her
courage--her dread, that is, of exposing herself to a legal process for
undue influence--our good lady was not at peace; or, to be exact, was
only at such peace as came to her by the free bestowal of her own
accumulations during her lifetime and after her death. She predeceased
her brother and had the pang of feeling that if half her residuum would
be deplorably diverted the other half would be, by the same stroke,
imperfectly applied; the artless Henry remained at once so well provided
and so dimly inspired. Here was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but
one; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the final
scene, than which nothing could well have been happier, on all the
premises, save for a single flaw: the installation in Forty-fourth
Street of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciled
there, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge and
representing near him his extinguished, _their_ extinguished, sister.
The too few years that followed were the good man's Indian summer and a
very wonderful time--so charmingly it shone forth, for all concerned,
that he was a person fitted to adorn, as the phrase is, almost any
position. Our admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disinterested
than his former protectress, had yet much more imagination; she had
enough, in a word, for perfect confidence, and under confidence what
remained of poor Henry's life bloomed like a garden freshly watered. Sad
alas the fact that so scant a patch was now left. It sufficed, however,
and he rose, just in time, to every conception; it was, as I have
already noted, as if he had all the while known, as if he had really
been a conscious victim to the superstition of his blackness. His final
companion recognised, as it were, his powers; and it may be imagined
whether when he absolutely himself proposed to benefit the gentlewomen
she passed him, or not, the blessed pen. He had taken a year or two to
publish by his behaviour the perfection of his civility, and so, on that
safe ground, made use of the pen. His competence was afterwards
attacked, and it emerged triumphant, exactly as his perfect charity and
humility and amenity, and his long inward loneliness, of half a century,
did. He had bowed his head and sometimes softly scratched it during that
immense period; he had occasionally, after roaming downstairs with the
troubled fold in his brow and the difficult, the smothered statement on