MY UNCLE'S ROOM, AND MY UNCLE IN IT.
At right angles to the long, black and white house, stood a building
behind it, of possibly earlier date, but uncertain intent. It had been
used for many things before my uncle's time--once as part of a small
brewery. My uncle was positive that, whether built for the purpose or
not, it had been used as a chapel, and that the house was originally the
out-lying cell of some convent. The signs on which he founded this
conclusion, I was never able to appreciate: to me, as containing my
uncle's study, the wonder-house of my childhood, it was far more
interesting than any history could have made it. It had very thick walls,
two low stories, and a high roof. Entering it from the court behind the
house, every portion of it would seem to an ordinary beholder quite
accounted for; but it might have suggested itself to a more comprehending
observer, that a considerable space must lie between the roof and the low
ceiling of the first floor, which was taken up with the servants' rooms.
Of the ground floor, part was used as a dairy, part as a woodhouse, part
for certain vegetables, while part stored the turf dug for fuel from the
neighbouring moor.
Between this building and the house was a smaller and lower erection, a
mere out-house. It also was strongly built, however, and the roof, in
perfect condition, seemed newer than the walls: it had been raised and
strengthened when used by my uncle to contain a passage leading from the
house to the roof of the building just described, in which he was
fashioning for himself the retreat which he rightly called his study, for
few must be the rooms more continuously thought and read in during one
lifetime than this.
I have now to tell how it was reached from the house. You could hardly
have found the way to it, even had you set yourself seriously to the
task, without having in you a good share of the constructive faculty. The
whole was my uncle's contrivance, but might well have been supposed to
belong to the troubled times when a good hiding-place would have added to
the value of any home.
There was a large recess in the kitchen, of which the hearth, raised a
foot or so above the flagged floor, had filled the whole--a huge chimney
in fact, built out from the wall. At some later time an oblong space had
been cut out of the hearth to a level with the floor, and in it an iron
grate constructed for the more convenient burning of coal. Hence the
remnant of the raised hearth looked like wide hobs to the grate. The
recess as a chimney-corner was thereby spoiled, for coal makes a very
different kind of smoke from the aromatic product of wood or peat.
Right and left within the recess, were two common, unpainted doors, with
latches. If you opened either, you found an ordinary shallow cupboard,
that on the right filled with shelves and crockery, that on the left with
brooms and other household implements.
But if, in the frame of the door to the left, you pressed what looked
like the head of a large nail, not its door only but the whole cupboard
turned inward on unseen hinges, and revealed an ascending stair, which
was the approach to my uncle's room. At the head of the stair you went
through the wall of the house to the passage under the roof of the
out-house, at the end of which a few more steps led up to the door of the
study. By that door you entered the roof of the more ancient building.
Lighted almost entirely from above, there was no indication outside of
the existence of this floor, except one tiny window, with vaguely pointed
arch, almost in the very top of the gable. Here lay my nest; this was the
bower of my bliss.
Its walls rose but about three feet from the floor ere the slope of the
roof began, so that there was a considerable portion of the room in which
my tall uncle could not stand upright. There was width enough
notwithstanding, in which four as tall as he might have walked abreast up
and down a length of at least five and thirty feet.
Not merely the low walls, but the slopes of the roof were filled with
books as high as the narrow level portion of the ceiling. On the slopes
the bookshelves had of course to be peculiar. My uncle had contrived, and
partly himself made them, with the assistance of a carpenter he had known
all his life. They were individually fixed to the rafters, each
projecting over that beneath it. To get at the highest, he had to stand
on a few steps; to reach the lowest, he had to stoop at a right angle.
The place was almost a tunnel of books.
By setting a chair on an ancient chest that stood against the gable, and
a footstool on the chair, I could mount high enough to get into the deep
embrasure of the little window, whence alone to gain a glimpse of the
lower world, while from the floor I could see heaven through six
skylights, deep framed in books. As far back as I can remember, it was my
care to see that the inside of their glass was always bright, so that sun
and moon and stars might look in.
The books were mostly in old and dingy bindings, but there were a few to
attract the eyes of a child--especially some annuals, in red skil, or
embossed leather, or, most bewitching of all, in paper, protected by a
tight case of the same, from which, with the help of a ribbon, you drew
out the precious little green volume, with its gilt edges and lovely
engravings--one of which in particular I remember--a castle in the
distance, a wood, a ghastly man at the head of a rearing horse, and a
white, mist-like, fleeting ghost, the cause of the consternation. These
books had a large share in the witchery of the chamber.
At the end of the room, near the gable-window, but under one of the
skylights, was a table of white deal, without cover, at which my uncle
generally sat, sometimes writing, oftener leaning over a book.
Occasionally, however, he would occupy a large old-fashioned easy chair,
under the slope of the roof, in the same end of the room, sitting silent,
neither writing nor reading, his eyes fixed straight before him, but
plainly upon nothing. They looked as if sights were going out of them
rather than coming in at them. When he sat thus, I would sit gazing at
him. Oh how I loved him--loved every line of his gentle, troubled
countenance! I do not remember the time when I did not know that his face
was troubled. It gave the last finishing tenderness to my love for him.
