Bohemian Days Part 35

"Agnes, she used to write to me. Seeing the anonymous letters you received, I knew the culprit instantly. It was that which precipitated the flight. She feared that her anonymous letters would result in her arrest and public trial for slander, as they would have done. The magistrate promised me that he would issue his warrant for every person who had employed the public mails to hara.s.s my wife, and when you entered this room my darker pa.s.sions were again working to punish that woman and her paramour."

"Dearest, let them be forgotten. Yes, forgiven too. But poor Mr. Knox Van de Lear! They have stolen his savings and mortgaged his household furniture, which he was confiding enough to have put in his wife's name.

That is also a part of the story related around the good pastor's grave."

"Calvin has not escaped," exclaimed Andrew Zane. "As long as that tigress accompanies him he has expiation to make. Voluptuous, jealous, restless, and, like a snake in the tightness of her folds and her noiseless approach, she will smother him with kisses and sell him to his enemies."

"Do you know her so well?" asked Agnes placidly.

"Very well. She was corrupt from childhood, but only a few of us knew it. She grew to be beautiful, and had the quickened intelligence which, for a while, accompanies ruined women: the unnatural sharpening of the duplicity, the firmer grasp on man as the animal, the study of the proprieties of life, and apparent impatience with all misbehavior. Her timid voice a.s.sisted her cunning as if with a natural gentleness, and invited onward the man who expected in her ample charms a bolder spirit.

She betook herself to the church for penance, perhaps, but remained there for a character. My wife, if I have suffered, it was, perhaps, in part because for every sin is some punishment; that woman was _my_ temptress also!"

His face was pale as he spoke these words, but he did not drop his eyes.

The wife looked at him with a face also paled and startled.

"Remember," said Andrew Zane, "that I was a man."

She walked to him in a moment and kissed his forehead.

"I will have no more deceit," said Andrew. "That is why I give you this pain. It was long, my darling, before we loved."

"That was the source, perhaps, of Lottie's anger with me," spoke Agnes.

"I think not. There was not a sentiment between us. It is the way, occasionally, that a very bad woman is made, by marriage or wealth, respectable, and she declares war on her own past and its imitators. You were pursued because you had exchanged deserts with her. You were pure and abused; she was approved but tainted. Not your misfortunes but your goodness rebuked her, and she lashed you behind her _alias_, as every demon would riot in las.h.i.+ng the angels."

"My husband," exclaimed Agnes, "where did you draw such secrets from woman's nature? G.o.d has blessed you with wisdom. I felt, myself, by some intuition of our s.e.x, that it was sin, not virtue, that took such pains to upbraid me."

"I drew them from the old, old plant," answered Andrew Zane; "the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yonder, where I skimmed the surface of a bad woman; here, where I am forgiven."

"If you felt remorse," said Agnes, "you were not given up."

"After _we_ were engaged that woman cast her eyes on my widowed father and notified me that I must not stand in her way. 'If you embarra.s.s me by one word,' she said to me in her pretty, timid way, but with the look of a lion out of her florid fringes, 'I will shatter your future hearthstone. You are not fit to marry a Christian woman like Agnes Wilt.

I am good enough for your father--yes,' she finished, with terrible irony, 'and to be your mother!' Those words went with me around the world. Agnes, was I not punished?"

"To think that the son of so good a man should be bound to such a tyrant."

"Yes, she will make him steal for her, or worse. He will end by being her most degraded creature, leading and misleading to her. Theirs is an unreturning path. G.o.d keep us all faithful!"

Duff Salter became again mysterious. He sent for his trunks, and gave his address as the "Treaty House," on Beach Street, nearly opposite the monument, only a square back from the Zane house.

"Andrew," said Salter, when the young husband sought him there, "I concluded to move because there will be a nurse in that house before midsummer. If I was deaf as I once was, it would make no difference. But a very slight cry would certainly pierce my restored sensibilities now."

