"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?"