“But he hasn’t the appearance of a bishop, nor even of a cleanly person.”
“That doesn’t matter. If you follow him cautiously, you will be able to see something very strange.”
After he had said this, Quentin bowed to the couple, and walked rapidly away in the direction of his home.
CHAPTER III
INFANCY: SOMBRE VESTIBULE OF LIFE
ARCHÆOLOGISTS guard those curious, twice-written documents called palimpsests as carefully as though they were so much gold. They are parchments from which the first inscriptions were erased years and years ago, to be substituted by others. More recently, assiduous investigators have learned how to bring the erased characters to light, to decipher them, and to read them.
The idea of those strange documents came to Quentin’s mind as he thought about his life.
Eight years of English school had apparently completely erased the memories of his early childhood. The uniformity of his school life, the continual sports, had dulled his memory. Night after night Quentin went to bed overcome with fatigue, with nothing to preoccupy his mind save his themes and his lessons; but his removal from the scholarly atmosphere, and his return to his home, had been sufficient to reawaken memories of his childhood—vaguely at first, but daily growing stronger, more distinct, and more detailed.
The erased inscription of the palimpsest was again becoming comprehensible: memories long dormant were crowding Quentin’s mind: of these recollections, some were sad and gloomy; others, and these were very few, were gay; still others were not as yet very clear to him.
Quentin endeavoured to reconstruct his childhood. He remembered having passed it in a house on the Calle de Librerías, near the Calle de la Feria and the Cuesta de Luján, and he went to see the place. It was on a corner of the street: a rose-coloured house with a silversmith’s shop on the lower floor, two large and pretentious balconies on the main floor, and above them, two rectangular windows. On top of the roof, was a diminutive azotea surrounded by a rubble-stone wall.
“That is where I was as a child,” said Quentin to himself.