Bohemian Days Part 23

"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 coa.r.s.er 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 superst.i.tious 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. He _had_ seen 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. Duff Salter 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, with your 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 princ.i.p.al 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 ident.i.ty 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 grat.i.tude 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 is a 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 pa.s.sed 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."