The aged school-master did not answer.
“He must be deaf,” they said to one another.
The man who had first spoken repeated his words in a louder and coarser tone.
“He must be asleep,” he said.
Yet, as they continued to speak to the old man without receiving an answer, they began to address their questions to his stark visage and his curious posture. They shook him by the arms and peered into his face.
“Why,” they said, “he looks as though he will never answer again.”
IV
The next few years of the boy’s existence were passed almost entirely in the society of his father in the little room behind the shop. He attended no other school, but devoted many hours in the day to the faded and timeworn volumes which so seldom found a purchaser. He read deeply in books of all kinds, of all ages and countries, for his great hunger for information seemed to grow on what it fed. In the evening, when the shop was closed for the night, and his father came to bear him company, he would spend many hours in putting questions to him. To many of these his father would smile in the secret and beautiful manner of the aged school-master, but would vouchsafe no answer.
On high days and holy days they would walk abroad together. Sometimes they would explore the quarters of the great city; at other times they would seek the country lanes. The boy’s partiality was for these latter excursions. He could never divest himself of the nameless dread that seized him in mingling with these vast acres of bricks and mortar, of immitigable noise, of unfathomable dirt, and, above all, of his horror of the mighty multitude that rendered the streets so terrible. One day as their steps were pointed towards the heart of the great city, and he was filled with misgiving, he ventured to say, “How I wish, my father, we could walk always where we walked yesterday.”
“As it pleases you, beloved one,” said his father.