FOCUS.
Calvin Van de Lear had been up-stairs with Duff Salter, and on his way
out had heard the voice of Agnes Wilt praying. He slipped into the back
parlor and listened at the crevice of the folding-door until his father
had given the pastoral benediction and departed. Then with cool
effrontery Calvin walked into the front parlor, where Agnes was sitting
by the slats of the nearly darkened window.
"Pardon me, Agnes," he said. "I was calling on the deaf old gentleman
up-stairs, and perceiving that devotions were being conducted here,
stopped that I might not interrupt them."
Calvin's commonplace nature had hardly been dazed by Agnes's prayer. He
was only confirmed in the idea that she was a woman of genius, and would
take half the work of a pastor off his hands. In the light of both
desire and convenience she had, therefore, appreciated in his eyes. To
marry her, become the proprietor of her snug home and ravishing person,
and send her off to pray with the sick and sup with the older women of
the flock, seemed to him such a comfortable consummation as to have
Heaven's especial approval. Thus do we deceive ourselves when the spirit
of God has departed from us, even in youth, and construe our dreams of
selfishness to be glimmerings of a purer life.
Calvin was precocious in assurance, because, in addition to being
unprincipled, he was in a manner ordained by election and birthright to
rule over Kensington. His father had been one of those strong-willed,
clear-visioned, intelligent young Eastern divinity students who brought
to a place of more voluptuous and easy burgher society the secular vigor
of New England pastors. Being always superior and always sincere, his
rule had been ungrumblingly accepted. Another generation, at middle age,
found him over them as he had been over their parents--a righteous,
intrepid Protestant priest, good at denunciation, counsel, humor, or
sympathy. The elders and deacons never thought of objecting to anything
after he had insisted upon it, and in this spirit the whole church had
heard submissively that Calvin Van de Lear was to be their next pastor.
This, of course, was conditional upon his behavior, and all knew that
his father would be the last man to impose an injurious person on the
church; they had little idea that "Cal." Van de Lear was devout, but
took the old man's word that grace grew more and more in the sons of the
Elect, and the young man had already professed "conviction," and
voluntarily been received into the church. There he assumed, like an
heir-apparent, the vicarship of the congregation, and it rather
delighted his father that his son so promptly and complacently took
direction of things, made his quasi pastoral rounds, led
prayer-meetings, and exhorted Sunday-schools and missions. A priest
knows the heart of his son no more than a king, and is less suspicious
of him. The king's son may rebel from deferred expectation; the priest's
son can hardly conspire against his father's pulpit. In the minister's
family the line between the world and the faith is a wavering one;
religion becomes a matter of course, and yet is without the mystery of
religion as elsewhere, so that wife and sons regard ecclesiastical
ambition as meritorious, whether the heart be in it piously or
profanely. Calvin Van de Lear was in the church fold of his own accord,
and his father could no more read that son's heart than any other
member's. Indeed, the good old man was especially obtuse in the son's
case, from his partiality, and thus grew up together on the same root
the flower of piety and hypocrisy, the tree and the sucker.
"Calvin," replied Agnes, "I do not object to your necessary visits here.
Your father is very dear to me."
"But can't I return to the subject we last talked of?" asked the young
man, shrewdly.
"No. That is positively forbidden."
"Agnes," continued Calvin, "you must know I love you!"
Agnes sank to her seat again with a look of resignation.
"Calvin," she said, "this is not the time. I am not the person for such
remarks. I have just risen from my knees; my eyes are not in this
world."
"You will be turning nun if this continues."
"I am in God's hands," said Agnes. "Yet the hour is dark with me."
"Agnes, let me lift some of your burden upon myself. You don't hate me?"
"No. I wish you every happiness, Calvin."
"Is there nothing you long for--nothing earthly and within the compass
of possibility?"
"Yes, yes!" Agnes arose and walked across the floor almost
unconsciously, with the palms of her hands held high together above her
head. As she walked to and fro the theological student perceived a
change so extraordinary in her appearance since his last visit that he
measured her in his cool, worldly gaze as a butcher would compute the
weight of a cow on chance reckoning.
"What is it, dear Agnes?"
He spoke with a softness of tone little in keeping with his unfeeling,
vigilant face.
"Oh, give me love! Now, if ever, it is love! Love only, that can lift me
up and cleanse my soul!"
"Love lies everywhere around you," said the young man. "You trample it
under your feet. My heart--many hearts--have felt the cruel treatment.
Agnes, _you_ must love also."
"I try to do so," she exclaimed, "but it is not the perfect love that
casteth out fear! God knows I wish it was."
Her eyes glanced down, and a blush, sudden and deep, spread over her
features. The young man lost nothing of all this, but with alert
analysis took every expression and action in.
"May I become your friend if greater need arises, Agnes? Do not repulse
me. At the worst--I swear it!--I will be your instrument, your subject."
