Though I have Lord Arthur's notes, and though he in no way bound me to secrecy, they want an interval longer than a hundred and ten years "prior to publication." Therefore they will rest in my safe, or wherever else they may have been affectionately mislaid, and where it would probably take a day's hard work to find them. There is no such secrecy and security as "filing for future reference." When the notes are found by my literary executors, they will please remember that they should not be given to the public until they have ample assurance that the head of the Devonshire family sees no objection. It is not a family skeleton in any sense, but till family facts become historic, the utmost discretion is demanded alike by courtesy and good feeling.
I had, alas! no sooner fully realised that I had made a friend in Lord Arthur and that I might look forward to many years of intimate intercourse with a man of knowledge and sympathy, from whom I could learn much and in the most fascinating and delightful way, than the end came. A short illness, followed by a rapid operation—hopeless, or almost hopeless—cut short this honourable and gracious life. I was one of the very few people whom Lord Arthur asked to see in the few days allowed him between life and death. He wanted to see me out of pure friendliness, to talk about his children and to show me, as only such an act could, that he, like me, had hoped much from our friendship. He was the kind of man who would be sure to prefer saying this by deed rather than by word.
But for the simplicity and essential nobility of character which he possessed, he might well have sent for me to see how a good man could die. There was everything to strengthen and so to quiet one in the way in which he faced the message which comes to all—a message so deeply dreaded by most of us, yet which, when it does come, proves to be not a sentence, but a reprieve—the mandatory word that does not imprison us, but sets us free, which flings the gates and lets us see the open heaven, instead of the walls and vaulted ceiling of the cells of which we have been the inhabitants.
But though the very last thing that Lord Arthur was thinking about was the impression upon my mind, that impression was intense both in kind and in degree. That short last talk at his bedside, in which so little was said, so much felt by both of us, has never left my memory. If for no other reason, it must be recorded here for it had, I feel, an essential if undefinable influence upon my life.
CHAPTER XIX
MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE 'NINETIES (Continued)
I am afraid that throughout these memoirs I have talked too much about the volumes which I might fill, but am not filling. Yet I must do so once more in this chapter. My mother-in-law, Mrs. Simpson, was an admirable talker and full of clear and interesting memories. I had no sooner entered the Simpson house and family than I found that there were a hundred points of sympathy between us. She had known everybody in London, who was worth knowing, through her father, Mr. Nassau-Senior, and had visited with him—she acted for some twenty years as his social companion owing to her mother's ill-health—most of the political country-houses in England, and had known in London everyone worth knowing on the Whig side, and most of the neutrals. Macaulay was one of her father's closest friends; so was the third Lord Lansdowne, the Lord Henry Petty of the Cabinets of the'thirties and 'forties—Lord Aberdeen, Lord John Russell, and Lord Palmerston, and, earlier, Lord Melbourne, Lord St. Leonards, Lord Denman, and Lord Campbell, to mention only a few names and at random. It was her father's habit to ride every day in the Park for reasons hygienic and social, and she rode with him. There they were sure to be joined by the Whig statesmen who sought Senior's advice on economic points. She saw little of the Tories,—except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, soon to become a Liberal, and Sir Robert Peel. Disraeli was of course, in those days, considered by the strict Whigs as "impossible"—a "charlatan," and "adventurer," almost "impostor."
In the world of letters she saw much of Sydney Smith, who was early a friend of her father's. She actually had the good fortune, while Miss Minnie Senior, to stop at the Combe Florey Rectory, and to discover that the eminent wit took as much trouble to amuse his own family when alone as to set the tables of Mayfair upon a roar. He liked to tease his girl guest by telling her that her father, then a Master in Chancery, did not care a straw for his daughter "Minnie." "De Minimis non curat Lex"—"the Master does not care for Minnie"—was a favourite travesty of the well-known maxim.
Rogers was also a friend, and as a girl she remembered going to his "very small" breakfast-parties, in the celebrated dining-room in which hung his famous pictures.
They were hung high, so as to get the light which was at the top of the room. It was this arrangement, by the way, that made Sydney Smith say that Rogers' dining-room was like Heaven and its opposite. There were gods and angels in the upper part, but below was "gnashing of teeth." While Rogers talked about his pictures, he would have them taken down by his man-servant, Edmond, and placed upon a chair at his side, or almost upon the lap of his guest, so that he might lecture about them at his ease. Mrs. Simpson often told me of the horror she felt as a girl lest she should throw a spoonful of soup over a Raphael or by an accident run a knife or a fork into the immortal canvas! She had not learnt that pictures are about the most indestructible things in the world.