‘What’s all this rampant wickedness, y’ irreverent dog?’ asked Armstrong. ‘This is your writing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Paul, feeling his throat harsh and constricted like a quill.
Armstrong said no more, but rolling up the bundle and sliding the knotted string once more about it, put it in his pocket and walked downstairs. Paul hardly dared to meet him at the mid-day dinner, but he put the best face he could upon the matter—a very pale and disturbed face it was—and presented himself at table. Nothing was said. The gray man sat with his book propped up against the bread-basket, as usual, and ate without knowing what passed his lips. The meal over, he took his arm-chair by the kitchen fire, and lit his pipe, and read with the cat perched on his shoulder. Mrs. Armstrong went to mind the shop, the rest of the family dispersed to their various avocations, and Paul sat still, listening to the ticking of the clock, and awaiting the stroke of two to take him back to work. He felt as if it would be cowardice to go earlier, but he was unhappy, and would willingly have been elsewhere.
Suddenly Armstrong reached out his hand towards the table and set down his book. Then from the coat-pocket where Paul had plainly seen it bulging he drew the roll of manuscript.
‘Paul,’ said the old man, ‘I’ve been readin’ this farrago, and the less that’s said about it the better. I obsairve that the main part of it’s devoted to the exaggerated satire of your neighbours. That’s a spirit I’m sorry to notice in ye, and I regret to see that ye’re already looking sulky at rebuke. The vairse,’ pursued Armstrong, ‘is mainly sickly, whining, puling stuff, as far away from Nature and experience as it’s easily possible to be. Now, I invite ye. Listen to this.’
He began to read with a fine disdain:
‘“Come not when I am dead
To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave.”’
Paul averted his head, and set one hand before his face. Months ago, when May Gold’s perfidy was a new thing, and the whole world was darkened, he had copied these lines from the Poet Laureate with tears, and they had seemed to him a perfect expression of himself. The old man ground out the lines with increasing scorn, and Paul began to grin, and then to shake with suppressed laughter. Armstrong went on to the end unyieldingly.
‘I’m not denying,’ he said, a moment later, ‘that I’ve found here and there a salt sprinkle o’ common-sense. But that, my lad,’ banging a hand on the manuscript page before him, ‘is simply unadulterated rubbish. It’s the silliest thing in the haul collection.’
Paul’s reverence for his father’s judgment in such matters was a tradition and a religion. ‘Old Armstrong’ was the parish pride as scholar and critic. The Rev. Roderic Murchison, who was a Master of Arts of Aberdeen, sat at the gray little man’s feet like a pupil. Armstrong had none of the minister’s Greek and Latin, but he was his master in English letters. In spite of this awful prescription of authority Paul spirted laughter.