Agnes sat in the renewed pallor of profound fear. God, on whom she had
but a moment before called, seemed to have withdrawn His face. Her black
ringlets, smoothed upon her noble brow in wavy lines, gave her something
of a Roman matron's look; her eyebrows, dark as the eyes beneath that
now shrank back yet shone the larger, might have befitted an Eastern
queen. Lips of unconscious invitation, and features produced in their
wholeness which bore out a character too perfect not to have lived
sometime in the realms of the great tragedies of life, made Agnes in her
sorrow peerless yet.
"Go, Calvin!" she said, with an effort, her eyes still upon the floor;
"if you would ever do me any aid, go now!"
As he passed into the passageway Calvin Van de Lear ran against a man
with a crutch and a wooden leg, who looked at him from under a head of
dark-red hair, and in a low voice cursed his awkwardness. The man bent
to pick up his crutch, and Calvin observed that he was badly scarred and
had one eyebrow higher than the other.
"Who are you, fellow?" asked Calvin, surprised.
"I'm Dogcatcher!" said the man. "When ye see me coming, take the other
side of the street."
Calvin felt cowed, not so much at these mysterious words as at a hard,
lowering look in the man's face, like especial dislike.
Agnes Wilt, still sitting in the parlor, saw the lame servant pass her
door, going out, and he looked in and touched his hat, and paused a
minute. Something graceful and wistful together seemed to be in his
bearing and countenance.
"Anything for me?" asked Agnes.
"Nothing at all, mum! When there's nobody by to do a job, call on Mike."
He still seemed to tarry, and in Agnes's nervous condition a mysterious
awe came over her; the man's gaze had a dread fascination that would not
let her drop her eyes. As he passed out of sight and shut the street
door behind him Agnes felt a fainting feeling, as if an apparition had
looked in upon her and vanished--the apparition, if of anything, of him
who had lain dead in that very parlor--the stern, enamored master of the
house whose fatherhood in a fateful moment had turned to marital desire,
and crushed the luck of all the race of Zanes.
Duff Salter was sitting at his writing table, with an open snuff-box
before him, and, as Calvin Van de Lear entered his room, Duff took a
large pinch of snuff and shoved the tablets forward. Calvin wrote on
them a short sentence. As Duff Salter read it he started to his feet and
sneezed with tremendous energy:
"Jeri-cho! Jericho! Jerry-cho-o-o!"
He read the sentence again, and whispered very low:
"Can't you be mistaken?"
"As sure as you sit there!" wrote Calvin Van de Lear.
"What is your inference?" wrote Duff Salter.
"Seduction!"
The two men looked at each other silently a few minutes, Duff Salter in
profound astonishment, Calvin Van de Lear with an impudent smile.
"And so religious!" wrote Duff Salter.
"That is always incidental to the condition," answered Calvin.
"It must be a great blow to your affection?"
"Not at all," scrawled the minister's son. "It gives me a sure thing."
"Explain that!"
"I will throw the marriage mantle over her. She will need me now!"
"But you would not take a wife out of such a situation?"
"Oh! yes. She will be as handsome as ever, and only half as proud."
Duff Salter walked up and down the floor and stroked his long beard, and
his usually benevolent expression was now dark and ominous, as if with
gloom and anger. He spoke in a low tone as if not aware that he was
heard, and his voice sounded as if he also did not hear it, and could
not, therefore, give it pitch or intonation:
"Is this the best of old Kensington? This is the East! Where I dreamed
that life was pure as the water from the dear old pump that quenched my
thirst in boyhood--not bitter as the alkali of the streams of the
plains, nor turbid like the rills of the Arkansas. I pined to leave that
life of renegades, half-breeds, squaws, and nomads to bathe my soul in
the clear fountains of civilization,--to live where marriage was holy
and piety sincere. I find, instead, mystery, blood, dishonor, hypocrisy,
and shame. Let me go back! The rough frontier suits me best. If I can
hear so much wickedness, deaf as I am, let me rather be an unsocial
hermit in the woods, hearing nothing lower than thunder!"
As Duff Salter went to his dinner that day he looked at Agnes sitting in
her place, so ill at ease, and said to himself,
"It is true."
* * * * *
Another matter of concern was on Mr. Duff Salter's mind--his
serving-man. Such an unequal servant he had never seen--at times full of
intelligence and snap, again as dumb as the bog-trotters of Ireland.
"What was the matter with you yesterday?" asked the deaf man of Mike one
day.
"Me head, yer honor!"
"What ails your head?"
"Vare-tigo!"
"How came that?"
"Falling out of a ship!"
"What did you strike but water?"
"Wood; it nearly was the death of me. For weeks I was wid a cracked head
and a cracked leg, yer honor!"
Still there was something evasive about the man, and he had as many
moods and lights as a sea Proteus, ugly and common, like that batrachian
order, but often enkindled and exceedingly satisfactory as a servant. He
often forgot the place where he left off a certain day's work, and it
had to be recalled to him. He was irregular, too, in going and coming,
and was quite as likely to come when not wanted as not to be on the spot
when due and expected. Duff Salter made up his mind that all the Eastern
people must have bumped their heads and became subject to vertigo.
