The Flight of the Shadow | Page 5

he went, and what time he would return no one
ever knew. His meals were uninteresting to him--no concern to any one
but Martha, who never uttered a word of impatience, and seldom a
word of anxiety. At whatever hour of the day he went, it was almost
always night when he came home, often late night. In the house he

much preferred his own room to any other.
This room, not so large as the kitchen-hall, but quite as long, seems to
me, when I look back, my earliest surrounding. It was the centre from
which my roving fancies issued as from their source, and the end of
their journey to which as to their home they returned. It was a curious
place. Were you to see first the inside of the house and then the outside,
you would find yourself at a loss to conjecture where within it could be
situated such a room. It was not, however, contained in what, to a
cursory glance, passed for the habitable house, and a stranger would not
easily have found the entrance to it.
Both its nature and situation were in keeping with certain peculiarities
of my uncle's mental being. He was given to curious inquiries. He
would set out to solve now one now another historical point as odd as
uninteresting to any but a mind capable of starting such a question. To
determine it, he would search book after book, as if it were a live thing,
in whose memory must remain, darkly stored, thousands of facts,
requiring only to be recollected: amongst them might nestle the thing
he sought, and he would dig for it as in a mine that went branching
through the hardened dust of ages. I fancy he read any old book
whatever of English history with the haunting sense that next moment
he might come upon the trace of certain of his own ancestors of whom
he specially desired to enlarge his knowledge. Whether he started any
new thing in mathematics I cannot tell, but he would sit absorbed,
every day and all day long, for weeks, over his slate, suddenly throw it
down, walk out for the rest of the day, and leave his calculus, or
whatever it was, for months. He read Shakespeare as with a microscope,
propounding and answering the most curious little questions. It seemed
to me sometimes, I confess, that he missed a plain point from his eyes
being so sharp that they looked through it without seeing it, having
focused themselves beyond it.
A specimen of the kind of question he would ask and answer himself,
occurs to me as I write, for he put it to me once as we read together.
"Why," he said, "did Margaret, in _Much ado about Nothing_, try to
persuade Hero to wear her other rabato?"
And the answer was,
"Because she feared her mistress would find out that she had been
wearing it--namely, the night before, when she personated her."

And here I may put down a remark I heard him make in reference to a
theory which itself must seem nothing less than idiotic to any one who
knows Shakespeare as my uncle knew him. The remark was this--that
whoever sought to enhance the fame of lord St. Alban's--he was careful
to use the real title--by attributing to him the works of Shakespeare,
must either be a man of weak intellect, of great ignorance, or of low
moral perception; for he cast on the memory of a man already more to
be pitied than any, a weight of obloquy such as it were hard to believe
anyone capable of deserving. A being with Shakespeare's love of
human nature, and Bacon's insight into essential truth, guilty of the
moral and social atrocities into which his lordship's eagerness after
money for scientific research betrayed him, would be a monster as
grotesque as abominable.
I record the remark the rather that it shows my uncle could look at
things in a large way as well as hunt with a knife-edge. At the same
time, devoutly as I honour him, I cannot but count him intended for
thinkings of larger scope than such as then seemed characteristic of him.
I imagine his early history had affected his faculties, and influenced the
mode of their working. How indeed could it have been otherwise!

CHAPTER IV
.
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