"Mr. Duff Salter, I suppose you know where you are. Your hostesses are very insinuating and artful—and what else,you can find out! One man has been murdered in that family; another has disappeared. They say in Kensington the house of Zane is haunted.
"A Warner."
Podge read the note, and her tears dropped upon it. He moved forward as if to speak to her, but correcting himself hastily, he wrote upon the tablets:
"Not even a suspicious person is affected the least by an anonymous letter. I only keep it that possibly I may detect the sender!"
Duff Salter and the ladies were sitting in the back parlor one evening following the events just related, when the door-bell rang, and Podge Byerly went to see who was there. She soon returned and closed thedoor of the front parlor, leaving a little crack, by accident, and lighted the gas there.
"Aggy," whispered Podge, coming in, "there's Mr. Calvin Van de Lear, our future minister. He's elegantly dressed, and has a nosegay in his hand."
"Can't you entertain him, dear?"
"I would be glad enough, but he asked in a very decided way for you."
"For me?"
Agnes looked distressed.
"Yes; he said very distinctly, 'I called to pay my respects particularly to Miss Agnes to-night.'"
Agnes left the room, and Duff Salter and Podge were again together. Podge could hear plainly what was said in the front parlor, and partly see, by the brighter light there, the motions of the visitor and her friend. She wrote on Duff Salter's tablet, "A deaf man is a great convenience!"
"Why?" wrote the large, grave man.
"Because he can't hear what girls say to their beaux."
"Is that a beau calling on our beautiful friend?"
"I'm afraid so!"
"How do you feel when a beau comes?"
"We feel important."
"You don't feel grateful, then; only complimented."
"No; we feel that on one of two occasions we have the advantage over a man. We can play him like a big fish on a little angle."
"When is the other occasion?"
"Some women," wrote Podge, "play just the same with the man they marry!"
Duff Salter looked up surprised.
"Isn't that wrong?" he wrote.
She answered mischievously, "A kind of!"
The large, bearded man looked so exceedingly grave that Podge burst out laughing.
"Don't you know," she wrote, "that the propensity to plague a man dependent on you is inherent in every healthy woman?"
He wrote, "I do know it, and it's a crime!"
Podge thought to herself "This old man is dreadfully serious and suspicious sometimes."
As Duff Salter relapsed into silence, gazing on the fire, the voice of Calvin Van de Lear was heard by Podge, pitched in a low and confident key, from the parlor side:
"I called, Agnes, when I thought sufficient time had elapsed since the troubles here, to express my deep interest in you, and to find you, I hoped, with a disposition to turn to the sunny side of life's affairs."
"I am not ready to take more than a necessary part in anything outside of this house," replied Agnes. "My mind is altogether preoccupied. I thank you for your good wishes, Mr. Van de Lear."
"Now do be less formal," said the young man persuasively. "I have always been Cal. before—short and easy, Cal. Van de Lear.Youmight call me almost anything, Aggy."
"I have changed, sir. Our afflictions have taught me that I am no longer a girl."
"You won't call me Cal., then?"
"No, Mr. Van de Lear."
"I see how it is," exclaimed the visitor. "Youthink because I am studying for orders I must be looked up to. Aggy, that's got nothing to do with social things. When I take the governor's place in our pulpit I shall make my sermons for this generation altogether crack, sentimental sermons, and drive away dull care. That's my understanding of the good shepherd."
"Mr. Van de Lear, there are some cares so natural that they are almost consolation. Under the pressure of them we draw nearer to happiness. What merry words should be said to those who were bred under this roof in such misfortunes as I have now—as the absent have?"
Podge saw Agnes put her handkerchief to her face, and her neck shake a minute convulsively. Duff Salter here sneezed loudly: "Jericho! Jerichew! Je-ry-cho-o!" He produced a tortoise-shell snuff-box, and Podge took a pinch, for fun, and sneezed until the tears came to her eyes and her hair was shaken down. She wrote on the tablets,
"Men could eat dirt and enjoy it."
He replied, "At last dirt eats all the men."
"It's to get rid of them!" wrote Podge. "My boys at school are dirty by inclination. They will chew anything from a piece of India rubber shoe to slippery elm and liquorice root. One piece of liquorice will demoralize a whole class. They pass it around."
Duff Salter replied, "The boys must have something in their mouths; the girls in their heads!"
"But not liquorice root," added Podge.
"No; they put the boys in their heads!"
"Pshaw!" wrote Podge, "girls don't like boys. They like nice old men who will pet them."
Here Podge ran out of the room and the conversation in the front parlor was renewed. The voice of Calvin Van de Lear said:
"Agnes, looking at your affairs in the light of religious duty, as you seem to prefer, I must tell you that your actions have not always been perfect."
Nothing was said in reply to this.
"I am to be your pastor at some not distant day," spoke the same voice, "and may take some of that privilege now. As a daughter of the church you should give the encouragement of your beauty and favor only to serious, and approved, and moral young men. Not such scapegraces as Andrew Zane!"
"Sir!" exclaimed Agnes, rising. "How dare you speak of the poor absent one?"
"Sit down," exclaimed Calvin Van de Lear, not a bit discomposed. "I have some disciplinary power now, and shall have more. A lady in full communion with our church—a single woman without a living guardian—requires to hear the truth, even from an erring brother. You have no right to go outside the range at least of respectable men, to place your affections and bestow your beauty and religion on a particularly bad man—a criminal indeed—one already fled from this community, and under circumstances of the greatest suspicion. I mean Andrew Zane!"
"Hush!" exclaimed Agnes; "perhaps he is dead."
A short and awkward quiet succeeded, broken by young Van de Lear's interruption at last:
"Aggy, I don't know but it is the best thing. Is it so?"
"For shame, sir!"
"He wouldn't have come to any good. I know him well. We went to school together here in Kensington. Under a light and agreeable exterior he concealed an obstinacy almost devilish. All the tricks and daredevil feats we heard of, he was at the head of them. After he grew up his eyes fell on you. For a time he was soberer. Then, perceiving that you were also his father's choice, he conspired against his father, repeatedly absconded, and gave that father great trouble to find and return him to his home, and still stepped between Mr. Zane and his wishes. Was that the part of a grateful and obedient son?"
Not a word was returned by Agnes Wilt.
"How ill-advised," continued Calvin Van de Lear, "was your weakness during that behavior! Do you know what the tattle of all Kensington is? That you favored both the father and the son! That you declined the son only because his father might disinherit him, and put off the father because the son would have the longer enjoyment of his property! I have defended you everywhere on these charges. They say even more,MissAgnes—if you prefer it—that the murder of the father was not committed by Andrew Zane without an instigator, perhaps an accessory."