One day Duff Salter received this note:
"MR. DEAF DUFF: Excuse the familiarity, but the coincidence amuses
me. I want you to make me a visit this evening after dark at my
quarters in my brother, Knox Van de Lear's house, on Queen Street
nearly opposite your place of lodging. If Mars crosses the orbit of
Venus to-night, as I expect--there being signs of it in the milky
way,--you will assist me in an observation that will stagger you on
account of its results. Do not come out until dark, and ask at my
brother's den for CAL."
"I will not be in to-night, Mike," exclaimed Duff Salter a little while
afterward. "You can have all the evening to yourself. Where do you spend
your spare time?"
"On Traity Island," replied Mike with a grin. "I doesn't like Kinsington
afther dark. They say it has ghosts, sur."
"But only the ghosts of they killed as they crossed from Treaty Island."
"Sure enough! But I've lost belafe in ghosts since they have become so
common. Everybody belaves in thim in Kinsington, and I prefer to be
exclusive and sciptical, yer honor."
"Didn't you tell me yesterday that you believed in spirits going and
coming and hoping and waiting, and it gave you great comfort?"
"Did I, sur? I forgit it inthirely. It must have been a bad day for my
vartigo."
Duff Salter looked at his man long and earnestly, and from head to foot,
and the inspection appeared to please him.
"Mike," he said, in his loud, deafish voice, "I am going to cure you of
your vertigo."
"Whin, dear Mister Salter."
"Perhaps to-morrow," remarked Duff Salter significantly. "I shall have a
man here who will either confer it on you permanently or cure you
instantly."
Duff Salter put on his hat, took his stick, and drew the curtains down.
Mike was sitting at the writing table arranging some models of vessels
and steam tugs as his employer turned at the doorway and looked back,
and, with a countenance more waggish than exasperated, Duff Salter shook
his cane at the unobservant Irishman, and sagely gestured with his head.
Agnes was about to take the head of the tea-table as he came down the
stairs.
"No," motioned Duff Salter, and pointed out of doors.
He gave a slight examination to Agnes, so delicate as to be almost
unnoticed, though she perceived it.
Duff sat at the tea side and wrote on his tablets:
"How is little Podge coming on?"
"Growing better," replied Agnes, "but she will be unfit to teach her
school for months. Kind friends have sent her many things."
Duff Salter waited a little while, and wrote:
"I wish I could leave everybody happy behind me when I go away."
"Are you going soon?"
"I am going at once," wrote Duff Salter with a sudden decision. "I am
not trusted by anybody here, and my work is over."
Agnes sat a little while in pain and wistfulness. Finally she wrote:
"There is but one thing which prevents our perfect trust in you; it is
your distrust of us."
"I _am_ distrustful--too much so," answered, in writing, the deaf man.
"A little suspicion soon overspreads the whole nature, and yet, I think,
one can be generous even with suspicion. Among the disciples were a
traitor, a liar, a coward, and a doubter; but none upbraid the last,
poor Thomas, and he is sainted in our faith. Do you know that suspicion
made me deaf? Yes; if we mock Nature with distrust, she stops our ears.
Do you not remember what happened to Zacharias, the priest? He would not
believe the angel who announced that his wife would soon become a
mother, and for his unbelief was stricken dumb!"
The deaf guest had either stumbled into this illustration, or written it
with full design. He looked at Agnes, and the pale and purple colors
came and went upon her face as she bent her body forward over the table.
Duff Salter arose and spoke with that lost voice, like one in a vacuum,
while he folded his tablet.
"Agnes," he said, "it has been cruel to a man of such a sceptical soul
as mine to educate him back from the faith he had acquired to the
unfaith he had tried to put behind him. Why did you do it? The
suppression of the truth is never excusable. The secret you might have
scattered with a word, when suspicion started against you, is now
diffused through every family and rendezvous in Kensington."
She looked miserable enough, and still received the stab of her guest's
magisterial tongue like an affliction from heaven.
"I had also become infected with this imputation," continued Duff
Salter. "All things around you looked sinister for a season. A kind
Providence has dispelled these black shadows, and I see you now the
victim of an immeasurable mistake. Your weakness and another's obstinacy
have almost ruined you. I shall save you with a cruel hand; let the
remorse be his who hoped to outlive society and its natural suspicions
by a mere absence."
"I will not let you upbraid him," spoke Agnes Wilt. "My weakness was the
whole mistake."
"Agnes," said the grave, bearded man, "you must walk through Kensington
to-morrow with me in the sight of the whole world."
She looked up and around a moment, and staggered toward a sofa, but
would have fallen had not Duff Salter caught her in his arms and placed
her there with tender strength. He whispered in her ear:
"Courage, little _mother_!"