Kitabı oku: «There & Back», sayfa 5

CHAPTER IX. A HOLIDAY

Richard was willing enough, and it only remained to settle what they would do with their holiday. Suppressing a chuckle, Simon proposed that they should have a walk, and a look at Mortgrange: it was a place well worth seeing! “And then,” he added, giving his grandson a poke, “we can ask after the mare, and learn how her new shoe fits.” They had known him there, he said, the last thirty years, and would let them have the run of the place, for sir Wilton and his lady were from home. Richard had never—to his knowledge—heard of Mortgrange, for Simon had hitherto avoided even mentioning the place; but he was ready to go wherever his grandfather pleased. Jessie would have company of her own, Simon said, with a nod and a wink: they need not trouble themselves about her!

So the next day, as soon us they had had their breakfast, they set out to walk the four or five miles that, by the road, lay between them and Mortgrange. It was a fine frosty morning. Not a few yellow leaves were still hanging, and the sun was warm and bright. It was one of those days near the death of the year, that make us wonder why the heart of man should revive and feel strong, while nature is falling into her dreary trance. Richard was dressed in a tradesman’s Sunday clothes, but tradesman as he was, and was proud to be, he did not altogether look one. He was in high spirits—for no reason but that his spirits were high. He was happy because he was happy—“like any other body!” he would have said: where was the wonder such a fine day, with a pleasant walk before him, and his jolly grandfather for company! That he could not make one hair white or black, one hour blessed or miserable, did not occur to him. Yet he believed that joy or sorrow determined whether life was or was not worth living! He had never said to himself, “Here I am, and cannot help being, and yet can order nothing! Even to-day I am happy only because I cannot help it!” He had indeed begun to learn that a man has his duty to mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he had not yet been tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How would he feel then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living for? He was happy now, and that was enough! The putting forth of their strength and skill doubtless makes many men feel happy—so long as they are in health; but how when they come to feel that that health is nowise in their power? While they have it, it seems a part of their being inalienable; when they have lost it, a thing irrecoverable. Richard took the thing that came, asked no questions, returned no thanks. He found himself here:—whence he came he did not care; whither he went he did not inquire. The present was enough, for the present was good; when the present was no longer good, why, then,—!

There are those to whom the present cannot be good save as a mode of the infinite. In such their divine origin asserts itself. Once known for what it is, the poorest present is a phial holding the elixir of life.

On their way Simon talked about the place they were going to see, and said its present owner was an elderly man, not very robust, with a second wife, who looked as if she had not a drop of warm blood, and yet as if she might live for ever.

“That was their son that came with the little lady,” he said.

“And the little lady was their daughter, I suppose!” rejoined Richard, with an odd quiver somewhere near his heart.

“She’s an Australian, they say,” answered his grandfather; “—no relation, I fancy.”

“Is Mortgrange a grand place?” asked Richard.

“It’s a fine house and a great estate,” answered Simon. “More might be made of it, no doubt; and I hope one day more will be made of it.”

“What do you mean by that, grandfather?”

“That I hope the son will make a better landlord than the father.”

They came to a great iron gate, standing open, without any lodge.

“We’re in luck!” said the blacksmith. “This will save us a long round! Somebody must have rode out, and been too lazy to shut it! We’d better leave it as we find it, though! Or say we bring the two halves together without snapping the locks! I know the locks; I put ‘em both on myself.—See now what a piece of work that gate is! All done with the hand! None o’ your beastly casting there! Up to your work, that, I’m thinking, lad!”

“Indeed it is! Those gates are worth reducing, for plates to stamp the covers of a right precious volume with!”

Simon misunderstood, and was on the point of flaring up, but what Richard followed with quieted him.

“I could almost give up bookbinding to work a pair of gates like those!” he said.

“I believe you, my boy!” returned his grandfather. “Come and live with me, and you shall!”

“But who would buy them when I had worked them?”

“If nobody had the sense, we’d put ‘em up before the cottage!”

“Like a door-lock on a prayer-book!”

“No matter! They would be worth the worth of themselves!”

“You would have to make the wall so high, there would be no light in the house!” persisted Richard.

