The Lucky Number. Ian Hay
“I may as well see them all now,” I said.
“Please yourself,” said Ada coldly.
It was a strange collection. There were three Telephone Directories in all—all old friends of mine, and peculiarly adapted, from their size and dignity, for “Presentation” purposes. (I think they were Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante. The Presentation Tennyson, however, proved to be a Bulb Catalogue.) There was a Hall and Knight's Algebra, from which, in my presence, the old man had frequently and most movingly quoted Keats. Homer, as Pettigrew had correctly indicated, was an elementary German grammar. Plato's Apology was Mr. Chardenal's First French Course.
“He used to get them cheaper than the real ones,” explained Ada. “Besides, what did it matter to him, anyhow?”
What indeed? Poor old boy!
I worked through the whole collection—the miscellaneous flotsam of second-hand bookshops and jumble sales—old novels sold in bundles; old directories sold as waste paper. Every book was neatly covered, and decorated with a sprawling number—the sight of which, although it advertised nothing to the outside world but the position of a book on a shelf, had never failed, for more than thirty years, to switch on the right record in that amazing repertoire.
Idly, I picked out the last book in the box. It was a stumpy little volume, bearing the number Twenty Five.
“That's 'Orace,” said Ada promptly. “It’s a real one—in Latin: only it has the English on the opposite page. We used that a lot.”
I turned over the time-Soiled leaves, and my eye encountered a familiar passage. I looked up.
“I think he would have liked to have a small inscription on the coffin,” I said. “We can arrange it when we go back to the house. There's a line here that seems to me to describe him very accurately.”
“Read it,” said Ada. I did so:
“Of upright life, and stainless purity.”
“Yes; he was all that,” said Ada thoughtfully. “Never done nothink on nobody; and always the gentleman. It will look nice on the plate. How does it go in Latin?”
I read aloud the ancient tag.
“Integer vitæ, scelerisque purus—”
Ada nodded her head vigorously.
“Put it in Latin,” she said. “He’d have liked it that way. Besides, it'll learn Mould and Pettigrew, and that lot!
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