Beasleys Christmas Party | Page 2

The moon hung kindly above its level roof in the silence of that
October morning, as I checked my gait to loiter along the picket fence;
but suddenly the house showed a light of its own. The spurt of a match
took my eye to one of the upper windows, then a steadier glow of

orange told me that a lamp was lighted. The window was opened, and a
man looked out and whistled loudly.
I stopped, thinking that he meant to attract my attention; that something
might be wrong; that perhaps some one was needed to go for a doctor.
My mistake was immediately evident, however; I stood in the shadow
of the trees bordering the sidewalk, and the man at the window had not
seen me.
"Boy! Boy!" he called, softly. "Where are you, Simpledoria?"
He leaned from the window, looking downward. "Why, THERE you
are!" he exclaimed, and turned to address some invisible person within
the room. "He's right there, underneath the window. I'll bring him up."
He leaned out again. "Wait there, Simpledoria!" he called. "I'll be down
in a jiffy and let you in."
Puzzled, I stared at the vacant lawn before me. The clear moonlight
revealed it brightly, and it was empty of any living presence; there were
no bushes nor shrubberies--nor even shadows--that could have been
mistaken for a boy, if "Simpledoria" WAS a boy. There was no dog in
sight; there was no cat; there was nothing beneath the window except
thick, close-cropped grass.
A light shone in the hallway behind the broad front doors; one of these
was opened, and revealed in silhouette the tall, thin figure of a man in a
long, old-fashioned dressing-gown.
"Simpledoria," he said, addressing the night air with considerable
severity, "I don't know what to make of you. You might have caught
your death of cold, roving out at such an hour. But there," he continued,
more indulgently; "wipe your feet on the mat and come in. You're safe
NOW!"
He closed the door, and I heard him call to some one up-stairs, as he
rearranged the fastenings:
"Simpledoria is all right--only a little chilled. 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.