MISCELLANEOUS TRAITS OF CHARACTER AND OPINIONS.
I am afraid all this "gup," as Richard would call it, will be considered rather light and frivolous about places so well known, but I want to give every word my husband has said about his life, and where I think he has forgotten anything, I like to put it in afterwards. I am afraid of its reading in a jerky style, for a friend, who one day sat in a corner when we were collaborating on one of his big tables, wrote the following specimen of us as we were beginning our work:—
"Burtons—Husband and Wife.
"He. Bless (sic) you, I say hold your tongue! Who wants your opinion?
"She (in a smaller voice). Oh, it is all very well, but you know you are like an iron machine, and I do all the wit and sparkle.[1]
"He. Oh, I dare say—the sparkle of a superannuated glow-worm. (Then both roared with laughter, and writing is suspended for several minutes.)
"She. Now then, go on, old iron-works, and have the first say."
(This is really the way most of our works, when collaborating, have been written.)
But I have a greater object than this. I want to prove to the world, that, though he was far from the sphere suited to his immense talent and services, which he had richly earned from the Governments that threw him away, his life was as happy as it could be made under the circumstances. It was not the being chained to a hard barren rock, as is generally represented. If the Governments had shown their appreciation of his services, had placed him where he ought to have been placed, I believe I may say he would not have had a sorrow in the world. It is true that the climate was bad—all our climates were—but once gout had laid hold of him, it pursued him in every climate, good and bad, and he suffered much. Indeed, it was one of our pet jokes that we were so inured to bad climates that we were generally ill in good ones.
I do not forgive the Governments for this, and less the Conservative, for which he worked so hard; but they were merciful about "leave." He did not owe to them a penny of the money that enabled him to do what he liked, go where he would, have what he liked, and have the best of loving care, both wifely and medical, all his last years. He had to give half his pay to his Vice-Consul when absent, and so it suited all round, but it galled him to have to ask for leave, and if they could make no better use of him, they should at least have let him go on full pay in 1886, when he had served them forty-four years, and felt his breaking-up coming on. The only comfort I find in the blow dealt him, about not getting Marocco, is, that I fear shortly after he would have become unequal for the post, and I know that quite latterly he was not able for more than he did.
He only made four attempts to better his official life after his career was broken by recall from Damascus, and they were at the latter end of his life. One was to be made a K.C.B., in 1878; the second in 1880, to be appointed Commissioner for the Slave-trade in the Red Sea—that was ten years before his death; one to succeed Sir John Drummond-Hay in Marocco, 1885—when that was refused him, in his heart he threw up the Service, though necessity kept him on; and in 1886 his last appeal was to be allowed to retire on his full pension.
There seems to have been all along, during my husband's life, an impression that he was always craving for Government honours, and complaining of neglect. This is absolutely untrue. He was too proud, too manly, too philosophic. He was profoundly silent on the subject. It was I who did it, I who asked, I who made interest, and left no stone unturned to get him advanced to his proper deserts, not from a mean vanity, nor selfish ambition, but because I saw all these long years, with deep pain, what all the world knows and acknowledges now, his true merits and great work; the true hero, abandoned and forgotten, so surely as Gordon was, silently eating his heart out by a foreign fireside, with a craving for England and his fellow-men as strong as Byron's. I alone am to blame, if blame there is; and in those days the Press backed me. What harm would it have done the Service, or the Foreign Office, to have given him his last four crippled years, with his pension? This reproach has been thrown in our teeth by successful people who ought to have had better taste.
Miscellaneous Traits of Character and Opinions.
As I said before, a man presents different characters to his wife, to his family, to her family, to his lover, to his men-friends, to his boon-companions, to the public. Now I have often, in the early days of my married life, watched with great interest and astonishment things that in after life I became quite used to. My husband, whose character naturally quite expanded with me in the privacy of our domestic life, became quite another man the moment anybody else entered the room. He was very natural with my immediate family, my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and one or two of my uncles, so that they would describe him very much in the same terms that I do. With his own family he was, again, quite a different man, so that they saw him in another light. With the few friends—and you could count them on the fingers of one hand—with whom he chose to be really intimate, he expanded to a certain amount; to all those he really liked he was a first-rate and staunch friend. With his boon-companions he was the centre of attraction. He would sit in the middle of them, and by his gaiety, brilliant conversation, and sound knowledge, fascinate the whole room, but to the world in general he seemed to wear a mask. He would throw out his quills like a porcupine, and somebody remarked they seemed to become harder every year.