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 anyone 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 advertisements 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 passed? 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 nobody 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 anyone wishes to know what Today 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.
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 workmanship 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, bookbinding 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, passionate, fidgetty, tipsy, idle, good-for-nothing lot; she hated them all, the very name and mention of them; she sided with