“Tut, man! did you never hear of a joke? All I say is, that if you’ll come and work with me—I don’t need to slave more than I like; I’ve got a few pounds in the bank!—if you’ll work, I’ll teach you. Leave me to find a fit place for what comes of it! They do most things at the foundries now, but there’s a market yet for hammer-work—if it be good enough, and not too dear; for them as knows a good thing when they sees it, ain’t generally got much money to buy things. It’s my opinion the only way to learn the worth of a thing, is to have to go without it.”

“Few people fancy iron gates, I fear.”

“More might fancy them if they were to be had good,” returned the old man.

The gate had admitted them to a long winding road, with clumps of trees here and there on the borders of it. The road was apparently not much used, for it was more than sprinkled with grass all over. A ploughed field was on one side, and a wild heathy expanse, dotted with fir-trees, on the other. Suddenly on the side of the field, gradually on that of the heath, the ground changed to the green sward of a park.

“A grand place for thinking!” said Richard to himself.

But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the things that came to him; he never said to things, Come; neither, when they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or, in short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses—not bad verses, but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which he bepraised her until, had she been indeed a woman, she must have been ashamed: she was the one essential of life! the one glory of existence! he was no man who would not die for her! But what was the thing he thus glorified? Liberty to go where you pleased, do what you liked, say what you chose!—that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy save that of love and truth—a freedom of which outward freedom is scarce the shadow—of such liberty, for all the good books he had read, for all the good poems he had admired, Richard had not yet begun to dream, not to say think. Then again, he would write about love, and he had never been in love in his life! All he knew of love was the pleasure of imagining himself the object of a tall, dark-eyed, long-haired, devoted woman’s admiration. He had never even thought whether he was worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times better than he what the word love meant: she had a history, he had none.

I will not describe the house of Mortgrange. It seemed to Richard the oldest house he had ever seen, and it moved him strangely. He said to himself the man must be happy who called such a house his own, lived in it, and did what he liked with it. The road they had taken brought them to the back of the Hall, as the people on the estate called the house. The blacksmith went to a side-door, and asked if he and his grandson might have a look at the place: he had heard the baronet was from home! The man said he would see; and returning presently, invited them to walk in.

Knowing his grandson’s passion, Simon’s main thought in taking him was to see him in the library, with its ten thousand volumes: it would be such a joke to watch him pondering, admiring, coveting his own! As soon, therefore, as they were in the great hall, he asked the servant whether they might not see the library. The man left them again, once more to make inquiry.

It was a grand old hall where they stood, fitter for the house of a great noble than a mere baronet; but then the family was older than any noble family in the county, and the poor baronetcy, granted to a foolish ancestor, on carpet considerations, by the needy hand of the dominie-king, was no great feather in the cap of the Lestranges. The house itself was older than any baronetcy, for no part of it was later than the time of Elizabeth. It was of fine stone, and of great size. The hall was nearly sixty feet in height, with three windows on one side, and a great one at the end. They were thirty feet from the floor, had round heads, and looked like church-windows. The other side was blank. Mid-height along the end opposite the great window ran a gallery.

To the sudden terror of Richard, who stood absorbed in the stateliness of the place, an organ in the gallery burst out playing. He looked up trembling, but could see only the tops of the pipes. As the sounds rolled along the roof, reverberated from the solid walls, and crept about the corners, it seemed to him that the soul of the place was throbbing in his ears the words of a poem centuries old, which he had read a day or two before leaving London:—

“Erthe owte of erthe es wondirly wroghte, Erthe hase getyn one erthe a dignyte of noghte, Erthe appone erthe hase sett alle his thoghte, How that erthe appone erthe may be heghe broghte.”

As he listened, his eyes settled upon a suit of armour in position: it became to him a man benighted, lost, forgotten in the cold; the bones were all dusted out of him by the wintry winds; only the shell of him was left.

“Mr. Lestrange is in the library, and will see Mr. Armour,” said the voice of the servant.

An election was at hand, and at such a time certain persons are more courteous than usual.

