A Simpleton

C >> Charles Reade >> A Simpleton



I have something more to say about my hero and heroine, but must first
deal with other characters, not wholly uninteresting to the reader, I
hope.

Dr. Staines directed Phoebe Falcon how to treat her husband. No
medicine, no stimulants; very wholesome food, in moderation, and
the temperature of the body regulated by tepid water. Under these
instructions, the injured but still devoted wife was the real healer.
He pulled through, but was lame for life, and ridiculously lame, for he
went with a spring halt,--a sort of hop-and-go-one that made the girls
laugh, and vexed Adonis.

Phoebe found the diamonds, and offered them all to Staines, in expiation
of his villany. "See," she said, "he has only spent one."

Staines said he was glad of it, for her sake, for he must be just to his
own family. He sold them for three thousand two hundred pounds; but
for the big diamond he got twelve thousand pounds, and I believe it was
worth double the money.

Counting the two sums, and deducting six hundred for the stone Mr.
Falcon had embezzled, he gave her over seven thousand pounds.

She stared at him, and changed color at so large a sum. "But I have no
claim on that, sir."

"That is a good joke," said he. "Why, you and I are partners in the
whole thing--you and I and Dick. Was it not with his horse and rifle I
bought the big diamond? Poor dear, honest, manly Dick! No, the money is
honestly yours, Mrs. Falcon; but don't trust a penny to your husband."

"He will never see it, sir. I shall take him back, and give him all his
heart can ask for, with this; but he will be little more than a servant
in the house now, as long as Dick is single; I know that;" and she could
still cry at the humiliation of her villain.

Staines made her promise to write to him; and she did write him a sweet,
womanly letter, to say that they were making an enormous fortune, and
hoped to end their days in England. Dick sent his kind love and thanks.

I will add, what she only said by implication, that she was happy after
all. She still contrived to love the thing she could not respect. Once,
when an officious friend pitied her for her husband's lameness, she
said, "Find me a face like his. The lamer the better; he can't run after
the girls, like SOME."

Dr. Staines called on Lady Cicely Treherne; the footman stared. He left
his card.

A week afterwards, she called on him. She had a pink tinge in her
cheeks, a general animation, and her face full of brightness and
archness.

"Bless me!" said he bluntly, "is this you? How you are improved!"

"Yes," said she; "and I am come to thank you for your pwescwiption: I
followed it to the lettaa."

"Woe is me! I have forgotten it."

"You diwected me to mawwy a nice man."

"Never: I hate a nice man."

"No, no--an Iwishman: and I have done it."

"Good gracious! you don't mean that! I must be more cautious in my
prescriptions. After all, it seems to agree."

"Admiwably."

"He loves you?"

"To distwaction."

"He amuses you?"

"Pwodigiously. Come and see."


Dr. and Mrs. Staines live with Uncle Philip. The insurance money is
returned, but the diamond money makes them very easy. Staines follows
his profession now under great advantages: a noble house, rent free; the
curiosity that attaches to a man who has been canted out of a ship in
mid-ocean, and lives to tell it; and then Lord Tadcaster, married into
another noble house, swears by him, and talks of him; so does Lady
Cicely Munster, late Treherne; and when such friends as these are warm,
it makes a physician the centre of an important clientele; but his
best friend of all is his unflagging industry, and his truly wonderful
diagnosis, which resembles divination. He has the ball at his feet, and
above all, that without which worldly success soon palls, a happy home,
a fireside warm with sympathy.

Mrs. Staines is an admiring, sympathizing wife, and an admirable
housekeeper. She still utters inadvertencies now and then, commits new
errors at odd times, but never repeats them when exposed. Observing
which docility, Uncle Philip has been heard to express a fear that,
in twenty years, she will be the wisest woman in England. "But, thank
heaven!" he adds, "I shall be gone before that."

Her conduct and conversation afford this cynic constant food for
observation; and he has delivered himself oracularly at various stages
of the study: but I cannot say that his observations, taken as a whole,
present that consistency which entitles them to be regarded as a body
of philosophy. Examples: In the second month after Mrs. Staines came to
live with him, he delivered himself thus: "My niece Rosa is an anomaly.
She gives you the impression she is shallow. Mind your eye: in one
moment she will take you out of your depth or any man's depth. She is
like those country streams I used to fish for pike when I was young;
you go along, seeing the bottom everywhere; but presently you come to
a corner, and it is fifteen deep all in a moment, and souse you go over
head and ears: that's my niece Rosa."

In six months he had got to this--and, mind you, each successive dogma
was delivered in a loud, aggressive tone, and in sublime oblivion of the
preceding oracle--"My niece Rosa is the most artful woman. (You may haw!
haw! haw! as much as you like. You have not found out her little game--I
have.) What is the aim of all women? To be beloved by an unconscionable
number of people. Well, she sets up for a simpleton, and so disarms all
the brilliant people, and they love her. Everybody loves her. Just you
put her down in a room with six clever women, and you will see who is
the favorite. She looks as shallow as a pond, and she is as deep as the
ocean."

At the end of the year he threw off the mask altogether. "The great
sweetener of a man's life," said he, "is 'a simpleton.' I shall not go
abroad any more; my house has become attractive: I've got a simpleton.
When I have a headache, her eyes fill with tender concern, and she
hovers about me and pesters me with pillows: when I am cross with her,
she is afraid I am ill. When I die, and leave her a lot of money,
she will howl for months, and say I don't want his money: 'I
waw-waw-waw-waw-want my Uncle Philip, to love me, and scold me.' One
day she told me, with a sigh, I hadn't lectured her for a month. 'I am
afraid I have offended you,' says she, 'or else worn you out, dear.'
When I am well, give me a simpleton, to make me laugh. When I am
ill, give me a simpleton to soothe me with her innocent tenderness. A
simpleton shall wipe the dews of death, and close my eyes: and when I
cross the river of death, let me be met by a band of the heavenly host,
who were all simpletons here on earth, and too good for such a hole, so
now they are in heaven, and their garments always white--because there
are no laundresses there."

Arrived at this point, the Anglo-Saxon race will retire, grinning, to
fresh pastures, and leave this champion of "a Simpleton," to thunder
paradoxes in a desert.