The voice of Agnes was heard in hasty and anxious imploration:
"For pity's sake, say no more. Be silent. Am I not bowed and wretched enough?"
She came hastily to the fissure of the door and lookedin, because Duff Salter just then sneezed tremendously:
"Jericho-o-o-o! Jer-ry-cho-o-o!"
Podge Byerly reappeared with a pack of cards and shuffled them before Duff Salter's face.
They sat down and played a game of euchre for a cent a point, the tablets at hand between them to write whatever was mindful. Duff Salter was the best player.
"I believe," wrote Podge, "that all Western men are gamblers. Are you?"
He wrote, to her astonishment,
"I was."
"Wasn't it a sin?"
"Not there."
"I thought gambling was a sin everywhere?"
"It is everywhere done," wrote Duff Salter. "You are a gambler."
"That's a fib."
"You risk your heart, capturing another's."
"My heart is gone," added Podge, blushing.
"What's his name?" wrote Duff Salter.
"That's telling."
Again the voices of the two people in the front parlor broke on Podge's ear:
"You must leave me, Mr. Van de Lear. You do not know the pain and wrong you are doing me."
"Agnes, I came to say I loved you. Your beauty has almost maddened me for years. Your resistance would give me anger if I had not hope left. I know you loved me once."
"Sir, it is impossible; it is cruel."
"Cruel to love you?" repeated the divinity student. "Come now, that's absurd! No woman is annoyed by an offer. I swear I love you reverently. I can put you at the head of this society—the wife of a clergyman. Busy tongues shall be stilled at your coming and going, and the shadow of this late tragedy will no more plague your reputation, protected in the bosom of the church and nestled in mine."
Sounds of a slight struggle were heard, as if the amorous young priest were trying to embrace Agnes.
Podge arose, listening.
The face of Duff Salter was stolid, and unconscious of anything but the game of cards.
"I tell you, sir!" exclaimed Agnes, "that your attentions are offensive. Will you force me to insult you?"
"Oh! that's all put on, my subtle beauty. You are not alarmed by these delicate endearments. Give me a kiss!"
"Calvin Van de Lear, you are a hypocrite. The gentleman you have slandered to win my favor is as dear to me as you are repulsive. Nay, sir, I'll teach you good behavior!"
She threw open the folding-doors just as Duff Salter had come to a terrific sneeze.
"Jericho! Jericho! Jer-rick-co-o-o-oh!"
Looking in with bold suavity, Calvin Van de Lear made a bow and took up his hat.
"Good-night," he said, "most reputable ladies, two of a kind!"
"I think," wrote Duff Salter frigidly, as the young man slammed the door behind him, "that we'll makea pitcher of port sangaree and have a little glass before we go to bed. We will all three take a hand at cards. What shall we play?"
"Euchre—cut-throat!" exclaimed Podge Byerly, rather explosively.
Duff Salter seemed to have heard this, for, with his grave eyes bent on Agnes, he echoed, dubiously:
"Cut-throat!"
With an impatient motion Podge Byerly snatched at the cards, and they fell to the floor.
Agnes burst into tears and left the room.
"Upon my word," thought Podge Byerly, "I believe this old gray rat is a detective officer!"
There was a shadow over the best residence on Queen Street.
Anonymous letters continued to come in almost by every mail, making charges and imputations upon Agnes, and frequently connecting Podge Byerly with her.
Terrible epithets—such as "Murderess!" "A second Mrs. Chapman!" "Jezebel," etc.—were employed in these letters.
Many of them were written by female hands or in very delicate male chirography, as if men who wrote like women had their natures.
There was one woman's handwriting the girls learned to identify, and she wrote more often than any—more beautifully in the writing, more shameless in the meaning, as if, with the nethermost experience in sensuality, she was prepared to subtleize it and be the universal accuser of her sex.
"What fiends must surround us!" exclaimed Agnes."There must be a punishment deeper than any for the writers of anonymous letters. A murderer strikes the vital spot but once. Here every commandment is broken in the cowardly secret letter. False witness, the stab, illicit joy, covetousness, dishonor of father and mother, and defamation of God's image in the heart, are all committed in these loathsome letters."
"Yes," added Podge Byerly, "the woman who writes anonymous letters, I think, will have a cancer, or wart on her eye, or marry a bow-legged man. The resurrectionists will get her body, and the primary class in the other world will play whip-top with the rest of her."
Agnes and Podge went to church prayer-meeting the night following Calvin Van de Lear's repulse at their dwelling, and Mr. Duff Salter gave each of them an arm.
Old Mr. Van de Lear led the exercises, and, after several persons had publicly prayed by the direction of the venerable pastor, Calvin Van de Lear, of his own motion and as a matter of course, took the floor and launched into a florid supplication almost too elegant to be extempore.
As he continued, Podge Byerly, looking through her fingers, saw a handsome, high-colored woman at Calvin's side, stealing glances at Agnes Wilt.
It was the wife of Calvin Van de Lear's brother, Knox—a blonde of large, innocent eyes, who usually came with Calvin to the church.
While Podge noticed this inquisitive or stray glance, she became conscious that something in the prayer was directing the attention of the whole meeting to their pew.
People turned about, and, with startled or bold looks, observed Agnes Wilt, whose head was bowed and her veil down.
The voice of Calvin Van de Lear sounded high and meaningful as Podge caught these sentences:
"Lord, smite the wicked and unjust as thou smotest Sapphira by the side of Ananias. We find her now in the mask of beauty, again of humility, even, O Lord, of religion, leading the souls of men down to death and hell. Thou knowest who stand before Thee to do lip service. All hearts are open to Thee. If there be any here who have deceived Thine elect by covetousness, or adultery, ormurder, Lord, make bare Thine arm!"
The rest of the sentence was lost in the terrific series of sneezes from Duff Salter, who had taken too big a pinch of snuff and forgot himself, so as to nearly lift the roof off the little old brick church with his deeply accentuated,
"Jer-i-cho-whoe!"
Even old Silas Van de Lear looked over the top of the pulpit and smiled, but, luckily, Duff Salter could hardly hear his own sneezes.
As they left the church Agnes put down her veil, and trembled under the stare of a hundred investigating critics.
When they were in the street, Podge Byerly remarked:
"Oh! that we had a man to resent such meanness as that. I think that those who address God with slant arrows to wound others, as is often done at prayer-meeting, will stand in perdition beside the writers of anonymous letters."
