CHAPTER VIII
I was wakened in the morning by Tony scratching at my door. Still half-asleep, I got up to let him in, and then returned to bed, where he had already taken the most comfortable place. He looked at me for a moment or two and then closed his round, dark, innocent eyes till they showed only as two slits of dim silver, and set up a loud snoring. I was too lazy to get up, and lay idly watching him. He had a curious and expressive beauty, resembling that of some wonderful piece of Chinese porcelain, at once bizarre and attractive. There was something quaint about him, an adorable simplicity. In colour he was white, decorated with brindle patches. Leonardo would have made a drawing of him, would have delighted in the superb limbs and wide deep chest, the big, broad, heavy, wrinkled head, with its massive, low-hanging jaw, its upturned, flat, black nose, its silky ears, like the petals of a rose, and those dark, lovely eyes, in which, when he was at rest, a profound melancholy floated. As a pup, able to walk and no more, he had been a birthday present from Mrs. Carroll: now he weighed about sixty pounds and was three years old.
As I watched him I tried to make up my mind whether I should say anything further about going to Derryaghy. In spite of all last night’s bravery I knew well enough that, when it came to the point, it was really rather impossible deliberately to disobey my father; and, what is more, that I shouldn’t want to do so. I somehow kept seeing the thing from his point of view, and this irritated me, because it made me powerless to do anything but sit at home and sulk.
“I’ll have to go up to the house and say that I can’t come,” I told him after breakfast. He had risen from the table and was in the act of taking down our Bibles from the book-shelf, preparatory to “worship”――a function which took place every morning and evening, and which consisted in my reading aloud a chapter from the Bible, and in my father making a prayer. Sometimes he commented on what I read, explained a verse, drew a lesson from it――interruptions I secretly resented, as they tended to prolong “worship”――sometimes he listened in silence.
He put my Bible down beside my tea-cup before replying. Then, when he had resumed his seat, and fumbled with his spectacle-case, he said, “You may go with them: I have been thinking it over.”
I answered nothing, though I had a sort of uncomfortable feeling that thanks might possibly be expected. I wondered what would happen if I were to say I didn’t want to go, that I should never go again, that I would rather stay here with him quite alone, free from all “worldly temptations.” It was really the most perfect opportunity imaginable for a thoroughly sentimental scene, like those in the stories he used to read to me. I pictured how it would be wrung out to the last drop of sloppiness, and be promptly followed by my conversion, or even death-bed.
“I think it is the ninth chapter of Isaiah,” my father said, interrupting these meditations.
“I read the ninth yesterday,” I replied. “It’s the tenth.”
My father turned another page, and I began:
“‘Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees――’” I felt my cheeks grow red, because the verse seemed to me so extraordinarily apt to the decree about my not going to Derryaghy. I did not look at my father, but keeping my eyes glued to the page went on. The rest of the chapter, however, was less pertinent.
“‘He is come to Aiath, he is passed to Migron; at Michmash he hath laid up his carriages:
‘They are gone over the passage: they have taken up their lodging at Geba; Ramah is afraid; Gibeah of Saul is fled.
‘Lift up thy voice, O daughter of Gallim; cause it to be heard unto Laish, O poor Anathoth.
‘Madmenah is removed; the inhabitants of Gebim gather themselves to flee,’” etc., etc.
It was not wildly exciting in itself, and I cannot say my reading of it made it more so. The only good point about it was that it did not lend itself to exegesis. The kind of thing my father liked was, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.” Then he would interrupt me to say, “That means, when their masters tell them to do what is right. If we are told to do something we know to be wrong, we must refuse to obey.”
When I had finished we knelt down before our chairs. My father prayed aloud, and I stared out of the window, and tried to decide whither I should take the Dales. Between the sentences my father, as usual, kept crossing and uncrossing his feet, and scraping them together, as if he were trying to remove a tight pair of slippers. It seemed odd to me that he could pray so earnestly and at the same time use such artificial language, crammed with “thees” and “thous,” and “hearests” and “doests.” Before he had reached “Amen” I was on my feet, dusting the knees of my trousers.