A Dog with a Bad Name

by Talbot Baines Reed

“The mistress sent it for—”

“Take it away, do you hear?” shouted Jeffreys, starting up with a face so terrible that Walker turned pale, and evacuated the room with the offending parcel as quickly as possible.

Jeffreys’ outburst of temper quickly evaporated, and indeed gave place to a much more prolonged fit of shame. Was this like conquering the evil in his nature, to be thus thrown off his balance by a trifle?

As it happened, he had ordered a suit of clothes in Overstone some days back, and was expecting them that very afternoon.

Mr Rimbolt, on the day after his engagement, had as delicately as possible offered him a quarter’s salary in advance, which Jeffreys, guessing the source which inspired the offer, had flatly refused. Mr Rimbolt’s gentlemanly urging, however, and the consciousness that his present clothes were disreputable, as well as another consideration, induced him to accept a month’s stipend; and on the strength of this he had visited the Overstone tailor.

But before doing so he had discharged his mind of a still more important duty. The sense of the debt still due to Bolsover had hung round his neck night and day. It was not so much on Mr Frampton’s account. He came gradually to hate the thought of Bolsover, and the idea of being a defaulter to the place worried him beyond measure. It seemed like an insult to the memory of poor young Forrester to owe money to the place which had witnessed that terrible tragedy; and the hope of washing his hands once for all of the school and its associations was the one faint gleam of comfort he had in looking back on the events of last year. It was therefore with a feeling of almost fierce relief that he procured a post-office order for the balance of his debt on the very afternoon of receiving the money, and enclosing it with merely his name added—for he wanted no receipt, and felt that even Mr Frampton’s letters would now no longer be of service to him—he posted it with his own hands, and hoped that he was done with Bolsover for ever. After that, with very different emotions, he visited the tailor.

The clothes arrived on the same afternoon which had witnessed the summary rejection of Mrs Rimbolt’s gift. That lady, from whom Walker had considered it prudent to keep back some of the particulars of his interview with the librarian, merely reporting “that Mr Jeffreys was much obliged, but did not require the things,” took to herself all the credit of his improved appearance when that evening Mr Rimbolt brought him in from the library to have coffee in the drawing-room.

Jeffreys, aware that he was undergoing inspection, felt very shy and awkward, but could not quite do away with the improvement, or conceal that, despite his ugly face and ungainly figure there was something of the gentleman about him.

Mrs Rimbolt by no means approved of her husband bringing his librarian into the drawing-room. She considered it a slight to herself and dangerous to Percy and Raby to have this person added to their family circle; and she most conscientiously made a point of lessening that danger on every occasion, by reminding him of his place and rendering his temporary visits to exalted latitudes as uncomfortable as possible. Mr Rimbolt, good easy-going gentleman, shrugged his shoulders and felt powerless to interfere, and when, after a week or two, his librarian generally pleaded some pressing work as an excuse for not going in to coffee, he understood it quite well and did not urge the invitation.

Percy, however, had a very different way of comporting himself. What he liked he liked; what he did not like he most conveniently ignored. He was anything but a model son, as the reader has discovered. He loved his parents, indeed, but he sadly lacked that great ornament of youth—a dutiful spirit. He was spoiled, and got his own way in everything. He ruled Wildtree Towers, in fact. If his mother desired him to do what he did not like, he was for the time being deaf, and did not hear her. If he himself was overtaken in a fault, he changed the subject and talked cheerily about something else. If one of his great “dodges” came to a ridiculous end, he promptly screened it from observation by a new one.