I do not know why it should have astonished me to find that Miss
Apperthwaite was a teacher of mathematics except that (to my
inexperienced eye) she didn't look it. She looked more like Charlotte
Corday!
I had the pleasure of seeing her opposite me at lunch the next day (when
Mr. Dowden kept me occupied with Spencerville politics, obviously from
fear that I would break out again), but no stroll in the yard with her
rewarded me afterward, as I dimly hoped, for she disappeared before I
left the table, and I did not see her again for a fortnight. On
week-days she did not return to the house for lunch, my only meal at
Mrs. Apperthwaite's (I dined at a restaurant near the “Despatch”
office), and she was out of town for a little visit, her mother informed
us, over the following Saturday and Sunday. She was not altogether out
of my thoughts, however--indeed, she almost divided them with the
Honorable David Beasley.
A better view which I was afforded of this gentleman did not lessen my
interest in him; increased it rather; it also served to make the
extraordinary didoes of which he had been the virtuoso and I the
audience more than ever profoundly inexplicable. My glimpse of him in
the lighted doorway had given me the vaguest impression of his
appearance, but one afternoon--a few days after my interview with Miss
Apperthwaite--I was starting for the office and met him full-face-on as
he was turning in at his gate. I took as careful invoice of him as I
could without conspicuously glaring.
There was something remarkably “taking,” as we say, about this
man--something easy and genial and quizzical and careless. He was the
kind of person you LIKE to meet on the street; whose cheerful passing
sends you on feeling indefinably a little gayer than you did. He was
tall, thin--even gaunt, perhaps--and his face was long, rather pale, and
shrewd and gentle; something in its oddity not unremindful of the late
Sol Smith Russell. His hat was tilted back a little, the slightest bit
to one side, and the sparse, brownish hair above his high forehead was
going to be gray before long. He looked about forty.
The truth is, I had expected to see a cousin german to Don Quixote; I
had thought to detect signs and gleams of wildness, however
slight--something a little “off.” One glance of that kindly and humorous
eye told me such expectation had been nonsense. Odd he might have
been--Gadzooks! he looked it--but “queer”? Never. The fact that Miss
Apperthwaite could picture such a man as this “sitting and sitting and
sitting” himself into any form of mania or madness whatever spoke loudly
of her own imagination, indeed! The key to “Simpledoria” was to be
sought under some other mat.
... As I began to know some of my co-laborers on the “Despatch,” and to
pick up acquaintances, here and there, about town, I sometimes made Mr.
Beasley the subject of inquiry. Everybody knew him. “Oh yes, I know Dave
BEASLEY!” would come the reply, nearly always with a chuckling sort of
laugh. I gathered that he had a name for “easy-going” which amounted to
eccentricity. It was said that what the ward-heelers and camp-followers
got out of him in campaign times made the political managers cry. He was
the first and readiest prey for every fraud and swindler that came to
Wainwright, I heard, and yet, in spite of this and of his hatred of
“speech-making” (“He's as silent as Grant!” said one informant), he had
a large practice, and was one of the most successful lawyers in the
state.
One story they told of him (or, as they were more apt to put it, “on”
him) was repeated so often that I saw it had become one of the town's
traditions. One bitter evening in February, they related, he was
approached upon the street by a ragged, whining, and shivering old
reprobate, notorious for the various ingenuities by which he had worn
out the patience of the charity organizations. He asked Beasley for a
dime. Beasley had no money in his pockets, but gave the man his
overcoat, went home without any himself, and spent six weeks in bed with
a bad case of pneumonia as the direct result. His beneficiary sold the
overcoat, and invested the proceeds in a five-day's spree, in the
closing scenes of which a couple of brickbats were featured to high,
spectacular effect. One he sent through a jeweller's show-window in an
attempt to intimidate some wholly imaginary pursuers, the other he
projected at a perfectly actual policeman who was endeavoring to soothe
him. The victim of Beasley's charity and the officer were then borne to
the hospital in company.
It was due in part to recollections of this legend and others of a
similar character that people laughed when they said, “Oh yes, I know
Dave BEASLEY!”
