Saturday. I found her in the library with Les Misérables on her knee when I came down from my room a little before lunch-time; and she looked up and gave me a smile that made me feel sorry for any one she had ceased to smile upon.
“I wanted to tell you,” I said, with a little awkwardness but plenty of truth, “I’ve found out that I’m an awful fool.”
“But that’s something,” she returned, encouragingly—“at least the beginning of wisdom.”
“I mean about Mr. Beasley—the mystery I was absurd enough to find in ‘Simpledoria.’ I want to tell you—”
“Oh, I know,” she said; and although she laughed with an effect of carelessness, that look which I had thought “far away” returned to her eyes as she spoke. There was a certain inscrutability about Miss Apperthwaite sometimes, it should be added, as if she did not like to be too easily read. “I’ve heard all about it. Mr. Beasley’s been appointed trustee or something for poor Hamilton Swift’s son, a pitiful little invalid boy who invents all sorts of characters. The old darky from over there told our cook about Bill Hammersley and Simpledoria. So, you see, I understand.”
“I’m glad you do,” I said.
A little hardness—one might even have thought it bitterness—became apparent in her expression. “And I’m glad there’s somebody in that house, at last, with a little imagination!”
“From everything I have heard,” I returned, summoning sufficient boldness, “it would be difficult to say which has more—Mr. Beasley or the child.”
Her glance fell from mine at this, but not quickly enough to conceal a sudden, half-startled look of trouble (I can think of no other way to express it) that leaped into it; and she rose, for the lunch-bell was ringing.
“I’m just finishing the death of Jean Valjean, you know, in Les Misérables,” she said, as we moved to the door. “I’m always afraid I’ll cry over that. I try not to, because it makes my eyes red.”
And, in truth, there was a vague rumor of tears about her eyes—not as if she had shed them, but more as if she were going to—though I had not noticed it when I came in.
…That afternoon, when I reached the Despatch office, I was commissioned to obtain certain political information from the Honorable David Beasley, an assignment I accepted with eagerness, notwithstanding the commiseration it brought me from one or two of my fellows in the reporter’s room. “You won’t get anything out of him!” they said. And they were true prophets.
I found him looking over some documents in his office; a reflective, unlighted cigar in the corner of his mouth; his chair tilted back and his feet on a window-sill. He nodded, upon my statement of the affair that brought me, and, without shifting his position, gave me a look of slow but wholly friendly scrutiny over his shoulder, and bade me sit down. I began at once to put the questions I was told to ask him—interrogations (he seemed to believe) satisfactorily answered by slowly and ruminatively stroking the left side of his chin with two long fingers of his right hand, the while he smiled in genial contemplation of a tarred roof beyond the window. Now and then he would give me a mild and drawling word or two, not brilliantly illuminative, it may be remarked. “Well—about that—” he began once, and came immediately to a full stop.
“Yes?” I said, hopefully, my pencil poised.
“About that—I guess—”
“Yes, Mr. Beasley?” I encouraged him, for he seemed to have dried up permanently.
“Well, sir—I guess—Hadn’t you better see some one else about that?”
This with the air of a man who would be but too fluent and copious upon any subject in the world except the one particular point.
I never met anybody else who looked so pleasantly communicative and managed to say so little. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all; and I guessed that this faculty was not without its value in his political career, disastrous as it had proved to his private happiness. His habit of silence, moreover, was not cultivated: you could see that “the secret of it” was just that he was born quiet.
My note-book remained noteless, and finally, at some odd evasion of his, accomplished by a monosyllable, I laughed outright—and he did, too! He joined cachinnations with me heartily, and with a twinkling quizzicalness that somehow gave me the idea that he might be thinking (rather apologetically) to himself: “Yes, sir, that old Beasley man is certainly a mighty funny critter!”
When I went away, a few moments later, and left him still intermittently chuckling, the impression remained with me that he had had some such deprecatory and surreptitious thought.
Two or three days after that, as I started downtown from Mrs. Apperthwaite’s, Beasley came out of his gate, bound in the same direction. He gave me a look of gay recognition and offered his hand, saying, “Well! Up in this neighborhood!” as if that were a matter of considerable astonishment.
I mentioned that I was a neighbor, and we walked on together. I don’t think he spoke again, except for a “Well, sir!” or two of genial surprise at something I said, and, now and then, “You don’t tell me!” which he had a most eloquent way of exclaiming; but he listened visibly to my own talk, and laughed at everything that I meant for funny.
I never knew anybody who gave one a greater responsiveness; he seemed to be with you every instant; and how he made you feel it was the true mystery of Beasley, this silent man who never talked, except (as my cousin said) to children.
It happened that I thus met him, as we were both starting downtown, and walked on with him, several days in succession; in a word, it became a habit. Then, one afternoon, as I turned to leave him at the Despatch office, he asked me if I wouldn’t drop in at his house the next day for a cigar before we started. I did; and he asked me if I wouldn’t come again the day after that. So this became a habit, too.
A fortnight elapsed before I met Hamilton Swift, Junior; for he, poor little father of dream-children, could be no spectator of track events upon the lawn, but lay in his bed upstairs. However, he grew better at last, and my presentation took place.
We had just finished our cigars in Beasley’s airy, old-fashioned “sitting-room,” and were rising to go, when there came the faint creaking of small wheels from the hall. Beasley turned to me with the apologetic and monosyllabic chuckle that was distinctly his alone.
“I’ve got a little chap here—” he said; then went to the door. “Bob!”
The old darky appeared in the doorway pushing a little wagon like a reclining-chair on wheels, and in it sat Hamilton Swift, Junior.
My first impression of him was that he was all eyes: I couldn’t look at anything else for a time, and was hardly conscious of the rest of that weazened, peaked little face and the under-sized wisp of a body with its pathetic adjuncts of metal and leather. I think they were the brightest eyes I ever saw—as keen and intelligent as a wicked old woman’s, withal as trustful and cheery as the eyes of a setter pup.
“Hoo-ray!”
Thus the Honorable Mr. Beasley, waving a handkerchief thrice around his head and thrice cheering.
And the child, in that cricket’s voice of his, replied:
“Br-r-ra-vo!”
This was the form of salutation familiarly in use between them. Beasley followed it by inquiring, “Who’s with us today?”
“I’m Mister Swift,” chirped the little fellow. “Mis-ter Swift, if you please, Cousin David Beasley.”
Beasley executed a formal bow. “There is a gentleman here who’d like to meet you.” And he presented me with some grave phrases commendatory of my general character, addressing the child as “Mister Swift”; whereupon Mister Swift gave me a ghostly little hand and professed himself glad to meet me.
“And besides me,” he added, to Beasley, “there’s Bill Hammersley and Mr. Corley