he had been thinking of it for some considerable time. that pilgrimage was my last—it'll be two years ago this autumn—and it was in the spring of last year he died.

he was happy in his death. it saved him from the thing he dreaded above everything, certainty of the ultimate extinction. it has not come yet. we are feeling still the long reverberation of his vogue. we miss him still in the gleam, the jest gone forever from the papers. there is no doubt but that his death staved off the ultimate extinction. it revived the public interest in him. it jogged the feeble pulse of his once vast circulation. it brought the familiar portrait back again into the papers, between the long, long columns. and there was more laurel and a larger crowd at brookwood than on the day when we first met him in the churchyard at chenies.

and then we said there had been stuff in him. we talked (in the papers) of his "output." he had been, after all, a prodigious, a gigantic worker. he appealed to our profoundest national instincts, to our british admiration of sound business, of the self-made, successful man. he might not have done anything for posterity, but he had provided magnificently for his child and widow.

so we appraised him. then on the top of it all the crash came, the tremendous crash that left his child and widow almost penniless. he hadn't provided for them at all. he had provided for nothing but his own advertisement. he had been living, not only beyond his income, but beyond, miles beyond, his capital, beyond even the perennial power that was the source [pg 197] of it. and he had been afraid, poor fellow! to retrench, to reduce by one cucumber-frame the items of the huge advertisement; why, it would have been as good as putting up the shop windows—his publishers would instantly have paid him less.

his widow explained tearfully how it all was, and how wise and foreseeing he had been; what a thoroughly sound man of business. and really we thought the dear lady wouldn't be left so very badly off. we calculated that burton would marry antigone, and that the simple, self-denying woman could live in modest comfort on the mere proceeds of the inevitable sale. then we heard that the tudor mansion, the "grounds," the very cucumber-frames, were sunk in a mortgage; and the sale of his "effects," the motor-cars and furniture, the books and the busts, paid his creditors in full, but it left a bare pittance for his child and widow.

they had come up to town in that exalted state with which courageous women face adversity. in her excitement antigone tried hard to break off her engagement to grevill burton. she was going to do typewriting, she was going to be somebody's secretary, she was going to do a thousand things; but she was not going to hang herself like a horrid millstone round his neck and sink him. she had got it into her head, poor girl, that wrackham had killed himself, ruined himself by his efforts to provide for his child and widow. they had been the millstones round his neck. she even talked openly now about the "pot-boilers" they had compelled papa to write; by which she gave us to understand that he had been made for better things. it would have broken your heart to hear her.

her mother, ravaged and reddened by grief, met us day after day (we were doing all we could for her) [pg 198] with her indestructible, luminous smile. she could be tearful still on provocation, through the smile, but there was something about her curiously casual and calm, something that hinted almost complacently at a little mystery somewhere, as if she had up her sleeve resources that we were not allowing for. but we caught the gist of it, that we, affectionate and well-meaning, but thoroughly unbusiness-like young men, were not to worry. her evident conviction was that he had foreseen, he had provided for them.

"lord only knows," i said to burton, "what the dear soul imagines will turn up."

then one day she sent for me; for me, mind you, not burton. there was something that she and her daughter, desired to consult me about. i went off at once to the dreadful little lodgings in the fulham road where they had taken refuge. i found antigone looking, if anything, more golden and more splendid, more divinely remote and irrelevant against the dingy background. her mother was sitting very upright at the head and she at the side of the table that almost filled the room. they called me to the chair set for me facing antigone. throughout the interview i was exposed, miserably, to the clear candor of her gaze.

her mother, with the simplicity which was her charming quality, came straight to the point. it seemed that wrackham had thought better of us, of burton and me, than he had ever let us know. he had named us his literary executors. of course, his widow expounded, with the option of refusal. her smile took for granted that we would not refuse.

what did i say? well, i said that i couldn't speak for burton, but for my own part i—i said i was honored (for antigone was looking at me with those eyes) and of course i shouldn't think of refusing, and i didn't [pg 199] imagine burton would either. you see i'd no idea what it meant. i supposed we were only in for the last piteous turning out of the dead man's drawers, the sorting and sifting of the rubbish heap. we were to decide what was worthy of him and what was not.

there couldn't, i supposed, be much of it. he had been hard pressed. he had always published up to the extreme limit of his production.

i had forgotten all about the "life and letters." they had been only a fantastic possibility, a thing our profane imagination played with; and under the serious, chastening influences of his death it had ceased to play.

and now they were telling me that this thing was a fact. the letters were, at any rate. they had raked them all in, to the last postcard (he hadn't written any to us), and there only remained the life. it wasn't a perfectly accomplished fact; it would need editing, filling out, and completing from where he had left it off. he had not named his editor, his biographer, in writing—at least, they could find no note of it among his papers—but he had expressed a wish, a wish that they felt they could not disregard. he had expressed it the night before he died to antigone, who was with him.

"did he not, dearest?"

i heard antigone say, "yes, mamma." she was not looking at me then.

there was a perfectly awful silence. and then antigone did look at me, and she smiled faintly.

"it isn't you," she said.

no, it was not i. i wasn't in it. it was grevill burton.

i ought to tell you it wasn't an open secret any longer that burton was editing the "life and letters [pg 200] of ford lankester," with a critical introduction. the announcement had appeared in the papers a day or two before wrackham's death. he had had his eye on burton. he may have wavered between him and another, he may have doubted whether burton was after all good enough; but that honor, falling to burton at that moment, clinched it. there was prestige, there was the thing he wanted. burton was his man.

there wouldn't, mrs. wrackham said, be so very much editing to do. he had worked hard in the years before his death. he had gathered in all the material, and there were considerable fragments—whole blocks of reminiscences, which could be left, which should be left as they stood (her manner implied that they were monuments). what they wanted, of course, was something more than editing. anybody could have done that. there was the life to be completed in the later years, the years in which mr. burton had known him more intimately than any of his friends. above all, what was necessary, what had been made so necessary, was a critical introduction, the summing up, the giving of him to the world as he really was.

did i think they had better approach mr. burton direct, or would i do that for them? would i sound him on the subject?

i said cheerfully that i would sound him. if burton couldn't undertake it (i had to prepare them for this possibility), no doubt we should find somebody who could.

but antigone met this suggestion with a clear "no." it wasn't to be done at all unless mr. burton did it. and her mother gave a little cry. it was inconceivable that it should not be done. mr. burton must. he would. he would see the necessity, the importance of it. [pg 201]

of course i saw it. and i saw that my position and burton's was more desperate than i had imagined. i couldn't help but see the immense importance of the "life and letters." they were bound, even at this time of day, to "fetch" a considerable sum, and the dear lady might be pardoned if she were incidentally looking to them as a means of subsistence. they were evidently what she had had up her sleeve. her delicacy left the financial side of the question almost untouched; but in our brief discussion of the details, from her little wistful tone in suggesting that if mr. burton could undertake it at once and get it done soon, if they could in fact launch it on the top of the returning tide—from the very way that she left me to finish her phrases for her i gathered that they regarded the "life and letters" as wrackham's justification in more ways than one. they proved that he had not left them unprovided for.

well, i sounded burton. he stared at me aghast. i was relieved to find that he was not going to be sentimental about it. he refused flatly.

"i can't do him and lankester," he said.

i saw his point. he would have to keep himself clean for him. i said of course he couldn't, but i didn't know how he was going to make it straight with antigone.

"i shan't have to make it straight with antigone," he said. "she'll see it. she always has seen."