Bohemian Days Part 17

THE PIGEON GIRL.

On the sloping market-place, In the village of Compeigne, Every Sat.u.r.day her face, Like a Sunday, comes again; Daylight finds her in her seat, With her panier at her feet, Where her pigeons lie in pairs; Like their plumage gray her gown, To her sabots drooping down; And a kerchief, brightly brown, Binds her smooth, dark hairs.

All the buyers knew her well, And, perforce, her face must see, As a holy Raphael Lures us in a gallery; Round about the rustics gape, Drinking in her comely shape, And the housewives gently speak, When into her eyes they look, As within some holy book, And the gables, high and crook, Fling their suns.h.i.+ne on her cheek.

In her hands two milk-white doves, Happy in her lap to lie, Softly murmur of their loves, Envied by the pa.s.sers-by; One by one their flight they take, Bought and cherished for her sake, Leaving so reluctantly; Till the shadows close approach, Fades the pageant, foot and coach, And the giants in the cloche Ring the noon for Picardie.

Round the village see her glide, With a slender sunbeam's pace!

Mirrored in the Oise's tide, The gold-fish float upon her face; All the soldiers touch their caps; In the cafes quit their naps Garcon, guest, to wish her back; And the fat old beadles smile As she kneels along the aisle, Like Pucelle in other while, In the dim church of Saint Jacques.

Now she mounts her dappled a.s.s-- He well-pleased such friend to know-- And right merrily they pa.s.s The armorial chateau; Down the long, straight paths they tread Till the forest, overhead, Whispers low its leafy love; In the archways' green caress Rides the wondrous dryadess-- Thrills the gra.s.s beneath her press, And the blue-eyed sky above.

I have met her, o'er and o'er, As I strolled alone apart, By a lonely carrefour In the forest's tangled heart, Safe as any stag that bore Imprint of the Emperor; In the copse that round her grew Tiptoe the straight saplings stood, Peeped the wild boar's satyr brood, Like an arrow clove the wood The glad note of the cuckoo.

How I wished myself her friend!

(So she wished that I were more) Jogging toward her journey's end At Saint Jean au Bois before, Where her father's acres fall Just without the abbey wall; By the cool well loiteringly The s.h.a.ggy Norman horses stray, In the thatch the pigeons play, And the forest round alway Folds the hamlet, like a sea.

Far forgotten all the feud In my New World's childhood haunts, If my childhood she renewed In this pleasant nook of France; Might she make the blouse I wear, Welcome then her homely fare And her sensuous religion!

To the market we should ride, In the Ma.s.s kneel side by side, Might I warm, each eventide, In my nest, my pretty pigeon.

THE DEAF MAN OF KENSINGTON.

A TALE OF AN OLD SUBURB.

CHAPTER I.

THE MURDER.

Between the Delaware River and Girard Avenue, which is the market street of the future, and east of Frankfort Road, lies Kensington, a respectable old district of the Quaker City, and occupying the same relation to it that Kensington in England does to London. Beyond both Kensingtons is a Richmond, but the English Richmond is a beauteous hill, with poetical recollections of Pope and Thomson, while our Richmond is the coal district of Philadelphia, flat to the foot and dingy to the eye.

Kensington, however, was once no faint miniature of the staid British suburb. The river bending to the eastward there conducts certain of the streets crookedly away from the rectangular Quaker demon who is ever seeking to square them. Along the water side, or near it, pa.s.ses a sort of Quay Street, between s.h.i.+p-yards and fish-houses on the one side, and shops or small tenements on the other, and this street scarcely discloses the small monument on the site of the Treaty Tree, where William Penn in person satisfied the momentary expectations of his Indian subjects.

Nearly parallel to the water side street is another, wider and more aristocratic, and lined with many handsome dwellings of brick, or even brown-stone, where the successful s.h.i.+pbuilders, fishtakers, coal men, and professional cla.s.ses have established themselves or their posterity.

This street was once called Queen, afterward Richmond Street, and it is crossed by others, as Hanover, Marlborough, and Shackamaxon, which attest in their names the duration of royal and Indian traditions hereabout. Pleasant maple, sometimes sycamore and willow trees shade these old streets, and they are kept as clean as any in this ever-mopped and rinsed metropolis, while the society, though disengaged from the great city, had its better and worser cla.s.s, and was fastidious about morals and behavior, and not disinclined to express its opinion.

One winter day in a certain year Kensington had a real sensation. The Delaware was frozen from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, and one could walk on the ice from Smith's to Treaty Island, and from Cooper's Point to the mouth of the Cohocksink. On the second afternoon of the great freeze fires were built on the river, and crowds a.s.sembled at certain smooth places to see great skaters like Colonel Page cut flourishes and show sly gallantry to the buxom housewives and gra.s.s widows of Kensington and the Jerseys. A few horses were driven on the ice, and hundreds of boys ran merrily with real sleighs crowded down with their friends. A fight or two was improvised, and unlicensed vendors set forth the bottle that inebriates.

In the midst of the afternoon gayety a small boy, kneeling down to buckle up to a farther hole the straps on his guttered skates, saw just at his toe something like human hair. The small boy rose to his feet and stamped with all his might around that object, not in any apprehension but because small boys like to know; and when the ice had been well broken, kneeling down and pulling it out in pieces with his mitten, the small boy felt something cold and smooth, and then he poked his finger into a human eye. It was a dead man. No sooner had the urchin found this out than he bellowed out at the top of his voice, running and falling as he yelled: "Murder! Murder! Murder!"

From all parts of the ice, like flies chasing over a silver salver toward some sweet point of corruption, the hundreds and thousands swarmed at the news that a dead body had been found. When they arrived on the spot, spades, picks, and ice-hooks had been procured by those nearest sh.o.r.e, and the whole mystery brought from the depths of the river to the surface.

