“Not quite that,” he responded stiffly, and hurried through the meagre and distasteful repast, to avoid any further conversation.
There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which recurred to him when he had paid his ten cents and got out on the street again. There was something interesting in the thought of Alice at the seaside. Neither of them had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for granted the most extravagant landsman’s conception of its curative and invigorating powers. It was apparent to him that he was going to pay much greater attention to Alice’s happiness and well-being in the future than he had latterly done. He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano. He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl. And this seaside notion—why, that was best of all.
His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her delighted eyes upon the marvel of a great ocean storm, or roaming along a beach strewn with wonderful marine shells, exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty. The fresh sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind’s eye, and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather pallid cheeks. He was prepared already hardly to know her, so robust and revivified would she have become, by the time he went down to the depot to meet her on her return.
For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself at the seaside. It sketched instead pictures of whole weeks of solitary academic calm, alone with his books and his thoughts. The facts that he had no books, and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts, subordinated themselves humbly to his mood. The prospect, as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to embrace the priest’s and the doctor’s libraries; the thoughts which he longed to be alone with involved close communion with their thoughts. It could not but prove a season of immense mental stimulation and ethical broadening. It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well; the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery, as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden lights modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall marble forms.
He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar’s house. His walk had brought him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad main highway which yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms, to a commanding site on the hillside. Below, in the valley, lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in factory smoke, at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed upon the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically with lumber, presenting an oddly incongruous suggestion of forest odors and the simplicity of the wilderness. In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground, stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage, peeping through which tiled turrets and ornamented chimneys marked the polite residences of those who, though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west, nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine linen from the profits of this toil. Nearer at hand, pastures with grazing cows on the one side of the road, and the nigh, weather-stained board fence of the racecourse on the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.
Dr. Ledsmar’s house, toward which Theron’s impulses had been secretly leading him ever since Celia’s parting remark about the rheumatism, was of that spacious and satisfying order of old-fashioned houses which men of leisure and means built for themselves while the early traditions of a sparse and contented homogeneous population were still strong in the Republic. There was a hospitable look about its wide veranda, its broad, low bulk, and its big, double front door, which did not fit at all with the sketch of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.
Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being admitted by a Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback when the door was opened by the doctor himself. His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial, but the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host’s inner room and rested heavily upon his opening speech.
“I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill,” he said, laying aside his hat.
“It’s nothing at all,” replied Ledsmar. “Merely a stiff shoulder that I wear from time to time in memory of my father. It ought to be quite gone by nightfall. It was good of you to come, all the same. Sit down if you can find a chair. As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here. That’s it—throw those things on the floor.”
Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his feet, and sat down. Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about him. Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books. One could hardly walk about without treading on them. The dust which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese servants.
“I must thank you, first of all, doctor,” he began, “for your kindness in coming when I was ill. ‘I was sick, and ye visited me.’ ”
“You mustn’t think of it that way,” said Ledsmar; “your friend came for me, and of course I went; and gladly too. There was nothing that I could do, or that anybody could do. Very interesting man,
