Amaryllis at the Fair Part 9

"I daresay--I daresay," said the old man, in the hasty manner of feeble age, as he cut another notch to record her height. The handle of the peel was notched all round, where he had measured his grandchildren; there were so many marks it was not easy to see how he distinguished them.

"Is your father coming?" he asked, when he had finished with the knife.

"I don't know." This was Jesuitically true--she did not _know_--she could not be certain; but in her heart she was sure he would not come.

But she did not want to hear any hard words said about him.

"Has he sent anything? Have you brought anything for me? No. No.

Hum!--ha!"--fit of coughing--"Well, well--come in; dinner's late, there's time to hear you read--you're fond of books, you read a great deal at home,"--and so talking, half to himself and half to her, he led the way into the parlour by the shop.

Bowed by more than ninety years, his back curved over forwards, and his limbs curved in the opposite direction, so that the outline of his form resembled a flattened capital S. For his chin hung over his chest, and his knees never straightened themselves, but were always more or less bent as he stood or walked. It was much the att.i.tude of a strong man heavily laden and unable to stand upright--such an att.i.tude as big Jack Duck in his great strength might take when carrying two sacks of wheat at once. There was as heavy a load on Grandfather Iden's back, but Time is invisible.

He wore a grey suit, as a true miller and baker should, and had worn the same cut and colour for years and years. In the shop, too, he always had a grey hat on, perhaps its original hue was white, but it got to appear grey upon him; a large grey chimney-pot, many sizes too big for his head apparently, for it looked as if for ever about to descend and put out his face like an extinguisher. Though his boots were so carefully polished, they quickly took a grey tint from the flour dust as he pottered about the bins in the morning. The ends of his trousers, too long for his antique shanks, folded and creased over his boots, and almost hid his grey cloth under-gaiters.

A great k.n.o.bbed old nose--but stay, I will not go further, it is not right to paint too faithfully the features of the very aged, which are repellent in spite of themselves; I mean, they cannot help their faces, their sentiments and actions are another matter; therefore I will leave Father Iden's face as a dim blot on the mirror; you look in it and it reflects everywhere, except one spot.

Amaryllis followed him jauntily,--little did she care, reckless girl, for the twenty thousand guineas in the iron box under his bed.

The cottage folk, who always know so much, had endless tales of Iden's wealth; how years ago bushels upon bushels of pennies, done up in five-s.h.i.+lling packets, had been literally carted like potatoes away from the bakehouse to go to London; how ponies were laden with sacks of silver groats, all paid over that furrowed counter for the golden flour, dust more golden than the sands of ancient Pactolus.

Reckless Amaryllis cared not a pin for all the spade guineas in the iron box.

The old man sat down by the fire without removing his hat, motioning to her to shut the door, which she was loth to do, for the little room was smothered with smoke. Troubled with asthma, he coughed incessantly, and mopped his mouth with a vast silk handkerchief, but his dull blood craved for warmth, and he got his knees close to the grate, and piled up the coal till it smoked and smoked, and filled the close apartment with a suffocating haze of carbon. To be asked into Father Iden's sanctuary was an honour, but, like other honours, it had to be paid for.

Amaryllis gasped as she sat down, and tried to breathe as short as possible, to avoid inhaling more than she could bear.

"Books," said her grandfather, pointing to the bookcases, which occupied three sides of the room. "Books--you like books; look at them--go and see."

To humour him, Amaryllis rose, and appeared to look carefully along the shelves which she had scanned so many times before. They contained very good books indeed, such books as were not to be found elsewhere throughout the whole town of Woolhorton, and perhaps hardly in the county, old and rare volumes of price, such as Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Co. delight to offer to collectors, such as Bernard Quaritch, that giant of the modern auction room, would have written magnificent cheques for.

Did you ever see the Giant Quaritch in the auction-room bidding for books? It is one of the sights of London, let me tell you, to any one who thinks or is alive to the present day. Most sights are reputations merely--the pale reflection of things that were real once. This sight is something of the living time, the day in which we live. Get an _Athenaeum_ in the season, examine the advertis.e.m.e.nts of book auctions, and attend the next great sale of some famous library.

You have a recollection of the giant who sat by the highway and devoured the pilgrims who pa.s.sed? This giant sits in the middle of the ring and devours the books set loose upon their travels after the repose of centuries.

What prices to give! No one can withstand him. From Paris they send agents with a million francs at their back; from Berlin and Vienna come the eager snappers-up of much considered trifles, but in vain. They only get what the Giant chooses to leave them.

Books that n.o.body ever heard of fetch 50, 60, 100, 200; wretched little books never opened since they were printed; dull duodecimos on the course of the river Wein; nondescript indescribable twaddling local books in Italian, Spanish, queer French, written and printed in some unknown foreign village; read them--you might as well try to amuse yourself with a Chinese pamphlet! What earthly value they are of cannot be discovered. They were composed by authors whose names are gone like the sand washed by the Nile into the sea before Herodotus. They contain no beautiful poetry, no elevated thought, no scientific discovery; they are simply so much paper, printing, and binding, so many years old, and it is for that age, printing, and binding that the money is paid.

