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 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.
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.
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 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.