A Dog with a Bad Name

by Talbot Baines Reed

Chapter Fourteen.

Snob and Snub.

Jeffreys was not long in finding out the best and the worst of his new lot at Wildtree Towers. To an ordinary thick-skinned fellow, with his love of books and partiality for boys, his daily life during the six months which followed his introduction under Mr Rimbolt’s roof might have seemed almost enviable. The whole of each morning was devoted to the duties of the library, which, under his conscientious management, gradually assumed the order of a model collection. A librarian is born, not made, and Jeffreys seemed unexpectedly and by accident to have dropped into the one niche in life for which he was best suited. Mr Rimbolt was delighted to see his treasures gradually emerging from the chaos of an overcrowded lumber-room into the serene and dignified atmosphere of a library of well-arranged and well-tended volumes. He allowed his librarian carte blanche with regard to shelves and binding. He agreed to knock a third room into the two which already constituted the library, and to line it with bookcases. He even went the length of supporting a clever bookbinder at Overstone for several months with work on his own volumes, and, greatest sacrifice of all, forebore his craze of buying right and left for the same space of time until the arrears of work should be overtaken, and a clear idea could be formed of what he already had and what he wanted. Jeffreys revelled in the work, and when he discovered that he had to deal with one of the most valuable private collections in the country, his pride and sense of responsibility advanced step by step. He occupied his leisure hours in the study of bibliography; he read books on the old printers and their works; he spent hours with the bookbinder and printer at Overstone, studying the mechanism of a book; he even studied architecture, in connexion with the ventilation and lighting of libraries, and began to teach himself German, in order to be able to master the stores of book-lore buried in that rugged language.

All this, then, was congenial and delightful work. He was left his own master in it, and had the pride of seeing the work growing under his hands: and when one day Mr Rimbolt arrived from London with a great man in the world of old books, for the express purpose of exhibiting to him his treasures, it called an honest flush to the librarian’s face to hear the visitor say, “Upon my word, Rimbolt, I don’t know whether to congratulate you most on your books or the way in which they are kept! Your librarian is a genius!”

If all his life could have been spent in the shelter of the library Jeffreys would have had little to complain of. But it was not, and out of it it needed no great discernment to perceive that he had anything but a friend in Mrs Rimbolt. She was not openly hostile; it was not worth her while to wage war on a poor domestic, but she seemed for all that to resent his presence in the house, and to be possessed of a sort of nervous desire to lose no opportunity of putting him down.

After about a week, during which time Jeffreys had not apparently taken her hint as to the arranging of his person in “respectful” raiment. Walker waited upon the librarian in his chamber with a brown-paper parcel.

“My lady’s compliments,” said he, with a grin—he was getting to measure the newcomer by his mistress’s standard—“and hopes they’ll suit.”

It was a left-off suit of Mr Rimbolt’s clothes, with the following polite note: “As Mr Jeffreys does not appear disposed to accept Mrs Rimbolt’s advice to provide himself with clothes suitable for the post he now occupies at Wildtree Towers, she must request him to accept the accompanying parcel, with the wish that she may not again have occasion to refer to so unpleasant a subject.”

Jeffreys flushed scarlet as he read this elegant effusion, and, greatly to Walker’s astonishment crushed the letter up into a ball and flung it out of the window.

“Take that away!” he shouted, pointing to the parcel.