‘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.