'Be quiet, Dora! That book'll show him what can be made even of a beastly bookseller.'
David took it from him, looked at the title, and laughed. He knew it well. It was the 'Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London,' the eccentric record of a seventeenth-century dealer in books, who, like Daddy, had been a character and a vagrant.
'Och! Don't I know it by heart?' said Daddy, with enthusiasm. 'Many a time it's sent me off tramping, when my poor Isabella thought she'd got me tied safe by the heels in the chimney corner. Though love is strong as death, and every good man loves his wife as himself, yet—many's the score of times I've said it off pat to Isabella—yet I cannot think of being confined in a narrower study than the whole world. "There's a man for you! He gets rid of one wife and saddles himself with another—sorrow a bit will he stop at home for either of them!" Finding I am for travelling, Valeria, to show the height of her love, is as willing I should see Europe as Eliza was I should see America. 'Och! give me the book, you divil,' cried Daddy, growing more and more Hibernian as his passion rose, 'and, bedad, but I'll drive it into you.'
And, reaching over, Daddy seized it, and turned over the pages with a trembling hand. Dora flushed, and the tears rose into her eyes. She realised perfectly that this performance was levelled at her at least as much as at David. Daddy's mad irritability had grown of late with every week.
'Listen to this, Davy!' cried Daddy, putting up his hand for silence.' "When I have crossed the Hellespont, where poor Leander was drowned, Greece, China, and the Holy Land are the other three countries I'm bound to. And perhaps when my hand is in—"'
'My hand is in!' repeated Daddy, in an ecstasy. 'What a jewel of a man!'
'I may step thence to the Indies, for I am a true lover of travels, and, when I am once mounted, care not whether I meet the sun at his rising or going down, provided only I may but ramble.... He is truly a scholar who is versed in the volume of the Universe, who doth not so much read of Nature as study Nature herself.'
'Well said—well said indeed!' cried Daddy, flinging the book down with a wild gesture which startled them both. 'Was that the man, Adrian Lomax, to spend the only hours of the only life he was ever likely to see—his first thought in the morning, and his last thought at night—in tickling the stomachs of Manchester clerks?'
His peaked chin and straggling locks fell forward on his breast. He stared sombrely at the young people before him, in an attitude which, as usual, was the attitude of an actor.
David's natural instinct was to jeer. But a glance at Dora perplexed him. There was some tragedy he did not understand under this poor comedy.