himself back in his chair and began to talk with
incoherent emotion, and in phrases that echoed now and again his brother's
style at its worst; there were tear in his eyes, and he was, I think,
slightly intoxicated. "He could escape, oh, yes, he could escape--there is
a yacht in the Thames, and five thousand pounds to pay his bail--well, not
exactly in the Thames, but there is a yacht--oh, yes, he could escape,
even if I had to inflate a balloon in the back yard with my own hand, but
he has resolved to stay, to face it out, to stand the music like Christ.
You must have heard--it is not necessary to go into detail--but he and I,
we have not been friends; but he came to me like a wounded stag, and I
took him in." "After his release"--after the failure of his action against
Lord Queensberry, I think--"Stewart Headlam engaged a room at an hotel and
brought him there under another name, but the manager came up and said,
'Are you Mr. Wilde?' You know what my brother is, you know how he would
answer that. He said, 'Yes, I am Oscar Wilde,' and the manager said he
must not stay. The same thing happened in hotel after hotel, and at last
he made up his mind to come here. It is his vanity that has brought all
this disgrace upon him; they swung incense before him." He dwelt upon the
rhythm of the words as his brother would have done--"They swung it before
his heart." His first emotion at the thought of the letters over, he
became more simple, and explained that his brother considered that his
crime was not the vice itself, but that he should have brought such misery
upon his wife and children, and that he was bound to accept any chance,
however slight, that might reestablish his position. "If he is acquitted,"
he said, "he will stay out of England for a few years, and can then gather
his friends about him once more--even if he is condemned he will purge his
offence--but if he runs away he will lose every friend that he has." I
heard later, from whom I forget now, that Lady Wilde had said, "If you
stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no
difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you
again." While I was there, some woman who had just seen him--Willie
Wilde's wife, I think--came in, and threw herself in a chair, and said in
an exhausted voice, "It is all right now, he has made up his mind to go to
prison if necessary." Before his release, two years later, his brother and
mother wer