Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/136

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114
SPINOZA.

had enough for his life. Ah, my dear Doctor, how lucky I am to have a man to whom I can tell all this, and who knows how to value such a discovery! Ever since this morning I have been waiting impatiently for you. I cannot understand now how they could have thought for so long that the most refined of Romans would have praised the stupid Moors. Sit down, my dear Doctor."

The Magister placed some open books that lay on a chair carefully on the floor. He now first paid his respects to the two strangers, whom he had not hitherto appeared to notice. Baruch stared before him absently during the long commentary of the Magister; he pressed his lips thoughtfully together; it seemed to him as if to-day all the world conspired to remind him at every step of the Moorish origin of his mother.

"What do they want with me?" inquired the Magister irritably. The physician appeased him, and said they had a request to make. "Sit down here," the Magister said to the father, and straightened his arm-chair, covered with brown leather.

"You, young man, sit by me on the bed."

"Have you nearly finished the medicine? and how is your cough?" inquired the physician.

"Optime. Last night I coughed a long time in bed, and when I had extinguished the lamp, the letters still swam before my eyes; then it first struck me that the reading was Marsi, I cried out