"They are driving me to the last point," said Agnes. "I can go to church no more. When will they get between me and heaven? Yet the Lord's will be done."
Spring broke on the snug little suburb, and buds and birds fulfilled their appointments on the boughs of willows, ailanthuses, lindens, and maples. Some peach-trees in the back yard of the Zane House hastened to put on their pink scarves and bonnets, and the boys said that an old sucker of Penn's Treaty Elm down in a ship-yard was fresh and blithsome as a second wife. In the hearts and views of living people, too, spring brought a budding of youthfulness and a gush of sap. Duff Salter acknowledged it as he looked in Podge Byerly's blue eyes and felt her hands as they wrapped his scarf around him, or buttoned his gloves. Whispering, and without the tablets this time, he articulated:
"Happy for you, Mischief, that I am not young as these trees!"
"We'll have you set out!" screamed Podge, "like a piece of hale old willow, and you'll grow again!"
Duff Salter frequently walked almost to her school with Podge Byerly, which was far down in the old city. They seldom took the general cut through Maiden and Laurel Streets to Second, but kept down the river bank by Beach Street, to see the ship-yards and hear the pounding of rivets and the merry adzes ringing,and see youngsters and old women gathering chips, while the sails on the broad river came up on wind and tide as if to shatter the pier-heads ere they bounded off.
In the afternoons Duff Salter sometimes called on Rev. Silas Van de Lear, who had great expectations that Duff would build them a much-required new church, with the highest spire in Kensington.
"Here, Brother Salter, is an historic spot," wrote the good old man. "I shouldn't object to a spire on my church, with the figure of William Penn on the summit. Friend William and his sons always did well by our sect."
"Is it an established fact that he treated with the Indians in Kensington?" asked Duff Salter, on his ivory tablets.
"Indisputable! Friend Penn took Thomas Fairman's house at Shackamaxon—otherwise Eel-Hole—and in this pleasant springtime, April 4, 1683, he met King Tammany under the forest elm, with the savage people in half-moon circles, looking at the healthy-fed and business-like Quaker. There Tammany and his Indian allies surrendered all the land between the Pennypack and Neshaminy."
"A Tammany haul!" interrupted young Calvin Van de Lear, rather idiotically. "What did the shrewd William give?"
"Guns, scissors, knives, tongs, hoes, and Indian money, and gew-gaws—not much. Philadelphia had no foundation then, and Shackamaxon was an established place. We are the Knickerbockers here in Kensington."
"An honest Quaker would not build a spire," wrote Duff Salter, with a grim smile.
Duff Salter was well known to the gossips of Kensington as a fabulously rich man, who had spent his youth partly in this district, and was of Kensington parentage, but had roved away to Mexico as a sailor boy, or clerk, or passenger, and refusing to return, had become a mule-driver in the mines of cinnabar, and there had remained for years in nearly heathen solitude, until once he arrived overland in Arkansas with a train from Chihuahua, the whole of it, as was said, laden with silver treasure, and his own property. He had been disappointed in love, and had no one to leave his riches to. This was the story told by Reverend Silas Van de Lear.
The people of Kensington were less concerned with the truth of this tale than with the future intentions of the visitor.
"How long he tarries in Zane's homestead!" said the people that spring. "Hasn't he settled that estate yet?"
"It never will be settled if he can help it," said public Echo, "as long as there are two fine young women there, and one of them so fascinating over men!"
Indeed, Duff Salter received letters, anonymous, of course—the anonymous letter was then the suburban press—admonishing him to beware of his siren hostess.
"She has ruined two men," said the elegant female handwriting before observed. "You must want to be the subject of a coroner's inquest. That house is bloody and haunted, rich Mr. Duff Salter! Beware of LadyAgnes, the murderess! Beware, too, of her accomplice, the insinuating little Byerly!"
Duff Salter walked out one day to make the tour of Kensington. He passed out the agreeable old Frankford road, with its wayside taverns, and hay carts, and passing omnibuses, and occasional old farm-like houses, interspersed with newer residences of a city character, and he strolled far up Cohocksink Creek till it meandered through billowy fields of green, and skirted the edges of woods, and all the way was followed by a path made by truant boys. Sitting down by a spring that gushed up at the foot of a great sycamore tree, the grandly bearded traveller, all flushed with the roses of exercise, made no unpleasing picture of a Pan waiting for Echo by appointment, or holding talk with the grazing goats of the poor on the open fields around him.
"How changed!" spoke the traveller aloud. "I have caught fishes all along this brook, and waded up its bed in summer to cool my feet. The girl was beside me whose slender feet in innocent exposure were placed by mine to shame their coarser mould. We thought we were in love, or as near it as are the outskirts to some throbbing town partly instinctive with a coming civic destiny. Alas! the little brook that once ran unvexed to the river, freshening green marshes at its outlet, has become a sewer, discolored with dyes of factories, and closed around by tenements and hovels till its purer life is over. My playmate, too, flowed on to womanhood, till the denser social conditions shut her in; she mingled the pure current of her life with another more turgid, and dull-eyed children, like houses of the suburbs, are builded on her bosom. I am alone, like this old tree, beside the spring where once I was a sapling, and still, like its waters, youth wells and wells, and keeps us yet both green in root. Come back, O Love! and freshen me, and, like a rill, flow down my closing years!"
Duff Salter's shoulder was touched as he ceased to speak, and he found young Calvin Van de Lear behind him.
"I have followed you out to the country," said the young man, howling in the elder's ear, "because I wanted to talk to you aloud, as I couldn't do in Kensington."
Duff Salter drew his storied ivory tablets on the divinity student, and said, crisply, "Write!"
"No, old man, that's not my style. It's too slow. Besides, it admits of nothing impressive being said, and I want to convince you."
"Jericho! Jericho!" sneezed Duff Salter. "Young man, if you stun my ear that way a third time I'll knock you down. I'm deaf, it's true, but I'm not a hallooing scale to try your lungs on. If you won't write, we can't talk."
With impatience, yet smiling, Calvin Van de Lear wrote on the tablets,
"Have you seen the ghost?"
"Ghost?"
"Yes, the ghosts of the murdered men!"
"I never saw a ghost of anything in my life. What men?"
"William Zane and Sayler Rainey."
"Who has seen them?"
"Several people. Some say it's but one that has been seen. Zane's ghost walks, anyway, in Kensington."
"What for?"
"The fishwomen and other superstitious people say, because their murderers have not been punished."
"And the murderers are—"
"Those who survived and profited by the murder, of course?"
"Jer-ri-choo-woo!" exploded Duff Salter. "Young man," he wrote deliberately, "you have an idle tongue."
