ENCOMPASSED.
"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 keep three 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 woods and 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
swallowed there. 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 school director, 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 and under 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 awaiting me, 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, rather of
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!"