down all our lands, and in the evening walking, my father and I about the fields talking, and had advice from Mr.
Now and again, I confess, there was one at Brooksmith's, but so pathetically sociable as to make the excellent man look at me in a way that seemed to say: "Do exchange a glance with me, or I shan't be able to stand it." What he wasn't able to stand was not what Mr. Offord said about him, but what he wasn't able to say in return.
He had a resigned philosophic sense of what his guests our guests, as I came to regard them in our colloquies would expect. His feeling was that he wouldn't absolutely have approved of himself as a substitute for Mr. Offord; but he was so saturated with the religion of habit that he would have made, for our friends, the necessary sacrifice to the divinity.
For a long time I had no occasion to make use of the information: he proved on trial so very difficult a case. The people who knew him and had known Mr. Offord didn't want to take him, and yet I couldn't bear to try to thrust him among strangers strangers to his past when not to his present.
Several do complain of abundance of land flung up by tenants out of their hands for want of ability to pay their rents; and by name, that the Duke of Buckingham hath L6000 so flung up. And my father writes, that Jasper Trice, upon this pretence of his tenants' dealing with him, is broke up housekeeping, and gone to board with his brother, Naylor, at Offord; which is very sad.
Then I remembered a story told in The Athenæum of all papers and written by a Dr Jephson, of his experience whilst paying a visit to Lord Offord, and making notes late at night in the library of the house for some literary work on hand. Thinking it might be an hallucination, he deliberately turned round away from the priest rubbed his eyes, and then slowly looked back again.
"He thinks me rather mad, but I've broken him in, and now he likes the place, he likes the company," said the old man. I embraced this fully after I had become aware that Brooksmith's main characteristic was a deep and shy refinement, though I remember I was rather puzzled when, on another occasion, Mr. Offord remarked: "What he likes is the talk mingling in the conversation."
Offord was MY society, and now, you see, I just haven't any. You go back to conversation, sir, after all, and I go back to my place," Brooksmith stammered, without exaggerated irony or dramatic bitterness, but with a flat unstudied veracity and his hand on the knob of the street-door. He turned it to let me out and then he added: "I just go downstairs, sir, again, and I stay there."
The explanation is usually that our women have not the skill to cultivate it the art to direct through a smiling land, between suggestive shores, a sinuous stream of talk. My affectionate, my pious memory of Mr. Offord contradicts this induction only, I fear, more insidiously to confirm it.
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