Altogether, I should say, Beasley was about the most popular man in
Wainwright. I could discover nowhere anything, however, to shed the
faintest light upon the mystery of Bill Hammersley and Simpledoria. It
was not until the Sunday of Miss Apperthwaite's absence that the
revelation came.
That afternoon I went to call upon the widow of a second-cousin of mine;
she lived in a cottage not far from Mrs. Apperthwaite's, upon the same
street. I found her sitting on a pleasant veranda, with boxes of
flowering plants along the railing, though Indian summer was now close
upon departure. She was rocking meditatively, and held a finger in a
morocco volume, apparently of verse, though I suspected she had been
better entertained in the observation of the people and vehicles
decorously passing along the sunlit thoroughfare within her view.
We exchanged inevitable questions and news of mutual relatives; I had
told her how I liked my work and what I thought of Wainwright, and she
was congratulating me upon having found so pleasant a place to live as
Mrs. Apperthwaite's, when she interrupted herself to smile and nod a
cordial greeting to two gentlemen driving by in a phaeton. They waved
their hats to her gayly, then leaned back comfortably against the
cushions--and if ever two men were obviously and incontestably on the
best of terms with each other, THESE two were. They were David Beasley
and Mr. Dowden. “I do wish,” said my cousin, resuming her rocking--“I
do wish dear David Beasley would get a new trap of some kind; that old
phaeton of his is a disgrace! I suppose you haven't met him? Of course,
living at Mrs. Apperthwaite's, you wouldn't be apt to.”
“But what is he doing with Mr. Dowden?” I asked.
She lifted her eyebrows. “Why--taking him for a drive, I suppose.”
“No. I mean--how do they happen to be together?”
“Why shouldn't they be? They're old friends--”
“They ARE!” And, in answer to her look of surprise, I explained that I
had begun to speak of Beasley at Mrs. Apperthwaite's, and described the
abruptness with which Dowden had changed the subject.
“I see,” my cousin nodded, comprehendingly. “That's simple enough.
George Dowden didn't want you to talk of Beasley THERE. I suppose it may
have been a little embarrassing for everybody--especially if Ann
Apperthwaite heard you.”
“Ann? That's Miss Apperthwaite? Yes; I was speaking directly to her. Why
SHOULDN'T she have heard me? She talked of him herself a little
later--and at some length, too.”
“She DID!” My cousin stopped rocking, and fixed me with her glittering
eye. “Well, of all!”
“Is it so surprising?”
The lady gave her boat to the waves again. “Ann Apperthwaite thinks
about him still!” she said, with something like vindictiveness. “I've
always suspected it. She thought you were new to the place and didn't
know anything about it all, or anybody to mention it to. That's it!”
“I'm still new to the place,” I urged, “and still don't know anything
about it all.”
“They used to be engaged,” was her succinct and emphatic answer.
I found it but too illuminating. “Oh, oh!” I cried. “I WAS an innocent,
wasn't I?”
“I'm glad she DOES think of him,” said my cousin. “It serves her right.
I only hope HE won't find it out, because he's a poor, faithful
creature; he'd jump at the chance to take her back--and she doesn't
deserve him.”
“How long has it been,” I asked, “since they used to be engaged?”
“Oh, a good while--five or six years ago, I think--maybe more; time
skips along. Ann Apperthwaite's no chicken, you know.” (Such was the
lady's expression.) “They got engaged just after she came home from
college, and of all the idiotically romantic girls--”
“But she's a teacher,” I interrupted, “of mathematics.”
“Yes.” She nodded wisely. “I always thought that explained it: the
romance is a reaction from the algebra. I never knew a person connected
with mathematics or astronomy or statistics, or any of those exact
things, who didn't have a crazy streak in 'em SOMEwhere. They've got to
blow off steam and be foolish to make up for putting in so much of their
time at hard sense. But don't you think that I dislike Ann Apperthwaite.
She's always been one of my best friends; that's why I feel at liberty
to abuse her--and I always will abuse her when I think how she treated
poor David Beasley.”
“How did she treat him?”
“Threw him over out of a clear sky one night, that's all. Just sent him
home and broke his heart; that is, it would have been broken if he'd had
any kind of disposition except the one the Lord blessed him with--just
all optimism and cheerfulness and make-the-best-of-it-ness! He's never
cared for anybody else, and I guess he never will.”
