Part 23 (1/2)

”How changed!” spoke the traveller aloud. ”I have caught fishes all along this brook, and waded up its bed in summer to cool my feet. The girl was beside me whose slender feet in innocent exposure were placed by mine to shame their coa.r.s.er mould. We thought we were in love, or as near it as are the outskirts to some throbbing town partly instinctive with a coming civic destiny. Alas! the little brook that once ran unvexed to the river, freshening green marshes at its outlet, has become a sewer, discolored with dyes of factories, and closed around by tenements and hovels till its purer life is over. 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 suburbs, 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.

”I have followed you out to the country,” said the young man, howling in the elder's ear, ”because I wanted to talk to you aloud, as I couldn't do in Kensington.”

Duff Salter drew his storied ivory tablets on the divinity student, and said, crisply, ”Write!”

”No, old man, that's not my style. It's too slow. Besides, it admits of nothing impressive being said, and I want to convince you.”

”Jericho! Jericho!” sneezed Duff Salter. ”Young man, if you stun my ear that way a third time I'll knock you down. I'm deaf, it's true, but I'm not a hallooing scale to try your lungs on. If you won't write, we can't talk.”

With impatience, yet smiling, Calvin Van de Lear wrote on the tablets,

”Have you seen the ghost?”

”Ghost?”

”Yes, the ghosts of the murdered men!”

”I never saw a ghost of anything in my life. What men?”

”William Zane and Sayler Rainey.”

”Who has seen them?”

”Several people. Some say it's but one that has been seen. Zane's ghost walks, anyway, in Kensington.”

”What for?”

”The fishwomen and other superst.i.tious people say, because their murderers have not been punished.”

”And the murderers are--”

”Those who survived and profited by the murder, of course?”

”Jer-ri-choo-woo!” exploded Duff Salter. ”Young man,” he wrote deliberately, ”you have an idle tongue.”

”Friend Salter, you are blind as well as deaf. Do you know Miss Podge Byerly?”

”No. Do you?”

”She's common! Agnes Wilt uses her as a stool-pigeon. She fetches, and carries, and flies by night. One of the school directors shoved her on the public schools for intimate considerations. Perhaps you'll see him about the house if you look sharp and late some night.”

”Jer-rich-co! Jericho!”

Duff Salter was decidedly red in the face, and his grave gray eyes looked both fierce and convicted. He _had_ seen a school director visiting the house, but thought it natural enough that he should take a kind interest in one of the youthful and pretty teachers. The deaf man returned to his pencil and tablets.

”Do you know, Mr. Van de Lear, that what you are saying is indictable language? It would have exposed you to death where I have lived.”

The young man tossed his head recklessly. Duff Salter now saw that his usually sallow face was flushed up to the roots of his long dry hair and almost colorless whiskers, as if he had been drinking liquors.