my home!”
My mother came in as he ceased. He went up to her, put his arm round her waist and kissed her. Such caresses with him had not lost their tender charm by custom: my mother’s brow, before somewhat ruffled, grew smooth on the instant. Yet she lifted her eyes to his in soft surprise.
“I was but thinking,” said my father, apologetically, “how much I owed you, and how much I love you!”
CHAPTER II
And now behold us, three days after my arrival, settled in all the state and grandeur of our own house in Russell Street, Bloomsbury, the library of the Museum close at hand. My father spends his mornings in those lata silentia, as Virgil calls the world beyond the grave. And a world beyond the grave we may well call that land of the ghosts,—a book collection.
“Pisistratus,” said my father one evening, as he arranged his notes before him and rubbed his spectacles, “Pisistratus, a great library is an awful place! There, are interred all the remains of men since the Flood.”
“It is a burial-place!” quoth my Uncle Roland, who had that day found us out.
“It is an Heraclea!” said my father.
“Please, not such hard words,” said the Captain, shaking his head.
“Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead. Do want to speak to Cicero?—I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?—I write down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up Aristophanes. And we owe all this to our ancest—”
“Ancestors who wrote books; thank you.”
Here Roland offered his snuff-box to my father, who, abhorring snuff, benignly imbibed a pinch, and sneezed five times in consequence,—an excuse for Uncle Roland to say, which he did five times, with great unction, “God bless you, brother Austin!”
As soon as my father had recovered himself, he proceeded, with tears in his eyes, but calm as before the interruption—for he was of the philosophy of the Stoics,—
“But it is not that which is awful. It is the presuming to vie with these ‘spirits elect;’ to say to them, ‘Make way,—I too claim place with the chosen. I too would confer with the living, centuries after the death that consumes my dust. I too—’ Ah, Pisistratus! I wish Uncle Jack had been at Jericho before he had brought me up to London and placed me in the midst of those rulers of the world!”
I was busy, while my father spoke, in making some pendent shelves for these “spirits elect;” for my mother, always provident where my father’s comforts were concerned, had foreseen the necessity of some such accommodation in a hired lodging-house, and had not only carefully brought up to town my little box of tools, but gone out herself that morning to buy the raw materials. Checking the plane in its progress over the smooth deal, “My dear father,” said I, “if at the Philhellenic Institute I had looked with as much awe as you do on the big fellows that had gone before me, I should have stayed, to all eternity, the lag of the Infant Division.”
“Pisistratus, you are as great an agitator as your namesake,” cried my father, smiling. “And so, a fig for the big fellows!”
And now my mother entered in her pretty evening cap, all smiles and good humor, having just arranged a room for Uncle Roland, concluded advantageous negotiations with the laundress, held high council with Mrs. Primmins on the best mode of defeating the extortions of London tradesmen, and, pleased with herself and all the world, she kissed my father’s forehead as it bent over his notes, and came to the tea-table, which only waited its presiding deity. My Uncle Roland, with his usual gallantry, started up, kettle in hand (our own urn—for we had one—not being yet unpacked), and having performed with soldier-like method the chivalrous office thus volunteered, he joined me at my employment, and said,—
“There is a better steel for the hands of a well-born lad than a carpenter’s plane.”
“Aha! Uncle—that depends—”
“Depends! What on?”
“On the use one makes of it. Peter the Great was better employed in making ships than Charles XII. in cutting throats.”
“Poor Charles XII.!” said my uncle, sighing pathetically; “a very brave fellow!”
“Pity he did not like the ladies a little better!”
“No man is perfect!” said my uncle, sententiously. “But, seriously, you are now the male hope of the family; you are now—” My uncle stopped, and his face darkened. I saw that he thought of his son,—that mysterious son! And looking at him tenderly, I observed that his deep lines had grown deeper, his iron-gray hair more gray. There was the trace of recent suffering on his face; and though he had not spoken to us a word of the business on which he had left us, it required no penetration to perceive that it had come to no successful issue.
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