Arthur Carroll made an entrance into the "Tonsorial Parlor."
Moreover, the other men could see out in front of the establishment,
the coach, the coachman in livery--the first livery on record as
actually resident in Banbridge; liveries had passed through, but
never before tarried--the fretting steeds with their glittering
equipment. Around the coach had already gathered several small boys,
huddled together, and transfixed with awe too deep for impudence.
Carroll, having greeted the men, said good-morning urbanely to the
barber, who had ceased lathering Tappan and was looking at him
indeterminately. It seemed dreadful to him that this great man should
have to wait for the milkman. The barber was a conservative to the
core, and would speak of the laboring-classes and tradesmen as if he
himself were on the other side of the highway from birth. Tappan
himself, who, as said before, was naturally surly, was also a
dissenter on principle, and had an enlarged sense of injury, had
qualms at keeping waiting a man who patronized him to the extent of
two quarts of cream and three quarts of milk daily. It was like
quarrelling with his bread-and-butter, as he put it, when alluding to
the affair later on.
"I ain't goin' through the world seein' no men as is better 'n I be,"
he said, "but there's jest this much about it, I ain't a fool, an' I
know enough to open the door when a man wants to walk through to pay
me some money. Ef Carroll hadn't been takin' that much cream and
milk, I'd set there in that barber's-chair ef I'd had a year's beard
to shave, an' I'd kept him waitin', and enjoyed it, but, as it was, I
did what I did."
What Tappan did was to wave back Flynn's lathering-hand, and to say,
rather splutteringly, that he would wait, "ef Captain Carroll was in
a hurry."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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