George Alfred Townsend

“ Who will believe us without a witness of what I must assert—a story so improbable that I would not believe it myself? I must say that I married my wife secretly from my father's house, confessing deceit for both of us, and with Agnes's religious professions, a sin in the church's estimation. If there could be an excuse for me, the strict people of Kensington will accord none to her. They will charge on her maturer mind the whole responsibility, paint her in the colors of ingratitude, and find in her greatest poverty the principal motive. ”

“ He kissed the little book as if it were a box of divine balm, and raised his voice, looking still tenderly at Agnes, and addressing Duff Salter:
"Will you examine me, my father's friend?"
"Yes, now! You will!" exploded the alderman.
"No, take your own method, thou alternate of the late Mike Donovan," exclaimed Duff Salter with a smile.
"I never thought there could be an excuse for my behavior," said Andrew Zane, "until this unexpected kind treatment had encouraged me. Indeed, my friends, I am in every alternative unfortunate. To defend myself I must reflect upon the dead. ”

“ As Podge Byerly walked up the worn stone walk of the lawn she saw a familiar image at the door—her mother.
"You here, mother?" said Podge. "What is the meaning of it?"
"This is my house, my darling. There is our friend who gave it to us. You will need to teach no more. The mill and a little farm surrounding us will make us independent."
Podge turned to Duff Salter.
"How kind of you!" she said. "Yet it frightens me the more. These surprises, tender as they are, excite me. Everything about you is mysterious. You are not even deaf as you were. ”

“ If this history of Ralph Flare that we are writing was not a fiction, we might make Suzette give way at once under the burden of her grief, and rest upon a chair, and weep. On the contrary, she did just the opposite. She laughed.
Human nature is consistent only in its inconsistencies. She meant to break down in the end, but wished to intimidate him by a show of carelessness, so she first said quietly: "Monsieur Ralph, I have come to see to my washing; it went out with yours; will you tell the proprietor to send it to me?" ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 sub [Pg 189] urbs, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ I found the world far better than it had seemed when I was one of its chatterers. By my voluntary silence I had banished the disturbing element in Nature; for our enemy is always within us, not without. In that seven years, for most of which I heard everything and answered none, except by my pencil, I was prosperous, observant, sober, and considerate. The deceit of affecting not to hear has brought its penalty, however. You are afraid of me."
"Were you ever in love before?"
"I fear I will surprise you again by my answer," said Duff Salter. ”

“ And so Lees was at rest—the master's only son, the heir to lands and houses, and servants, and hopes. He had escaped the bullet, but also that honor which a soldier's death conferred—and thus, abroad and neglected, had existed awhile upon the charity of strangers, to expire of his own wickedness, and accept, as a boon, this place among the bones of the wretched.
How beat the hearts which wait for the strife to be done and for him to return! The field-hands sleep more honored in their separate mounds beneath the pine trees. ”

“ Risque having engaged a frugal bed at a little distance from Wisbaden, enters the grand saloon of the Kursaal, and turning to the right, sees before him a perspective, to which not all the marvels of art or nature afford comparison: a snug little room, with a table of green baize in the centre of the floor, and about the table sundry folks of various ages and degrees, before each a heap of glittering coins, and in the midst of all a something which moves forever, with a hurtle and a hum—the roulette. ”

“ There was old Terrapin, with bonnets and dresses in his wardrobe, and a sewing-basket on his mantel, and with his own huge boots outside the door a pair of tapering gaiters, and in his easy-chair a little being to sing and chatter and mix his punch and make his cigarettes. Ah! how much more entrancing would be Ralph's chamber with Suzette to garnish it! He would make a thousand studies of her face; she should be his model, his professor, his divinity! ”

