Part 17 (1/2)
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.