“Is it a mockery, beloved one, to call a hero by the name he has always borne?” said his father.
The boy rose from the table with haggard cheeks.
“I have no right to bear so great a name,” he said. “I usurped it upon no better pretext than a false and beguiling ignorance. I pray you, my father, do not mock me with that name. It is the badge of other clay than this. My valour is too little. I am the constant sport of the great world out of doors.”
“Art thou the first hero who has been despised, beloved one?” said his father.
“I can wear no proud name,” said the boy, refusing all consolation, “until I have won it at the point of the sword. In this little room of ours I am Achilles; but in the great world out of doors I am another, and him the great world out of doors accounts as less than nought.”
About the time the sixth week of his labours passed, he said one evening to his father, when overcome with despair, “I think, my father, I have learned too little or too much. I find that the great world out of doors is not at all as the ancient authors have depicted it in their writings; yet I cannot believe that they would play me false. But it is all most strange. The world of men and things is not in the least as rendered to me by the books in the shop. I cannot comprehend it; and yet sometimes I seem to comprehend it beyond the measure of my strength.”
“I think, beloved one,” said his white-haired father softly, “the time is now at hand when you may be permitted to look into the volume yonder upon the shelf. Who knows that it may not melt a little of the darkness from your heart?”
Weak and spent as the boy now was, at these words his pulses thrilled with expectation. From his earliest childhood this high moment had been in his thoughts. And now it had come upon him suddenly in an hour when least anticipated, and when the least merited. It was the evening of Saturday of the sixth week, and it had seemed as he had crept over the threshold of the little room that any prolongation of the term through which he had passed would break him in pieces. To live through another week like the one from which he had just emerged would be beyond the strength of his frame.
But this proposal of his father’s, just as he felt his strength to be failing, had endowed his veins with new life. How many times had he feasted his imagination on that mysterious tome which was bound so massively, wherein his father read! Would it ever be his happiness to read in it too? And now the hour was at hand!
“Canst thou raise the volume from the shelf, Achilles?” his father asked.