Sam looked at her attentively, wondering why her little nose always
reddened when she cried. But he waited patiently, until she finished
her rambling reproaches. It occurred to him that he would tell Mrs.
Richie all about this matter of the prints. "She will understand," he
thought.
Sam's acquaintance with Mrs. Richie had begun when she was getting
settled in her new house. Sam senior, having no desire to climb the
hill road, sent his various communications to his tenant by his son,
and afterwards Sam junior had communications of his own to make. He
fell into the habit of stopping there on Sunday afternoons, quite
oblivious of the fact that Mrs. Richie did not display any pleasure at
seeing him. After one of these calls he was apt to be late in reaching
"The Top," as his grandfather's place was called, and old Benjamin
Wright, in his brown wig and moth-eaten beaver hat, would glare at him
with melancholy dark eyes.
"Gad-a-mercy, what do you mean,--getting here at six-five! I have my
tea at six, sir; at six sharp. Either get here on time or stay away. I
don't care which. Do you hear?"
"Yes, sir," young Sam would murmur.
"Where have you been? Mooning after that female at the Stuffed Animal
House?"
"I had to leave a message, sir, about the lease."
"How long does it take to leave a message about a lease?"
"She was not down-stairs and I had to wait--"
"I had to wait! That's more to the point. There, don't talk about
it. You drive me crazy with your chatter."
Then they would sit down to supper in a black silence only broken by
an occasional twitter from one of the many cages that hung about the
room. But afterwards young Sam had his reward; the library, a toby,
long before he was old enough to smoke, and his grandfather reading
aloud in a wonderful voice, deep, sonorous, flexible--Shakespeare,
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, there was nothing
personal in such reading--it was not done to give pleasure to young
Sam. Every night the old man rumbled out the stately lines, sitting by
himself in this gloomy room walled to the ceiling with books, and
warmed by a soft-coal fire that snapped and bubbled behind the iron
bars of the grate. Sometimes he would burst into angry ecstasy at the
beauty of what he read "There! What do you think of that?"
"Oh, it's splendid!"
"Hah! Much you know about it! There is about as much poetry in your
family as there is in that coal scuttle."