“Of all legends,—all foolish legends,” quoth the Doctor, wrathfully, with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and contempt excited, “and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard the like of this! Have you the key?”
“No; nor have I ever heard of it,” answered the schoolmaster.
“But you have some papers?”
“They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search,” said the schoolmaster. “My father knew of them.”
“A foolish legend,” reiterated the Doctor. “It is strange how human folly strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and foolish grows older.”
He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides and a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away as many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns, as if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had any taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which has been already mentioned,—the figure in antique sordid garb, with a halter round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor and the two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who probably knew nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from the gentle and cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed in the contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor, looking in his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.
“What are you crying about?” said he, gruffly.
“I don’t know,” said the schoolmaster quietly. “But there is something in this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!”
“Very foolish,” muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the room. “I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can’t tell the reason why.”
After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler, and, looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling downward, great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about his master’s head in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so distressed the schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he went out, and called the two children to take a walk with him, with the purpose of breathing air that was neither infected with spiders nor graves.