There & Back

“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.

CHAPTER XI. ALICE

Soon after his visit to Mortgrange, the young bookbinder went home, recalled at last by his parents. John Tuke was shocked with the hardness and blackness of his hands, and called his wife’s attention to them. She, however, perhaps from nearer alliance with the smithy, professed to regard their condition as by no means a serious matter. She could not, nevertheless, quite conceal her regret, for she was proud of her boy’s hands.

Richard supposed of course that his father’s annoyance came only from the fear that his touch would be no longer sufficiently delicate for certain parts of his work; and certainly, when he looked at them, he thought the points of his fingers were broader than before, and was a little anxious lest they should have lost something of their cunning. He did not know that mechanical faculty, for fine work as well as rough, goes in general with square-pointed fingers. Delicately tapered fingers, whatever they may indicate in the way of artistic invention, are not the fingers of the painter or the sculptor. The finest fingers of the tapering kind I have ever seen, were those of a distinguished chemist of the last generation. Eager to satisfy both his father and himself, that the hands of the bookmender had not degenerated more than his skill could counteract, Richard selected, from a few that were waiting his return, the book worthiest of his labour, set to work, and by a thorough success quickly effected his purpose.

He was now, however, anxious, before doing anything else, to learn all that was known for the restoration and repair of the insides of books. In this an old-bookseller, a friend of his father, was able to give him no little help, putting him up to wrinkles not a few. Richard was surprised to see how, with a penknife, on a bit of glass, he would pare the edge of a scrap of paper to half the thickness, in order to place two such edges together, and join them without a scar. He taught him how to clean letterpress and engravings from ferruginous, fungous, and other kinds of spots. He made him acquainted with a process which considerably strengthened paper that had become weak in its cohesion; and when Richard would make further experiment, he supplied him with valueless letterpress to work upon. His time was thus more than ever occupied. For many weeks he scarcely even read.

It was not long, however, before he bethought him that he must see Arthur. He went the same evening to call on him, but found other people in the house, who could tell him nothing about the family that had left. His aunt said she had seen Alice once, and knew they were going, but did not know where they were gone. Richard would have inquired at the house in the City where Arthur was employed, but he did not know even the name of the firm. Once, from the top of an omnibus, he saw him—in the same shabby old comforter, looking feebler and paler and more depressed than ever; but when he got down, he had lost sight of him, and though he ran hither and thither, looking up this street and that, he recovered no glimpse of him. The selfish mother and the wasting children came back to him vividly as he walked sadly home.

He had counted Alice the nicest girl he had ever seen, but since going to the country had not thought much about her; and now, since seeing the fairy-like lady with the big brown mare, he had a higher idea of the feminine. But although therefore he would not have thought the pale, sweet-faced dressmaker quite so pleasing as before, he would, because of the sad look into which her countenance always settled, have felt her quite as interesting.

Richard had not yet arrived at any readiness to fall in love. It is well when this readiness is delayed until the individuality is sufficiently developed to have its own demands. I venture to think one cause of unhappiness in marriages is, that each person’s peculiar self, was not, at the time of engagement, sufficiently grown for a natural selection of the suitable, that is, the correspondent; and that the development which follows is in most cases the development of what is reciprocally non-correspondent, and works for separation and not approximation. The only thing to overcome this or any other disjunctive power, is development in the highest sense, that is, development of the highest and deepest in us—which can come only by doing right. The man who is growing to be one with his own nature, that is, one with God who is the naturing nature, is coming nearer and nearer to every one of his fellow-beings. This may seem a long way round to love, but it is the only road by which we can arrive at true love of any kind; and he who does not walk in it, will one day find himself on the verge of a gulf of hate.

Individuality, forestalled by indifference, had no chance of keeping sir Wilton and lady Ann apart, but certainly had done nothing to bring them together. Where all is selfishness on both sides, what other correspondences may exist will hardly come into play. The loss of the unloved heir had perhaps done a little to approximate them; but they speedily ceased to hold any communication of ideas on the matter. As they did nothing to recover him, so they seemed to take almost no thought as to his existence or non-existence. If he were alive, neither father nor stepmother had the least desire to discover him. Answering honestly, each would have chosen that he should remain unheard of. As to the possibility of his dying in want, or being brought up in wickedness, that did not trouble either of them. His stepmother did not think the more tenderly of another woman’s child that she cared for her own children only because they were hers. If you could have got the idea into the pinched soul of lady Ann, that the human race is one family, it would but have enhanced her general dislike, her feeble enmity to humanity. When she did or said anything to displease him, sir Wilton would sometimes hint at a new advertisement, but she did not much heed the threat. On the whole, however, they had got on better than might have been expected, partly in virtue of her sharp tongue and her thick skin, which combination of the offensive and defensive put sir Wilton at a disadvantage: however sharp his retort might be, she never felt it, but went on; and harping does not always mean such pleasant music, that you want to keep the harper awake. She had brought him four children—Arthur, the one whose acquaintance Richard had made, a younger brother who promised foully, and two girls—the elder common in feature and slow in wits, but with eyes and a heart; the younger clever and malicious.

One stormy winter night, as Richard was returning from a house in Park Crescent, to which he had carried home a valuable book restored to strength and some degree of aged beauty, from one of the narrow openings on the east side of Regent Street, came a girl, fighting with the wind and a weak-ribbed umbrella, and ran buffeted against him, notwithstanding his endeavour to leave her room. The collision was very slight, but she looked up and begged his pardon. It was Alice. Before he could speak, she gave a cry, and went from him in blind haste as fast as she could go; but with the fierce wind, her perturbation, and the unruliness of the umbrella, which she was vainly trying to close that she might run the better, she struck full against a lamp-post, and stood like one stunned and on the point of falling. Richard, however, was close behind her, and put an arm round her. She did not resist; she was indeed but half-conscious. The same moment he saw a cab and hailed it. The man heard and came. Richard lifted her into it, and got in after her. But Alice came to herself, got up, and leaning out of the cab on the street side, tried to open the door. Richard caught her, drew her back, and made her sit down again.

“Richard! Richard!” she cried, as she yielded to his superior strength, and burst into tears, “where are you taking me?”

“Wherever you like, Alice. You shall tell the cabman yourself. What is the matter with you? Don’t be angry with me. It is not my fault that I have not been to see you and Arthur. You went away, and nobody could tell me where to find you! Give the cabman your address, Alice.”

“I’m not going home,” sobbed Alice.

“Where are you going, then? I will go with you. You’re not fit to go anywhere alone! I’m afraid you’re badly hurt!”

“No, no! Do let me out. Indeed, indeed, you must!”

“Well, then, I won’t! You’ll drop down and be left to the police! It’s horrible to think of you out in such a night! Come home with me. If you are in any trouble, my mother will help you.”

Here Alice, who had yielded to the pressure with which Richard held her, broke from him, and pushed him away. Richard put his other arm across, and laid hold of the door of the cab, telling the man to get up on his box, and have a little patience. He obeyed, and Richard turned again to Alice.

“Richard,” she said, “your mother would kill me!”

“Nonsense!” he rejoined; “what a fancy! My mother!”