“ At almost every house she felt a kindness speak for her, except mankind; a recollection of nursing, comforting, praying with some one, but all forgotten now. "Via Crucia, Via Crucia," her thorn-torn feet seemed to patter in the echoes of her ears and mind, and there arose upon her spirit the sternest curse of women, direful with God's own rage, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception."
Thus she reached the magistrate's little office, around the door of which was a little crowd of people, and Duff Salter led her in the private door to the residence itself. ”

“ Spring broke on the snug little suburb, and buds and birds fulfilled their appointments on the boughs of willows, ailanthuses, lindens, and maples. Some peach-trees in the back yard of the Zane House hastened to put on their pink scarves and bonnets, and the boys said that an old sucker of Penn's Treaty Elm down in a ship-yard was fresh and blithsome as a second wife. In the hearts and views of living people, too, spring brought a budding of youthfulness and a gush of sap. ”

“ You cured me of years of suspicion, and I consented to hear again. The world grew candid to me; its sounds were melodious, its silence was sincere. It is you who are deaf. You cannot hear my heart."
"I hear no other's, at least," said Podge. "Tell me the story of your strange deceit."
They drew chairs upon the lawn. Podge took off [Pg 271] her bonnet and looked very delicate as her color rose and faded alternately in the emotions of one wooed in earnest and uncertain of her fate.
"I have not come by money without hard labor," said the hale and handsome man. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Here is little Suzette, smiling and skipping, and driving her glances straight into Ralph Flare's heart.
"Good-day, sir," she cries, and takes a chair close by him, after the manner of a sparrow alighting. She smooths back her pure wristbands, disclosing the grace of the arm, and as she laughs in Ralph's face he knows what she is saying to herself; it is more doubtful that he loves her than that she knows it. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Auburn Risque, packed away in the omnibus train, with a cheap cigar between his lips, and a face like a refrigerator, was scudding over the rolling provinces of France, thinking as little of the sunshine, and the harvesters of flax, and the turning leaves of the woods, and the chateaux overawing the thatched little villages, as if the train were his mail-coach, and France were Arkansas, and he were lashing the rump of the "off" horse, as he had done for the better part of his life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They closed their chamber-doors, and waited in hunger and sorrow for the moment when the sky should be their shelter and beggary their craft.
It was in this hour of ruin that the genius of Mr. Auburn Risque was manifest. The horse is always sure of a proprietor, and with horses Mr. Risque was more at home than with men.
"Man is ungrateful," soliloquized Risque, keeping along the Rue Mouffetard in the Chiffoniers' Quarter; "a horse is invariably faithful, unless he happens to be a mule. Confound men! the only excellence they have is not a virtue—they can play cards!" ”

“ Passing the sick father's door, Calvin led Duff Salter up to the garret floor, where a room with rag carpet, dumb-bells, boxing-gloves, theological books, and some pictures far from modest, disclosed the varied tastes of an entailed pulpit's expectant. Calvin drew down the curtain of the one window and lighted a lamp. There was a table in the middle of the floor, and there the two men conducted a silent conversation on the ivory tablets.
"This is my room," wrote Calvin. "I stay here all day when I study or enjoy myself. ”

“ As to Agnes, there was only one respectable opinion—that she was a superb work of nature and triumph of womanhood, notwithstanding romantic and possibly awkward circumstances of origin and relation. All men, of whatever time of life and for whatsoever reason, admired her—the mean and earthy if only for her mould, the morally discerning for her beautiful quality that pitied, caressed, encouraged, or elevated all who came within her sphere. ”

“ One member, at least, of the Southern Colony would never share the winnings of Auburn Risque, and now that they referred to his forebodings of the morning, it was recalled that with his own demise, he had prophesied the failure of "the system." [Pg 29]
His end seemed to each young exile a personal admonition; they had known him strong and spirited, and with them he had grown poor and unhappy. Poverty is a warning that talks like the wind, and we do not heed it; but death raps at our door with bony knuckles, so that we grow pale and think. ”

“ I have had a detective on his track; too late to arrest the rascal, but the identity 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. ”