One--two--three! HA!"
A sound came to our ears of some one landing heavily--and at full length, it seemed--on the turf, followed by a slight, rusty groan in the same voice. "Ugh! Don"t you laugh, Bill Hammersley! I haven"t jumped as much as I OUGHT to, these last twenty years; I reckon I"ve kind of lost the hang of it. Aha!" There were indications that Mr. Beasley was picking himself up, and brushing his trousers with his hands. "Now, it"s your turn, Bill. What say?" Silence again, followed by, "Yes, I"ll make Simpledoria get out of the way. Come here, Simpledoria. Now, Bill, put your heels together on the edge of the walk. That"s right. All ready?
Now then! One for the money--two for the show--three to make ready--and four for to GO!" Another silence. "By jingo, Bill Hammersley, you"ve beat me! Ha, ha! That WAS a jump! What say?" Silence once more. "You say you can do even better than that? Now, Bill, don"t brag. Oh! you say you"ve often jumped farther? Oh! you say that was up in Scotland, where you had a spring-board? Oho! All right; let"s see how far you can jump when you really try. There! Heels on the walk again. That"s right; swing your arms. One--two--three! THERE you go!" Another silence. "ZING! Well, sir, I"ll be e-tarnally snitched to flinders if you didn"t do it THAT time, Bill Hammersley! I see I never really saw any jumping before in all my born days. It"s eleven feet if it"s an inch. What? You say you--"
I heard no more, for Miss Apperthwaite, her face flushed and her eyes shining, beckoned me imperiously to follow her, and departed so hurriedly that it might be said she ran.
"I don"t know," said I, keeping at her elbow, "whether it"s more like Alice or the interlocutor"s conversation at a minstrel show."
"Hush!" she warned me, though we were already at a safe distance, and did not speak again until we had reached the front walk. There she paused, and I noted that she was trembling--and, no doubt correctly, judged her emotion to be that of consternation.
"There was no one THERE!" she exclaimed. "He was all by himself! It was just the same as what you saw last night!"
"Evidently."
"Did it sound to you"--there was a little awed tremor in her voice that I found very appealing--"did it sound to you like a person who"d lost his MIND?"
"I don"t know," I said. "I don"t know at all what to make of it."
"He couldn"t have been"--her eyes grew very wide--"intoxicated!"
"No. I"m sure it wasn"t that."
"Then _I_ don"t know what to make of it, either. All that wild talk about "Bill Hammersley" and "Simpledoria" and spring-boards in Scotland and--"
"And an eleven-foot jump," I suggested.
"Why, there"s no more a "Bill Hammersley,"" she cried, with a gesture of excited emphasis, "than there is a "Simpledoria"!"
"So it appears," I agreed.
"He"s lived there all alone," she said, solemnly, "in that big house, so long, just sitting there evening after evening all by himself, never going out, never reading anything, not even thinking; but just sitting and sitting and sitting and SITTING--Well," she broke off, suddenly, shook the frown from her forehead, and made me the offer of a dazzling smile, "there"s no use bothering one"s own head about it."
"I"m glad to have a fellow-witness," I said. "It"s so eerie I might have concluded there was something the matter with ME."
"You"re going to your work?" she asked, as I turned toward the gate.
"I"m very glad I don"t have to go to mine."
"Yours?" I inquired, rather blankly.
"I teach algebra and plain geometry at the High School," said this surprising young woman. "Thank Heaven, it"s Sat.u.r.day! I"m reading Les Miserables for the seventh time, and I"m going to have a real ORGY over Gervaise and the barricade this afternoon!"
III
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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sing 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 spa.r.s.e, 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 pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sing 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?"