“Oh,” he would say good-naturedly, “one eats when he is hungry. Rules for meal times are absurd.”
“Still,” father would urge, evidently not pleased, but endeavouring to speak gently—yet even in our father’s gentleness we felt an impression of authority—“still there must be order in a household.”
“Order, order, oho!”
You should have heard his “ohos!” uttered softly, warily, in a sort of aside, yet striking at all established order, and accompanied by a little dry laugh. That little laugh at once placed grandfather above his interlocutors. Nothing have I ever met in all the forms of human expression more disquieting, more mocking, more ironical, than that little laugh. It at once gave you the idea that you were a beast. It produced upon me the effect of the sharp clip of the shears when the rose bushes are pruned; ric, rac, the flowers fall; ric, rac, there are none left. By his little laugh, involuntarily, no doubt, grandfather offered an insult to all the world.
His presiding at table was honorary and not effective. Not only did he not direct the conversation, he followed it but fitfully, when it interested him. For that matter, he assumed no responsibility about anything. When he walked in the garden, visited the vines, Tem, Mimi and The Hanged utterly failed to extract from him any directions. He would simply make a vague gesture which signified “Let me alone.” The trio did not make a point of receiving instructions, for his silence suited them, but matters went none the better in consequence.
Besides his laugh, he had another claim to superiority, his violin. Was he not in the drawing room among the portraits, young and curly-haired, with a guitar in his hands?
“Never in my life have I twanged that odious instrument,” he one day protested. “But a wandering Italian felt impelled to make a daub of me.”
“You were so beautiful,” asserted Aunt Deen. “The artist was all enthusiasm over you.”
“Oh, the artist!”
He would spend long hours in his room playing his instrument, but he devoted still more time to examining it lovingly, handling it, tightening or loosening the strings, touching the bow with resin, as mowers in the fields so often spend more time whetting their scythes than in mowing, indefinitely making music upon them with a stone.