Bohemian Days Part 22

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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.e.x.

"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 G.o.d'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 cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l. 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, or _murder_, 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 G.o.d 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."

CHAPTER V.

THE GHOST.

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 b.u.t.toned 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 pa.s.senger, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y and haunted, rich Mr. Duff Salter! Beware of Lady Agnes, the murderess! Beware, too, of her accomplice, the insinuating little Byerly!_"

Duff Salter walked out one day to make the tour of Kensington. He pa.s.sed out the agreeable old Frankford road, with its wayside taverns, and hay carts, and pa.s.sing 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.