The Treaty House was a fine, old-fas.h.i.+oned brick, with a long saloon or double parlor containing many curiosities, such as pieces of old s.h.i.+ps of war, weapons used in Polynesia and brought home by old sea captains, the jaws of whales and narwhals, figure-heads from perished vessels, harpoons, and points of various naval actions. In those days, before manufactures had extended up all the water streets, and when domestic war had not been known for a whole generation, the little low marble monument on the site of William Penn's treaty with the Indians attracted hundreds of strangers, who moistened their throats and cooled their foreheads in the great bar parlor of the Treaty House. It was still a secluded spot, shady and dewy with venerable trees, and the moisture they gave the old brown and black bricks in the contiguous houses, some of them still stylish, and all their windows topped with marble or sandstone, gray with the superinc.u.mbent weight of time or neglect. Large rear additions and sunless sideyards carried out the idea of a former gentry. Some b.u.t.tonwood trees, now thinning out with annual age, conveyed by their speckled trunks the notion of a changing social standard, white and brown, native and foreign, while the lines of maples stood on blackened boles like old retired seamen, bronzed in many voyages and planted home forever. But despite the narrow, neglected, shady street, the slope of Shackamaxon went gently shelving to the edges of long sunny wharves, nearly as in the day when Penn selected this greensward to meet his Indian friends, and barter tools and promises for forest levels and long rich valleys, now open to the sky and murmurous with wheat and green potato vines.

Sitting before the inn door, on drowsy June afternoons, Duff Salter heard the adzes ring and hammers smite the thousand bolt-heads on lofty vessels, raised on mast-like scaffolds as if they meant to be launched into the air and go cleared for yonder faintly tinted spectral moon, which lingered so long by day, like the symbol of the Indian race, departed but lambent in thoughtful memories. Duff had grown superst.i.tious; he came out of the inn door sidewise, that he might always see that moon over his right shoulder for good luck.

One morning Andrew Zane appeared at the Treaty House before Duff Salter had taken his julep, after the fas.h.i.+on of malarious Arkansas.

"Mr. Salter, it is all over. There is a baby at our house."

"Girl?"

"Just that!"

"I thought so," exclaimed Duff Salter. "It was truly mother's labor, and ought to have been like Agnes. We will give her a toast."

"In nothing but water," spoke Andrew soberly. "I hope I have sown my wild oats."

"I will imitate you," heartily responded Duff Salter; "for it occurred to me in Arkansas that people shot and butchered each other so often because they threw into empty stomachs a long tumbler of liquor and leaves. You are well started, Andrew. Your father's and his partner's estate will give you an income of $10,000. What will you do?"

"I have no idea whatever. My mind is not ready for business. My serious experience has been followed by a sort of stupor--an inquiry, a detached relation to everything."

"Let it be so awhile," answered the strong, gray-eyed man. "Such rests are often medicine, as sleep is. The mind will find its true channel some day."

"Can I be of service to you, Mr. Salter? Money would be a small return of our obligations to you."

"No, I am independent. Too independent! I wish I had a wife."

"Ah! Agnes told me that besides seeing the baby when you came to the house, little Mary Byerly would be there. She is well enough to be out, and has lost her invalid brother."

"If you see me blush, Andrew," said Duff Salter, "you needn't tell of it. I am in love with little Podge, but it's all over. With no understanding of woman's sensibilities, I shook that fragile child in my rude grasp, and frightened her forever. What will you call your baby?"

"Agnes says it shall be _Euphemia_, meaning 'of good report.' You know it came near being a young lady of bad report."

"As for me, Andrew, I shall make the contract for the steeple and completion of the new church, and then take a foreign journey. Since I stopped sneezing I have no way to disguise my sensibilities, and am more an object of suspicion than ever."

Duff Salter peeped at the beautiful mother and hung a chain of gold around the baby's neck, and was about slipping out when Podge Byerly appeared. She made a low bow and shrank away.

"Follow her," whispered Andrew Zane. "If she is cool now she will be cold hereafter, unless you nurse her confidence."

With a sense of great youthfulness and demerit, Duff Salter entered the parlors and found Podge sitting in the shadows of that thrice notable room where death and grief had been so often carried and laid down. The little teacher was pale and thin, and her eyes wore a saddened light.

"I am very glad to see you again," said Duff Salter. "I wanted your forgiveness."

Striking the centre of sympathy by these few words, the late deaf man saw Podge's throat agitated.

"If you knew," he continued, "how often I accused myself since your illness, you would try to excuse me."

After a little silence Podge said,

"I don't remember just what happened, Mr. Salter. Was it you who sent me many beautiful and dainty things while I was sick? I thought it might be."

"You guessed me, then? At least I was not forgotten."

"I never forgot you, sir; but ever since my illness you seem to have been a part of the dread river and its dead. I have often tried to restore you as I once thought of you, but other things rise up and I cannot see you. My head was gone, I suppose."

"Alas, no! I drove away your heart. If that would come back, the wandering head would follow, little friend. Are you afraid of me?"

"Sometimes. One thing, I think, is your deafness. While you were deaf you seemed so natural that we talked freely before you, prattling out our fancies undisguised. We wouldn't have done it if we knew that you heard as well as we. That makes me afraid too. Oh! why did you deceive us so?"