"Friend Salter, you are blind as well as deaf. Do you know Miss Podge Byerly?"
"No. Do you?"
"She's common! Agnes Wilt uses her as a stool-pigeon. She fetches, and carries, and flies by night. One of the school directors shoved her on the public schools for intimate considerations. Perhaps you'll see him about the house if you look sharp and late some night."
"Jer-rich-co! Jericho!"
Duff Salter was decidedly red in the face, and his grave gray eyes looked both fierce and convicted. Hehadseen a school director visiting the house, but thought it natural enough that he should take a kind interest in one of the youthful and pretty teachers. The deaf man returned to his pencil and tablets.
"Do you know, Mr. Van de Lear, that what you are saying is indictable language? It would have exposed you to death where I have lived."
The young man tossed his head recklessly. DuffSalter now saw that his usually sallow face was flushed up to the roots of his long dry hair and almost colorless whiskers, as if he had been drinking liquors. Forgetting to use the tablets, Calvin spoke aloud, but not in as high a key as formerly:
"Mr. Salter, Agnes Wilt has no heart. She was a step-niece of the late Mrs. Zane—her brother's daughter. The girl's father was a poor professional man, and died soon after his child was born, followed at no great distance to the grave by his widow. While a child, Agnes was cold and subtle. She professed to love me—that was the understanding in our childhood. She has forgotten me as she has forgotten many other men. But she is beautiful, and I want to marry her. You can help me."
"What do you want with a cold and calculating woman?" wrote Duff Salter stiffly. "What do you want particularly with such a dangerous woman—a demon, as you indicate?"
"I want to save her soul, and retrieve her from wickedness. Upon my word, old man, that's my only game. You see, to effect that object would set me up at once with the church people. I'm told that a little objection to my prospects in the governor's church begins to break out. If I can marry Agnes Wilt, she will recover her position in Kensington, and make me more welcome in families. I don't mind telling you that I have been a little gay."
"That's nothing," wrote Duff Salter smilingly. "So were the sons of Eli."
"Correct!" retorted Calvin. "I need a taming down, and only matrimony can do it. Now, withyour aid I can manage it. Miss Wilt does not fancy me. She can be made to do so, however, by two causes."
"And they are—"
"Her fears and her avarice. I propose to bring this murder close home to her. If not a principal in it, she is an undoubted accessory after the fact. Andrew Zane paid her a visit the night the dead bodies were discovered in the river."
"You are sure of this?"
"Perfectly. I have had a detective on his track; too late to arrest the rascal, but the identity of a sailor man who penetrated into the house by the coal-hole is established by the discovery of the clothing he exchanged for that disguise—it was Andrew Zane. Concealment of that fact from the law will make her an accessory."
"Jericho! Jericho!" sneezed Duff Salter, but with a pale face, and said:
"That fact established would be serious; but it would be a gratuitous and vile act for you, who profess to love her."
"It is love that prompts me—love and pain! A divine anger, I may call it. I propose to make myself her rescuer afterward, and establish myself in her gratitude and confidence. You are to help me do this by watching the house from the inside."
"Dishonorable!"
"You were the friend of William Zane, the murdered man. Every obligation of friendship impels you to discover his murderer. You are rich; lend me money to continue my investigations. I know this isa cool proposition; but it is better than spending it on churches."
"Very well," wrote Duff Salter, "as the late Mr. Zane's executor, I will spend any proper sum of money to inflict retribution upon his injurers. I will watch the house."
They went home through Palmer Street, on which stood the little brick church—the street said to be occasionally haunted by Governor Anthony Palmer's phantom coach and four, which was pursued by his twenty-one children in plush breeches and Panama hats, crying, "Water lots! water fronts! To let! to lease!"
As Duff Salter entered the house he saw the school director indicated by Calvin Van de Lear sitting in the parlor with Podge Byerly. For the first time Duff Salter noticed that they looked both intimate and confused. He tried to reason himself out of this suspicion. "Pshaw," he said; "it was my uncharitable imagination. I'll go back, as if to get something, and look more carefully."
As the deaf man reopened the parlor-door he saw the school director making a motion as if to embrace Podge, who was full of blushes and appearing to shrink away.
"There's no imagination about that," thought Duff Salter. "If I could only hear well enough my ears might counsel me."
He felt dejected, and his suspicions colored everything—a most deplorable state of mind for a gentleman. Agnes, too, looked guilty, as he thought, and hardly addressed a smile to him as he passed up to his room.
Duff Salter put on his slippers, lighted his gas, drew the curtains down and set the door ajar, for in the increasing warmth of spring his grate fire was almost an infliction.
"I have not been wise nor just," he said to himself. "My pleasing reception in this house, and feminine arts, have altogether obliterated my great duty, which was to avenge my friend. Yes, suspicion was my duty. I should have been suspicious from the first. Even this vicious young Van de Lear, shallow as he is, becomes my unconscious accuser. He says, with truth, that every obligation of friendship impels me to discover the murderers of William Zane."
Duff Salter arose, in the warmth of his feelings, and paced up and down the floor.
"Ah, William Zane," he said, "how does thy image come back to me! I was the only friend he would permit. In pride of will and solitary purpose he was the greatest of all. Rough, unpolished, a poor scholar, but full of energy, he desired nothing but he believed it his. He desired me to be his friend, and I could not have resisted if I would. He made me go with him even on his truant expeditions, and carry his game bag along the banks of the Tacony, or up the marshes of Rancocus. Yet it was a happy servitude; for beneath his impetuous mastery was a soul of devotion. He loved like Jove, and permitted no interposition in his flame; his dogmatism and force were barbarous, but he gave like a child and fought like a lion. I saw him last as he was about to enter on business, in the twenty-first year of his age, an anxious young man with black hair in natural ringlets, a pale brow, gray eyes wideapart, and a narrow but wilful chin. He was ever on pivot, ready to spring. And murdered!"
Duff Salter looked at the door standing ajar, attracted there by some movement, or light, or shadow, and the very image he was describing met his gaze. There were the black ringlets, the pale forehead, the anxious yet wilful expression, and the years of youthful manhood. It was nothing in this world if not William Zane!
Duff Salter felt paralyzed for a minute, as the blood flowed back to his heart, and a sense of fright overcame him. Then he moved forward on tip-toe, as if the image might dissolve. It did dissolve as he advanced; with a tripping motion it receded and left a naked space. In the darkness of the stairway it absorbed itself, and the deaf man grasped the balustrade where it had stood, and by his trembling shook the rails violently. He then staggered back to his mantel, first bolting the door, as if instinctively, and swallowed a draught of brandy from a medicinal bottle there.
