第32章 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH(6)

Kinglake used to regret the disuse of duelling, as having impaired the higher tone of good breeding current in his younger days, and even blamed the Duke of Wellington for proscribing it in the army. He had himself on one occasion sent a cartel, and stood waiting for his adversary, like Sir Richard Strachan at Walcheren, eight days on theFrench coast; but the adversary never came. Hayward once referred to him, as a counsellor, and if necessary a second, a quarrel with Lord R-. Lord R-'s friend called on him, a Norfolk squire, "broad-faced and breathing port wine," after the fashion of uncle Phillips in "Pride and Prejudice," who began in a boisterous voice, "I am one of those, Mr. Kinglake, who believe R- to be a gentleman." In his iciest tones and stoniest manner Kinglake answered: "That, Sir, I am quite willing to assume." The effect, he used to say, as he told and acted the scene, was magical; "I had frozen him sober, and we settled everything without a fight." Of all his friends Hayward was probably the closest; an association of discrepancies in character, manner, temperament, not complementary, but opposed and hostile; irreconcilable, one would say, but for the knowledge that in love and friendship paradox reigns supreme. Hayward was arrogant, overbearing, loud, insistent, full of strange oaths and often unpardonably coarse; "our dominant friend," Kinglake called him; "odious" is the epithet I have heard commonly bestowed upon him by less affectionate acquaintances. Kinglake was reserved, shy, reticent, with the high breeding, grand manner, quiet urbanity, GRATA PROTERVITAS, of a waning epoch; restraint, concentration, tact of omission, dictating alike his silence and his speech; his well-weighed words "crystallizing into epigrams as they touched the air." When Hayward's last illness came upon him in 1884, Kinglake nursed him tenderly; spending the morning in his friend's lodgings at 8, St. James's Street, the house which Byron occupied in his early London days; and bringing on the latest bulletin to the club. The patient rambled towards the end; "we ought to be getting ready to catch the train that we may go to my sister's at Lyme." Kinglake quieted his sick friend by an assurance that the servants, whom he would not wish to hurry, were packing. "On no account hurry the servants, but still let us be off." The last thought which he articulated while dying was, "I don't exactly know what it is, but I feel it is something grand." "Hayward is dead," Kinglake wrote to a common friend; "the devotion shown to him by all sorts and conditions of men, and, what is better, of women, was unbounded. Gladstone found time to be with him, and to engage himin a conversation of singular interest, of which he hasmade a memorandum."AnotherofKinglake'slife-longfamiliarswasCharlesSkirrow, Taxing Master in Chancery, with his accomplished wife, from whose memorable fish dinners at Greenwich he was seldom absent, adapting himself no less readily to their theatrical friends - theBancrofts, Burnand, Toole, Irving - than to the literary set withwhich he was more habitually at home.He was religiously loyal tohis friends, speaking of them with generous admiration, eagerlydefending them when attacked. He lauded Butler Johnstone as themost gifted of the young men in the House of Commons; would notallow Bernal Osborne to be called untrue; "he offends people if youlike, but he is never false or hollow."A clever SOBRIQUETfathered on him, burlesquing the monosyllabic names of a well-knowndiarist and official, he repelled indignantly. "He is my friend,and had I been guilty of the JEU, I should have broken two of mycommandments; that which forbids my joking at a friend's expense,and that which forbids my fashioning a play upon words."He entreated Madame Novikoff to visit and cheer Charles Lever, dyingat Trieste; deeply lamented Sir H. Bulwer's death: "I used to thinkhis a beautiful intellect, and he was wonderfully SIMPATICO to me."But he was shy of condoling with bereaved mourners, believing wordsused on such occasions to be utterly untrue.He loved to includehusband and wife in the same meed of admiration, as in the case ofDean Stanley and Lady Augusta, or of Sir Robert and Lady EmilyPeel.Peel, he said, has the RADIANT quality not easy to describe;Lady Emily is always beauteous, bright, attractive.Lord Stanhopehe praised as a historian, paying him the equivocal compliment thathis books were much better than his conversation.So, too, hequalified his admiration of Lady Ashburton, dwelling on her beauty,silver voice, ready enthusiasm apt to disperse itself by flying attoo many objects.

He was wont to speak admiringly of Lord Acton, relating how, a Roman Catholic, yet respecting enlightenment and devoted to books, he once set up and edited a "Quarterly Review," with a notion of reconciling the Light and the Dark as well as he could; but the "Prince ofDarkness, the Pope," interposed, and ordered him to stop the "Review." He was compelled to obey; not, he told people, on any religious ground, but because relations and others would have made his life a bore to him if he had been contumacious against the Holy Father.