THE GREAT LEDGER-BOOK--WHICH I NOW SAW TURNED TO AN ENGINE OF OUR SALVATION . . . _Frontispiece_ THE ARGUMENT BETWEEN MR. SKEGS AND PTOLEMY MR. JORDAN REGARDED ME VERY MOURNFULLY "YOU CANNOT BE IGNORANT THAT THIS AFFAIR IS LIKE TO END BADLY FOR YOU, MR. DENIS" IDONIA CHAPTER I IN WHICH I LEARN FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT I HAVE AN UNCLE The first remembrance I hold of my father is of a dark-suited tall man of an unchanging gravity on all occasions. He had, moreover, a manner of saying "Ay, ay," which I early came to regard as the prologue to some definite prohibition; as when I asked him (I being then but a scrubbed boy) for his great sword, to give it to a crippled soldier at our gate, who had lost his proper weapon in the foreign wars-- "Ay, ay," said my father, nodding his grey head, "so he lost his good sword, and you would make good the loss with mine. Ay, 'twas a generous thought of yours, Denis, surely." I was for reaching it down forthwith, where it hung by the wall in its red velvet scabbard, delighted at the pleasure I was to do my bedesman. "Go to your chamber, boy," said my father in a voice smaller than ordinary. "But, sir, the sword!" I cried. "Ay, the sword," he replied, nodding as before. "But, go warn Simon Powell that he look to his poultry-lofts. And learn wisdom, Denis, for you have some need of it, in my judgment." The same temperate behaviour he ever showed; granting little, and that never to prayers, but sometimes upon good reasoning. He seemed to have put by anger as having no occasion for the use of it, anger being neither buckler nor broadsword, he would say, but Tom Fool's motley. This calmness of his, I say, it was I first remember, and it was this too that put a distance between us; so that I grew from boyhood to nigh manhood, that is until my eighteenth year, without any clear understanding of what lay concealed behind his mask of quiet. That he had a passion for books I soon discovered, and the discovery confirmed me in the foolish timidity with which I regarded him. For hours together would he sit in the little high room beyond the hall, his beard buried in his ruff, while the men awaited his orders to go about the harvesting, and would read continuously in his great folios: the Lives of Plutarch, or Plato, or the Stoick Emperor, or other such works, until the day was gone and all labour lost. I have known our overseer to swear horrid great oaths when he learned that Master Cleeve had received a new parcel of books by the carrier, crying out that no estate would sustain the burden of so much learning so ill applied.