Arnold and Sim shared the room above the store and served both as watchmen and as clerks; but it was Sim who cooked their meals, who made their beds, who swept and dusted and polished. Although the two worked for equally small pay and, all in all, were as satisfactory men as any storekeeper could hope to have, Arnold had carried even into the work of the store that same odd, foreign dignity; and it apparently never occurred, even to petulant, talkative Sim, that Arnold, so reserved, so quietly assured, should have lent his hand to mere domestic duties.
Learning early in their acquaintance, each that the other played chess, they had got a board and a set of men, and, in spite of a disparity in skill that for some people must have made it very irksome, had kept the game up ever since. Arnold Lamont played chess with the same precision with which he spoke English; and if Sim Muzzy managed to catch him napping, and so to win one game in twenty, it was a feat to be talked about for a month to come.
Through the windows, as I said, I saw them playing chess in the back shop; then, coming round the corner of the store, I saw someone just entering. It was no other than Cornelius Gleazen, in beaver, stock, coat, and diamonds, with the perpetual cigar bit tight between his teeth.
A little to my surprise, I noticed that there were beads of perspiration on his forehead. I had been walking fast myself, and yet I had not thought of it as a warm evening: the overcast sky and the wind from the sea, with their promise of rain to break the drouth, combined to make the night the coolest we had had for some weeks. It surprised me also to see that Gleazen was breathing hard—but was he? I could not be sure.
Then, through the open door, I again saw Arnold Lamont in the back room. In his hand he was holding a knight just over the square on which it was to rest; but with his eyes he was following Cornelius Gleazen across the store and round behind my uncle's desk, where now there was a second chair in place of the cracker-box.
When Gleazen had sat down beside my uncle, he tapping the desk with a long pencil, which he had drawn from his pocket, Uncle Seth bustling about among his papers, with quick useless sallies here and there, and into the pigeonholes, as if he were confused by the mass of business that confronted him,—it was a manner he sometimes affected when visitors were present,—Arnold Lamont put down the knight and absently, as if his mind were far away, said in his calm, precise voice, "Check!"
"No, no! You mustn't do that! You can't do that! That's wrong! See! You were on that square there—see?—and you moved so! You can't put your knight there," Sim Muzzy cried.
That Lamont had transgressed by mistake the rules of the game hit Sim like a thunderclap and even further befuddled his poor wits.
"Ah," said Lamont, "I see. I beg you, pardon my error. So! Check."
He again moved the knight, apparently without thought; and Sim Muzzy fell to biting his lip and puzzling this way and that and working his fingers, which he always did when he was getting the worst of the game.