"There is a ghost abroad!" exclaimed Duff Salter with a shudder. "I have seen it."
He turned the gas on very brightly, so as to soothe his fears with companionable light. Then, while the perspiration stood upon his forehead, Duff Salter sat down to think.
"Why does it haunt me?" he said. "Yet whom but me should it haunt?—the executor of my friend, intrusted with his dying wishes, bound to him by ancient ties, and recreant to the high duty of punishing his murderers? The ghost of William Zane admonishes me that there can be no repose for my spirit until Itake in hand the work of vengeance. Yes, if women have been accessory to that murder, they shall not be spared. Miss Agnes is under surveillance; let her be blameless, or beware!"
"He looks scared out of last year's growth," remarked Podge Byerly when Duff Salter came down-stairs next day.
"Happy for him, dear, he is not able to hear what is around him in this place!" exclaimed Agnes aloud.
They always talked freely before their guest, and he could scarcely be alarmed even by an explosion.
Duff wrote on his tablets during breakfast:
"I must employ a smart man to do errands for me, and rid me of some of the burdens of this deafness. Do you know of any one?"
"A mere laborer?" inquired Agnes.
"Well, an old-fashioned, still-mouthed fellow like myself—one who can understand my dumb motions."
Agnes shook her head.
Said Duff Salter to himself:
"She don't want me to find such an one, I guess." Then, with the tablets again, he added, "It's necessary for me to hunt a man at once, and keep him here on the premises, close by me. I have almost finished up this work of auditing and clearing the estate. I intend now to pay some attention to the tragedy, accident, or whatever it was, that led to Mr. Zane's cutting off. You will second me warmly in this, I am sure."
Agnes turned pale, and felt the executor's eyes upon her.
Podge Byerly was pale too.
Duff Salter did not give them any opportunity to recover composure.
"To leave the settlement of this estate with such a cloud upon it would be false to my trust, to my great friend's memory, and, I may add, to all here. There is a mystery somewhere which has not been pierced. It is very probably a domestic entanglement. I shall expect you (to Agnes), and you, too," turning to Podge, "to be absolutely frank with me. Miss Agnes, have you seen Andrew Zane since his father's body was brought into this house!"
Agnes looked around helplessly and uncertain. She took the tablets to write a reply. Something seemed to arise in her mind to prevent the intention. She burst into tears and left the table.
"Ha!" thought Duff Salter grimly, "there will be no confession there. Then, little Miss Byerly, I will try to throw off its guard thy saucy perversity; for surely these two women understand each other."
After breakfast he followed Podge Byerly down Queen Street and through Beach, and came up with her as she went out of Kensington to the Delaware water-front about the old Northern Liberties district.
Duff bowed with a little of diffidence amid all his gravity, and sneezed as if to hide it:
"Jericho!—Miss Podge, see the time—eight o'clock, and an hour before school. Let us go look at the river."
They walked out on the wharf, and were wholly concealed from shore by piles of cord-wood and staves.
"I like to get off here, away from listeners, where I need not be bellowed at and tire out well-meaning lungs. Now—Jericho! Jericho!" he sneezed, without any sort of meaning. "Miss Podge," said Duff Salter, "if you look directly into my eyes and articulate distinctly, I can hear all you say without raising your voice higher than usual. How much money do you get for school teaching?"
"Five hundred dollars."
"Is that all? What do you do with it?"
"Support my mother and brother."
"And yourself also?"
"Oh! yes."
"She can't do it!" exclaimed Duff Salter inwardly; "that director comes in the case. Miss Podge, how old is your brother?"
"Twenty-four. He's my junior," she said archly. "I'm old."
"Why do you support a man twenty-four years old? Did he meet with an accident?"
"He was taken sick, and will never be well," answered Podge warily.
"Excuse me!" exclaimed Duff Salter, "was it constitutional disease? You know I am interested."
"No, sir. He was misled. A woman, much older than himself, infatuated him while a boy, and he married her, and she broke his health and ruined him."
Podge's eyes fell for the first time.
Duff Salter grasped her hand.
"And you tell me!" he exclaimed, "that you keepthree grown people on five hundred dollars a year? Don't you get help from any other quarter?"
"Agnes has given me board for a hundred dollars a year," said Podge, "but times have changed with her now, and money is scarce. She would take other boarders, but public opinion is against her on all sides. It's against me too. But for love we would have separated long ago."
Podge's tears came.
"What right had you," exclaimed Duff Salter, rather angrily, "to maintain a whole family on the servitude of your young body, wearing its roundness down to bone, exciting your nervous system, and inviting premature age upon a nature created for a longer girlhood, and for the solace of love?"
She did not feel the anger in his tones; it seemed like protection, for which she had hungered.
"Why, sir, all women must support their poor kin."
"Men don't do it!" exclaimed Duff Salter, pushing aside his gray apron of beard to see her more distinctly. "Did that brother who rushed in vicious precocity to maintain another and a wicked woman ever think of relieving you from hard labor?"
"He never could be anything less to me than brother!" exclaimed Podge; "but, Mr. Salter, if that was only all I had to trouble me! Oh, sir, work is occupation, but work harassed with care for others becomes unreal. I cannot sleep, thinking for Agnes. I cannot teach, my head throbs so. That river, so cold and impure, going along by the wharves, seems to suck and plash all day in my ears, as we see and hear it now. At my desk I seem to see those low shores and woodsand marshes, on the other side, and the chatter of children, going all day, laps and eddies up like dirty waves between me and that indistinct boundary. I am floating on the river current, drowning as I feel, reaching out for nothing, for nothing is there. All day long it is so. I was the best teacher in my rank, with certainty of promotion. I feel that I am losing confidence. It is the river, the river, and has been so since it gave up those dead bodies to bring us only ghosts and desolation."
"It was a faithful witness," spoke Duff Salter, still harsh, as if under an inner influence. "Yes, a boy—a little boy such as you teach at school—had the strength to break the solid shield of ice under which the river held up the dead and bring the murder out. Do you ever think of that as you hear a spectral river surge and buoy upward, whose waves are made by children's murmurs—innocent children haunting the guilty?"
"Do you mean me, Mr. Salter? Nothing haunts me but care."
"I have been haunted by a ghost," continued Duff Salter. "Yes, the ghost of my playmate has come to my threshold and peeped on me sitting there inattentive to his right to vengeance. We shall all be haunted till we give our evidence for the dead. No rest will come till that is done."
"I must go," cried Podge Byerly. "You terrify me."
