A Dog with a Bad Name

by Talbot Baines Reed

After that he sacrificed even his afternoon constitutionals, and took to the life of a hermit until Wildtree Towers should be rid of its visitors. But even so he could not be quite safe. Percy occasionally hunted him out and demanded his company with himself and a few choice spirits on some hare-brained expedition. Jeffreys did not object to Percy or the hare-brained expedition; but the “choice spirits” sometimes discomposed him. They called him “Jeffy,” and treated him like some favoured domestic animal. They recognised him as a sort of custodian of Percy, and on that account showed off before him, and demonstrated to Percy that he was no custodian of theirs. They freely discussed his ugliness and poverty within earshot. They patronised him without stint, and made a display of their own affluence in his presence. And when once or twice he put down his foot and interdicted some illegal proceeding, they blustered rudely, and advised Percy to get the cad dismissed.

It was like some of the old Bolsover days back again, only with the difference that now he steeled himself to endure all patiently for young Forrester’s sake. It disappointed him to see Percy, led away by his company, sometimes lift his heel against him; yet it suited his humour to think it was only right, and a part of his penance, it should be so. Percy’s revolt, to do that youth justice, was short-lived and speedily repented of. As soon as his friends were gone he returned to Jeffreys with all his old allegiance, and showed his remorse by forgetting all about his recent conduct.

Perhaps the most trying incident in all that trying time to Jeffreys was what occurred on the last day of the Brothertons’ visit. The colonel and his family had been so busy seeing the natural beauties of Wildtree, that, till their visit was drawing to an end, they found they had scarcely done justice to the beautiful house itself, and what it contained. Consequently the last evening was spent in a visit en masse to the library where Jeffreys was duly summoned to assist Mr Rimbolt in exhibiting the treasures it contained.

As usual when the lady of the house was of the party, the librarian went through his work awkwardly. He answered her questions in a confused manner, and contrived to knock over one or two books in his endeavour to reach down others. He was conscious that some of the company were including him among the curiosities of the place, and that Mr Rimbolt himself was disappointed with the result of the exhibition. He struggled hard to pull himself together, and in a measure succeeded before the visit was over, thanks chiefly to Mrs Rimbolt’s temporary absence from the library. The lady returned to announce that coffee was ready in the drawing-room, and Jeffreys, with a sigh of relief, witnessed a general movement towards the door.

He was standing rather dismally near the table, counting the seconds till he should be left alone, when Mrs Brotherton advanced to him with outstretched hand. Imagining she was about to wish him good-evening in a more friendly manner than he had expected, he advanced his own hand, when, to his horror and dismay, he felt a half-crown dropped into it, with the half-whispered remark, “We are much obliged to you.”

He was too staggered to do anything but drop his jaw and stare at the coin until the last of the party had filed from the room, not even observing the look of droll sympathy which Raby, the last to depart, darted at him.

Left to himself, one of his now rare fits of temper broke over him. He stormed out of the place and up into his room, where, after flinging the coin into the grate, he paced up and down the floor like an infuriated animal. Then by a sudden impulse he picked the coin up, and opening a toolbox which he kept in the room, he took from it a hammer and bradawl. Two or three vicious blows sufficed to make a hole in the centre of the Queen’s countenance. Then with a brass-headed nail he pinned the miscreant piece of silver to the wall above the mantelpiece, and sat looking at it till the storm was over.

It was a week or two before he quite recovered from this shock and settled down again to the ordinary routine of his life at Wildtree Towers. As the afternoons became shorter, and out-of-door occupations in consequence became limited, he found Percy unexpectedly amenable to a quiet course of study, which greatly improved the tone of that versatile young gentleman’s mind. Percy still resolutely set his face against a return to school, and offered no encouragement to his perplexed parents in their various schemes for the advancement of his education. Consequently they were fain to be thankful, until some light dawned on the question, that his education was not being wholly neglected, and Mr Rimbolt in particular recognised that under Jeffreys’ influence and tuition the boy was improving in more ways than one.

The autumn passed uneventfully. Mr Rimbolt had occasion once or twice to go up to London, and on these occasions Jeffreys was reminded that he was not on a bed of roses at Wildtree. But that half-crown over the mantelpiece helped him wonderfully. Raby continued to regard him from a distance with a friendly eye, and now and then alarmed him by challenging him to some daring act of mutiny which was sure to end in confusion, but which, for all that, always seemed to him to have some compensation in the fellow-feeling it established between the poor librarian and the dependent and kept-under niece.

News arrived now and then from India, bringing relief as to what was past, but by no means allaying anxiety as to what might be in store for the soldier there. A week before Christmas, Raby told Jeffreys, with mingled pride and trepidation, that her father had written to say he had been made major, and expected to be sent in charge of a small advance force towards Kandahar, to clear the way for a general advance. By the same post another letter came for Mrs Rimbolt, the contents of which, as the Fates would have it, also came to Jeffreys’ ears.