I have read a good many books in my time--I would not give sixpence for the whole lot.

They are not like a block-book--first efforts at printing; nor like the first editions of great authors; there is not the slightest intrinsic value in them whatever.

Yet some of them fetch prices which not long ago were thought tremendous even for the Shakespeare folio.

Hundreds and hundreds of pounds are paid for them. Living and writing authors of the present day are paid in old songs by comparison.

Still, this enormous value set on old books is one of the remarkable signs of the day. If any one wishes to know what To-Day is, these book-auctions are of the things he should go to see.

Such books as these lined Grandfather Iden's shelves; among them there were a few that I call _real_ old books, an early translation or two, an early Shakespeare, and once there had been a very valuable Boccaccio, but this had gone into Lord Pamment's library, "Presented by James Bartholomew Iden, Esq."

The old man often went to look at and admire his Boccaccio in my Lord's library.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XI.

THERE was one peculiarity in all the books on Grandfather Iden's shelves, they were all very finely bound in the best style of hand-art, and they all bore somewhere or other a little design of an ancient Roman lamp.

Hand-art is a term I have invented for the workmans.h.i.+p of good taste--it is not the sculptor's art, nor the painter's--not the art of the mind, but the art of the hand. Some furniture and cabinet work, for instance, some pottery, book-binding like this, are the products of hand-art.

"Do you see the Lamp?" asked the old man, when Amaryllis had stared sufficiently at the backs of the books.

"Yes, I can see the Lamp."

"House of Flamma," said old Iden.

"House of Flamma," repeated Amaryllis, hastily, eager to show that she understood all about it. She feared lest he should enter into the history of the House of Flamma and of his connection with it; she had heard it all over and over again; her mother was a Flamma; she had herself some of the restless Flamma blood in her. When anything annoyed her or made her indignant her foot used to tap the floor, and her neck flush rosy, and her face grow dusky like the night. Then, striving to control herself, she would say to herself, "I _will_ not be a Flamma."

Except her dear mother and one other, Amaryllis detested and despised the whole tribe of the Flammas, the nervous, excitable, pa.s.sionate, fidgetty, tipsy, idle, good-for-nothing lot; she hated them all, the very name and mention of them; she sided with her father as an Iden against her mother's family, the Flammas. True they were almost all flecked with talent like white foam on a black horse, a spot or two of genius, and the rest black guilt or folly. She hated them; she would not be a Flamma.

How should she at sixteen understand the wear and tear of life, the pressure of circ.u.mstances, the heavy weight of difficulties--there was something to be said even for the miserable fidgetty Flammas, but naturally sixteen judged by appearances. Shut up in narrow grooves and working day after day, year after year, in a contracted way, by degrees their const.i.tutional nervousness became the chief characteristic of their existence. It was Intellect overcome--over-burdened--with two generations of petty cares; Genius dulled and damped till it went to the quart pot.

Sixteen could scarcely understand this. Amaryllis detested the very name; she would not be a Flamma.

But she was a Flamma for all that; a Flamma in fire of spirit, in strength of indignation, in natural capacity; she drew, for instance, with the greatest ease in pencil or pen-and-ink, drew to the life; she could write a letter in sketches.

Her indignation sometimes at the wrongfulness of certain things seemed to fill her with a consuming fire. Her partizans.h.i.+p for her father made her sometimes inwardly rage for the lightning, that she might utterly erase the opposer. Her contempt of sycophancy, and bold independence led her constantly into trouble.

Flamma means a flame.

Yet she was gentleness itself too; see her at the bookshelves patiently endeavouring to please the tiresome old man.

"Open that drawer," said he, as she came to it.

Amaryllis did so, and said that the coins and medals in it were very interesting, as they really were. The smoke caught her in the throat, and seemed to stop the air as she breathed from reaching her chest. So much accustomed to the open air, she felt stifled.

Then he asked her to read to him aloud, that he might hear how she enunciated her words. The book he gave her was an early copy of Addison, the page a pale yellow, the type old-fount, the edges rough, but where in a trim modern volume will you find language like his and ideas set forth with such transparent lucidity? How easy to write like that!--so simple, merely a letter to an intimate friend; but try!

Trim modern volumes are so very hard to read, especially those that come to us from New York, thick volumes of several hundred pages, printed on the thinnest paper in hard, unpleasant type. You cannot read them; you _work_ through them.

The French have retained a little of the old style of book in their paper bound franc novels, the rough paper, thick black type, rough edges are pleasant to touch and look at--they feel as if they were done by hand, not turned out hurriedly smooth and trim by machinery.