All this has nothing to do with the main question.'
'Go on, then!'
'Well, this library was left as a kind of dust-catcher, as such libraries are, until one day, more than a hundred years after the old boy's death, some enterprising person seems to have examined his books, and he found a number of volumes of writing which were all in cipher, so that no one could make head or tail of them.'
'Dear me, how very interesting!'
'Yes, it naturally excited curiosity. Why should a man write volumes of cipher? Imagine the labour of it! So some one set to work to solve the cipher. This was about the year 1820. After three years they succeeded.'
'How in the world did they do it?'
'Well, they say that human ingenuity never yet invented a cipher which human ingenuity could not also solve. Anyhow, they did succeed. And when they had done so, and copied it all out clean, they found they had got hold of such a book as was never heard of before in the whole history of literature.'
Maude laid her sewing on her lap, and looked across with her lips parted and her eyebrows raised.
'They found that it was an inner Diary of the life of this man, with all his impressions, and all his doings, and all his thoughts--not his ought-to-be thoughts, but his real, real thoughts, just as he thought then at the back of his soul. You see this man, and you know him very much better than his own wife knew him. It is not only that he tells of his daily doings, and gives us such an intimate picture of life in those days, as could by no other means have been conveyed, but it is as a piece of psychology that the thing is so valuable. Remember the dignity of the man, a high government official, an orator, a writer, a patron of learning, and here you have the other side, the little thoughts, the mean ideas which may lurk under a bewigged head, and behind a solemn countenance. Not that he is worse than any of us. Not a bit. But he is frank. And that is why the book is really a consoling one, for every sinner who reads it can say to himself, "Well, if this man who did so well, and was so esteemed, felt like this, it is no very great wonder that I do."'
Maude looked at the fat brown book with curiosity. 'Is it really all there?' she asked.
'No, dear, it will never all be published. A good deal of it is, I believe, quite impossible. And when he came to the impossible places, he doubled and trebled his cipher, so as to make sure that it should never be made out. But all that is usually published is here.' Frank turned over the leaves, which were marked here and there with pencilings.
'Why are you smiling, Frank?'
'Only at his way of referring to his wife.'
'Oh, he was married?'
'Yes, to a very charming girl. She must have been a sweet creature. He married her at fifteen on account of her beauty. He had a keen eye for beauty had old Pepys.'
'Were they happy?'
'Oh yes, fairly so. She was only twenty-nine when she died!'
'Poor girl!'
'She was happy in her life--though he DID blacken her eye once.'
'Not really?'
'Yes, he did. And kicked the housemaid.'
'Oh, the brute!'
'But on the whole he was a good husband. He had a few very good points about him.'
'But how does he allude to his wife?'
'He has a trick of saying, "my wife, poor wretch!"'
'Impertinent! Frank, you said to-night that other men think what this odious Mr. Pepys says. Yes, you did! Don't deny it! Does that mean that you always think of me as "poor wretch"?'
'We have come along a little since then. But how these passages take you back to the homely life of those days!'
'Do read some.'
'Well, listen to this, "And then to bed without prayers, to-morrow being washing-day." Fancy such a detail coming down to us through two centuries.'
'Why no prayers?'
'I don't know. I suppose they had to get up early on washing-days, and so they wanted to go to sleep soon.'
'I'm afraid, dear, you do the same without as good an excuse. Read another!'
'He goes to dine with some one--his uncle, I think.