CHAPTER X. THE LIBRARY

Simon and Richard followed the man through a narrow door in the thick wall, across a wide passage, and then along a narrow one. A door was thrown open, and they stepped into a sombre room. The floor of the hall was of great echoing slabs of stone, but now their feet sank in the deep silence of a soft carpet.

Here a new awe, dwelling, however, in an air of homeliness, awoke in Richard. Around him, from floor to ceiling, was ranged a whole army of books, mostly in fine old bindings; in spite of open window and great fire and huge chimney, the large lofty room was redolent of them. Their odour, however, was not altogether pleasing to Richard, whose practised organ detected in it the signs of a blamable degree of decay. The faint effluvia of decomposing paper, leather, paste, and glue, were to Richard as the air of an ill-ventilated ward in the nostrils of a physician. He sniffed and made an involuntary grimace: he had not seen Mr. Lestrange, who was close to him, half hidden by a bookcase that stood out from the wall.

“Good morning, Armour!” said Lestrange. “Your young man does not seem to relish books!”

“In a grand place like this, sir,” remarked Richard, taking answer upon himself, “such a library as I never saw, except, of course, at the British Museum, it makes a man sorry to discover indications of neglect.”

“What do you mean?” returned Lestrange in displeasure.

Richard’s remark was the more offensive that his superior style issued in a comparatively common tone. Neither was there anything in the appearance of the place to justify it.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, fearing he had been rude, “but I am a bookbinder!”

“Well?” rejoined Lestrange, taking him now for a sneaking tradesman on the track of a big job.

“I know at once the condition of an old book by the smell of it,” pursued Richard. “The moment I came in, I knew there must be some here in a bad way—not in their clothes merely, but in their bodies as well—the paper of them, I mean. Whether a man has what they call a soul or not, a book certainly has: the paper and print are the body, and the binding is the clothes. A gentleman I know—but he’s a mystic—goes farther, and says the paper is the body, the print the soul, and the meaning the spirit.”

A pretty fellow to be an atheist! my reader may well think.

Mr. Lestrange stared. He must be a local preacher, this blacksmith, this bookbinder, or whatever he was!

“I am sorry you think the books hypocrites,” he said. “They look all right!” he added, casting his eyes over the shelves before him.

“Would you mind me taking down one or two?” asked Richard. “My hands are rather black, but the colour is ingrain, as Spenser might say.”

“Do so, by all means,” answered Lestrange, curious to see how far the fellow could support with proof the accuracy of his scent.

Richard moved three paces, and took down a volume—one of a set, the original edition in quarto of “The Decline and Fall,” bound in russia-leather.

“I thought so!” he said; “going!—going!—Look at the joints of this Gibbon, sir. That’s always the way with russia—now-a-days, at least!—Smell that, grandfather! Isn’t it sweet? But there’s no stay in it! Smell that joint! The leather’s stone-dead!—It’s the rarest thing to see a volume bound in russia, of which the joints are not broken, or at least cracking. These joints, you see, are gone to powder! All russia does—sooner or later, whatever be the cause.—Just put that joint to your nose, sir! That’s part of what you smell so strong in the room.”

He held out the book to him, but Lestrange drew back: it was not fit his nose should stoop to the request of a tradesman!

Richard replaced the book, and took down one after another of the same set.

“Every one, you see, sir,” he said, “going the same way! Dust to dust!”

“If they’re all going that way,” remarked the young man, “it would cost every stick on the estate to rebind them!”

“I should be sorry to rebind any of them. An old binding is like an old picture! Just look at this French binding! It’s very dingy, and a good deal broken, but you never see anything like that nowadays—as mellow as modest, and as rich as roses! Here’s one says the same thing as your grand hall out there, only in a piping voice.”

Lestrange was not exactly stuck-up; he had feared the fellow was bumptious, and felt there was no knowing what he might say next, but by this time had ceased to imagine his dignity in danger. The young blacksmith’s admiration of the books and of the hall pleased him, and he became more cordial.

“Do you say all russia-leather behaves in the same fashion?” he asked.