"Tell me," asked Duff Salter in a low tone, "has Andrew Zane been seen by Agnes Wilt since he escaped?"
"Don't ask me."
"Tell me, and I will give you a sum of money which shall get you rest for years. Open your mind to me, and I will send you to Europe. Your brother shall be my brother; your invalid mother will receive abundant care. I will even ask you to love me!"
An instant's blushes overspread Podge's worn, pale face, and an expression of restful joy. Then recurring indignation made her pale again to the very roots of her golden hair.
"Betray my friend!" she exclaimed. "Never, till she will give me leave."
"I have lost my confidence in you both," said Duff Salter coldly, releasing Podge's arm. "You have been so indifferent in the face of this crime and public opinion as to receive your lovers in the very parlor where my dead friend lay. Agnes has admitted it by silence. I have seen your lover releasing you from his arms. Miss Byerly, I thought you artless, even in your arts, and only the dupe, perhaps, of a stronger woman. I hoped that you were pure. You have made me a man of suspicion and indifference again." His face grew graver, yet unbelieving and hard.
Podge fled from his side with alarm; he saw her handkerchief staunching her tears, and people watching her as she nearly ran along the sidewalk.
"Jericho! Jerichoo! Jer—"
Duff Salter did not finish the sneeze, but with a long face called for a boat and rower to take him across to Treaty Island.
Podge arrived at school just as the bell was ringing, and, still in nervousness and tears, took her place in her division while the Bible was read. She saw the principal's eye upon her as she took off her bonnet and moistened her face, and the boys looked up a minute or two inquiringly, but soon relapsed to their individual selfishness. When the glass sashes dividing the rooms were closed and the recitations began, the lapping sound of the river started anew. A film grew on her eyes, and in it appeared the distant Jersey and island shore, with the uncertain boundary of point, cove, and marsh, like a misty cold line, cheerless and void of life or color, as it was every day, yet standing there as if it merely came of right and was the river's true border, and was not to be hated as such. Podge strained to look through the illusion, and walked down the aisle once, where it seemed to be, and touched the plaster of the wall. She had hardly receded when it reappeared, and all between it and her mind was merely empty river, wallowing and lapping and sucking and subsiding, as if around submerged piers, or wave was relieving wave from the weight of floating things like rafts, or logs, or buoys, or bodies. Into this wide waste of muddy ripples every sound in the school-room swam, and also sights and colors, till between her eye-lash and that filmy distant margin nothing existed but a freshet, alive yet with nothing, eddying around with purposeless power, and still moving onward with an under force. The open book in her hand appeared like a great white wharf, or pier, covered with lime and coal in spots and places, and pushed forward into this hissing, rippling, exclaiming deluge, which washed its base and spread beyond. Podge could barely read a question in the book, and the sound of her voice was like gravel or sand pushed off the wharf into the river and swallowedthere. She thought she heard an answer in a muddy tone and gave the question out again, and there seemed to be laughter, as if the waters, or what was drowned in them, chuckled and purled, going along. She raised her eyes above the laughers, and there the boundary line of Jersey stood defined, and all in front of it was the drifting Delaware. It seemed to her that boys were darting to and fro and swapping seats, and one boy had thrown a handful of beans. She walked down the aisle as if into water, wading through pools and waves of boys, who plashed and gurgled around her. She walked back again, and a surf of boys was thrown at her feet. The waters rose and licked and spilled and flowed onward again. Podge felt a sense of strangling, as if going down, in a hollow gulf of resounding wave, and shouted:
"Help! Save me! Save me!"
She heard a voice like the principal teacher's, say in a lapping, watery way, "Miss Byerly, what is the meaning of this? Your division is in disorder. Nobody has recited. Unless you are ill I must suspend you and call another teacher here."
"Help! I'm floating off upon the river. Save me! I drown! I drown!"
The scholars were all up and excited. The principal motioned another lady teacher to come, and laid Podge's head in the other's lap.
"Is it brain fever?" he asked.
"She has been under great excitement," Podge heard the other lady say. "The Zane murder occurred in her family. Last night, I have been told, Miss Byerly refused Mr. Bunn, our principal schooldirector, and a man of large means, who had long been in love with her."
"Where is he?" said the principal.
"I heard it from his sister," said the other lady. "Mortified at her refusal, because confident that she would accept him, he sailed this day for Europe."
These were the last words Podge Byerly heard. Then it seemed that the waters closed over her head.
Agnes, left alone in the homestead, had a few days of perfect relief, except from anonymous letters and newspaper clippings delivered by mail. That refined handwriting which had steadily poured out the venom of some concealed hostility survived all other correspondence—delicate as the graceful circles of the tiniest fish-hooks whose points and barbs enter deepest in the flesh.
"Whom can this creature be?" asked Agnes, bringing up her strong mind from its trouble. "I can have made no such bitter enemy by any act of mine. A man would hardly pursue so light a purpose with such stability. There is more than jealousy in it; it is sincere hate, drawn, I should think, from a deep social or mental resentment, and enraged because I do not sink under my troubles. Yes, this must be a woman who believes me innocent but wishes my ruin. Some one, perhaps, who is sinning unsuspected, and, in her envy of another and purer one, gloats in the scandal which does not justly stain me. The anonymous letter," thought Agnes, "is a malignant form of conscience, after all!"
But life, as it was growing to be in the Zane house,was hardly worth living. Podge Byerly was broken down and dangerously ill at her mother's little house. All of Agnes's callers had dropped off, and she felt that she could no longer worship, except as a show, at Van de Lear's church; but this deprivation only deepened Agnes's natural devotion. Duff Salter saw her once, and oftener heard her praying, as the strong wail of it ascending through the house pierced even his ears.
"That woman," said Duff, "is wonderfully armed; with beauty, courage, mystery, witchery, she might almost deceive a God."
The theory that the house was haunted confirmed the other theory that a crime rested upon its inmates.
"Why should there be a ghost unless there had been a murder?" asked the average gossip and Fishtowner, to whom the marvellous was certain and the real to be inferred from it. Duff Salter believed in the ghost, as Agnes was satisfied; he had become unsocial and suspicious in look, and after two or three days of absence from the house, succeeding Podge's disappearance, entered it with his new servant.
Agnes did not see the servant at all for some days, though knowing that he had come. The cook said he was an accommodating man, ready to help her at anything, and of no "airs." He entered and went, the cook said, by the back gate, always wiped his feet at the door, and appeared like a person of not much "bringing up." One day Agnes had to descend to the kitchen, and there she saw a strange man eating with the cook; a rough person with a head of dark red hair and grayish red beard all round his mouth andunder his chin. She observed that he was one-legged, and used a common wooden crutch on the side of the wooden leg. Two long scars covered his face, and one shaggy eyebrow was higher than the other.
