I’ll bring him up to your fire.”
I went on my way in a condition of astonishment that engendered, almost, a doubt of my eyes; for if my sight was unimpaired and myself not subject to optical or mental delusion, neither boy nor dog nor bird nor cat, nor any other object of this visible world, had entered that opened door. Was my “finest” house, then, a place of call for wandering ghosts, who came home to roost at four in the morning?
It was only a step to Mrs. Apperthwaite’s; I let myself in with the key that good lady had given me, stole up to my room, went to my window, and stared across the yard at the house next door. The front window in the second story, I decided, necessarily belonged to that room in which the lamp had been lighted; but all was dark there now. I went to bed, and dreamed that I was out at sea in a fog, having embarked on a transparent vessel whose preposterous name, inscribed upon glass life-belts, depending here and there from an invisible rail, was Simpledoria.
II.
Mrs. Apperthwaite’s was a commodious old house, the greater part of it of about the same age, I judged, as its neighbor; but the late Mr. Apperthwaite had caught the Mansard fever of the late Seventies, and the building-disease, once fastened upon him, had never known a convalescence, but, rather, a series of relapses, the tokens of which, in the nature of a cupola and a couple of frame turrets, were terrifyingly apparent. These romantic misplacements seemed to me not inharmonious with the library, a cheerful and pleasantly shabby apartment down-stairs, where I found (over a substratum of history, encyclopaedia, and family Bible) some worn old volumes of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an early edition of Cooper’s works; Scott, Bulwer, Macaulay, Byron, and Tennyson, complete; some odd volumes of Victor Hugo, of the elder Dumas, of Flaubert, of Gautier, and of Balzac: Clarissa, Lalla Rookh, The Alhambra, Beulah, Uarda, Lucile, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben-Hur, Trilby, She, Little Lord Fauntleroy; and of a later decade, there were novels about those delicately tangled emotions experienced by the supreme few; and stories of adventurous royalty; tales of “clean-limbed young American manhood;” and some thin volumes of rather precious verse.
’Twas amid these romantic scenes that I awaited the sound of the lunch-bell (which for me was the announcement of breakfast), when I arose from my first night’s slumbers under Mrs. Apperthwaite’s roof; and I wondered if the books were a fair mirror of Miss Apperthwaite’s mind (I had been told that Mrs. Apperthwaite had a daughter). Mrs. Apperthwaite herself, in her youth, might have sat to an illustrator of Scott or Bulwer. Even now you could see she had come as near being romantically beautiful as was consistently proper for such a timid, gentle little gentlewoman as she was. Reduced, by her husband’s insolvency (coincident with his demise) to “keeping boarders,” she did it gracefully, as if the urgency thereto were only a spirit of quiet hospitality. It should be added in haste that she set an excellent table.
Moreover, the guests who gathered at her board were of a very attractive description, as I decided the instant my eye fell upon the lady who sat opposite me at lunch. I knew at once that she was Miss Apperthwaite, she “went so,” as they say, with her mother; nothing could have been more suitable. Mrs. Apperthwaite was the kind of woman whom you would expect to have a beautiful daughter, and Miss Apperthwaite more than fulfilled her mother’s promise.
I guessed her to be more than Juliet Capulet’s age, indeed, yet still between that and the perfect age of woman. She was of a larger, fuller, more striking type than Mrs. Apperthwaite, a bolder type, one might put it—though she might have been a great deal bolder than Mrs. Apperthwaite without being bold. Certainly she was handsome enough to make it difficult for a young fellow to keep from staring at her. She had an abundance of very soft, dark hair, worn almost severely, as if its profusion necessitated repression; and I am compelled to admit that her fine eyes expressed a distant contemplation—obviously of habit not of mood—so pronounced that one of her enemies (if she had any) might have described them as “dreamy.”
Only one other of my own sex was present at the lunch-table, a Mr. Dowden, an elderly lawyer and politician of whom I had heard, and to whom Mrs. Apperthwaite, coming in after the rest of us were seated, introduced me. She made the presentation general; and I had the experience of receiving a nod and a slow glance, in which there was a sort of dusky, estimating brilliance, from the beautiful lady opposite me.
It might have been better mannered for me to address myself to Mr. Dowden, or one of the very nice elderly women, who were my fellow-guests, than to open a conversation with Miss Apperthwaite; but I did not stop to think of that.
“You have a splendid old house next door to you here, Miss Apperthwaite,” I said. “It’s a privilege to find it in view from my window.”
There was a faint stir as of some consternation in the little company. The elderly ladies stopped talking abruptly and exchanged glances, though this was not of my observation at the moment, I think, but recurred to my consciousness later, when I had perceived my blunder.
“May I ask who lives there?” I pursued.
Miss Apperthwaite allowed her noticeable lashes to cover her eyes for an instant, then looked up again.
“A Mr. Beasley,” she said.
“Not the Honorable David Beasley!” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” she returned, with a certain gravity which I afterward wished had checked me. “Do you know him?”
“Not in person,” I explained. “You see, I’ve written a good deal about him. I was with the Spencerville Journal until a few days ago, and even in the country we know who’s who in politics over the state. Beasley’s the man that went to Congress and never made a speech—never made even a motion to adjourn—but got everything his district wanted. There’s talk of him now for Governor.”
“Indeed?”
“And so it’s the Honorable David Beasley who lives in that splendid place. How curious that is!”
“Why?” asked Miss Apperthwaite.
“It seems too big for one man,” I answered; “and I’ve always had the impression Mr. Beasley was a bachelor.”
“Yes,” she said, rather slowly, “he is.”
“But of course he doesn’t live there all alone,” I supposed, aloud, “probably he has—”
“No. There’s no one else—except a couple of colored servants.”
“What a crime!” I exclaimed. “If there ever was a house meant for a large family, that one is. Can’t you almost hear it crying out for heaps and heaps of romping children? I should think—”
I was interrupted by a loud cough from Mr. Dowden, so abrupt and artificial that his intention to check the flow of my innocent prattle was embarrassingly obvious—even to me!
“Can you tell me,” he said, leaning forward and following up the interruption as hastily as possible, “what the farmers were getting for their wheat when you left Spencerville?”
“Ninety-four cents,” I answered, and felt my ears growing red with mortification. Too late, I remembered that the new-comer in a community should guard his tongue among the natives until he has unravelled the skein of their relationships, alliances, feuds, and private wars—a precept not unlike the classic injunction:
“Yes, my darling daughter. Hang your clothes on a hickory limb, But don’t go near the water.”
However, in my confusion I warmly regretted my failure to follow it, and resolved not to blunder again.
Mr. Dowden thanked me for the information for which he had no real desire, and, the elderly ladies again taking up (with all too evident relief) their various mild debates, he inquired if I played bridge. “But I forget,” he added. “Of course you’ll be at the Despatch office in the evenings, and can’t be here.” After which he immediately began to question me about my work, making his determination to give me no opportunity again to mention the Honorable David Beasley unnecessarily conspicuous, as I thought.
I could only conclude that some unpleasantness had arisen between