Then at length I began to think the interview a strange one. But in truth it was hardly stranger that my visitor should remember Sir Upward, than that he should have been my great-grandfather’s librarian!
“I owe him much,” he continued; “for, although I had read many more books than he, yet, through the special direction of his studies, he was able to inform me of a certain relation of modes which I should never have discovered of myself, and could hardly have learned from any one else.”
“Would you mind telling me all about that?” I said.
“By no means—as much at least as I am able: there are not such things as wilful secrets,” he answered—and went on.
“That closet held his library—a hundred manuscripts or so, for printing was not then invented. One morning I sat there, working at a catalogue of them, when he looked in at the door, and said, ‘Come.’ I laid down my pen and followed him—across the great hall, down a steep rough descent, and along an underground passage to a tower he had lately built, consisting of a stair and a room at the top of it. The door of this room had a tremendous lock, which he undid with the smallest key I ever saw. I had scarcely crossed the threshold after him, when, to my eyes, he began to dwindle, and grew less and less. All at once my vision seemed to come right, and I saw that he was moving swiftly away from me. In a minute more he was the merest speck in the distance, with the tops of blue mountains beyond him, clear against a sky of paler blue. I recognised the country, for I had gone there and come again many a time, although I had never known this way to it.
“Many years after, when the tower had long disappeared, I taught one of his descendants what Sir Upward had taught me; and now and then to this day I use your house when I want to go the nearest way home. I must indeed—without your leave, for which I ask your pardon—have by this time well established a right of way through it—not from front to back, but from bottom to top!”
“You would have me then understand, Mr. Raven,” I said, “that you go through my house into another world, heedless of disparting space?”
“That I go through it is an incontrovertible acknowledgement of space,” returned the old librarian.
“Please do not quibble, Mr. Raven,” I rejoined. “Please to take my question as you know I mean it.”
“There is in your house a door, one step through which carries me into a world very much another than this.”