“I don’t know about the wisdom, my dear. I often feel as if I had but learned the alphabet of wisdom, and that most imperfectly.”
The professor’s tone had become grave, and of the truth of his conviction there could be no doubt. Octave looked at him in astonishment.
“Why, Professor von Holsneck! If you are not wise, who in this world is?”
“The more we learn the greater is the vista of knowledge which opens before us. What I have gained in understanding is as nothing, nothing, to that I could desire, and, being almost at the end of life, that I must leave unknown; unless, indeed, in that other life I shall be permitted to advance forever.”
“Then—what must you think of poor me!” cried Octave, abashed at last by a thought of her own acquirements in comparison with his.
“That you are a very charming child,” responded the great man, so heartily and affectionately that her smiles returned.
When they had reached their station, and had been driven up the mountain side in one of the lumbering stages which were on hand for the accommodation of stray passengers, their talk reverted to Germany and the son of the professor, who was still there, prosecuting his studies in art, and whose attainments seemed, to judge by the fond parent’s talk, to be something wonderful indeed.
The truth was, that Octave had walked straight into the deepest corner of his heart by her swift recognition of a humble scene which that absent son had depicted on his canvas, and had sent across the sea to convince his father that the absence was not unfruitful of good result. An artist’s career had been the last the professor would have chosen for his boy; but he was wise enough to let each nature work out its own salvation in its own way. “A good artist would have been a spoiled scientist,” he had philosophically reasoned with himself; though his disappointed hopes were sometimes still hard to bear. So, when Octave’s ignorant tongue had told him that the boy had been right, he had been better pleased than if she had brought him a costly offering.
Seeing it pleased him, if not wholly understanding why, the girl had gone on to describe in detail all the familiar scenes in which her previous summers had been passed; and the description brought the absent son’s present environment in clearest view to the father’s mental sight.
“Down the little path there by the gate, Hans always went of a morning with his tin dinner-pail, and his spade or shovel over his shoulder, the little best room,—I know that is the one they have given your boy,—the great bed stands so and so; and there is an old black chest of drawers. In those, I shouldn’t wonder but he keeps all his pictures, and wet sketches, to get them out of the dust. Gretchen is eternally stirring up a dust, you must know, and then laying it down again with a wet rag. Paula used to sketch in oils, and she and Gretchen were always in a riot on account of the ‘fuzz’ sticking so to the paint. She used to threaten putting her horrid daubs in the chest then, but I wouldn’t let her. I wasn’t going to have my Sunday frock spoiled and smutched by green and yellow spots, would you?”