“Yes, now. I fancy it did not some years ago. There may be some change in the preparation of the leather. I don’t know. It is a great pity! Russia is lovely to the eye—and to the nostrils.—May I take a look at some of the old books, sir?”

“What do you call an old book?”

“One not later, say, than the time of James the First.—Have you a first folio, sir?”

Lestrange was thinking of his coming baronetcy.

“First folio?” he answered absently. “I dare say you will find a good many first folios on the shelves!”

“I mean the folio Shakespeare of 1623. There are, of course, many folios much scarcer! I saw one the other day that the booksellers themselves gave eight hundred guineas for!”

“What was it?” asked Lestrange carelessly.

“It was a wonderful copy—unique as to condition—of Gower’s Confessio Amantis;—not a very interesting book, though I do not doubt Shakespeare was fond of it. You see Shakespeare could hear the stones preaching!”

“By Jove, a man may hear the sticks do that any Sunday!”

“True enough, sir, ha-ha!”

“Have you read Gower, then?”

“A good deal of him.”

“Was it that same precious copy you read him in?”

“It was; but I hadn’t time for more than about the half. I must finish on another edition, I fear.”

“How did you get hold of a book of such value?”

“The booksellers who bought it, asked me to take it into my hospital. It wanted just a little, a very little patching. The copy in the museum is not to compare to it.”

“You say it was not interesting?”

“Not very interesting, I said, sir.”

“Why did you read so much of it, then?”

“When a book is hard to come at, you are the more ready to read it when you have the chance.”

“I suppose that’s why one borrows his neighbour’s books and don’t read his own! I seldom take one down from those shelves.”

Richard felt as if a wall was broken down between them.

All the time they talked, old Simon stood beside, pleased to note how well his grandson could hold up the ball with the young squire, but saying nothing. If the matter had been hoof of horse, cow, or ass, he would not have been silent: he knew hoofs better than Richard knew books.

Richard took down a small folio, the back of which looked much too soft and loose. Opening it, he found what he expected—a wreck. It was hardly fit to be called any more a book. The clothes had forsaken the body, or rather the body had decayed away from the clothes.

“Now, look here!” he said. “Here is Cowley’s Poems—in such a state that I doubt if anything would ever make a book of it again. I thought by the back all was wrong inside! See how the leaves have come away singly: the paper itself is rotten! I doubt if there is any way to make paper so far gone as this hold together. I know a good deal can be done, and I must learn what is known. I shan’t be master of my trade till I know all that can be done now to stop such a book from crumbling into dust! Then I may find out something more!”

“Well, for that one, I don’t think it matters: Cowley ain’t much!” said Lestrange, throwing the volume on a table. “I remember once taking down the book, and trying to read some of it: I could not; it’s the dullest rubbish ever written.”

“It’s not so bad as that, sir!” answered Richard, and taking up the book he turned the leaves with light, practiced hand. “He was counted the greatest poet of his day, and no age loves dullness! Listen a moment, sir; I will read only one stanza.”

He had found the “Hymn to the Light,” and read:—

“First born of Chaos, who so fair didst come From the old Negro’s darksome womb! Which when it saw the lovely Child, The melancholy Mass put on kind looks and smil’d.”

“I don’t see much in that!” said Lestrange, as Richard closed the book, and glanced up expectant.

Richard was silent for an instant.

“At any rate,” he returned, “it is necessary to the understanding of our history, that we should know the kind of thing admired and called good at any given time of it: so our lecturer at King’s used to tell us.”

“At King’s!” cried Lestrange.

“King’s college, London, I mean,” said Richard. “They have evening classes there, to which a man can go after his day’s work. My father always took care I should have time for anything I wanted to do. I go still when I am at home—not always, but when the lecturer takes up any special subject I want to know more about.”

“You’ll be an author yourself some day, I suppose!”

“There’s little hope or fear of that, sir! But I can’t bear not to know what’s in my very hands. I can’t be content with the outsides of the books I bind. It seems a shame to come so near light and never see it shine. If I were a tailor, I should learn anatomy. I know one tailor who is as familiar with the human form as any sculptor in London—more, perhaps!”

