"Oh, my boy! my dear boy!" said Mr. Floyd. "When your accident came I forgot my own wishes at once, thinking only of your need of your mother. I would have given up more for you than that: I would have given up my life. Come, come! we have fallen into too serious a vein. Let us talk about our trip to Europe and the East. I never had the right sort of a travelling-companion yet: wise men stay at home, but bores and noodles go abroad."
"But when we start the wise men will no longer be at home."
"You have hit it precisely. There are a few things I want to show you—some cathedrals, landscapes and pictures. I will save you a world of trouble, and will instruct you at once to find certain objects frightful and unworthy of notice or esteem. The zest of travel is taken out of one by the necessity of muttering vague formulas of meaningless praise before pictures and statues it is traditional to admire. There's too much of everything in this world. When a man has reached my age and my state of health he feels the necessity of getting at the real substance of things."
"But can one get at it?"
"Oh, don't utter any precocious wisdom. Certainly, one can get at the substance of things. True, there is enough mystery and perplexity about the system of the world, and at times all life looms up a terrible enigma, so increasing in difficulty of solution that Death's key to knowledge seems the one thing to be desired. But it is well for a man not to lose himself in labyrinths of conjecture, but to resolutely put aside his spirit of philosophical inquiry, and do something useful for himself and his fellow-men. For my own part, I don't think Hamlet a fine fellow. Don't ask conundrums. Your duty now is to finish your collegiate course respectably. Take honors or not as it happens, but be a man, and win yourself the place you ought to take, and keep it like a gentleman. Then we will travel, and I will remember you are young and let you do the foolish things youth loves to do. We will have famous times together. Not that I altogether approve of vagabondizing. Still, what is there for us to do? I am worn out: you are too young to have duties to society, and ought to try life, and examine, criticise and become enlightened. I suppose I shall catch the mania for bric-à-brac and curiosities, and make them the object of my life, since I have no other. If I do, I shall be obliged to will them to you, Floyd, for, Goodness knows, Helen will have enough to set up a museum of art without any help from me."
"I think so," I rejoined: "this house is so filled with wonderful things. But Helen—"
"Don't talk about me, please," cried a voice from behind the acacias, "for I am here;" and the little girl came through the drooping branches covered with their plumy canary-colored blossoms, and advanced toward us with that wonderful princess-like gait of hers. She was smiling demurely. "Listeners hear no good of themselves, they say," she observed, throwing a laughing glance at me.
"I was only about to remark that you seemed tolerably indifferent to your possessions."
"The fact is," said Mr. Floyd teasingly, "since Helen found that the moon and the sea did not belong to her, she gave up, and has not believed she is so very rich, after all;" and while he laughed and Helen blushed, and half hid herself, I heard how the child, when she was six years old, had taken her new nursery-governess around the place, saying, "This is my pony," "These are my dogs," "This is my conservatory," and "These are my greenhouses:" then, when she had exhausted the inventory of her wealth, she had affirmed, "That is my moon" and "That is my water;" and when it was explained to her that the crescent over the pine trees in the west belonged alike to all the children on the wide earth, and that the fickle sea too paid its homage at a thousand shores, she was quite inconsolable, and nothing could make up to her for her loss.
A very quiet, demure little woman was Helen now-a-days. I deplored the necessity for the graceful French governess who was polishing her into a conventional manner and preparing her for the dull routine which other girls must follow. I never analyzed my impressions of Helen then, but I am sure I considered her far above any commonplace educational needs, for I knew that she was so wise, so disciplined, so true to all her duties, that she was altogether a woman, and not a little girl at all. It gave me a positive shock to discover that she was ciphering in vulgar fractions and that her spelling was, to say the least, crude. Not but that she was childish enough in many things, and so exquisitely docile with her father that he often scolded her for her over-careful obedience. I could understand well enough myself how she liked to be led by the strong man who loved her, and whom she so dearly loved, because when she was alone with her grandfather she needed to govern, holding a dreary sway over her little kingdom.