Previous to the Englishman’s coming that morning, she had never felt any shame at working in the lamp black hut with her employer, or appearing before passers-by unclad, but now a great light had come to her; she was free to confess that she was changed and humiliated.
The Viscount looked her over and over, and far into those wonderful stone grey eyes that mirrored a refined soul lost in the wilderness. Then he made bold to speak:
“Deborah”, he said, “since you have been so frank with me in telling the story of your life, I will freely confess to you that I loved you the minute my eyes rested on you, even in your unbecoming homespun cap, and lamp black from head to foot. I realize that your being here is but an accident, and my coming the instrument to take you away. I will marry you, and strive always to make you happy, if you will come away with me, and I will take you to England where, among people of refined tastes, you will shine and always be at peace.”
Deborah opened her thin delicate mouth in surprise, and her eyes became like grey stars. “Really, do you mean that”? she said.
“I mean every word,” replied The Viscount Adare.
“I know that I feel differently towards you than any man I have seen, so I must love you, and I will always be happy with you,” resumed the girl. “And while I owe Simon Supersaxo a deep debt of gratitude for saving me from being forced into marrying that horrid old road-agent, I owe myself more, and you more still. I will go with you whenever you are ready to take me, no matter what my conscience will tell me later. Though I’ll say to you honestly that I never thought there was any life for me further than to make lamp black, until you came.”
She explained to him that at Christmastime the lamp black man always went with a party of companions on a great elk hunt to the distant Sinnemahoning Country, and if The Viscount would return then, she would arrange to meet him at a certain place at a certain day and hour, and go away with him. “There is a little clearing or old field on the top of the ridge, beyond this house,” and pointing her slender white hand, showed to him through the open door. “Meet me there on the day before Christmas, and I will be free to go away with you rejoicing.”
The balance of the visit was passed in pleasant amity, until towards nightfall, when The Viscount shouldered his pack and seized his staff, and started away, not for Pittsburg, but eastward again. Deborah, her slender reed-like figure swaying in the autumn breeze, walked with him to the edge of the clearing. She kissed him goodbye among the savin bushes, and he kissed her many times in return, until they parted at the carnelian-leafed sassafras trees on the hill, and he commenced the ascent of the steep face of Chestnut Ridge.
The trip back to Philadelphia was taken impatiently, but with a different kind of impatience; he wanted the entire intervening time obliterated, until he could get back to his strange exotic mountain love. In Philadelphia he engaged passage for England the first week in January, and wrote letters abroad to complete the arrangements for taking his wife-to-be to his ancestral home. He could never forget the last afternoon in the Quaker City. Christmas was coming, and the spirit of this glad festival was in the air, even more so than in “Merrie England.” He was walking through Chancellor Street when he came upon two blind Negro Christmas-singers, former sailors, who had lost their sight in the premature explosion of a cannon on the deck of a frigate on the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. He stopped, elegant gentleman that he was, listened enraptured to their songs of simple faith: “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.”
“If they had so much to be thankful for,” he mused, “how much more have I, with lovely Deborah only a few days in the future.”[future.”]