I was worried by the talk I had overheard through the open door. "You
have behaved worse to others. I don't wonder at your shrinking from
showing your face here." Betty had, weeks ago, called him a devil. She
had treated him to-night in a manner which, if not justified, was
abominable. I was forced to the conclusion that Betty was fully aware
of some discreditable chapter in the man's life which had nothing to do
with the affair at Vilboek's Farm, which, indeed, had to do with
another woman and this humdrum little town of Wellingsford. Otherwise
why did she taunt him with hiding from the light of Wellingsfordian day?
Now, please don't think me little-minded. Or, if you do think so,
please remember the conditions under which I have lived for so many
years and grant me your kind indulgence for a confession I have to
make. Besides being worried, I felt annoyed. Wellingsford was my little
world. I knew everybody in it. I had grown to regard myself as the
repository of all its gossip. The fraction of it that I retailed was a
matter of calculated discretion. I made a little hobby--it was a
foible, a vanity, what you will--of my omniscience. I knew months ahead
the dates of the arrivals of young Wellingsfordians in this world of
pain and plenitude. I knew of maidens who were wronged and youths who
were jilted; of wives who led their husbands a deuce of a dance, and of
wives who kept their husbands out of the bankruptcy court. When young
Trexham, the son of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, married a minor
light of musical comedy at a registrar's office, I was the first person
in the place to be told; and I flatter myself that I was instrumental
in inducing a pig-headed old idiot to receive an exceedingly charming
daughter-in-law. I loved to look upon Wellingsford as an open book. Can
you blame me for my resentment at coming across, so to speak, a couple
of pages glued together? The only logical inference from Betty's remark
was that Boyce had behaved abominably and even notoriously to a woman
in Wellingsford. To do him justice, I declare I had never heard his
name associated with any woman or girl in the place save Betty herself.
I felt that, in some crooked fashion, or the other, I had been done out
of my rights.
And there, placidly smoking his cigar and watching the wreaths of blue
smoke with the air of an idle seraph contemplating a wisp of cirrus in
Heaven's firmament, sat the man who could have given me the word of the
enigma.
He broke the silence by saying:
"Have you ever seriously considered the real problems of the Balkans?"