To the left, as you entered the hall, was a dining-room massively furnished, adorned with a few family portraits, and as many vigorous engravings. But there lacked that indescribable air of comfort which often characterises those rooms devoted to the innocent and social refreshment of the body at meal-times. The chairs, though in themselves all that dining-room chairs ought to be, did not look as if on a habitual good understanding with one another; some were against the wall, and others stood near the table, and at irregular distances, as though they never enjoyed that cozy fraternity so desirable in well-conditioned seats. Books, too, lay about in little zigzag heaps; while a bunch of keys, a pair of lady’s gloves, and a skein of coloured wool lay huddled together on the centre of the sideboard. The whole arrangement, or rather disarrangement, of the room bespoke, on the part of the presiding female management, an indifference to those minor details of order and comfort a due attention to which makes home (a genuine English home) the happiest spot in the world.
Opposite to this room, on the other side of the hall, was another of similar size, used apparently as a sort of reception-room. Huge book-shelves occupied two of the walls, an orrery stood against a third, while dusty curiosities filled up the corners. There was something peculiarly depressing about the general appearance and tone of this apartment,—nothing bright, nothing to suggest cheerful and happy thoughts,—plenty of food for the mind, but presented in such an indigestible form as was calculated to inflict on the consumer intellectual nightmare. This room was known as the library.
But we pass on to the doctor’s own special room—the study. This was beyond and behind the dining-room. Book-shelves towered on all sides, filled with volumes of all sizes, and in nearly all languages, some in exquisitely neat white vellum binding, with Tome One, Tome Two, etcetera, in shining gold on their backs—the products of an age when a conscientiousness could be traced in the perfect finish of all the details of a work external or internal; some in the form of stately folios, suggestive at once both of the solidity and depth of learning possessed by the writers and expected in the readers; while a multitude of lesser volumes were crowded together, some erect, others lying flat, or leaning against one another for support. Greek and Latin classic authors, and in all languages poets, historians, and specially writers on science were largely represented—even French and German octavoes standing at ease in long regiments side by side, suggestive of no Franco-Prussian war, but only of an intellectual contest, arising out of amicable differences of opinion. On one side of the principal bookcase was an electrical machine, and on the other an air-pump; while a rusty sword and a pair of ancient gauntlets served as links to connect the warlike past with the pacific present. In the centre of the room was a large leather-covered writing-table, on which lay a perfect chaos of printed matter and manuscript; while bottles of ink, red, black, and blue, might be seen emerging from the confusion like diminutive forts set there to guard the papers from unlearned and intrusive fingers. Order was clearly not the doctor’s “first law;” and certainly it must have required no common powers of memory to enable him, when seated in front of the confusion he himself had made, to lay his hand upon any particular book or manuscript which might claim his immediate attention. On either side of a small fire-place at the rear of the table, and above it, hung charts, historical, geological, and meteorological; while a very dim portrait of some friend of the doctor, or perhaps of some literary celebrity, looked down from over the doorway through a haze of venerable dust on the scientific labours which it could neither share nor lighten.
In the corner of the room farthest from the door was a little closet, seldom opened, secured by a patent lock, whose contents no one was acquainted with save the doctor himself. The housemaid, whose duties in this room were confined to an occasional wary sweeping and dusting, and fire-lighting in the winter season, would keep at a respectful distance from this closet, or pass it with a creeping dread; for the boy-in-buttons had thrown out dark suggestions that it probably contained the skulls of murderers, or, at the least, snakes and scorpions preserved in spirits, or even possibly alive, and ready to attack any daring intruder on their privacy.
Such were Dr John Prosser’s home and study.
It was just four o’clock in the afternoon of the 24th of December when the doctor returned to his house from the city.
“Is your mistress at home?” he asked of the boy.
“No, sir; she told me to tell you that she was gone to a meeting of the school board.”
The doctor’s countenance fell. He was evidently disappointed; and no wonder, for he had been away from his home for the last ten days, and felt keenly the absence of his wife, and of a loving greeting on his return.
“Any letters for me, William?” he asked.