Peter Taylor by Peter Taylor

Author:Peter Taylor
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2017-07-26T04:30:00+00:00

Before the day of the move from Ritchie Court arrived, Sylvia had had other visits from Mr. Canada. Usually he made some pretense of business, but of his half-dozen visits there were at least two occasions when he forgot to mention any reason for coming. After the first day Sylvia always received him hospitably and chatted with him in the living room during the hour or more that he stayed. Her children could not understand why she tolerated his attentions, and Sylvia was not at all clear about it in her own mind. She resented his clumsy gestures about the house rent and the scholarship for Charley, and she was embarrassed before her children to have to acknowledge his obvious aspirations as a suitor. But to the children she laughed both about his gestures and about his aspirations, and she continued to let him come to the house. She continued even after the children’s amusement at the situation turned to disapproval and their good-natured teasing to accusing silence. Yet to the very end there was no change in hers and Mr. Canada’s relationship and she was ever looking forward to the time when she would see him no more.

She looked forward to that time, she soon found, with just the same pleasure that she looked forward to the day when she would not see Leander Thompson again. For Leander, like Mr. Canada, didn’t come to see Sylvia just the one time. Actually, he turned up again on the very morning after Mr. Canada’s first call at the house, and he stayed even longer than Mr. Canada had done.

Sylvia was still at the breakfast table when he arrived, and she waited until she and Margaret had had their second cups of coffee before telling the maid to let him come into the dining room.

Leander began speaking before he was well into the room. “Miss Sylvia, I’ve been let go,” he said. “Those people have accused me of taking things—over there!” As he spoke he had come forward, and he stopped within a few feet of Sylvia’s chair at the table. As he said “over there” he gestured with his cap in the general direction of the house where he had been working since he left the Harrisons’ service. “Miss Sylvia, you know—and you know, Miss Margaret—that I wouldn’t take nothing that didn’t belong to me. They say I took two pocket watches and a bottle of their whisky, and you all know how sparing I am of whisky.”

He was in such an obvious state of excitement that Sylvia asked him to sit down in one of the straight chairs that were lined against the wall. At first he refused, but Sylvia said that she would not talk to him until he had sat down and calmed himself. Once he was seated, Sylvia asked, “When did all this happen, Leander?”

“It happened just this morning when I came in to work. They—he, Mr. Warren—said they found the pocket watches and half bottle of whisky on my shelf in their garage where I generally keep my things.

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