"Oh, leave that to me, leave that to me," responded the great man serenely. "Theophilus ain't going to suffer, but a little discipline won't do him any harm."
His plan was well laid, I saw, but the best-laid plans, as the great man himself might have informed me, are not always those that are destined to reach maturity. When I had parted from him, I fell, almost unconsciously, to scheming on my own account, and the result was that before going into my office, I looked up the real estate agent who had charge of the auction, and took over the mortgage which too great an indulgence in roses had forced upon Dr. Theophilus. In my luncheon hour I rushed up to the house, where I found Mrs. Clay, with a big wooden ladle in her hand, wandering distractedly between the outside kitchen and the little garden, where the doctor was placidly spraying his roses with a solution of kerosene oil.
"I knew it would come," said the poor lady, in tears; "no amount of preserves and pickles could support the extravagance of Theophilus. More than two years ago George Bolingbroke warned me that I should end my days in the poorhouse, and it has come at last. As for Theophilus, even the thought of the poorhouse does not appear to disturb him. He does nothing but walk around and repeat some foolish Latin verse about Æquam—æquam—until I am sick of the very sound—"
When I explained to her that the auction would be postponed, at least for another century, she recovered her temper and her spirit, and observed emphatically that she hoped the lesson would do Theophilus good.
"May I go out to him now?"
"Oh, yes, you'll find him somewhere in the garden. He has just been in with a watering-pot to ask for kerosene oil."
In the centre of the gravelled walk, between the shining rows of oyster shells, the doctor stood energetically spraying his roses. At the sound of my step he looked round with a tranquil face, his long white hair blowing in the breeze above his spectacles, which he wore, as usual when he was not reading, pushed up on his forehead.
"Ah, Ben, you find us afflicted, but not despondent," he observed. "Now is the time, as I just remarked to Tina a minute ago, to prove the unfailing support of a knowledge of Latin and of the poet Horace. Æquam memento—"
"I'm afraid, doctor, I haven't time for Horace," I returned, ruthlessly cutting short his enjoyment, while the sonorous sentence still rolled in his mouth; "but I've attended to this affair of the mortgage, and you shan't be bothered again. Why on earth didn't you come to me sooner about it?"
Bending over, he plucked a rosebud with a canker at the heart, and stood meditatively surveying it. "An Anna von Diesbach," he observed, "and when perfect a most beautiful rose. The truth was, my boy, that I felt a delicacy about approaching my friends in the hour of my misfortunes. Old George I did go to in my extremity, but I fear, Ben,—I seriously fear that I have estranged old George by making him a present of a little box of ants. He imagines, I fancy, that I intended a reflection upon his intelligence. Because the ant is small, he concludes, unreasonably, that it is unworthy. On the contrary, as I endeavoured to convince him, it possesses a degree of sagacity and foresight the human being might well envy—"