“What did she do it for?”
“NOTHING!” My cousin shot the indignant word from her lips. “Nothing in
the wide WORLD!”
“But there must have been--”
“Listen to me,” she interrupted, “and tell me if you ever heard anything
queerer in your life. They'd been engaged--Heaven knows how long--over
two years; probably nearer three--and always she kept putting it off;
wouldn't begin to get ready, wouldn't set a day for the wedding. Then
Mr. Apperthwaite died, and left her and her mother stranded high and dry
with nothing to live on. David had everything in the world to give
her--and STILL she wouldn't! And then, one day, she came up here and
told me she'd broken it off. Said she couldn't stand it to be engaged to
David Beasley another minute!”
“But why?”
“Because”--my cousin's tone was shrill with her despair of expressing
the satire she would have put into it--“because, she said he was a man
of no imagination!”
“She still says so,” I remarked, thoughtfully.
“Then it's time she got a little imagination herself!” snapped my
companion. “David Beasley's the quietest man God has made, but everybody
knows what he IS! There are some rare people in this world that aren't
all TALK; there are some still rarer ones that scarcely ever talk at
all--and David Beasley's one of them. I don't know whether it's because
he can't talk, or if he can and hates to; I only know he doesn't. And
I'm glad of it, and thank the Lord he's put a few like that into this
talky world! David Beasley's smile is better than acres of other
people's talk. My Providence! Wouldn't anybody, just to look at him,
know that he does better than talk? He THINKS! The trouble with Ann
Apperthwaite was that she was too young to see it. She was so full of
novels and poetry and dreaminess and highfalutin nonsense she couldn't
see ANYTHING as it really was. She'd study her mirror, and see such a
heroine of romance there that she just couldn't bear to have a fiance
who hadn't any chance of turning out to be the crown-prince of Kenosha
in disguise! At the very least, to suit HER he'd have had to wear a
'well-trimmed Vandyke' and coo sonnets in the gloaming, or read On a
Balcony to her by a red lamp.
“Poor David! Outside of his law-books, I don't believe he's ever read
anything but Robinson Crusoe and the Bible and Mark Twain. Oh, you
should have heard her talk about it!--'I couldn't bear it another day,'
she said, 'I couldn't STAND it! In all the time I've known him I don't
believe he's ever asked me a single question--except when he asked if
I'd marry him. He never says ANYTHING--never speaks at ALL!' she said.
'You don't know a blessing when you see it,' I told her. 'Blessing!' she
said. 'There's nothing IN the man! He has no DEPTHS! He hasn't any more
imagination than the chair he sits and sits and sits in! Half the time
he answers what I say to him by nodding and saying 'um-hum,' with that
same old foolish, contented smile of his. I'd have gone MAD if it had
lasted any longer!' I asked her if she thought married life consisted
very largely of conversations between husband and wife; and she answered
that even married life ought to have some POETRY in it. 'Some romance,'
she said, 'some soul! And he just comes and sits,' she said, 'and sits
and sits and sits and sits! And I can't bear it any longer, and I've
told him so.'”
“Poor Mr. Beasley,” I said.
“_I_ think, 'Poor Ann Apperthwaite!'” retorted my cousin. “I'd like to
know if there's anything NICER than just to sit and sit and sit and sit
with as lovely a man as that--a man who understands things, and thinks
and listens and smiles--instead of everlastingly talking!”
“As it happens,” I remarked, “I've heard Mr. Beasley talk.”
“Why, of course he talks,” she returned, “when there's any real use in
it. And he talks to children; he's THAT kind of man.”
“I meant a particular instance,” I began; meaning to see if she could
give me any clew to Bill Hammersley and Simpledoria, but at that moment
the gate clicked under the hand of another caller. My cousin rose to
greet him; and presently I took my leave without having been able to get
back upon the subject of Beasley.
Thus, once more baffled, I returned to Mrs. Apperthwaite's--and within
the hour came into full possession of the very heart of that dark and
subtle mystery which overhung the house next door and so perplexed my
soul.