"I axes your pardon," said the man; "me and cook takes our snack when we can, mum."
A day or two after Agnes passed the same man again at the landing on the stairway. He bowed, and said in his Scotch or Irish dialect,
"God bless ye, mum!"
Agnes thought to herself that she had not given the man credit for a certain rough grace which she now perceived, and as she turned back to look at him he was looking at her with a fixed, incomprehensible expression.
"Am I being watched?" thought Agnes.
One day, in early June, as Agnes entered the parlor, she found Reverend Silas Van de Lear there. At the sight of this good old man, the patriarch of Kensington, by whom she had been baptized and received into the communion, Agnes Wilt felt strongly moved, the more that in his eyes was a regard of sympathy just a little touched with doubt.
"My daughter!" exclaimed the old man, in his clear, practised articulation, "you are daily in my prayers!"
The tears came to Agnes, and as she attempted to wipe them away the good old gentleman drew her head to his shoulder.
"I cannot let myself think any evil of you, dear sister, in God's chastising providence," said the clergyman. "Among the angels, in the land that is awaitingme, I had expected to see the beautiful face which has so often encouraged my preaching, and looked up at me from Sabbath-school and church. You do not come to our meetings any more. My dear, let us pray together in your affliction."
The old man knelt in the parlor and raised his voice in prayer—a clear, considerate, judicial, sincere prayer, such as age and long authority gave him the right to address to heaven. He was not unacquainted with sorrow himself; his children had given him much concern, and even anguish, and in Calvin was his last hope. A thread of wicked commonplace ran through them all; his sterling nature in their composition was lost like a grain of gold in a mass of alloy. They had nothing ideal, no reverence, no sense of delicacy. Taking to his arms a face and form that pleased him, the minister had not ingrafted upon it one babe of any divinity; that coarser matrix received the sacred flame as mere mud extinguishes the lightning. He fell into this reminiscence of personal disappointment unwittingly, as in the process of his prayer he strove to comfort Agnes. The moment he did so the cold magistracy of the prayer ceased, and his voice began to tremble, and there ran between the ecclesiastic and his parishioner the electric spark of mutual grief and understanding.
The old man hesitated, and became choked with emotion.
As he stopped, and the pause was prolonged, Agnes herself, by a powerful inner impulsion, took up the prayer aloud, and carried it along like inspiration. She was not of the strong-minded type of women, ratherof the wholly loving; but the deep afflictions of the past few months, working down into the crevices and cells of her nature, had struck the impervious bed of piety, and so deluged it with sorrow and the lonely sense of helplessness that now a cry like an appeal to judgment broke from her, not despair nor accusation, but an appeal to the very equity of God.
It arose so frankly and in such majesty, finding its own aptest words by its unconscious instinct, that the aged minister was presently aware of a preternatural power at his side. Was this woman a witch, genius, demon, or the very priestess of God, he asked.
The solemn prayer ranged into his own experience by that touch of nature which unlocks the secret spring of all, being true unto its own deep needs. The minister was swept along in the resistless current of the prayer, and listened as if he were the penitent and she the priest. As the petition died away in Agnes's physical exhaustion, the venerable man thought to himself:
"When Jacob wrestled all night at Peniel, his angel must have been a woman like this; for she has power with God and with men!"
Calvin Van de Lear had been up-stairs with Duff Salter, and on his way out had heard the voice of Agnes Wilt praying. He slipped into the back parlor and listened at the crevice of the folding-door until his father had given the pastoral benediction and departed. Then with cool effrontery Calvin walked into the frontparlor, where Agnes was sitting by the slats of the nearly darkened window.
"Pardon me, Agnes," he said. "I was calling on the deaf old gentleman up-stairs, and perceiving that devotions were being conducted here, stopped that I might not interrupt them."
Calvin's commonplace nature had hardly been dazed by Agnes's prayer. He was only confirmed in the idea that she was a woman of genius, and would take half the work of a pastor off his hands. In the light of both desire and convenience she had, therefore, appreciated in his eyes. To marry her, become the proprietor of her snug home and ravishing person, and send her off to pray with the sick and sup with the older women of the flock, seemed to him such a comfortable consummation as to have Heaven's especial approval. Thus do we deceive ourselves when the spirit of God has departed from us, even in youth, and construe our dreams of selfishness to be glimmerings of a purer life.
Calvin was precocious in assurance, because, in addition to being unprincipled, he was in a manner ordained by election and birthright to rule over Kensington. His father had been one of those strong-willed, clear-visioned, intelligent young Eastern divinity students who brought to a place of more voluptuous and easy burgher society the secular vigor of New England pastors. Being always superior and always sincere, his rule had been ungrumblingly accepted. Another generation, at middle age, found him over them as he had been over their parents—a righteous, intrepid Protestant priest, good at denunciation, counsel, humor, or sympathy. The elders and deacons never thought ofobjecting to anything after he had insisted upon it, and in this spirit the whole church had heard submissively that Calvin Van de Lear was to be their next pastor. This, of course, was conditional upon his behavior, and all knew that his father would be the last man to impose an injurious person on the church; they had little idea that "Cal." Van de Lear was devout, but took the old man's word that grace grew more and more in the sons of the Elect, and the young man had already professed "conviction," and voluntarily been received into the church. There he assumed, like an heir-apparent, the vicarship of the congregation, and it rather delighted his father that his son so promptly and complacently took direction of things, made his quasi pastoral rounds, led prayer-meetings, and exhorted Sunday-schools and missions. A priest knows the heart of his son no more than a king, and is less suspicious of him. The king's son may rebel from deferred expectation; the priest's son can hardly conspire against his father's pulpit. In the minister's family the line between the world and the faith is a wavering one; religion becomes a matter of course, and yet is without the mystery of religion as elsewhere, so that wife and sons regard ecclesiastical ambition as meritorious, whether the heart be in it piously or profanely. Calvin Van de Lear was in the church fold of his own accord, and his father could no more read that son's heart than any other member's. Indeed, the good old man was especially obtuse in the son's case, from his partiality, and thus grew up together on the same root the flower of piety and hypocrisy, the tree and the sucker.
"Calvin," replied Agnes, "I do not object to your necessary visits here. Your father is very dear to me."
"But can't I return to the subject we last talked of?" asked the young man, shrewdly.
"No. That is positively forbidden."