There lay together on the ice two men, apparently several days in the water, and with the usual look of drowned people of good condition--gla.s.sy and of fixed expression, as if in the moment of death a consenting grimness had stolen into their countenances, neither composed nor terrified.

The bodies had been already recognized when the main part of the crowd arrived. Kensington people, generally, knew them both.

"It's William Zane and his business partner, Sayler Rainey! They own one of the marine railways at Kensington. Come to think of it, I haven't seen them around for nearly a week, neighbor!" exclaimed an old man.

"It's a case of drowning, no doubt," spoke up a little fellow who did a river business in old chains and junk. "You see they had another s.h.i.+p-mending place on the island opposite Kinsington, and rowin'

theirselves over was upset and never missed!"

"Quare enough too!" added a third party, "for yisterday I had a talk with young Andrew Zane, this one's son (touching the body with his foot), and Andrew said--a little pale I thought he was--says he, 'Pop's _about_.'"

Here a little buzz of mystery--so grateful to crowds which have come far over slippery surface and expect much--undulated to the outward boundaries. As the people moved the ice cracked like a cannon shot, and they dispersed like blackbirds, to rally soon again.

"Here's a doctor! Now we'll know about it! _He's_ here!" was exclaimed by several, as an important little man was pushed along, and the thickest crowd gave him pa.s.sage. The little man borrowed a boy's cap to kneel on, adjusted a sort of microscopic gla.s.s to his nose, as if plain eyes had no adequate use to this scientific necessity, and he called up two volunteers to turn the corpses over, keep back the throng, give him light, and add imposition to apprehension. Finally he stopped at a place in the garments of the princ.i.p.al of the twain. "Here is a hole," he exclaimed, "with burned woollen fibre about it, as if a pistol had been fired at close quarters. Draw back this woollen under-jacket! There--as I expected, gentlemen, is a pistol shot in the breast! What is the name of the person? Ah! thank you! Well, William Zane, gentlemen, was shot before he was drowned?"

The great crowd swayed and rushed forward again, and again the ice cracked like artillery. Before the mult.i.tude could swarm to the honey of a crime a second time, the news was dispersed that both of the drowned men had bullet wounds in their bodies, and both had been undoubtedly murdered. Some supposed it was the work of river pirates; others a private revenge, perpetrated by some following boat's party in the darkness of night. But more than one person piped shrilly ere the people wearily scattered in the dusk for their homes on the two sh.o.r.es of the river: "How did it happen that young Zane, the old un's son, said yisterday that his daddy was about, when he's been frozen in at least three days?"

CHAPTER II.

THE FLIGHT.

A handsome residence on the south side of Queen Street had been the home of the prosperous s.h.i.+p-carpenter, William Zane. His name was on the door on a silver plate. As the evening deepened and the news spread, the bell was pulled so often that it aided the universal alarm following a crime, and a crowd of people, reinforced by others as fast as it thinned out, kept up the watch on ever-recurring friends, coroner's officers and newspaper reporters, as they ascended the steps, looked grave, made inquiries, and returned to dispense their information.

But there was very little indignation, for Zane had been an insanely pa.s.sionate man, rather hard and exacting, and had he been found dead alone anywhere it would probably have been said at once that he brought it on himself. His partner, Rainey, however, had conducted himself so negatively and mildly, and was of such general estimation, that the murder of the senior member of the film took on some unusual public sympathy from the reflected sorrow for his fellow-victim. The latter had been one of Zane's apprentices, raised to a place in the establishment by his usefulness and sincere love of his patron. Just, forbearing, soft-spoken, and not avaricious, Sayler Rainey deserved no injury from any living being. He was unmarried, and, having met with a disappointment in love, had avowed his intention never to marry, but to bequeath all the property he should acquire to his partner's only son, Andrew Zane.

What, then, was the motive of this double murder? The public comprehension found but one theory, and that was freely advanced by the rash and imputative in the community of Kensington: The murderer was he who had the only known temptation and object in such a crime. Who could gain anything by it but Andrew Zane, the impulsive, the mischief-making and oft-restrained son of his stern sire, who, by a double crime, would inherit that undivided property, free from the control of both parent and guardian?

"It is parricide! that's what it is!" exclaimed a fat woman from Fishtown. "At the bottom of the river dead men tell no tales. The rebellious young sarpint of a son, who allus pulled a l.u.s.ty oar, has chased them two older ones into the deep water of the channel, where a pistol shot can't be heard ash.o.r.e, and he expected the property to be his'n. But there are gallowses yet, thank the Lord!"

"Mrs. Whann, don't say that," spoke up a deferential voice from the face of a rather sallow-skinned young man, with long, ringleted, yellow hair.

"Don't create a prejudice, I beg of you. Andrew Zane was my cla.s.smate.

He gave his excellent father some trouble, but it shouldn't be remembered against him now. Suppose, my friends, that you let me ring the bell and inquire?"

"Who's that?" asked the crowd. "He's a fine, mature-looking, charitable young man, anyway."

"Its the old Minister Van de Lear's son, Calvin. He's going to succeed his venerable and pious poppy in Kensington pulpit. They'll let him in."

The door closed when Calvin Van de Lear entered the residence of the late William Zane. When it reopened he was seen with a handkerchief in his hand and his hat pulled down over his eyes, as if he had been weeping.

"Stop! stop! don't be going off that way!" interposed the fat fishwife.

"You said you would tell us the news."

"My friends," replied Calvin Van de Lear, with a look of the greatest pain, "Andrew Zane has not been heard from. I fear your suspicions are too true!"

He crossed the street and disappeared into the low and elderly residence of his parents.