It was from no meddlesome curiosity that I sat watching him, from no
longing to learn what he was thinking about, or what pictures were going
and coming before the eyes of his mind, but from such a longing to
comfort him as amounted to pain. I think it was the desire to be near
him--in spirit, I mean, for I could be near him in the body any time
except when he was out on one of his lonely walks or rides--that made me
attend so closely to my studies. He taught me everything, and I yearned
to please him, but without this other half-conscious yearning I do not
believe I should ever have made the progress he praised. I took indeed a
true delight in learning, but I would not so often have shut the book I
was enjoying to the full and taken up another, but for the sight or the
thought of my uncle's countenance.
I think he never once sat down in the chair I have mentioned without
sooner or later rising hurriedly, and going out on one of his solitary
rambles.
When we were having our lessons together, as he phrased it, we sat at the
table side by side, and he taught me as if we were two children finding
out together what it all meant. Those lessons had, I think, the largest
share in the charm of the place; yet when, as not unfrequently, my uncle
would, in the middle of one of them, rise abruptly and leave me without a
word, to go, I knew, far away from the house, I was neither dismayed nor
uneasy: I had got used to the thing before I could wonder what it meant.
I would just go back to the book I had been reading, or to any other that
attracted me: he never required the preparation of any lessons. It was of
no use to climb to the window in the hope of catching sight of him, for
thence was nothing to be seen immediately below but the tops of high
trees and a corner of the yard into which the cow-houses opened, and my
uncle was never there. He neither understood nor cared about farming. His
elder brother, my father, had been bred to carry on the yeoman-line of
the family, and my uncle was trained to the medical profession. My father
dying rather suddenly, my uncle, who was abroad at the time, and had not
begun to practise, returned to take his place, but never paid practical
attention to the farming any more than to his profession. He gave the
land in charge to a bailiff, and at once settled down, Martha told me,
into what we now saw him. She seemed to imply that grief at my father's
death was the cause of his depression, but I soon came to the conclusion
that it lasted too long to be so accounted for. Gradually I grew
aware--so gradually that at length I seemed to have known it from the
first--that the soul of my uncle was harassed with an undying trouble,
that some worm lay among the very roots of his life. What change could
ever dispel such a sadness as I often saw in that chair! Now and then he
would sit there for hours, an open book in his hand perhaps, at which he
cast never a glance, all unaware of the eyes of the small maiden fixed
upon him, with a whole world of sympathy behind them. I suspect, however,
as I believe I have said, that Martha Moon, in her silence, had pierced
the heart of the mystery, though she _knew_ nothing.
One practical lesson given me now and then in varying form by my uncle, I
at length, one day, suddenly and involuntarily associated with the
darkness that haunted him. In substance it was this: “Never, my little
one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that
makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once
it will begin to eat a hole in it.” He would so often say the kind of
thing, that I seemed to know when it was coming. But I had heard it as a
thing of course, never realizing its truth, and listening to it only
because he whom I loved said it.
I see with my mind's eye the fine small head and large eyes so far above
me, as we sit beside each other at the deal table. He looked down on me
like a bird of prey. His hair--gray, Martha told me, before he was
thirty--was tufted out a little, like ruffled feathers, on each side. But
the eyes were not those of an eagle; they were a dove's eyes.
“A secret, little one, is a mole that burrows,” said my uncle.
The moment of insight was come. A voice seemed suddenly to say within me,
“He has a secret; it is biting his heart!” My affection, my devotion, my
sacred concern for him, as suddenly swelled to twice their size. It was
as if a God were in pain, and I could not help him. I had no desire to
learn his secret; I only yearned heart and soul to comfort him. Before
long, I had a secret myself for half a day: ever after, I shared so in
the trouble of his secret, that I seemed myself to possess or rather to
be possessed by one--such a secret that I did not myself know it.
But in truth I had a secret then; for the moment I knew that he had a
secret, his secret--the outward fact of its existence, I mean--was my
secret. And besides this secret of his, I had then a secret of my own.
For I knew that my uncle had a secret, and he did not know that I knew.
Therewith came, of course, the question--Ought I to tell him? At once, by
the instinct of love, I saw that to tell him would put him in a great
difficulty. He might wish me never to let any one else know of it, and
how could he say so when he had been constantly warning me to let nothing
grow to a secret in my heart? As to telling Martha Moon, much as I loved
her, much as I knew she loved my uncle, and sure as I was that anything
concerning him was as sacred to her as to me, I dared not commit such a
breach of confidence as even to think in her presence that my uncle had a
secret. From that hour I had recurrent fits of a morbid terror at the
very idea of a secret--as if a secret were in itself a treacherous,
poisonous guest, that ate away the life of its host.
But to return, my half-day-secret came in this wise.