He led the way into the parlour, which was a large square room, regarded by Barnesville as the most sumptuous of reception chambers, inasmuch as its floor was covered by a Brussels carpet adorned with exotics of multifarious colours, its walls ornamented with massively framed photographs, and its corners fitted up with whatnots and shining hair-cloth seats known in Hamlin County as “tater-tates,” and in that impressive character admired beyond expression. Its crowning glory, however, was the piano, which had belonged to Jenny Rutherford in her boarding-school days, and was the delight of the Judge’s heart. It furnished him with his most cherished recreation in his hours of repose from political conflict and argument, inasmuch as he regarded his wife’s performance seldom to be equalled and never surpassed, and the soft, pleasant voice with which she sang “The Last Rose of Summer” and other simple and sentimental melodies as that of a cantatrice whose renown might have been world-wide if she had chosen to turn her attention to its development.
“Lord!” he said, throwing himself into one of the shining arm-chairs. “There’s nothing like music, nothing under the shining sun. ‘Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.’”
This in his most sonorous quotation tones: “Let a man get tired or out of sorts, or infernal mad at a pack of cursed fools, and music’s the thing that’ll set him straight every time, if he’s any sort of a fellow. A man that ain’t fond of music ain’t of any account on God’s green earth. I wouldn’t trust him beyond a broom-straw. There’s a mean streak in a man that don’t care for music, sure. Why, the time the Democrats elected Peyton, the only thing that saved me from bursting a blood-vessel was Jenny’s playing ‘My Lodging’s on the Cold Ground’ with variations. I guess she played it for two hours hand-running, because when I found it was sort of soothing me, I didn’t want her to break in on the effect by beginning another. Play it for Tom, Jenny, after you’ve sung awhile. There’s one thing I’ve made up my mind to—if I had fifty girls, I’d have ’em all learn music if they didn’t know anything—not the operatic kind, you know, but enough to teach them to sing to a man like Jenny does. Go on, Jenny.”
The sustaining and cheering effects of Sophronia’s fried chicken and waffles probably added to his comfortable enjoyment, which was without limit. He leaned back in his armchair as far as the stiffly ornamented back would admit of his so doing and kept time with his head or his feet, occasionally joining in on a chorus with startling suddenness in an evidently subdued roar, which, though subdued, was still roaring enough, and, despite the excellence of its intention, quite out of tune enough to cause the wax flowers in their wax basket on the table (both done by Jenny at boarding-school) to shake under the glass shade until they tapped against its side with a delicate tinkle.
It was while this was going on that Tom, sitting near a side table, picked up a book and almost unconsciously opened it and read its title. Having read its title, an expression of interest showed itself on his countenance and he turned over a leaf or so, and as he turned them over dipped into them here and there.
He had the book in his hand when Jenny Rutherford ended her last chorus and came towards him.
“Do you go much by this?” he asked.
She took it from him and glanced at it.
“I brought Tom Scott up on it,” she said. “Mother wasn’t with me then, and I was such a child I did not know what to do with him.”
“Seems to be a good sort of book,” said Tom, and he turned over the leaves again.