“Just let me get my cap,” I cried, starting up, as if I had totally forgotten the scene in the tower.
Father, who was observing us, checked my enthusiasm by saying:
“Thank you. To-day I will take him for a walk. I am at leisure.”
He very seldom allowed himself leisure. His patients were more and more absorbing him. His reputation must have extended far and wide, for he was sent for from great distances; his absences, his journeys multiplied.
“I am no longer my own master,” he said to mother. “And life is passing.”
“My dear,” she murmured. “I beg of you don’t overtire yourself so.”
She was always devising ways of caring for him, of finding means for him to rest. To reassure her he would laugh, drawing himself up to full height, rounding out his chest. He never needed rest. His robust shoulders might have borne up the world; and in fact did he not carry the burden of the house and of our seven futures? By a strange complication of feeling, though inwardly I was always in a state of revolt against him, I never ceased to admire him. I could not imagine him beaten, or complaining. Life was for him one perpetual victory.
I admired him only at a distance. The prospect of this walk with him appalled me, and I remained on the stairs, waiting for some unknown event to interpose an obstacle.
“Come,” he said encouragingly, “run get your cap—make haste. The days are long—we can take a good walk.”
There was no harshness in his sonorous voice, but rather that encouraging tone that always brought hope to his patients. In fact, neither when he took me home from the Café of the Navigators, nor in the tower chamber, had he treated me harshly. But his kindness had no softening effect upon me. I was not in the least grateful for it, but still considered him as a ruthless tyrant bent upon keeping me in fetters. As soon as he appeared I ceased to be free. Had he taken me to the wildest, most desolate place in the world, I should still have seen walls rising up around me. With grandfather it always seemed to me as if all enclosures disappeared, and the enfranchised earth belonged to every one—or to no one.