The Flight of the Shadow | Page 7

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