Lilith | Page 4

George MacDonald
peculiarities there is no occasion to say more.
The house as well as the family was of some antiquity, but no description of it is
necessary to the understanding of my narrative. It contained a fine library, whose growth
began before the invention of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly
influenced, of course, by changes of taste and pursuit. Nothing surely can more impress

upon a man the transitory nature of possession than his succeeding to an ancient property!
Like a moving panorama mine has passed from before many eyes, and is now slowly
flitting from before my own.
The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it,
had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it
occupied the greater part of the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of it
were covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it overflowed were
of various sizes and shapes, and communicated in modes as various--by doors, by open
arches, by short passages, by steps up and steps down.
In the great room I mainly spent my time, reading books of science, old as well as new;
for the history of the human mind in relation to supposed knowledge was what most of all
interested me. Ptolemy, Dante, the two Bacons, and Boyle were even more to me than
Darwin or Maxwell, as so much nearer the vanished van breaking into the dark of
ignorance.
In the evening of a gloomy day of August I was sitting in my usual place, my back to one
of the windows, reading. It had rained the greater part of the morning and afternoon, but
just as the sun was setting, the clouds parted in front of him, and he shone into the room. I
rose and looked out of the window. In the centre of the great lawn the feathering top of
the fountain column was filled with his red glory. I turned to resume my seat, when my
eye was caught by the same glory on the one picture in the room--a portrait, in a sort of
niche or little shrine sunk for it in the expanse of book-filled shelves. I knew it as the
likeness of one of my ancestors, but had never even wondered why it hung there alone,
and not in the gallery, or one of the great rooms, among the other family portraits. The
direct sunlight brought out the painting wonderfully; for the first time I seemed to see it,
and for the first time it seemed to respond to my look. With my eyes full of the light
reflected from it, something, I cannot tell what, made me turn and cast a glance to the
farther end of the room, when I saw, or seemed to see, a tall figure reaching up a hand to
a bookshelf. The next instant, my vision apparently rectified by the comparative dusk, I
saw no one, and concluded that my optic nerves had been momentarily affected from
within.
I resumed my reading, and would doubtless have forgotten the vague, evanescent
impression, had it not been that, having occasion a moment after to consult a certain
volume, I found but a gap in the row where it ought to have stood, and the same instant
remembered that just there I had seen, or fancied I saw, the old man in search of a book. I
looked all about the spot but in vain. The next morning, however, there it was, just where
I had thought to find it! I knew of no one in the house likely to be interested in such a
book.
Three days after, another and yet odder thing took place.
In one of the walls was the low, narrow door of a closet, containing some of the oldest
and rarest of the books. It was a very thick door, with a projecting frame, and it had been
the fancy of some ancestor to cross it with shallow shelves, filled with book-backs only.

The harmless trick may be excused by the fact that the titles on the sham backs were
either humorously original, or those of books lost beyond hope of recovery. I had a great
liking for the masked door.
To complete the illusion of it, some inventive workman apparently had shoved in, on the
top of one of the rows, a part of a volume thin enough to lie between it and the bottom of
the next shelf: he had cut away diagonally a considerable portion, and fixed the remnant
with one of its open corners projecting beyond the book-backs. The binding of the
mutilated volume was limp vellum, and one could open the corner far enough to see that
it
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