Lestrange began to feel uncomfortable. If he let this prodigy go on talking and asking questions, he would find out how little he knew about anything! But Richard was no prodigy. He was only a youth capable of interest in everything, with the stimulus of not finding the fountains of knowledge at his very door, and the aid of having to work all day at some pleasant task, nearly associated with higher things that he loved better. He did know a good deal for his age, but not so very much for his opportunity, his advantages being great. Most men who learn would learn more, I suspect, if they had work to do, and difficulty in the way of learning. Those counted high among Richard’s advantages. He was, besides, considerably attracted by the mechanics of literature—a department little cultivated by those who have most need of what grows in it.

Further talk followed. Lestrange grew interested in the phenomenon of a blacksmith that bound books and read them. He began to dream of patronage and responsive devotion. What a thing it would be for him, in after years, with the cares of property and parliament combining to curtail his leisure, to have such a man at his beck, able to gather the information he desired, and to reduce, tabulate, and embody it so as to render his chief the best-informed man in the House! while at other times he would manage for him his troublesome tenants, and upon occasion shoe his wife’s favourite horse! He could also depend upon him to provide, from the rich stores of his memory, suitable quotations when he wished to make a speech! Lestrange had never thought whether the wish to appear might not indicate the duty to be; had never seen that, until he was, to desire to appear was to cherish the soul of a sneak. He had no notion of anything but the look; no notion that, having made a good speech, he would deserve an atom the less praise for it that he could not have made it without his secretary. Did any one think the less of clearing a five-barred gate, he would have answered, that it could not be done without a horse? Where was the difference? A man you paid to be your secretary, still more a man whose education to be your secretary you had paid for—was he not yours in a way at least analogous to that in which a horse was yours? He could break away from you more easily, no doubt, but a man knew better than a horse on which side his bread was buttered!

“I think, squire, I’ll go and have a pipe with the coachman!” said the blacksmith at length.

“As you please, Armour,” answered Lestrange. “I will take care of your—nephew, is he?”

“My grandson, sir—from London.”

“All right! There’s good stuff in the breed, Armour!—I will bring him to you.”

Richard went on taking down book after book, and showing his host how much they required attention.

“And you could set all right for—?—for how much?” asked Lestrange.

“That no one could say. It would, however, cost little more than time and skill. The material would not come to much. Only, where the paper itself is in decay, I do not know about that. I have learned nothing in that department yet.”

“For generations none of us have cared about books—that must be why they have gone so to the bad!—the books, I mean,” he added with a laugh. “There was a bishop, and I think there was a poet, somewhere in the family; but my father—hm!—I doubt if he would care to lay out money on the library!”

“Tell him,” suggested Richard, “that it is a very valuable library—at least so it appears to me from the little I have seen of it; but I am sure of this, that it is rapidly sinking in value. After another twenty years of neglect it would not fetch half the price it might easily be brought up to now.”

“I don’t know that that would weigh much with him. So long as he sees the shelves full, and the book-backs all right, he won’t want anything better. He cares only how things look.”

“But the whole look of the library is growing worse—gradually, it is true, and in a measure it can’t be helped—but faster than you would think, and faster than it ought. The backs, which, from a library point of view, are the faces of the books, may, up to a certain moment, look well, and after that go much more rapidly. I fear damp is getting at these from somewhere!”

“Would you undertake to set all right, if my father made you a reasonable offer?”

“I would—provided I found no injury beyond the scope of my experience.”

Richard spoke in book-fashion: he was speaking about books, and to a social superior! he was not really pompous.

“Well, if my father should come to see the thing as I do, I will let you know. Then will be the time for a definite understanding!”

“The best way would be that I should come and work for a set time: by the progress I made, and what I cost, you could judge.”

Lestrange rang the bell, and ordered the attendant to take the young man to his grandfather.

The two wandered together over the grounds, and Richard saw much to admire and wonder at, but nothing to approach the hall or the library.

On their way home, Simon, to his grandson’s surprise, declared himself in favour of his working at the Mortgrange library. But the idea tickled his fancy so much, that Richard wondered at the oddity of his grandfather’s behaviour.