Part 75

Here follows a list of books, but it has been more or less carefully erased; and though some of the names are still to be made out, I conclude that Barty did not wish them to be made public.

* * * * *

Before Roberta was born, Leah had reserved herself an hour every morning and every afternoon for what she called the cultivation of her mind--the careful reading of good standard books, French and English, that she might qualify herself in time, as she said, for the intellectual society in which she hoped to mix some day; she built castles in the air, being somewhat of a hero-worshipper in secret, and dreamt of meeting her heroes in the flesh, now that she was Barty's wife.

But when she became a mother there was not only Roberta who required much attention, but Barty himself made great calls upon her time besides.

To his friends' astonishment he had taken it into his head to write a book. Good heavens! Barty writing a book! What on earth could the dear boy have to write about?

He wrote much of the book at night in bed, and corrected and put it into shape during the daytime; and finally Leah had to copy it all out neatly in her best handwriting, and this copying out of Barty's books became to her an all but daily task for many years--a happy labor of love, and one she would depute to no one else; no hired hand should interfere with these precious productions of her husband's genius. So that most of the standard works, English and French, that she grew to thoroughly master were of her husband's writing--not a bad education, I venture to think!

Besides, it was more in her nature and in the circumstances of her life that she should become a woman of business and a woman of the world rather than a reader of books--one who grew to thoroughly understand life as it presented itself to her; and men and women, and especially children; and the management of a large and much frequented house; for they soon moved away from Southampton Row.

She quickly arrived at a complete mastery of all such science as this--and it is a science; such a mastery as I have never seen surpassed by any other woman, of whatever world. She would have made a splendid Marchioness of Whitby, this daughter of a low-comedy John Gilpin; she would have beaten the Whitby record!

She developed into a woman of the world in the best sense--full of sympathy, full of observation and quick understanding of others' needs and thoughts and feelings; absolutely sincere, of a constant and even temper, and a cheerfulness that never failed--the result of her splendid health; without caprice, without a spark of vanity, without selfishness of any kind--generous, open-handed, charitable to a fault; always taking the large and generous view of everything and everybody; a little impulsive perhaps, but not often having to regret her impulses; of unwearied devotion to her husband, and capable of any heroism or self-sacrifice for his sake; of that I feel sure.

No one is perfect, of course. Unfortunately, she was apt to be somewhat jealous at first of his singularly catholic and very frankly expressed admiration of every opposite type of female beauty; but she soon grew to see that there was safety in numbers, and she was made to feel in time that her own type was the arch-type of all in his eyes, and herself the arch-representative of that type in his heart.

She was also jealous in her friendships, and was not happy unless constantly assured of her friends' warm love--Ida's, mine, even that of her own father and mother. Good heavens! had ever a woman less cause for doubt or complaint on that score!

Then, like all extremely conscientious people who always know their own mind and do their very best, she did not like to be found fault with; she secretly found such fault with herself that she thought that was fault-finding enough. Also, she was somewhat rigid in sticking to the ways she thought were right, and in the selection of these ways she was not always quite infallible. On a les défauts de ses qualités; and a little obstinacy is often the fault of a very noble quality indeed!

Though somewhat shy and standoffish during the first year or two of her married life, she soon became "joliment dégourdie," as Barty called it; and I can scarcely conceive any position in which she would have been awkward or embarrassed for a moment, so ready was she always with just the right thing to say--or to withhold, if silence were better than speech; and her fit and proper place in the world as a great man's wife--and a good and beautiful woman--was always conceded to her with due honor, even by the most impertinent among the highly placed of her own sex, without any necessity for self-assertion on her part whatever--without assumption of any kind.

It was a strange and peculiar personal ascendency she managed to exert with so little effort, an ascendency partly physical, no doubt; and the practice of it had begun in the West End emporium of the "Universal Fur Company, Limited."

How admirably she filled the high and arduous position of wife to such a man as Barty Josselin is well known to the world at large. It was no sinecure! but she gloried in it; and to her thorough apprehension and management of their joint lives and all that came of them, as well as to her beauty and sense and genial warmth, was due her great popularity for many years in an immense and ever-widening circle, where the memory of her is still preserved and cherished as one of the most remarkable women of her time.

With all this power of passionate self-surrender to her husband in all things, little and big, she was not of the type that cannot see the faults of the beloved one, and Barty was very often frankly pulled up for his shortcomings, and by no means had it all his own way when his own way wasn't good for him. She was a person to reckon with, and incapable of the slightest flattery, even to Barty, who was so fond of it from her, and in spite of her unbounded admiration for him.

Such was your mother, my dear Roberta, in the bloom of her early twenties and ever after; till her death, in fact--on the day following his!

* * * * *

Somewhere about the spring of 1863 she said to me:

"Bob, Barty has written a book. Either I'm an idiot, or blinded by conjugal conceit, or else Barty's book--which I've copied out myself in my very best handwriting--is one of the most beautiful and important books ever written. Come and dine with me to-night; Barty's dining in the City with the Fishmongers--you shall have what you like best: pickled pork and pease-pudding, a dressed crab and a Welsh rabbit to follow, and draught stout--and after dinner I will read you the beginning of Sardonyx--that's what he's called it--and I should like to have your opinion."

I dined with her as she wished. We were alone, and she told me how he wrote every night in bed, in a kind of ecstasy--between two and four, in Blaze--and then elaborated his work during the day, and made sketches for it.

And after dinner she read me the first part of Sardonyx; it took three hours.

Then Barty came home, having dined well, and in very high spirits.

"Well, old fellow! how do you like Sardonyx?"

I was so moved and excited I could say nothing--I couldn't even smoke. I was allowed to take the precious manuscript away with me, and finished it during the night.

Next morning I wrote to him out of the fulness of my heart.

I read it aloud to my father and mother, and then lent it to Scatcherd, who read it to Ida. In twenty-four hours our gay and genial Barty--our Robin Goodfellow and Merry Andrew, our funny man--had become for us a demi-god; for all but my father, who looked upon him as a splendid but irretrievably lost soul, and mourned over him as over a son of his own.

And in two months Sardonyx was before the reading world, and the middle-aged reader will remember the wild enthusiasm and the storm it raised.