"Agnes," continued Calvin, "you must know I love you!"
Agnes sank to her seat again with a look of resignation.
"Calvin," she said, "this is not the time. I am not the person for such remarks. I have just risen from my knees; my eyes are not in this world."
"You will be turning nun if this continues."
"I am in God's hands," said Agnes. "Yet the hour is dark with me."
"Agnes, let me lift some of your burden upon myself. You don't hate me?"
"No. I wish you every happiness, Calvin."
"Is there nothing you long for—nothing earthly and within the compass of possibility?"
"Yes, yes!" Agnes arose and walked across the floor almost unconsciously, with the palms of her hands held high together above her head. As she walked to and fro the theological student perceived a change so extraordinary in her appearance since his last visit that he measured her in his cool, worldly gaze as a butcher would compute the weight of a cow on chance reckoning.
"What is it, dear Agnes?"
He spoke with a softness of tone little in keeping with his unfeeling, vigilant face.
"Oh, give me love! Now, if ever, it is love! Love only, that can lift me up and cleanse my soul!"
"Love lies everywhere around you," said the young man. "You trample it under your feet. My heart—many hearts—have felt the cruel treatment. Agnes,youmust love also."
"I try to do so," she exclaimed, "but it is not the perfect love that casteth out fear! God knows I wish it was."
Her eyes glanced down, and a blush, sudden and deep, spread over her features. The young man lost nothing of all this, but with alert analysis took every expression and action in.
"May I become your friend if greater need arises, Agnes? Do not repulse me. At the worst—I swear it!—I will be your instrument, your subject."
Agnes sat in the renewed pallor of profound fear. God, on whom she had but a moment before called, seemed to have withdrawn His face. Her black ringlets, smoothed upon her noble brow in wavy lines, gave her something of a Roman matron's look; her eyebrows, dark as the eyes beneath that now shrank back yet shone the larger, might have befitted an Eastern queen. Lips of unconscious invitation, and features produced in their wholeness which bore out a character too perfect not to have lived sometime in the realms of the great tragedies of life, made Agnes in her sorrow peerless yet.
"Go, Calvin!" she said, with an effort, her eyes still upon the floor; "if you would ever do me any aid, go now!"
As he passed into the passageway Calvin Van deLear ran against a man with a crutch and a wooden leg, who looked at him from under a head of dark-red hair, and in a low voice cursed his awkwardness. The man bent to pick up his crutch, and Calvin observed that he was badly scarred and had one eyebrow higher than the other.
"Who are you, fellow?" asked Calvin, surprised.
"I'm Dogcatcher!" said the man. "When ye see me coming, take the other side of the street."
Calvin felt cowed, not so much at these mysterious words as at a hard, lowering look in the man's face, like especial dislike.
Agnes Wilt, still sitting in the parlor, saw the lame servant pass her door, going out, and he looked in and touched his hat, and paused a minute. Something graceful and wistful together seemed to be in his bearing and countenance.
"Anything for me?" asked Agnes.
"Nothing at all, mum! When there's nobody by to do a job, call on Mike."
He still seemed to tarry, and in Agnes's nervous condition a mysterious awe came over her; the man's gaze had a dread fascination that would not let her drop her eyes. As he passed out of sight and shut the street door behind him Agnes felt a fainting feeling, as if an apparition had looked in upon her and vanished—the apparition, if of anything, of him who had lain dead in that very parlor—the stern, enamored master of the house whose fatherhood in a fateful moment had turned to marital desire, and crushed the luck of all the race of Zanes.
Duff Salter was sitting at his writing table, with anopen snuff-box before him, and, as Calvin Van de Lear entered his room, Duff took a large pinch of snuff and shoved the tablets forward. Calvin wrote on them a short sentence. As Duff Salter read it he started to his feet and sneezed with tremendous energy:
"Jeri-cho! Jericho! Jerry-cho-o-o!"
He read the sentence again, and whispered very low:
"Can't you be mistaken?"
"As sure as you sit there!" wrote Calvin Van de Lear.
"What is your inference?" wrote Duff Salter.
"Seduction!"
The two men looked at each other silently a few minutes, Duff Salter in profound astonishment, Calvin Van de Lear with an impudent smile.
"And so religious!" wrote Duff Salter.
"That is always incidental to the condition," answered Calvin.
"It must be a great blow to your affection?"
"Not at all," scrawled the minister's son. "It gives me a sure thing."
"Explain that!"
"I will throw the marriage mantle over her. She will need me now!"
"But you would not take a wife out of such a situation?"
"Oh! yes. She will be as handsome as ever, and only half as proud."
Duff Salter walked up and down the floor and stroked his long beard, and his usually benevolent expression was now dark and ominous, as if with gloom and anger. He spoke in a low tone as if not awarethat he was heard, and his voice sounded as if he also did not hear it, and could not, therefore, give it pitch or intonation:
"Is this the best of old Kensington? This is the East! Where I dreamed that life was pure as the water from the dear old pump that quenched my thirst in boyhood—not bitter as the alkali of the streams of the plains, nor turbid like the rills of the Arkansas. I pined to leave that life of renegades, half-breeds, squaws, and nomads to bathe my soul in the clear fountains of civilization,—to live where marriage was holy and piety sincere. I find, instead, mystery, blood, dishonor, hypocrisy, and shame. Let me go back! The rough frontier suits me best. If I can hear so much wickedness, deaf as I am, let me rather be an unsocial hermit in the woods, hearing nothing lower than thunder!"
As Duff Salter went to his dinner that day he looked at Agnes sitting in her place, so ill at ease, and said to himself,
"It is true."
Another matter of concern was on Mr. Duff Salter's mind—his serving-man. Such an unequal servant he had never seen—at times full of intelligence and snap, again as dumb as the bog-trotters of Ireland.
"What was the matter with you yesterday?" asked the deaf man of Mike one day.
"Me head, yer honor!"
"What ails your head?"
"Vare-tigo!"
"How came that?"
"Falling out of a ship!"
"What did you strike but water?"
"Wood; it nearly was the death of me. For weeks I was wid a cracked head and a cracked leg, yer honor!"
Still there was something evasive about the man, and he had as many moods and lights as a sea Proteus, ugly and common, like that batrachian order, but often enkindled and exceedingly satisfactory as a servant. He often forgot the place where he left off a certain day's work, and it had to be recalled to him. He was irregular, too, in going and coming, and was quite as likely to come when not wanted as not to be on the spot when due and expected. Duff Salter made up his mind that all the Eastern people must have bumped their heads and became subject to vertigo.
One day Duff Salter received this note: