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  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




WITHIN THESE WALLS

[Illustration: Decoration]




  WITHIN THESE WALLS

  By
  RUPERT HUGHES

  _Author of_
  “SOULS FOR SALE,” “CLIPPED WINGS”
  “THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT”
  “WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY”

  [Illustration: Decoration]


  HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
  NEW YORK AND LONDON
  1923




  WITHIN THESE WALLS

  Copyright, 1923
  By Harper & Brothers
  Printed in the U.S.A.

  _First Edition_




ILLUSTRATIONS


  “HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!”              _Facing p._  90

  THE SUNLIGHT THAT MADE A SHIMMERING AUREOLE
  ABOUT HER FLASHED IN HER EYES, SHINING WITH
  THE TEARS OF RAPTURE                           ”        118

  “SWEAR THAT YOU WILL NEVER MENTION JUD
  LASHER’S NAME TO ANYBODY”                      ”        156




WITHIN THESE WALLS




WITHIN THESE WALLS




CHAPTER I


He called that tulip tree “the bouquet of God,” because it was more
like a Titan’s handful of flowers than a tree.

Yet it stood a hundred and fifty feet high, and the stem of it was so
large that a man and a girl together could just touch hands about its
bole by stretching their arms to full length in a double embrace, and
leaning their cheeks against its bark, deep-fluted as a Corinthian
column.

This afternoon it meant a torch of welcome on the peak of the last
hill; and it was stirred into yellow flame by the breeze that stroked
its multitudinous blossoms.

Beneath it, the house looked small, cuddling in the shadow, its roof
all pied yellow and green with the fallen saffron petals of the
orange-stained tulip cups, with the stripped sheaths of leaf and
flower, and the broad, blunt, glossy leaves, and the pistils and
stamens shredded and powdery.

To David RoBards the house was home, and never so much home as now that
he fled to it with his bride from New York, and from the cholera that
had begun another of its grisly pilgrimages about the world. Leaving
its religious home in India and traversing Asia and Europe, it had
finally stridden overseas to Canada; drifted across the lakes to the
new village of Chicago, and descended the Mississippi to devastate New
Orleans. In the meanwhile it had crept down the Hudson to where New
York’s two hundred thousand souls waited helpless and shuddering.

Invisible devils of pestilence were darting everywhere now, wringing
the vitals of the city to an agony, and flinging rich and poor
to the cobblestones in such foul and twisted anguishes that the
scavengers recoiled, and the nearest of kin or of love shrank away
with gorges rising and bowels melting, not with pity, but with fear.
In Bellevue Hospital the dead lay on the floor so thickly strewn that
the overworked physicians could hardly move about among them. And the
nurses detailed from the prison took to drink and fought across the
beds of the dying or slept off their liquor on a mattress of corpses.

New York was the prey of confusion. It was the prey of panic. The
people were a-shiver like the leaves of the poplars that lined
Broadway. The great street was paved all the way now to the farmsteads
out at Twenty-third Street. The shops crowding in from Pearl Street had
begun to pursue the homes.

Broadway was ceasing to be a lane of homes. But the cholera was faster
and fiercer than commerce. It had turned Broadway into a channel of
escape. It was all fugitive with citizens fleeing from this new Pompeii
whose fires were from within, whose lava seethed in the loins of its
people. Half the people—a hundred thousand fled.

The swine that had kept the roadway clean were frightened into the
byways by the frightened men and women. The cattle droves that had gone
lowing along Broadway in hundreds were thrust aside by the human herds;
and their dusty wardens cursed the plague.

The street was full of funerals, lone paupers in carts, merchants with
retinues of mourners on foot, moving slowly up to the burial ground
for plague victims in Washington Square. Only men, of course, went to
the funerals, but women joined the flight. The quick crowded the dead
into the flushed gutters, and the hackney coaches, the heavy busses,
the light wagons from Ford, the four-horse stages, the Tilburys,
chairs, gigs, and phaetons were hurried north in a jumble of wagons and
drays filled with baggage and household effects, as well as wives and
children.

The city was moving once more out to Chelsea and other rural retreats.
A hotel of pine boards had been run up in a Greenwich wheatfield in two
days, and it held already five hundred exiles. But Greenwich was not
far enough for RoBards and his precious bride. She had been too hardly
won to be lightly risked.

He had bought the two bays and the Godwin carriage for the escape,
and when he checked his horses under the tree before her home in Park
Place, she was waiting on the step.

He had sent ahead his man, Cuff, and her woman, Teen—both of them
manumitted only five years before by the New York emancipation law of
1827, both still and forever slaves at heart. They were to prepare
his house in the country for the honeymoon. It was up in Westchester,
beyond White Plains, near Robbin’s Mills. The stage could have carried
the bride and groom, but it was booked for days ahead.

So now he helped her in and bestowed her packages. For all his fear, it
was wonderful to feel the exquisite elbow of pretty Patty Jessamine in
his palm, and to know that henceforth she was Mistress David RoBards.

He wished that the crowd of young and old bucks who had besought her
in marriage since she was fifteen, might have been drawn up in review
along Broadway to see him carry her off. Most of all he wished that
Harry Chalender might have witnessed his triumph, for he had dreaded
Chalender so much among his rivals that he was still surprised at his
success. He wondered a little that Chalender had made no resistance to
his conquest.

He whirled the steeds, and turning his back on the Columbia College
Building looming through the grove behind him, sent them galloping
towards City Hall placid in its marble serenity just ahead, its flower
beds and grasses protected from cattle and pigs by a new picket fence.

Patty squealed and clutched RoBards’ arm, as a decently cowardly young
lady ought, when the carriage spun to the left, and RoBards snapped his
whip to warn away a foolish girl who swept the crossing, and one of the
pestiferous boys who thrust loco-foco matches under every nose.

He almost overran the pretty girl who sold hot corn, and a shriek ended
her sweet sing-song, “Lily white corn! Buy my lily white corn!”

Progress was slow among the lumbering busses and stages. Besides, the
horses must be dealt with sparingly. They had twenty-seven miles ahead
of them before they should reach White Plains, and five or more beyond
that. And the paved streets would end at the newly opened Madison
Square.

There was much to terrify the eyes in their progress. Dear friends were
seen among the funeral followers, and among the fugitives many who had
mocked at the prophets of the plague. But Harry Chalender was not to
be seen, though RoBards did not mention him, of course. The foreign
critics were ridiculing the Yankee passion for questions, but even here
bridegrooms did not ask their brides about their bitterest rivals.

The thin and wretched poplar trees along Broadway were drooping under
the hot midsummer sun, and the grass was yellow in the yards; for
water, the greatest need of New York, was more than usually sparse. It
was so expensive that sailing vessels from Europe brought with them
casks enough to take them back again.

The pumps at the corners were crowded with negroes and paupers carrying
pails, and with gentlemen pausing to drink or to splash their hot
faces. The cisterns were dry in the backyards, for no rain had blessed
the roofs.

The bride smiled wanly at her husband as they passed Contoit’s Garden,
for they had often gone together into its cool shadows. It was as near
as they could come to a Watteau idyl in the circumspection of Manhattan
proprieties, and he had leant upon the bare board and dabbed at a lemon
ice (slyly drenched with surreptitious cognac by the negro waiter)
while she dipped the famous Contoit ice cream from an earthenware dish
with a black pewter spoon, and crumbled the poundcake with fingers that
seemed too delicate for any more difficult office. In his infatuated
gaze she wore the grace of Versailles as she carried her spoon curvily
to lips like curled rose-petals under the multiple shade of a black
scuttle hat adrip with veils and studded with a huge peony that brushed
the low branches of the living ceiling. But that was for memory to
cherish in a bright niche on the black wall of New York’s fate.

Even when they reached Niblo’s Gardens out at the edge of civilization,
in the suburbs about Houston Street, the trees that hung their branches
across the high board fence held out no promise of comfort within. The
dust that Billy Niblo had come so far to escape was whipped into clouds
by innumerable hooves, and fell back in the listless air to stifle the
lungs and sting the eyes. Few couples ventured into the bowers where
Mrs. Niblo purveyed ice cream to ladies, and port negus to their beaux.

On these woeful nights, in the flower-scented, flower-lanterned
gardens, the gleaming lanterns of multi-colored glass flattered not
many cheeks, brightened not many eyes. Even the Ravels, who were later
to play here for three hundred nights, had just met with disaster; for
though they ravished New York with the grace of their acrobatics, their
writhing contortions, their dancing, and most of all by their amazing
antics upon the new and bewildering invention of roller skates—even
they could not bring the morose populace to the Park Theatre, and the
cholera closed them out after two weeks of vain battle with the general
despair.

There were sad memories for the RoBards twain on every hand. Herealong
they had walked and wooed; at this house or that they had met for
dinner or dance, and now the homes where carriages had been packed for
balls, were hushed with dread, or shaken with the outcries of woe.

It seemed good to turn away from Broadway at Madison Square, and join
the dust-misted Post Road, with its huge stages lurching perilously,
and racking the bones of the tossed passengers bound for Harlem, New
Rochelle, Rye, and all the towns beyond to Boston.

From here on, the highway ran through farmland, broken now and then by
dwellings, or by warder trees that sheltered mansions in the garden
deeps; but the heat was ruthless and beat with oven-glow upon grain and
grass praying in vain for relief.

Past the cattle marts of Bull’s Head Village, on up Murray’s Hill, and
down through the village of Odellville, their horses trotted doggedly,
threaded McGowan’s Pass, and climbed Breakneck Hill, the scene of
so many fatal mishaps that Patty was in a panic. She clung to her
husband’s arm with such anxiety that he could hardly manage his team.
But to their surprise they got down alive into the plains of Harlem.

RoBards had counted on resting his bride and his horses at Harlem
Village while they took dinner there at three. But Harlem was in even
direr estate than New York, and a pallid negro, who brought water to
the horses, stammered a warning against the accursed spot. Families
had been annihilated by the cholera in a night. Under the big willow
by the church a corpse had been found, and of the coroner’s jury of
twelve, all were dead in a week save one. The firehouse at Harlem was
a fearsome place, as RoBards could see; for it was a morgue where two
overworked black men nailed together pine boxes, and nailed the dead
into them in dozens. The rumor had spread that in their haste they were
burying some of the villagers alive in the churchyard.

Patty implored her husband to drive on, and he lashed the horses to a
run to outrace her fears. He would not have hurt animal or man, except
for her; but for her he was strangely capable of anything, cruel or
sublime.

Not long the gallopade lasted before the jades fell back into a dogged
trot. They pushed on through Bronxdale, and rejoined the Boston Post
Road at McTeague’s Caves. Soon a great flying stage of the new Concord
type, with its huge body swung on great leather thoroughbraces, rolled
by at better than the wonted six miles an hour. It passed RoBards’
weary horses, and hid them and its own seasick passengers in a smoke of
dust.

Coaches like these had been established in New York only a few months
before, to run on rails. RoBards had ridden on one of the first trips,
the whole distance from Prince to Fourteenth Street. The rails made
it easier for the passengers and the horses. Indeed, the legislature
had incorporated a wonderful company that proposed to build a railway
from the Harlem River to White Plains, and pull the coaches with steam
engines, like those on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, which had gone
tearing through space at the incredible speed of twenty miles an hour.
Some doctors said it would blind the passengers to see the landscape
shoot past at such an ungodly speed. But this was the age of wonders.

If the Boston stages threw up such a blinding dust, what would the
steam engines do?

It was good to turn off at the head of Black Dog Brook, and take the
less frequented highway to White Plains, past Tuckahoe, and through
the scenes that Mr. Cooper had described in his novel, _The Spy_.
RoBards had read it as a boy one Saturday night, and it had kept him
awake until he heard the Sunday church bells toll, and heard the chains
rattle as they were drawn across Broadway to keep the ribald infidels
from disturbing the orderly by driving horses on Sunday.

Mr. Cooper was in Europe now, quarreling with some and being praised by
others. He had been highly spoken of by a French critic named Balzac,
who was also writing novels, if RoBards were not mistaken. Yet nearly
everybody said that America had no literature!

In the midst of RoBards’ disquisition on such themes, Patty wailed:

“I’m hungry!”

It was the female bird chirping to her mate, and RoBards felt both
proud and pitiful. Fortunately he could descry, not far ahead, a row of
dormer windows breaking the roof of a long low house that he recognized
as Varian’s Tavern at Scarsdale. A pock-marked milestone set there in
1773 mournfully announced that they were already XXI miles from New
York.

A great barn yawned for the tired horses, and they quickened their gait
as they sniffed its plentiful fodder.

Being a bridegroom, RoBards had worn his second-best suit, made for him
only a little while before by Tryon and Derby, and it had reduced him
to the fashionable immobility in which a gentleman of the mode almost
rivaled a lady.

His black frock was so tight across the chest, so short of waist, and
so constricted of armhole, that he could hardly breathe, or drive the
horses. The pantaloons (if one must mention them) were so snug to his
skin, and the straps beneath his boots drew them so taut, that his
nether limbs were all pins and needles, and when he stepped down from
the carriage, he could hardly endure the exquisite distress.

When he put up his arms for Patty, he heard the ominous hiss of a
slipping seam in a sleeve. His poor bride was asleep all over, and
could hardly rise from her seat or direct her fall across the wheel
into his arms.

They staggered tipsily to the tavern doorway, where RoBards checked her
at the sill to point out the saber-scars still gashing the woodwork.
The British had made them when they were plundering and pursuing the
rebels along this very road nearly sixty years before.

In the tavern lounged a crowd of loud and smelly Westerners who had
goaded their herds all the way from Ohio, and were waiting here to
haggle with the cattle-dealers from New York. But the cattle-dealers
had their own hides to think of.

In the fields about the tavern hundreds of horned pedestrians were
content to graze at ease, while the cholera made New York a human
slaughter-house. They had walked a long way to die, and they were in no
haste.

The inn’s good host, Colonel Varian, veteran of the War of 1812, gave
the city travelers a welcome all the heartier for the contrast between
Patty Jessamine and the disgusted and disgusting drovers, who bellowed
their orders for his ale as if they had caught their voices, as well as
their fragrance, from their cattle.

In a secluded nook Patty forgot to be exquisite, and ate with the
sincerity of hunger, and made fatigue an excuse for sipping a noggin
from the brandy bottle that was a necessary part of all tableware. Then
she prinked a little, and left at Varian’s what dust she had absorbed
on the road hitherto. And so they drove on.

The pad-pad of the horses’ feet, the hot air, the winding miles of
uphill and down, brought her great eyelids over the dear eyes wearied
with terror, and she slept at last against her husband’s shoulder. He
had wanted to discourse to her of the historic places they passed; for
this ground was classic with Washington’s retreats to victory; these
fields and creeks had been clotted with the blood of patriots. But
history had never interested her, though it was RoBards’ passion—next
to her.

He felt strangely like a father carrying a daughter home from school,
though he was not more than eight years her senior. But she was such
a child! though already entering seventeen. He gazed down at her
admiringly, and her head had fallen back until she seemed to gaze up at
him, though her eyes were closed and he knew she slept.

In her poke bonnet her face was like a fragment of bisque at the bottom
of a basket. The brows and the arched eyelids, the tiny path along
the bridge of her nose, the curled nostrils, the incredible grace and
petulant pathos of her lips, severed a little as she panted, and the
whorl of her chin, were of too studied a perfection, he thought, to
have grown merely by any congress of blood and flesh.

He could hardly endure not to bend and kiss her, but that would have
brought her eyes open and he could not study her as now, when she lay
before him like some rare object of vertu, some priceless thing in
tinted Carrara that he had bought overseas and was hurrying to his
private gallery, its one gem, and never to be shared with the public
gaze.

It seemed that only now he had a first moment of leisure to review the
surprise of her capture. She was his wife almost before he dreamed that
he had any hope of winning her at all. It would have been ungallant
but quaintly truthful to say that she had carried him off on this odd
elopement, in which the fleeing couple were man and wife, whom no one
pursued.




CHAPTER II


This was no such runaway match as that famous affair of a cousin of
hers, who had stolen from a masked ball with a forbidden suitor, had
crossed the Hudson, and ridden forty miles on horseback in the night to
find a parson to marry them.

That bold foray against the respectabilities had revealed how easy it
was for forbidden young Romeos to creep into the parlors of the city
Capulets and steal thence their Juliets.

But that elopement had the excuse of thwarting parental tyranny. This
was a flight from Sodom condemned.

When RoBards first pleaded with Patty to marry him and be gone from the
accursed town, she had smiled drearily.

“You don’t want me to run away like Lot’s wife?”

“Yes! yes!”

“But she died looking back, and I’m afraid I’d meet her fate. I’d cry
myself into another pillar of salt, and become only another milestone
on the Post Road. Would you like me like that, Mister RoBards?”

She had somehow never learned to call him by his first name, before
they were married. And by some stranger mystery of shyness, after they
were married, she dared the “David” only on occasions of peculiar
emotion. Even after she bore him children, she called him “Mister
RoBards.”

She had laughed away his alarm, though her merriment was sickly. And
then her uncle had gone with the other members of the Board of Health
to inspect the quarantine station established at Staten Island against
the infected foreigners, swarming overseas in sailing vessels like vast
unclean buzzards; and in two weeks every member of that board was dead
save one; and he was not her uncle.

This had ended her laughter in terror. She had denounced the
authorities for the ignominy of her uncle’s fate. Wealthy as he had
been, his body was carried out to the old Potter’s Field in Washington
Square, and buried in that notorious spot hitherto devoted to the
paupers, the criminals, and the overripe fruit of the gallows tree.

Then one day a nameless corpse was found in Park Place, before her very
door; a cousin of hers that she loved was called to the inquest; and
nine of the twenty on the coroner’s board were dead in a few days, and
her cousin was one of them.

Patty was ready then to flee anywhere; but she could not persuade
Harry Chalender to escape, and she vowed that she would not go without
him. RoBards felt a cholera of jealousy burning his very vitals as
he realized that his wife had seemed more afraid of leaving Harry
Chalender than of the plague.

But Harry Chalender scorned to fly and RoBards would not leave town
while Patty was there, even though she refused his love. He had just
resigned himself to a life without her, and was hoping that the
pestilence would end his suffering, when she came to him.

Only yesterday afternoon it was! And she came running along the street
to his house—defying all the gossips in a greater fear!

He was living just below City Hall Park, on the east side of Broadway,
in a once fashionable home that had become a fashionable boarding
house. He happened to be standing at his window brooding when the sight
of a woman running caught his eye. He was astounded to see that it was
Patty Jessamine. Everybody was, for everybody knew her beauty. RoBards
was down the stairs and at the front door just as she crossed Broadway,
dodging among the tangled traffic.

She paused to lean against the pump that stood at the corner there,
not heeding that her tiny shoes and the ribbons about her ankles were
bedabbled with the mire, for she cowered from a staggering, groping
wretch who seemed to turn black as he reeled, clutched at her wide
skirts, and sprawled in the last gripe of cholera. She had to step
across him to escape and RoBards ran to catch her as she swooned.

Her scream of dismay ended in a stuttering whisper:

“Marry me, Mr. RoBards! and take me away before I die.”

His exultance was so great at the undreamed-of benison that he felt a
howl of wolfish triumph straightening his throat. So he had won her
away from Harry Chalender! How? What did it matter? He cried,

“God knows how gladly!”

He stopped a passing hackney coach and took her home. She was afraid
at first to get out of the cab, for she explained that her father was
stricken with the cholera, and her brother had died in the house that
afternoon.

He reassured her as best he could, and gave her servants orders to pack
her things, and make her ready for such a wedding as he might improvise
in a city whose ministers were worn out in body and soul with funeral
ceremonies.

In mad haste he had somehow accomplished the countless details that
made her his in the eyes of State and Church. It was not till long
after that she had grown calm enough to repent her frenzy of fear, and
the irreparable calamity of a marriage at such speed.

She had been reared to look forward to her wedding day as the high
festival of her life, and had devoted numberless hours to visions of
herself in her vast, creamy satin bridal robe from Whittingham’s, with
a headdress like a veiled tower set upon a coiffure molded by Martell’s
own deft fingers, a pair of Lane’s tightest satin boots, and gloves
six buttons high. She had insisted that she should receive the newest
novelty, a bridal bouquet, and that the wedding cake should be as big
as a cathedral.

And now she was married and all, and never a sign of splendor, only an
old veil and a wreath of artificial orange blossoms; only the ring that
the groom had all but forgotten to bring.

Still, she was alive, and that was something; that was everything; that
was far more than could be said of many a pretty friend of hers who
had been blooming toward wifehood a week ago, and was now a blighted
thing in a box from a coffin warehouse.

As RoBards stared down at her when he could risk a glance away from
the rough road, she seemed to be almost waxen with death. Her cheeks
were so pale, her breathing so gentle, that she might be drifting from
him even now. The little distance between sleep and death gave her an
especial dearness, and he hated himself for the meanness of remembering
his question after the preacher had gone and the few friends had
dispersed:

“How does it happen that you didn’t ask Harry Chalender to your
wedding?”

He had asked it teasingly, in a spirit of mischievous bravado. But she
had groaned:

“Harry? Harry is dying! Didn’t you know it? The old slave-woman at his
house told our black man.”

This had cast ashes upon the fire of his rejoicing. But the flames
leaped through them again. For he had won. She was his, and it would be
impious to complain that his enemy had been stricken.

He felt a sudden dread of his bride. Could she be so heartless, so
selfish—ah, well, women were weak things and men must be strong for
them.

The good thing, the glorious thing, was that he had her his. She was
Mrs. RoBards now, and she was asleep against his arm. The harsh ruts of
the road jolting her tender body kept her bosom tremulous as a heap of
white hyacinths fluttered by a soft breeze of summer.

With the rocking of the carriage her velvet cheek slid up and down on
his shoulder. He was startled to note at length that his sleeve was
pink and her inner cheek whiter than the other. So she powdered and
painted! And he had never known it! He would have said that only the
wantons that crowded the town or the shameless flirts were discontent
to leave their skins as God made them. Yet his own bride—but—she was
a wife now. She would be a mother in time. And she would have no
temptations to vanity henceforth.

He studied her a little closelier, as if, in marrying her, he had
indeed taken her from beneath the veil of romance into the keen
sunlight of truth. The delicate forehead had never a wrinkle, even
between the eyebrows of such delicate penmanship. If she had thought
hard and fiercely on the problems of life and religion and natural
philosophy, there would have been lines there. Well, one did not marry
a woman for her wisdom. But what sorry tortures she endured to make
herself a doll! She denied herself not only the glory of flight in the
realms of thought, but even the privileges of motion.

She was the voluntary prisoner—as Fanny Kemble would say—of “tight
stays, tight garters, tight sleeves, tight waistbands, tight armholes,
and tight bodices.” She took no exercise, wore veils and handkerchiefs
to ward off the glare, and preferred to sit in the dark till the sun
was gone, lest it brown her pallor. Yet she went in little flat satin
slippers through the snow, and bared her shoulders to icy winds that
made a man huddle in his heaviest fear-naught.

But her foolishness somehow made her all the more fragile, all the more
needful of gentle dealing. And he loved her pitiably.

She was still asleep when he made out from a hilltop the spires of
the ancient courthouse, and the new academy in the half-shire village
of White Plains. RoBards wanted to tell his wife that she need not be
lonely out here, for she would be only a few miles from this lively
community, already containing several hundred people, a boys’ school,
and a newspaper. But he let her sleep, fearing that, after all, she
might not be impressed. She slept past the great sight of this region,
Washington’s old headquarters, only to wake a little later as the
carriage was flung and whipped about in a road of particular barbarity.

“Where are we, Mist’ RoBards?” she cried, and gasped to learn how far
they had driven. He watched her wild little glances with fascination.
She seemed to flirt and coquet with the very landscape.

She glanced with amazement at the wildness around her, the maples and
wild rhododendrons, and all the Westchester paradise of leaves and
flowers crowding in the little-used highway, brushing the fetlocks of
the horses, falling back like sickled wheat from the scythe of the
wheels, and bending down from above to flail the carriage top with
fragrant leaf-laden wands.

And now at last she spied his great tulip tree, and the Lilliputian
house beneath it, and she was weary enough to welcome the welcome they
vouchsafed.

The carriage rolled across a brief wooden bridge above a merry water.

“That’s old Bronck his river,” he told her. “And these hills were the
stronghold that Washington fell back to after the British drove him out
of the White Plains. Ignorant old General Howe had ordered his navy to
sail up the Bronx, and when the ships could not even find the little
creek, Howe feared to advance any further. He sneaked away to capture
Fort Washington by treachery.

“Our tulip trees won the praise of Washington while the great man was
here. Perhaps that very tree is the son of one of those that shed its
blossoms on his tent. Tulip trees are hard to persuade; they won’t grow
where you plant them. But this one came to live here of its own accord
when my father built this house for my mother.

“Strange, isn’t it, my darling, that they should have come out here—in
1805, it was—to escape from another pestilence? It was the yellow fever
then. It had been breaking out every few years before, but that year it
was frightful, and my mother was a bride then just as you are now.

“They went back to New York because she grew lonely, but they came out
again with the next fever summer. I was born here. Ten years ago I came
out for a while. That was another yellow fever year. Even you remember
that far back, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, Mist’ RoBards. That was when they moved the Post Office, the
Customs House, the banks, the newspapers, the churches—even my father’s
store, out to Greenwich Village. But we went back in the late fall.
When shall we go back now?”

“God knows!” he groaned. “I should be glad to stay here with you
forever.”

“It’s lonely, though—a little, don’t you think, Mist’ RoBards?”

“Not with you. We’d best forget New York. It’s a doomed city now.”

“Oh, don’t say that!”

“Dr. Chirnside called this a visitation of God’s judgment. It’s not
the first. Every few years the warning comes; the people run away and
repent, and live in simple villages or on their farms; but when the
plague has passed over they go back; they throw open their gaudy homes,
wash off the mark of the angel of the Passover on the bloody lintels of
their doors, and start up the carnival again. The men get drunk, the
women tipple and flirt. They dance all night, gamble, carouse, divorce,
live beyond their means, neglect the poor. Look at the churches on
Sunday! Hardly a man there; all women, and not many of them. Not one in
ten goes to church Sundays.”

She broke in on his tirade with a childish puzzler:

“What causes the plague, do you think, Mist’ RoBards?”

“Who can tell? It is God’s judgment, the pious men say. The doctors
call it an exhalation, a vapor, a miasma; but those are only words to
wrap ignorance in. God only knows what causes the plague.”

“Harry Chalender says—said——”

The word was the toll of a passing bell. The change of tense was like
the taking of a life. It silenced her a dreadful while. Then she tried
to banish the specter with an impersonal phrase:

“Some people say that cholera comes from bad water, and New York has no
good water. I can hardly drink the bitter stuff from the pumps, and I
can taste the old log pipes in the water that we buy from the Manhattan
Company’s well. The rainwater from the roofs is worse. No wonder
everybody drinks brandy, and there is so much drunkenness. Harry—many
people want to go out into the country, all the way up to the Croton or
the Bronx, and bring the pure streams down into the city, and do away
with the pumps and cisterns.”

RoBards laughed. “That’s an old idea. They talked about it after the
yellow fever of 1798. But they found it would cost a million dollars,
and gave it up, and let that old villain of an Aaron Burr dig his
Manhattan well in the heart of the town. Things are so much higher now
that it would cost five millions; and it would take years to lay the
miles of pipes. No, no, they’ll never make our wild little Bronx a New
York citizen. How much better to come up here into the hills and drink
its water where it is born.”

“Poor New York!” she sighed, and her head was turned so far about as
she looked off to the South that her round chin rested on the round
of her shoulder; the somber irises of her eyes were lost in the deep
lashes, where there was a hint of a tear, and her throat was a straight
line, taut as a whip-cord, from the tip of her tiny ear to the ivory
slope of her breast.

Her beauty was marble in the repose of intense meditation upon the city
abandoned to its fate. He drank it in devotedly before he laughed:

“Have you turned into Lot’s wife already, or have you the power to turn
those big eyes toward the house? It’s pretty from here.”

She startled a little, like the frightened gazelle which was the model
of ladylike conduct. Her head came round slowly, and she flicked the
dew from her eyes with a quick flutter of the lids. Then the arc of her
red lips changed from concave to convex as the sorrowful droop became a
warm smile.

A dark thought flitted through his mind that at best she found her
future prison less dismal than she had imagined it; and that her
fatigue would have made her greet even a jail with relief.

She had sat so long on so rough a voyage that she could hardly rise.

“My limbs have gone to sleep,” she said, and blushed at such a bold
allusion. She hardly knew her husband well enough yet for such
carelessness.

But he felt a dart of sharp happiness at such an indelicacy. This was
a wild adventure. A wilder was to follow, for, as he lifted her across
the front wheel he was forced to observe not only her prunella slippers
entire, but a flash of the white stocking above the ankle where the
crossed thongs were knotted.

He was dizzied by the swoop of her beauty. She came to earth and his
arms in the billow of her huge silken skirt, and her vast “elephant”
sleeves, with a swirl of ribbons everywhere.

An incense came with the goddess stooping to the ground, and she
leaned a moment along his body, the captive of his arms, and he thrust
his face so deep into her hat that its brim knocked off his own tall
beaver. He let it lie in the dust, though it was a deep-piled St. John
of the latest bell.

He kissed her full and fair, and his arms found her as soft, as spicy,
and as lithe in her voluminous taffeta as a long bough of tulip
blossoms smothered in leaves. But the sharp points of his collar,
protruding above his stock like a pair of spear-heads, hurt her cheek
and threatened to blind her, and she squealed. He loved to hear her
squeal.

A rude guffaw of unmannerly laughter brought him back to daylight and
indignation, as he heard old farmer Albeson roar:

“Wall, wall! I never seen two bodies with one head till now. Why, it’s
Master Dave! and his female bride!”

The farmer’s wife cackled at the wit of her spouse, and Patty giggled
with well-bred reserve. She treated the old rustics with the manner she
held toward the blacks who had been her father’s slaves when she was
younger. But though the Albesons were quick to remind any presumptuous
prigs that they were as good as royalty in the great and only republic,
they found Patty’s tyranny as pretty as a baby’s.

They led the way into the house. David’s black man Cuff took the horses
to the stable, and Patty’s brown woman Teen carried the luggage up the
steps and up the stairs to the long, lone room under the eaves, that
grazed the four high tops of bedposts carved as if the mahogany had
been twisted or braided.

The first duty was to wash off the dust of the travel. When Patty
lifted the scuttle hat from the clutter of her curls before the mirror,
she screamed with dismay:

“I’m blacker than Teen!”

RoBards himself poured water into the bowl and boasted of its clarity.

“Not much like the soup you get from your city cisterns, eh?”

“It’s cold, though,” she murmured.

She put him out of the room while she changed her dress to a simple,
loose house-robe. She slipped out of the steel cuirass of her stays,
and the soft sleeves drooped from her shoulders along her arms. There
was a girl’s body bewitchingly hinted inside the twinkling wrinkles.

After the return to simple, clinging things of the brief French
republic and the early Empire, the fashions had been departing more and
more from any respect for God’s image beneath. When Patty came down the
steps in something that was rather drapery than a group of balloons,
RoBards was amazed to find how human she was after all, how Grecian,
somehow; how much quainter, littler, dearer.

She apologized for her immodesty, but gave weariness as her excuse.

“I should have fainted in my room—if you had been there,” she said,
with an audacity he had never dreamed her capable of. “But where’s the
profit of a swoon if you fall into the arms of another woman—and a
black one at that?”

“You don’t have to faint to get into my arms,” he riposted as he
crushed her close.

“I’ll faint if you don’t let me out of them, Mist’ RoBards,” she gasped.

Then they went in to tea. She made hardly a pretence of eating. Even if
she had not been trained to fast at table like a lady, she would have
been too jaded with the travel.

Afterward he walked with her on the narrow piazza in the rising moon,
and he felt so wonderfully enriched by her possession, so intimately at
home with her, that he asked her if he might smoke.

“I beg you to, Mist’ RoBards,” she said; “I love the flavor of Havana.”

He took from the portmanteau-like lining of his hat one of the cigars
he carried there with his red silk handkerchief, his black gloves, and
any other small baggage that might otherwise bulge his pockets. As he
lighted it with one of the new spiral sulphur matches, he remembered
that Harry Chalender had smoked much and expensively.

Harry Chalender even smoked cigars on the street and in office hours,
though no gentleman was supposed to do that, and it would have ruined a
less secure young man financially and socially. Some of the banks would
not lend money to a man eccentric enough to smoke on the street or to
wear a mustache. But Harry had dared even to grow and wear a mustache
down Broadway. It was to pay a bet on an election, but it shocked the
more conservative.

His only effeminacy was his abstention from chewing tobacco and from
snuff. Patty often praised him for not spitting tobacco juice about
over her skirts and carpets, as so many of the gentlemen did. She had
one dress quite ruined on Broadway by a humorist’s ejaculation of such
liquor.

Because of Chalender, RoBards flung down his cigar and glared at it
where it lay in the grass, as smouldering as his sullen jealousy, and
glared back like an eye, watchful and resentful.

Only a little while he was privileged to stroll his porch with his arm
about Patty Jessamine’s unfortressed waist, for she tried to smuggle
away a yawn under the cover of a delicious sigh, and then protested
that she could not keep her eyelids open.

“No wonder!” he answered, “they’re so big!”

She kissed him on the cheek and drifted away before he could
retaliate. He walked up and down alone a while, breathing the incense
of her possession in the quiet air, still faintly flavored with the
perfume she employed.

Then he went in and up the dark stairs to find her. She lay asleep
along the bed as if she had been flung there. She was lying across
the border of the candle’s yellow feud with the blue moonlight; they
divided her form between dim gold and faint azure. She had fallen
aslumber where she fell, and he stole close to wonder over her and to
study her unblushing beauty.

Her face was out of the reach of the candle’s flickering gleam, and the
moon bewitched it with a mist of sapphire. Through the open window a
soft breeze loitered, fingering her curls, lifting them from her snowy
neck and letting them fall. And from the tulip tree a long, low branch,
studded with empty sconces of living brass, beat upon the pane with
muffled strokes.

“Beautiful! beautiful!” he whispered—not to her, nor to himself, but to
a something that seemed to watch with him. He longed to be worthy of
such beauty, and wondered if she—the she inside that little bosom—were
worthy of such treasures, such perils, as her face and her fascinations.

His heart ached with a yearning to shelter her from the evil of the
world, the plagues that would rend that lacy fabric, the fiends that
would soil its cleanliness. Such a petulant, froward, reckless little
imp it was that dwelt inside the alabaster shrine! Such loyalty she had
for the gaudy city and its frivolities! Such terror of the pestilence,
yet such terror of the great, sweet loneliness of this beloved solitude!

Else, why had she stared back along the road with a sorrow, with a
regret that seemed to trail almost like a ribbon reaching all the way
to town? Would she ever be divorced from the interests that he could
neither understand nor admire?

Well, she was his for a while—for now—and more his own while she
slept than while she was awake, for when she was awake her eyes kept
studying the plain, dull walls, and his plain, dull self; wondering,
no doubt, what substitute he could provide for the dances and picnics
and romances that crowded the days and nights in the city.

He bent to kiss a cheek like warm and pliant porcelain, and to draw the
quilt across a shoulder escaped from its sleeve, and all aglow, as if
light itself slumbered there.

He tiptoed from the room and down the stairs and into the August
night. He stepped into a cataract of moonbeams streaming down upon the
breathing grass and the somnolent trees, the old walls and fences, and
the waft flowers in the unkempt garden.

A wind walked to and fro among them like a prisoner in trailing
robes, a wind that seemed to be trying to say something, and could
not, because its tongue had been plucked out. But it kept trying
inarticulately to mumble a warning—against what?—the hazards of life
and love perhaps, and the inevitable calamities that follow success.

He had succeeded in winning Patty Jessamine. But what else had he
incurred?




CHAPTER III


Leaving the mansion of such a night and entering a mere house, was less
a going in than a going out. The night, vast as space, was yet closer
than the flesh, more intimate than the marrow of the bones or the
retina that sat behind the eyes and observed.

When he left the roomy dark at last he found Patty still asleep, or
pretending to be. He could not quite feel sure of her. He never could.
It was only of himself and of his idolatry that he was forever sure.

If she slept indeed it would be cruel to wake her. If she affected
slumber, it was because she prayed to be spared his love. In either
case he had not the courage to invade her retreat, or compel her
withdrawn presence to return.

This sublimity of devotion was ridiculous. But he achieved it.

The morning found him still a bachelor. He was amazed at first to hear
women’s voices in another room quarreling; it was Patty berating her
stupid maid.

When he met her at the breakfast table she was serene again, and held
up her cheek like a flower to be pressed against his lips. She had
taken command of the household, imperious as a young queen, a-simmer
with overbubbling pride like a little girl suddenly hoisted to the head
of the table in her mother’s absence.

Womanlike, she found a strange comfort in the discovery that the china
in the house was good, the linen of quality, and the silver dignified.
She had erudition of a sort, in a field where he was blankly ignorant.
She recognized at once that the gleaming coffee pot was from the
elegant hand of Paul Revere himself.

“I didn’t know he was a silversmith,” said RoBards.

“What else was he famous for?” Patty said.

This dazed him as a pretty evidence of the profound difference between
a male and a female mind. He started to tell her about what Paul Revere
had done when she began to praise his mother’s taste in china. She
laughed:

“You never saw the pieces of china I did, did you, Mist’ RoBards?”

“You did china? You never showed me any!”

“It was nothing to boast of. But when I was a little girl at Mrs.
Okill’s school, I drew a pattern of a tea-set—a wreath of sweet peas
and convolvulus surrounding my initial and a lamb holding a cross.
My cousin Peter, who was going out to China as a supercargo, said he
would take it with him and have it put on a tea-set. He made fun of my
drawing and wrote on the design under the lamb: ‘This is not a wig,
but a lamb.’ And in about a year the set came round the Horn in one of
my uncle’s ships. But the foolish, long-tailed apes in China had put
on every cup and saucer the words, ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ I
cried for days, and broke every piece to flinders.”

She could laugh with him now, and when she laughed he found a new
excuse for a new adoration. He was not gifted in frivolity, and the
old house seemed to store up her mirth for dark days when remembered
laughter would make a more heartbreaking echo than the remembered drip
of tears.

Breakfast left his soul famished for her love, but she would not be
serious. She flitted and chirped like a bird that lures a hunter away
from her nest.

She seemed to evade him, “to lock herself from his resort,” to be
preparing retreats and defences. He was humiliated and shamefully
ashamed to find that she was not yet his wife save by ceremony and
appearance. He had sharply rebuked the old farmer for a crassly
familiar joke or two upon a consummation devotedly to be wished, but he
would have hung his head if the truth were known.

Then finally, suddenly, strangely, she was his, and in a manner of no
sanctity at all, in a mood of eddying passion, like an evil intrigue.
Many of the bachelors, and many of the married men, kept mistresses,
but Patty was his wife. And yet he felt a bewildering sense of
infidelity to somebody, something. Was it because she seemed afterwards
to wear a look of guilt? Was she thinking that she was disloyal to
that man Chalender, whose ghost perhaps by now had left his body and
followed her up into this citadel?

If she seemed to feel guilty, she betrayed also an exhilaration in the
crime, a bravado he had never imagined her capable of.

He was the one that suffered remorse, and he came to wonder if it were
not after all man and not woman who had invented modesty and chastity,
and who upheld them as ideals which women accepted rather in obedience
than in conviction.

Evidently woman must be controlled and coerced for her own salvation.

There had been recently a flurry of a few insane zealots who had coined
a new phrase, “Women’s Rights,” and had invented an obscene garment
named after a shameless Mrs. Bloomer. In Boston a few benighted wearers
of this atrocity had been properly mobbed off the streets. They were
even less popular and less likely to succeed than the anti-slavery
fanatics.

RoBards was glad that Patty was at the other extreme from such bigots.
He would rather have her a butterfly than a beetle. He loved her for
saying once:

“I want to be ruled, Mist’ RoBards, if you please!”

And by God he would rule her—and for God he would rule her, and save
her, soul and body. If either failed it would be his fault.

Pride in her meekness, fear for her frailty, pity for her lack of
intellect, and wonder at her graces, were intertwisted with moods of a
groveling unworthiness of her, of upstaring rapture before her mystic
wisdoms.

Her purity seemed to be replenished after the storms of love, as the
blue sky came back innocent and untarnished after a black cloud and
lightning. Quick tempests rose and passed, and a fleet angelic quality
brought her down to earth on and in a rainbow from heaven.

He found himself studying her as a botanist studies a flower. In their
loneliness they dwelt as on a desert island.

But she could ride a little and he had good saddle horses, and she
found many occasions for excursions to White Plains. They rode often
together up to the Northcastle post office, where the stage flung off
the New York papers and the letters. She had a brave beauty as she
rode, her long skirt like a spinnaker at the horse’s flank, her veil
flying from her hat, her silhouette one with the horse’s back, where
her arched thigh rose above it and clasped the saddle horn.

The news from the city was blacker every day, and she was more and more
content with her exile, until a letter came to tell her that Harry
Chalender had not died after all, but had somehow won his duel with the
Asiatic death. The same post brought her word that her father had also
passed the crisis. She made a great noise of delight in the recovery of
her father. But she said nothing more of Harry Chalender.

And so his name rang aloud in the back of RoBards’ mind. He was hard
to please: if she had exclaimed upon Chalender’s escape he would have
winced. Yet her silence was unendurable.

In a ferocious quarrel that began in nothing at all, and was, on his
part, only the outcry of a love too exacting, because it was too
hungry, she flung at him:

“I needn’t have married you, Mist’ RoBards! You made me. You kept at
me.”

“Hush, sweetheart!” he pleaded, “you don’t want the servants to hear.”

“What do I care for servants? If I hadn’t been such a fool as to listen
to you, I might have married Harry Chalender.”

“Hush!” he stormed, “or, by——”

“By who, what?” she screamed, staring up at him as if in desire as in
need of a beating. When he could not smite such beauty, she cried at
him:

“This house! This terrible tomb! My father would have called it this
damned house. Well, it’s nothing but a madhouse to me, one of those
places where they lock people up so that they may go insane really.”

He choked. It was bad enough for a lady to swear, for his wife of all
ladies to swear, but there was a sacrilege in her curse upon this home.

This anathema and this bridal rebellion must be kept secret. Walls had
ears but no lips to speak. Servants, however, had both long ears and
large mouths; and negroes were blabbers.

And so for the sake of quiet, he crushed back his own wrath and his
sense of her wickedness, and fell on his knees before her, imploring
pardon as an idolater might prostrate himself before a shrine whence he
received only divine outrage and injustice. And she was appeased by his
surrender! And lifted him up in her arms amorously!

He resented her caresses more than her cruelty, but he preferred them
because they were private and murmurous. He had an inherited passion
for secrecy.

One day he learned that she had ordered her horse saddled without
consulting him, or inviting him to ride with her. He sent the nag back
to the stables, and when she came out habited, she was furious.

“You can’t ride alone about these woods,” he said.

“Why not? Who’s to harm me?”

“What if the horse bolted and flung you against a rock, or fell on you
or dragged you? Besides, there are many bad characters hereabouts. Only
a mile down the road is a family called Lasher.”

“Those poor wretches in that tumbledown hut? Who’s afraid of them?”

“They’re descendants of the Cowboys and Skinners who used to murder and
torture people here during the Revolution. We’re in the old Neutral
Ground, where those hyenas used to prey on patriots and Tories alike.
They burned homes, hung old ministers up by the neck to make them tell
where their money was, mistreated women—did everything horrible. Major
André was captured by some of them just a few miles from here. Those
Lashers are sons of one of the worst of the Skinners, and I wouldn’t
trust you among them.”

When she insisted, he said, “You shall not go!”

Three days later he read in his _Herald_ that Mr. Harry Chalender was
so far recovered from the cholera that he had gone to recuperate at his
farm near the village of Sing Sing, not far from the country seat of
Mr. Irving, the well-known writer.

Sing Sing was only a few miles away. RoBards handed the paper to his
wife, with an accusing finger pointing to the notice. She met his eye
with a bland gaze, and said:

“I knew it. That is where I wanted to ride. But you wouldn’t let me.”

“Why didn’t you ask me to go along with you?”

“You don’t like Harry.”

This logic dazed him.

“Because I don’t like him, you are to visit him secretly?”

“But his mother and sisters are there, Mist’ RoBards! Am I to forsake
my every friend?”

“Friend!” he groaned.

And that made her laugh. She flung her arms about him and said:

“The only time you’re funny is when you’re mad, Mist’ RoBards. I love
you jealous.”

A few weeks later when he and Patty came back from a tour of their
fields with the farmer, they saw a cariole (a “carry-all,” as she
called it) hitched to the post in front of the gate. On the porch they
found Chalender, pale, lean, weak, but still smiling.

The cry that escaped Patty’s lips was so poignant with welcome that
RoBards’ heart went rocking in his breast.

If Chalender had been in his usual health, RoBards might have killed
him. It was, oddly, wickeder to kill an ill man than a well one.

He wanted to challenge the fellow to a duel, but dueling was against
the laws of the nation, and latterly against the more powerful laws of
fashion. Besides, what excuse could he give for a challenge?

And the scandal of it! The newspapers were diabolically scandalous
nowadays; foreign travelers said they had never imagined anything so
outrageous as the American newspapers.

When RoBards saw Patty drop down in front of Chalender and hold his
hand, he had an impulse to shoot the dog dead. But he could not stain
Tuliptree Farm with blood.

While he waited for the stableman to take the horses, he could see that
Chalender’s manner with Patty was intimate, emotional, intense. He was
probably bewailing his loss of her. RoBards felt that the innocent old
house was depraved by such insolence, but in order to deny his wife
the luxury of another festival of his jealousy, when he came up on the
porch he greeted Chalender as cordially as he could, and complimented
him on his appearance—which was altogether too hale to please RoBards.

Harry Chalender usually suited his talk to his company, and the gallant
became at once the man of affairs.

“That’s the Bronx down there, isn’t it, Dave? We ought to have it in
New York now. It would put an end to this cholera. That’s one reason
why I’m up here in this solitude. New York is dying of thirst; we’ve
got to have water; we’ve put it off too long. But nobody can decide
what to do. The conservative crowd says the well water that was good
enough for our fathers is good enough for us. But our fathers died
in great agony, and we’re doing the same. The New York water is good
enough for cholera and yellow fever. It’s a fine thing, too, for
Greenwich Village, and other far-off points that the whole town runs
away to every few summers. But New York has got to get good water and
plenty of it—or move out of New York.

“Funny, isn’t it, how people hate to be saved? I was reading that when
Pontius Pilate brought water into Jerusalem, the Jews rose in a mob
and demanded somebody’s life—as they did on a certain other famous
occasion. And no doubt it will be devilish hard—pardon me, Patty!—to
persuade the New York mob to take water—and pay for it.

“You could divide the town into two parties, the Drys and the Wets. And
we Wets are at war among ourselves. One party wants to get a supply
from the Passaic River; some favor our Croton; some lean toward your
Bronx.”

RoBards answered with dubious irony:

“I’d thank them to lean the other way. If New York lays hands on our
classic stream, I’ll rise in a mob myself.”

Chalender offered an argument he probably supposed to be irresistible:

“You could sell out your holdings at a vast profit, and get very
rich without a stroke of work. I’m casting about for a few quiet
investments. If I only knew which way the cat would jump, I could do
very handsomely by myself.”

RoBards answered coldly:

“Different people have different standards of honesty.”

Patty gasped at the directness of this stab, but Chalender laughed:

“And some people call that honesty which is really only an indifference
to opportunity. Most of these starving farmers up here would shout with
joy if I offered them twenty-five dollars an acre. If I sold it later
for a hundred, they would howl that I had cheated them. But think how
much more gracefully I should spend it.”

RoBards nodded. “As for grace, you could have no rivals.”

Chalender did not wince; he did not even shrug. He went on:

“But the thing will have to be decided by an election.”

“You can always buy votes. One of the inalienable rights of our
citizens is the right to sell their birthrights.”

“Yes, but it takes such a pile of money to buy enough birthrights.
Nobody can vote without owning real estate, and property gives people
expensive notions. That’s why I am in favor of universal suffrage. I
should be willing even to give the ladies the vote—or anything else
the darlings desire.”

RoBards was hot enough to sneer:

“In a ladies’ election you would bribe them all with a smile.”

“Thanks!” said Chalender, destroying the insult by accepting it as a
compliment. “But let me have a look at your Bronx, won’t you? As an
engineer it fascinates me. It is the real reason for my visit to-day.”

This thin duplicity made even Patty blush. RoBards bowed:

“Our sacred Bandusian font is always open for inspection, but it’s
really not for sale.”

“Not even to save New York from depopulation?”

“That would be a questionable service to the world,” RoBards grumbled.
“The town is overgrown already past the island’s power to support. Two
hundred thousand is more than enough. Let the people get out of the
pest-hole into the country and till the farms.”

“You are merciless to us poor cits. No, my dear RoBards, what New York
wants she will take. She is the city of destiny. Some day the whole
island will be one swarm up to the Harlem, and it will have a gigantic
thirst. Doesn’t the Bible say something about the blessedness of him
who gives a cup of water to the least of these? Think what blessings
will fall on the head of him who brings gallons of water to every man
Jack in the greatest of American cities! Quench New York’s thirst and
you will check the plagues and the fevers that hold her back from
supremacy.”

“Her supremacy will do the world no good. It will only make her a
little more vicious; give crime and every evil a more comfortable home.”

“Is there no wickedness up here in Arcadia?”

“None compared to the foulness of the Five Points.”

“Isn’t that because there is almost nobody up here to be wicked—or to
be wicked with?”

“Whatever the reason, we are not complaining of the dearth.”

“That’s fine! It’s a delight to find somebody content with something.
But show me your Bronx, and I may do you a service. You won’t object
if I find fault with the stream, because then I shall have ammunition
to fight with against your real enemies, who want to dam the brook at
Williams’s Bridge and pipe it into town. You and I should be the best
of friends; for I want the people to look to the Croton for their help.
It will enable New York to wash its face oftener, and drink something
soberer than brandy. And it will enrich me through the sale of the
miserable lands that have grown nothing for me but taxes and mortgage
interest.”

But RoBards was not content, and he was a whit churlish as he led
Chalender along the high ridges, and let him remark the silver highway
the river laid among the winding hills of Northcastle, down into the
balsam-snowed levels of the White Plains.

Little as RoBards approved his tenacious guest, he approved himself
less. He felt a fool for letting Chalender pink him so with his clumsy
sarcasms, but he could not find wit for retort or take refuge in a
lofty tolerance.

He suffered a boorish confusion when Chalender said at last, as they
returned to the house and the cocktails that Patty had waiting for them
on the porch:

“I agree with you, David. The Bronx is not our river. I can honestly
oppose its choice. But it’s a pretty country you have here. I love the
sea and the Sound and the big Hudson, but there is a peculiar grace
about these inland hills of Westchester. I shall hope to see much of
them in the coming years.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I shall bid for a contract to build a section of the Croton
waterway. That may mean that I shall spend several years in your
neighborhood. My office will be the heights along the Hudson. That is
only a few miles away and a pleasant gallop. You won’t mind if I drop
in upon you now and then when I am lonely?”

Though Chalender ignored Patty’s existence in making this plea,
RoBards felt that it was meant for her. But what could he say except a
stupidly formal:

“It will be an honor to receive one of the captains of so great an
enterprise.”

“Thanks! And I can count upon always finding you here?”

Now RoBards amazed himself when he answered:

“I fear not. We came up only to escape the cholera. When that is over,
we shall return to New York. I have my law practice to remember.”

He could feel, like hot irons in his cheek, the sharp eyes of Patty. He
knew what she was thinking. He had said that he wanted to dwell here
forever. And now he was pretending that he was only a brief visitor.

Instead of gasping with the shock of her husband’s perversion, she
snickered a little. It was as if he heard a sleighbell tinkle in the
distance. But someone else was in that sleigh with his sweetheart.

He could not understand Patty. He seemed to please her most by his most
unworthy actions. He wondered if she had scented the jealousy that had
prompted his words, and had taken it once more as an unwitting tribute
to her.

He thought he detected a triumphant smile on Chalender’s face, and he
longed to erase it with the flat of his hand. Instead, he found himself
standing up to bow in answer to Chalender’s bow, like a jointed zany.

The inscrutable Patty, when Chalender had driven out of sight of the
little lace handkerchief she waved at him, turned to her husband with
sudden anger in her face. He braced himself for a rebuke, but again she
confused him by saying:

“The impudence of Harry Chalender! Daring to crowd in on our honeymoon!
It was splendid how you made him understand that we RoBardses don’t
welcome him here.”

“Did I? Don’t we?” stammered RoBards, so pitifully rejoiced to find
her loyal to him and to their sacred union that he gathered her in his
arms, and almost sobbed, “Oh, my dear! my sweet! my darling!”

Though she was as soft and flexile as a shaft of weeping willow,
somehow she was like a stout spar upholding him in the deep waters of
fear, and he felt most ludicrously happy when she talked nursery talk
to him and cooed:

“Poor, little David baby wants its Patty to love it, doesn’t it?”

He could not answer in her language, but he felt a divinity in it, and
was miserably drenched in ecstasy. And she had used his first name!




CHAPTER IV


By and by the summer sifted from the trees and ebbed from the sky. The
honeymoon passed like a summer, in days and nights of hot beauty, in
thunder-salvos of battle, in passions of impatient rain.

For a while the autumn was a greater splendor, a transit from a green
earth starred with countless blossoms of scarlet, purple, azure, to a
vast realm of gold—red gold, yellow gold, green gold, but always and
everywhere gold. All Westchester was a treasure-temple of glory. Then
the grandeur dulled, the gold was gilt, was only patches of gilt, was
russet, was shoddy. The trees were bare. Sharp outlines of unsuspected
landscape came forth like hags whose robes have dropped from their
gaunt bones. The wind grew despondent. Savor went with color; hope was
memory; warmth, chill.

Something mournful in the air reminded RoBards of a poem that Mr.
Bryant, the editor of the _Post_, had written a few years before:

  “The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year,
  Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere;
  Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
  They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.”

When he quoted this to Patty, her practical little soul was moved, as
always, to the personal:

“Your Mr. Bryant writes better than he fights, Mist’ RoBards. Only last
year, almost in front of our house, I saw him attack Mr. Stone, of
the _Commercial Advertiser_, with a horsewhip. Mr. Stone carried off
the whip. It was disgusting, but it brightened Broadway. Oh, dear,
does nothing exciting ever happen up here? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to
stroll down to the Battery to watch the sunset and cross the bridge to
Castle Garden, and hear the band play, and talk to all our friends? And
go to a dance, perhaps, or a theatre? The Kembles are there setting the
town on fire! And am I never to dance again? I was just learning to
waltz when the cholera came. I sha’n’t be able to dance at all unless
we go at once.”

It shocked RoBards to think that marriage had not changed the restless
girl to a staid matron. That she should want to waltz was peculiarly
harrowing, for this new and hideously ungraceful way of jigging and
twisting was denounced by all respectable people as a wanton frenzy,
heinously immoral, indecently amorous, and lacking in all the dignity
that marked the good old dances.

But he was in a mood to grant her anything she wished. She had a right
to her wishes now, for she was granting him his greatest wish; a son
and heir was mystically enfolded in her sweet flower-flesh, as hidden
now as the promise of the tulip tree in a bud that hardly broke the
line of a bough in the early spring, but later slowly unsheathed and
published the great leaf and the bright flower.

So he bade the servants pack her things and his, and they set out again
for New York.

Now the tide flowed back with them as it had ebbed with them. The
exiles were flocking once more to the city, and new settlers were
bringing their hopes to market. A tide of lawyers and merchants was
setting strong from New England, and packs of farmers who had harvested
only failure from the stingy lands, counted on somehow winnowing gold
on the city streets, where sharpers and humbugs of every kind would
take from them even that which they had not.

The drive to New York was amazingly more than a mere return along a
traveled path. Though they had gone out in a panic, they had been
enveloped in a paradise of leaves and flowers and lush weeds, as well
as in a bridal glamor. Now they went back under boughs as starkly
bare as the fences of rail or stone; only the weeds bore flowers, and
those were crude of fabric as of hue. And the hearts of the twain were
already autumnal. Their April, June, and August of love were gone and
November was their mantle. Patty’s orange blossoms were shed, and they
had been artificial, too.

Below White Plains the road was a-throng with cattle that frightened
Patty and the horses. When they were clear of these moving shoals,
they came into the Post Road where the stages went like elephants in a
panic. But Patty found them beautiful. She rejoiced in the increasing
crowds, and as the houses congregated about her, and the crowded
streets accepted her, she clapped her hands and cried:

“How good it is to be home!”

This sent a graveyard chill through RoBards’ heart, for it meant that
home to her was not in the solitude of his heart, but in the center of
the mob.

Home was to her more definitely the house in Park Place, her father’s
house to which he must take her till he found another lodging. Her
father and mother greeted her as a prodigal and him as a mere body
servant—which was what he felt himself to be.

The chief talk was of the cholera and its havoc. Three thousand and
five hundred dead made up its toll in the city, but the menace was
gone, and those who lived were doubly glad. The crowds in the streets
showed no gaps; there were no ruins visible. New houses were going up,
narrow streets being widened and the names changed.

It was only when the Sabbath called them to church, or some brilliant
performance took them to see Fanny Kemble and her father at the Park
Theatre, and they inquired for one friend or another, that they learned
dreadfully how many good friends had been hurried feet first to
Washington Square, whence they would never return.

Dinners were few, since nearly every family wore mourning for someone;
but gradually the gayety returned in full sweep. The dead were
forgotten, and the plans for preventing a return of the plague were
dismissed as a tiresome matter of old-fashioned unimportance. The pumps
and cisterns were no longer blamed for the slaughter of the innocents.

And now Patty must go into eclipse gradually. She grew more and more
peevish. When she complained that everybody worth while was moving
uptown, RoBards bought a house in St. John’s Park, just south of Canal
Street, and only a little distance from the Hudson River. The house
was new and modern, with a new cistern in the rear. Only a few steps
away was a pump supplied with water from the new city water works in
the salubrious region of Thirteenth Street and Broadway. There was a
key that admitted the family to the umbrageous park, behind whose high
fence there was seclusion.

There was something aristocratic and European, too, about the long iron
rail fence that framed the entire square, the same in front of every
house, and giving them all a formal uniform, a black court dress.

But even aristocracy palled. Patty found but a brief pleasure in the
privilege of walking there at twilight, and she dared not venture out
before dusk. It was chill then and she shivered as she sat on a bench
and breathed in the gloom that drooped from the naked branches like a
shroud. She did not want to be a mother yet, and she faced the ordeal
with dread, knowing how many mothers die, how few babies lived, for all
the pain of their long preparation.

The winter was cold and she complained of the dark of nights, though
her husband multiplied the spermaceti candles and the astral lamps
till her room was as dazzling as an altar. He filled the bins in the
hall closet with the best Liverpool coal and kept the grates roaring.
But she wailed of mornings when he had to break the ice in the water
pitcher for her and she huddled all day by the red-hot iron stove. She
made her servants keep it charged with blazing wood, until RoBards was
sure that the house would be set on fire.

When spring came again and released grass, birds, trees, souls,
flowers, the very air from the gyves of winter, she was so much more
a prisoner that she herself pleaded to be taken back to Tuliptree
Farm. If she could not meet people she did not want to see them pass
her windows, or hear them laugh as they went by in shadows of evening
time. On the farm she could wander about the yard unterrified and, with
increasing heaviness, devote herself to the flowerbeds. She fled at the
sight of any passerby and was altogether as hidden and craven as only a
properly bred American wife undergoing the shameful glory of motherhood
could be.

She was smitten at times with panics of fear. She knew that she would
perish and she called her husband to save her from dying so young;
yet when he got her in his arms to comfort her, she called him her
murderer. She accused him of dragging her into the hasty marriage, and
reminded him that if he had not inflicted his ring and his name and his
burden upon her she could have gone with her father and mother this
summer to Ballston Spa, where there was life and music, where the waltz
flourished in rivalry with the vivacious polka just imported.

But even in her most insane onsets she did not taunt him now with the
name of Harry Chalender. That was a comfort.

One day Chalender drove up to the house, but she would not see him.
Which gave RoBards singular pleasure. Chalender lingered, hoping no
doubt that she would relent. He sat out an hour, drinking too much
brandy, and cursing New York because it laughed at his insane talk of
going forty miles into the country to fetch a river into the city.
Chalender wanted to pick up the far-off Croton and carry it on a bridge
across the Spuyten Duyvil!

When he had left, Patty, who had overheard his every sentence, said:
“He must be going mad.” She was absent in thought a while, then
murmured as if from far off:

“I wonder if he is drinking himself to death on purpose, and why?”




CHAPTER V


All summer the water-battle went on in town, but with flagging
interest. Colonel DeWitt Clinton threw his powerful influence into the
plan for an open canal from a dam in the Croton down to a reservoir
to be built on Murray’s Hill. Even Clinton’s fervor left the people
cold. When he pointed out that they were paying hundreds of thousands
of dollars every year for bad water hauled in hogsheads, they retorted
that the Croton insanity would cost millions. When he pointed out that
the Croton would pour twenty million gallons of pure water every day
into the city, and declared that New York water was not fit to drink,
the answer came gaily that it did not need to be, since the plainest
boarding house kept brandy bottles on the table.

One old gentleman raised a town laugh by boasting that he had taken a
whole tumblerful of Manhattan water every morning for years and was
still alive. And yet the dream of bringing a foreign river in would not
down, though the believers in the artesian wells were ridiculed for
“the idea of supplying a populous city with water from its own bowels.”

The cholera had brought a number round to the Westchester project, but
the cholera passed in God’s good time. It would come back when God
willed. Plagues were part of the human weather like floods and drouths,
and not to be forefended.

In any case Patty was busied with her own concerns. Her baby was born
on Tuliptree Farm before her husband could get back from White Plains
with the doctor, though he had lashed his horses till the carry-all
flung to and fro like a broken rudder.

The son and heir was a girl, and in the hope that she would be an
heiress they named her after Patty’s Aunt Imogene, whose husband had
recently died and left her a fleet of vessels in the Chinese trade.

For a time instinct and pride in the flattery of people who cried that
the child was its mother’s own beautiful image gave the tiny replica a
fascination to Patty. She played with it as if it were a doll, and she
a little girl only pretending to motherhood.

But she tired of the bauble and turned the baby over to the servants.
Her Aunt Imogene cried out against her:

“Nowadays women don’t take care of their babies like they used to when
I was a girl. In the good old-fashioned days a mother was a mother. She
was proud to nurse her children and she knew all about their ills and
ailments. I had eleven children and raised all of them but six, and I
would no more have dreamed of hiring a nurse for them than I would have
I don’t know what. But these modern mothers!”

Criticism had no power over Patty, however. She admitted all that was
charged against her and simply added it to the long list of grievances
she had against her fate. RoBards often felt that this was cheating of
the lowest kind. It left a man no means of either comforting distress
or rebuking misbehavior.

As soon as the baby could be weaned from her mother to a nurse, Patty
made a pretext of ill health and joined the hegira to Saratoga Springs,
which was winning the fashion hunters away from Ballston Spa. She
traveled with some friends from the South who brought North a convoy
of slaves and camped along the road, preferring that gypsy gait to the
luxury of a voyage up the river on the palatial steamboats, in which
America led the world.

During that summer RoBards was both mother and father to the child,
and Immy’s fingers grew into and around his heart like the ivy that
embraced the walls of the house. He was bitter against his wife, whose
fingers had let his heart slip with ease and indifference.

Yet, by the time Patty returned from taking the waters in the North,
he was so lonely for her that their reunion was another and a first
marriage. He found a fresh delight in her company and learned the new
dances to keep her in his sight and out of the arms of other men.

By one of Nature’s mysterious dispensations, this girl with the soul
of a flirt and a gadabout had the bodily fertility of a great mother.
To her frank and hysterical disgust heaven sent her a second proof
of its bounty, which she received with an ingratitude that dazed her
husband—and frightened him, lest its influence be visited on the next
hostage to fortune. If the child should inherit the moods of its mother
it would come into the world like another Gloster, with hair and teeth
and a genius for wrath.

But the child arrived so placidly that the doctor could hardly wring
a first cry from him by slapping him and dipping him into a tub of
cold water. And he wept almost never. What he had he wanted. When it
was taken from him he wanted it no more. He chuckled and glowed in his
cradle like a little brook. He gave up his mother’s breast for a bottle
with such lack of peevishness that it was almost an act of precocious
gallantry. They named him Keith after an uncle.

Keithkins, as too often happens in a world of injustice, made it so
convenient to neglect him that his chivalry must be its own and only
reward. Patty left him in the country—“for his own good”—and went
earlier to New York than in the other autumns. There she plunged into a
whirlpool of recklessness.

She seemed to welcome every other beau but her husband. She would not
even flirt with him. She said he was too dangerous!

She laughed at his jealous protests against the worthless company she
affected. But when he courted her she fought him. Her extravagance in
the shops alarmed him, but when he quarreled with her on that score,
and demanded that she cease to smirch his credit with debts upon the
merchants’ books, she would run away from home and stay until he sought
her out in Park Place, where she was wheedling her father into ruinous
indulgence.

The old man’s business was prospering and his gifts to Patty were
hardly so much generosities as gestures of magnificence.

Harry Chalender was constantly seen with old Jessamine. They talked the
Croton project, but RoBards felt this to be only a tinsel pretext of
Chalender’s to keep close to Patty.

By the gods, he even infected her with his talk of water-power!
Everybody was talking it now. It had become politics.

For sixty years or so the town had dilly-dallied over a water
supply—ever since the Irishman Christopher Colles had persuaded the
British governor Tryon to his system of wells and reservoirs. Every
year a bill was put forward, and the Wars of the Roses were mimicked in
the Wars of the Rivers.

Bronx fought Croton incessantly but neither gained a victory. Wily
old Aaron Burr stole a march on both with his Manhattan Company and
sneaking a bank in under the charter of a waterworks sank a well and
purveyed liquid putridity at a high price.

It was a great relief to RoBards when the Crotonians gained the upper
hand in 1833, for it left his Bronx to purl along in leafy solitudes
undammed. But it took two years to bring the project to a vote and then
the majority was only seventeen thousand Ayes to six thousand Nos.

Just after the skyrockets of the Fourth of July died down, the
engineers went out into Westchester to plant their stakes, outlining
the new lake that the dam would form, and the pathway of the aqueduct
from the Croton to the Harlem.

This row of posts billowing up hill and down alongside the Hudson
stretched like a vast serpent across the homes and farms and the sacred
graveyards of villages and towns and old families. It was the signal
for a new war.

The owners of the land fell into two classes: those who would not let
the water pass through their demesnes at any price, and those who
sought to rob the city by unwarranted demands.

The farmers seemed to RoBards to comport themselves with dignity and
love of their own soil, though Chalender denounced them for outrageous
selfishness in preferring the integrity of their estates to the health
of a vast metropolis.

But RoBards saw through Chalender’s lofty patriotism. Chalender could
not unload his own land upon the city unless the whole scheme were
established, and Chalender’s price was scandalously high.

The stakes were not yet nearly aligned when an almost unequaled frost
turned the buxom hills to granite overnight. It seemed that the havoc
which this high emprise was to forestall had been purposely held in
leash by the ironic fiends until the procrastinating city had drawn
this parallel of stakes, this cartoon of an aqueduct. For almost
immediately the cataclysm broke.

The idleness enforced upon the engineers by the evil weather drove
most of them back to town, Harry Chalender among them. And now he
dragged Patty into that vortex of dissipation for which the city was
notorious. Dancing, drinking, theatre-going, riotous sleigh-rides,
immodest costumes, and dinners of wild revel gave the moralists reason
to prophesy that God would send upon the wicked capital fire from the
skies—as indeed He did in terrible measure.

Harry Chalender began to follow Patty about and to encounter her with
a regularity that ceased to resemble coincidence. There was gossip.
One of the slimy scandal-mongering newspapers well-named _The Hawk and
Buzzard_ printed a blind paragraph in which RoBards recognized his own
case.

But what could RoBards do? To horsewhip the editor or shoot the lover
would not only feed the newspapers but blacken the lives of the babies,
who were suffering enough now in the lack of a mother’s devotion
without being cursed for life with a mother of no reputation. In a
world governed by newspapers the old rules of conduct were altered.

The winter of 1835 fell bitterer than any ever known before. The cold
was an excruciation. The sleighs rang along the street as if the snow
were white steel. The pumps froze; the cisterns froze; the pipes of the
water companies froze underground, and the fire-hydrants froze at the
curbs.

The main industry of the town seemed to be the building and coaxing of
fires, though coal and wood were almost impossible to obtain, and the
price rose to such heights that one must either go bankrupt or freeze.

Everybody began to wonder what would happen if a house should blaze
up. The whole city would go. Who would come to the rescue of a burning
house in such weather? And with what water would the flames be fought?
Everybody listened for the new firebell that had been hung in the City
Hall cupola and had sent its brazen yelps across the sky so often, but
was ominously silent of late as if saving its horrific throat for some
Doomsday clangor.

Hitherto, membership in certain of the fire companies had been
cherished as a proof of social triumph. There were plebeian gangs made
up of mechanics and laborers, and the Bowery b’hoys were a byword of
uncouth deviltry.

But RoBards had been accepted into one of the most select fire clubs
with a silver plated engine. He kept his boots, trumpet, and helmet
in a basket under his bed, so that there was never any delay in his
response to the bell. He was so often the first to arrive that they
gave him the key, and in the longest run he always carried more than
his share of the weight in the footrace. But now he wished that he had
never joined the company.

Christmas drew near and Patty wore herself out in the shops and spent
her time at home in the manufacture of gifts with her own hands. They
were very apt hands at anything pretty and useless. She was going to
have a Christmas tree, too, a recent affectation borrowed from the
Hessian soldiers who had remained in the country after the Revolution.

The evening of the sixteenth of December was unbearably chill. The fire
itself seemed to be freezing red. The thermometer outside the house
dropped down to ten below zero. The servants refused to go to the
corner for water and Patty was frightened into staying home from a ball
she was invited to.

That was the ultimate proof of terror. It was one of the times when
the outer world was so cruel that just to sit within doors by a warm
fire was a festival of luxury; just to have a fire to sit by was wealth
enough.

Patty was so nearly congealed that she climbed into her husband’s lap
and gathered his arms about her like the ends of a shawl. It had been
a long while since she had paid his bosom such a visit and he was
grateful for the cold.

And then the great bell spoke in the City Hall tower—spoke one huge
resounding awful word, “Fire!” before it broke into a baying as of
infernal hounds.

When RoBards started to evict Patty from his lap she gasped: “You’re
not going out on such a night?” RoBards groaned: “I’ve got to!” He set
her aside and ran upstairs for the basket of armor, and Patty followed
him wailing with pity.

“Don’t go, darling!” she pleaded. “You can tell them to-morrow that you
were sick. You’ll die if you go out in this hideous cold, and then what
will become of me? Of us? Of our babies?”

Her solicitude heartened him. He was important to her after all! His
death would grieve her. That added a beauty to duty. But it took away
none of its authority.

While he struggled into his boots, she ran to a window looking south
and drew back the curtains. Through the thick lace of frost on the
panes a crimson radiance pierced, imbuing the air with a rosy mist as
if the town were seen through an upheld glass of Madeira.

“It looks like the end of the world!” Patty screamed. “What will become
of our beautiful city now? It will be nothing but ashes to-morrow.
Don’t go! You’ll be buried under a wall, or frozen to death in the
streets. If you’ll promise not to go down into that furnace, I’ll go
with you to-morrow to Tuliptree Farm, and never leave it again!”

His heart ached for her in her agitation, and it was not easy to tear
off the clinging hands for whose touch he had so often prayed. But he
broke free and dashed, helmeted and shod, into the icy world between
him and the advancing hell. The fire’s ancient enemy, water, was not at
hand for the battle, and the whole city lay helpless.

At the firehouse door RoBards met Harry Chalender. He was dressed for
the ball that Patty had planned to attend, and he wore white gloves and
dancing pumps.




CHAPTER VI


It was like Harry Chalender to wear dancing pumps to a fire on a
midwinter night.

“Harry will have ’em on Judgment Day,” said one of the other members of
the fire company, and they laughed at him through chattering teeth.

This did not amuse RoBards. He wanted to hate Chalender; but justice
was his foible, and he had to confess to his own prejudice that, while
it was Chalenderish to appear in pumps at a fire, it was equally like
him to be absent from no heroic occasion no matter what his garb.

Harry played the fool, perhaps, but he was always at King Lear’s side.
And though he never forgot his bauble, it tinkled and grinned wherever
there was drama.

And there promised to be drama enough this night.

The gathering volunteers flung back the folding doors and disclosed the
engine, a monster asleep and gleaming as with phosphorescent scales in
the light of the brass and silver trimmings polished often and piously.
A light was struck with a tinder-box and the signal lantern and torches
brightened the room.

The Fire King Engine Company had been proud of its tamed leviathan,
though there had been some criticism because on one side of the engine
an allegorical figure of Hope had been painted with almost no clothes
on her. But New York was advancing artistically with giant strides, and
a painting of a semi-nude Adam and Eve had been exhibited that summer
without provoking anything more violent than protest. Also, the Greek
casts were displayed nowadays without interference, though of course
ladies did not visit them at the same time with gentlemen.

But Heaven rebuked the ruthless allegory of Hope before this night was
over; and with the ruination of Hope went the beautiful scene on the
opposite flank of the engine, a painting of the recent burning of the
Roman Catholic Church in Nassau Street. The Fire Kings had played a
noble part there, and had almost saved the church.

Now, as they dashed into the street they were thrown into a tangle to
avoid the rush of the Naiad Hose Company swooping past with a gaudy
carriage, whose front panel presented the burning of Troy and the death
of Achilles, while the back panel showed an Indian maid parting from
her lover. The hosemen might have been Indians themselves from the wild
yell they gave.

There was no time for the usual gay dispute over the right of way, and
the cobblestones and brickbats with which the road would have been
normally challenged were frozen in the ice. Besides, the Fire Kings
were sparse in numbers.

Such Fire Kings as braved the elements would long tell of the
catastrophe. Getting to the neighborhood of the blaze was adventure
enough of itself. For the road was grooved with the tracks of sleigh
runners and chopped up with a confusion of hoof-marks impressed
in knife-edged ridges. The men inside the square of the draw-rope
alternately slipped, sliddered, fell, rose, stumbled, sprawled, and
ran on with wrenched joints and torn pantaloons. Their progress made
a sharp music as if they were trampling through a river of crackling
glass.

But they ran on because there was tonic in the community of misery.

RoBards was touched by the sight of Chalender’s lean face above the
satin stock and the frilled white shirt. The others were in red
flannel, and cold enough. Chalender’s great beaver hat was a further
trial to keep on, and finally the wind swirled it out of sight
and seeking. RoBards bared his own head and offered Chalender his
brass-bound helmet of glazed leather, but Chalender declined it with a
graceful gesture and a chill smile drawn painfully along the line of
his white mouth. The only color in his cheeks was imposed by the ruddy
flare of the sky.

The fire, wherever it was, seemed to retreat as the company advanced.
It grew in vastitude, too. The scarlet heavens were tormented with
yellow writhings, as if Niagara were falling upwards in a mist of smoke
and a spume of red spray.

Chalender’s patent leather pumps were soon cut through and his nimble
feet left bloody traces on the snow. This offended RoBards somehow.
Footprints on the snow were the sacred glory of the patriot troops at
Valley Forge. What right had a fop like Chalender to such martyrdom?

When the puffing Fire Kings covered the long half-mile to City Hall
Park, the fire was just as far away as ever.

From here on the way was clogged with engines and hose carts plunging
south and fighting through a tide of flight to the north. RoBards was
reminded of the retreat from the cholera, until a wrangle for priority
with a rival company engaged his thoughts, his fists, and his voice.

Wagons of every sort toppling over with goods of every sort locked
wheels while their drivers fought duels with whips and curses.
Merchants who had gone early to bed were scampering half-clad to
open their shops and rescue what they might. Everywhere they haggled
frantically for the hire or the purchase of carts. Two hundred dollars
was offered in vain for an hour’s use of a dray that would not have
brought so much outright that afternoon, with its team thrown in.

The commercial heart of the city was spurting flames, and the shop
in Merchant Street where the volcano first erupted had spread its
lava in circles. Everything was burning but the frozen river, and
ice-imprisoned shipping was ablaze at the docks. Whole warehouses were
emptied and their stores carried to apparent safety as far as Wall
Street, where they were heaped up in the shadow of the cupola of the
new Merchants’ Exchange.

Certain shopkeepers of pious mind shifted their wealth into the Dutch
Reformed Church for safety. In the deeps of its gloom some invisible
musician was playing on the big pipe-organ. The merchants lugging in
their burdens felt that he interceded for them harmoniously against
the din of the fiends whose fires danced on the windows, as if they
reveled in the sacrilege of attacking the temples of both Mammon and
Jehovah. First the fiends made a joke of the costly pretence that the
Merchants’ Exchange was fireproof. Then they leaped across a graveyard
to seize the church and sent Maypole ribbons twirling around and around
its high spire. In half an hour the steeple buckled and plunged through
its own roof, and the roof followed it, covering organ, pulpit, pews,
and merchandise.

Pearl Street, whose luxurious shops had made lower Broadway a
second-rate bazaar, was sinking into rubble. Copper roofs were melting
and red icicles dripped ingots on the street.

The Fire Kings pushed on, with ardor dwindling as the magnificence
of their task was revealed to them. They were scant of breath and
footsore and cold, and their helmets rattled with flying embers. Embers
were streaming across the river to Brooklyn and the people there sat
on their roofs and wondered if their town must follow New York to
destruction. On all the roofs in New York, too, shadowy bevies fought
off the embers and flung them into the street.

The fire companies were driven back in all directions. They felt as
tiny and futile as apes fumbling and chittering against a forest blaze.

By and by the bells ceased to ring. The tollers were too cold to pull
the ropes—and what was the use of going on alarming those who were
already in a panic? Yet the silence had an awe of doom in it.

Merchants and their women cursed and wept, and tears smeared smoky
faces. It was maddening to be so useless; firemen sobbed blasphemies
as soldiers did when wet powder rendered them ridiculous and mocked
their heroism. Their nostrils smarted with the acrid stench from
bubbling paint and varnish, from mountains of chewing tobacco, cigars,
and snuff, from thousands of shoes and boots and hats and household
furnishings. Miles of silk and wool and cotton, woven and prettily
designed, were all rags now that smoldered, or flew on the wind like
singed birds, awkward ravens frightened out of some old rookery.

Stage coaches and busses were caught in the lanes and consumed. The
shops of the jewelers crumpled and broke inwardly as well as the hovels
of the carpenters. Diamonds and rubies, emeralds, chains of fine gold,
and cunning devices in frosted silver were fused and jumbled among
black piles of rubbish.

Numberless casks of liquor blew up and shot curiously tinged sheets
of fire through the wallowing flames. Thieves rifled liquor stores,
and drunken wastrels, hilarious or truculent, reeled about as if an
insane asylum had opened its gates. These wretches had to be saved from
themselves, and they added a new terror to the reign of terror. Every
distress and mockery imaginable seemed to combine to make the night
maudlin, an infamous burlesque.

As a part of the night’s irony the firemen were blistered by both fire
and frost. While cold gales bit their necks and backs, and the wet
streets congealed their feet to mere hobbles, the blast from the flames
blistered their cheeks.

Everywhere the pavements squirmed with black snakes of hose, limp
and empty; for the hydrants were frozen, the cisterns sucked dry. In
the face of such fire, little new fires had to be started around the
hydrants to thaw them out, but when the water came it turned to ice in
the hose as the chilled engines refused to work.

It was madness to stand and wait in imbecile palsy while the holocaust
flourished.

“Water! water! in God’s name where can we get water!” the men shrieked
at one another.

Finally Harry Chalender seized a trumpet and bawled through it:

“To the wharf!”

The Fire Kings and the Naiad Hose Company ran to their places and
hurried down the nearest street to the nearest dock. The hose flopped
on ice, for the ice above had dammed the current and the water was not
only low but frozen.

RoBards seized an axe and clambered down a slimy pile toward the
surface. He smote at the ice and split it. Black water leapt at him and
he felt hands clutching his ankles to drag him under.

It was ungodly lonely down there in the dark and he was afraid to stay.
But when he would climb up again, the slippery log refused its aid.
Clinging to the cold ooze about the pile and watching the river smack
its lips and wait, he felt death hideously near. He yelled for help
again and again. At last a bare head was thrust out above, a hand was
reached down to him. He knew by its soiled white glove that it was
Chalender’s hand, but he seized it and was drawn up from the solitude
of the muttering waters to the glare of the upper world. The cinders
rained upon his white face now as if they were shoveled at him.

He ran to join the men at the engine, gripping the long pump handles
and working them up and down. It was good to be at work at something.

“Jump her, boys, jump her!” they cried, and heaved and grunted, hoisted
and squatted in alternate effort.

But only a little water came. It hardly swelled the hose. The engine
choked. Before it was put in order the hose was stopped with a mush
of freezing water. They built a fire from the too abundant fuel, and
stretched the hose over it like a long snake being warmed.

As the taskless volunteers waited, twiddling their wintry thumbs and
stupidly regarding the dark building before them, the fire subtly
arrived in its eaves. Along the cornice it ran like an autumnal vine
of poison ivy reddening on a wall. Soon the roof was a miter of white
flame. The whole warehouse was a huge fireworks, a set piece like “the
Temple of the Union” that the city displayed at Vauxhall Gardens every
Fourth of July. It lacked only the 1776 in silver lace-work and the
stars of the twenty-six states.

Just as the set-piece frames would crack, this building became
wreckage. The top floor ripped free and took the next one with it to
crush a lower. Then with a drunken belch of crimson, the roof went up
and back and spewed flame in a giant’s vomit upon a store that had
been called fireproof. Its somber dignity was now a rabid _carmagnole_.
Stone and brick and steel grew as soft as osiers, bending and twisting.
Inside there were thuds of detonating barrels of spirits. The stout
walls billowed, broke outwards, spilling themselves across the street.

The Fire Kings fled with cries of terror, many of them battered to
their knees with missiles.

When they turned to look back from safety, their engine was buried in
the flaming barricade that had been a street.

Now the Fire Kings were idle indeed. As they loafed despondent, they
saw boats coming slowly across the river among the floes of ice. Newark
was sending firemen to the rescue. But what could they do? There was no
water.

The alarm was on its way to Philadelphia. The hills of Germantown,
indeed, flickered with the illumination a hundred miles away, while
swift riders and men in sleighs were carrying the news of the end of
New York to its old rival. Before sunset of the next day four hundred
Quakers would be setting out with their engines across the white roads.
When they arrived on the second day they would find the fire still
ravening and the fighters overwhelmed with fatigue and hopelessness.

Forty-five miles away on a steamboat from Albany returning New Yorkers
hung over the rail and wondered if Judgment Day had indeed been sounded
for the metropolis of the new world.

Deeply as he had abhorred the town, RoBards felt his heart ache for
it now. Pity turned to love, and it seemed abominable that the work
and the treasure and the destinies of so many poor people should be
annulled in this pure wantonness of destruction.

Odd, that a man should love or hate a city or a nation, or feel sorry
for a jumble of buildings or a stretch of land, a shore, or a hill. But
RoBards knew a sudden tenderness for New York. His heart suffered a
revulsion like that of the English soldiers, who wept for Joan of Arc
when she turned beautiful and pitiful as she blistered and browned in
the faggots they had heaped and lighted about her.

A little after midnight Harry Chalender at his elbow shouted aloud his
meditations:

“Only one thing can save this poor town—gunpowder! The Brooklyn Navy
Yard! There’s plenty of powder there!”




CHAPTER VII


RoBards and Chalender ran as long as they could; then walked a while
till the agony in their lungs eased a little; then ran again. At last
they reached the East River.

Moored at the slip were many rowboats, lying far below and rocking in
the tide that bumped them against the high piles and scraped them with
sharp blocks of ice floating out into the bay.

The two men lowered themselves over the edge and dropped through the
dark into the nearest boat, and almost into the river.

It was ticklish business when they worked their way out into the
current; and the oars were of more frequent use for prodding off the
onslaughts of ice than for progress.

The river seemed as wide here as a Red Sea of blood, for the
conflagration streaked every wave with rubric. From one wharf a cargo
of turpentine had run flaming and a little Sargasso Sea, a blazing
island of floating fire, sailed down the bay, singeing the wharf posts
and leaving them charred and tottering. Fleeing from this pursuing
island, sailboats sped seaward in the icy gale like gray owls.

The lower end of Manhattan Island was all alive with fire under a
hovering sky of smoke. RoBards and Chalender craned their necks now
and then to correct their course toward the masts of the live-oak war
frigates, standing like a burned forest against the sky.

At last their skiff jarred the float at the landing place. Sailors and
marines caught their hands and made fast the painter and asked foolish
questions whose answers they knew well enough.

Chalender demanded an audience with the officer in command, and his
voice sent men darting to the powder house. Boats were loaded with
kegs and manned and pushed out into the river.

It was not so lonely returning. But far overhead the river that had
never been bridged, was bridged now by a long arch of driven embers,
a stream like a curved aerial river, an infernal rainbow promising
destruction, linking Brooklyn to New York as Gomorrah was joined with
Sodom in a deluge of brimstone.

When at length the powder bringers reached the docks again, carrying
ruin to fight ruin with, they hastened to the nearest point in the
widening scarlet circle and selected a building once removed from the
blazing frontier.

The owner, Mr. Tabelee, and a few laborers were loading his wares into
a wagon which he had just bought from the driver.

When the marines and civilians came to him and said that they were
about to blow up his building, Mr. Tabelee ordered them about their
business.

Chalender answered:

“Our business is the salvation of our city from complete destruction.
You ought to be glad to sacrifice your store.”

“Sacrifice hell!” Tabelee roared.

An alderman and two city watchmen came up. They lent their authority
to Chalender, and restrained the protesting Tabelee while the marines
entered the building. It was lighted with the new-fangled system of
gas, a dangerous and doubtless short-lived fashion.

Down to the cellar went Chalender, RoBards, and a group of powder
bearers with two kegs. They set down one keg and thrust an upright
plank between the head of it and the ceiling of the cellar, so that the
cellar explosion should be transmitted to the floor above.

There were baskets of champagne in this cellar. Marines stripped the
bottles of their straw jackets, piled them up and made a fuse by
sprinkling powder on a tape they laid along the floor and up the stairs
out into the street.

When the train was ready a spark was snapped at the outer end of the
fuse, and the spectators ran in one direction while the fire ran like a
sparkling mouse in the other.

Boom! The building split and caved in and a cheer went up at the
triumph over the fire. But the fire had the last laugh for the
splintered timbers made a lively kindling and the building which was
supposed to act as a barrier simply added itself as fuel. This was one
of those iron jokes the gods alone can laugh at.

Chalender was not stubborn and dogged. He was elastic. Anybody could
bend or turn him aside, but he always came again with the backlash of a
steel rod or a whip.

The failure in Tabelee’s case only confirmed his determination.

He and his crew proceeded to level a street of buildings one by one.
As if a vast invisible plough overturned them along its furrow, they
rolled over and lay black.

RoBards seeing how the trick was done was eager to carry on the good
work. Chalender assigned to him a number of powder kegs and a wagon to
carry them, and despatched him ahead.

There was a kind of intoxication in this destruction. The fever was
catching. RoBards had a high motive, but he became in spirit once more
a boy on Hallowe’en. He had in his late youth joined the Callithumpian
Band that made New Year’s Eve a carnival of mischief. He had taken a
sign, “Coffin Warehouse,” and hung it on a doctor’s front gate. On the
Fourth of July he had fired a flintlock from his father’s front stoop
and blown the powdered scratch wig from the head of an old-fashioned
neighbor sitting in his window. He had set off spitfire crackers and
squibs under the bellies of sleepy horses.

And now he was exultant in a private Evacuation Day festivity, kicking
over buildings like a naughty young Pantagruel. A kind of grim laughter
filled his soul as he heard the thud of some vast structure, built up
by masons painfully month by month, and knocked down by him in one
noisy moment.

He so lost sight of his progress that he did not pause to see whose
shops he wrecked. In one warehouse filled with Chinese importations
he made his fuse of a bolt of silk strangely exquisite to his numbed
fingers; he had long since discarded his soppy gloves.

As he unreeled the bolt and stretched a royal path for the fire, the
silk seemed to whisper in his fingers, bewailing its use for such a
purpose. He wondered what the Celestial who spun it after the American
pattern had planned it for—a lady’s dress, no doubt. Running back to
the cellar he filled a cornucopia of Chinese paper with powder and
returned along his path, sifting the black grains over the sulphur-hued
fabric.

As he proceeded sidewise, crab-fashion, up the stairs his shoulder
struck somebody’s thighs. He saw beneath his gaze a pair of black
slippers, little ones in India rubbers. His eyes rose with him, and
widened to find at the top of the dress, a face of beauty in such wrath
that he could hardly recognize it as his wife’s.

“Patty!” he gasped, “what are you doing here, in the name of——”

“What in the same name are you doing here?” she broke in, her voice
a-croak with unwomanly ire.

“Trying to save the city.”

“What do you care about the city?” she sneered, so harsh a look in her
eyes that he lost patience and commanded:

“Get out of the way at once! I’m going to blow up this building.”

She forgot her obedience and shamed him before strangers by retorting:

“I’ll not budge! I’ve a better right than you in my father’s warehouse.”

“Your father’s? Good God!”

He looked past her and saw old Jessamine’s face, purple with rage and
the long use of Madeira and the habit of domination. He was ordering
the marine officer off his premises, and the marine officer turned
to one of the city officials who was with him. The official nodded
and the officer beckoned one of his soldiers and, pointing to Mr.
Jessamine, spoke:

“Throw that dunderhead out of here before I tumble the building on him.”

And in a holiday spirit the soldiers ran the old gentleman to the curb.

He almost expired at the sacrilege to his person. Patty whirled, seized
her husband as with claws, and screamed:

“Stop them! stop them!”

The first was a bloodcurdling shriek that knifed the air. The second
was the cry of a rabbit dragged from its warren by a terrier. Her anger
made her faint. Her hands relaxed their clutch, her taut body grew limp
and slid down through RoBards’ arms. She was a heap of cloth under a
hat at his feet.

He bent and gathered her up with vast difficulty. He was worn out with
his toil and she gave him no help. The marine officer had to aid him.
They stood her on her feet and RoBards thrust one arm under her knees
and another about her waist. When he rose, her hat fell back, dangling
by the ribbons from her throat. Her face hung down white and lifeless
as a broken doll’s.

He staggered under the weight of her against his weary lungs and
staggered yet more under the burden of the sweetness of her round body
and her delicate limbs. It was hard to endure that so darling a thing
should have looked at him with such hate.

He was about to lay her upon one of the counters and revive her from
her swoon, when he saw that the marine officer was knocking a flint in
the tinder-box and kneeling to set the burning rag to the powdered silk.

Out of the dark shop RoBards hustled with Patty. Her feet caught across
the door and he had to fall back and sidle through with her. In the
street the world was red again and he fled stumblingly across the rough
cobbles and up the next alley.

The ground quaked and reeled under him and he heard a roar as of one of
the Miltonic cannons the angels fought with in heaven. He glanced over
his shoulder and, through the ravine of the alley, saw the Jessamine
warehouse rise, turn to a quivering black jelly, and splash back in a
heap, releasing to the view a larger crimson sky.

When the reverberations had dulled, the air throbbed with a hoarse
weeping. Against the wall an ancient man leaned his head in the crook
of his elbow, and cried like a birched schoolboy. It was old Jessamine.

“Two hundred thousand dollars gone!” he was moaning. “And the insurance
worthless.”

Patty came back to life with a sigh and lifting her head as from a
pillow, peered up into RoBards’ face sleepily. When she realized who
held her, she kicked and struggled, muttering:

“Let me down, you fiend! Let me down, I say!”

He set her on her feet and steadied her while she wavered. She
recognized her father’s voice and ran to him, crying:

“Papa! poor papa!”

They whispered together for a moment, then he heard the old man groan:

“We are beggars now! beggars!”

RoBards moved to them with hands outstretched in sympathy, but when
they saw him they stared and shrank from him.

The old man cowered over his gold-headed cane, and Patty set her
arm under his to help him as they tottered along the wall, the
father’s white head wagging, the daughter’s form bent as if with age.
They looked to be beggars indeed—and in a city where the rich were
especially smitten.




CHAPTER VIII


The cart with the powder kegs moved on, but RoBards did not follow. The
holiday of overturning buildings had ceased to suggest either a sacred
duty or a pastime. He drifted irresolute about the town.

He went home at last, cold, cold, cold. The distance was thrice as
long as when he ran with the Fire Kings. St. John’s Park was like a
graveyard when he reached it. Though it was far from the hour of winter
sunrise, the bare trees were thrilled with daybreak ardor; the houses
were pink with tremulous auroral rose. But no birds sang or flew, and
the dawn in the sky was the light of devastation.

He hoped for and dreaded the meeting with his wife. He had been
preparing his defence all the way home. He was a good lawyer and he had
a good case, but women were not like the judges he found on the bench
before him. Women had their own statutes and procedures, and appeals
were granted on the most peculiar grounds.

But his wife was not at home. She had stopped at her father’s, of
course, for a while. The black folk about the house were asleep while
the white man’s town went up in smoke. It was none of their affair.

He flung down his crushing helmet, drew off his sodden boots, and put
his benumbed toes against the warming stove.

He meant to keep awake till Patty came back. But he nodded stupidly.
When, as it seemed, he flung up his head for the last long nod, his
eyes found broad daylight. The stove was cold, and he was chilled again.

He heard the sounds of breakfast-getting on the floor below. Some one
was shoveling up coal from the bin in the hall closet.

He glanced at his own clothes. His hands were grimed. His red flannel
shirt was foul. He fell back from the mirror at the sight of his
reflection. He looked a negro, with only his eyeballs white.

Aching with fatigue, he stripped to the skin and put on clean
underclothes. He cracked the water in the pitcher and filled the bowl
with lumps of ice. When he had soused his face and hands, the bowl was
full of ink and his face was not half clean.

He went to the door and, with jaws dripping darkly, howled to his black
man, Cuff, for water.

The answer came up the stairs:

“Cistern done froze. Pump at de corner don’t pump. Man who sells de
bottles of water ain’t come round—he bottles all pop, most like. I’ll
fotch you what we got in de kittle.”

The hot water helped, but he blackened three towels before he could see
his own skin.

He put on a fresh shirt and stock and his best suit—for Patty’s
sake—and went down to breakfast.

It was the usual banquet of meat, potatoes, eggs, fruit, vegetables,
hot breads, preserves, sauces, and coffee. The coffee bettered his
inner being so much that he assumed the outer world improved. He found
courage to look at the morning paper. RoBards was one of the seventeen
hundred New Yorkers who subscribed to a paper.

He took the _Courier and Enquirer_, edited by General Webb, who had
proved himself a soldier, indeed, a year ago when the mob attacked his
building and he drove it off. That was the first time the mayor was
ever elected by a popular vote, and the riots gave little encouragement
to the believers in general male suffrage.

During the fire the _Courier_ reporters had been scurrying about
gathering up information, and RoBards read with awe the list of streets
destroyed and the summing-up:

“Six hundred and seventy-four tenements, by far the greater part in the
occupancy of our largest shipping and wholesale drygoods merchants,
and filled with the richest produce of every portion of the globe. How
estimate the immense loss sustained, or the fearful consequences to
the general prosperity?”

The paper dropped from RoBards’ hands. If that had been the state of
affairs at the hour when the paper’s forms were closed, where could the
fire be now?

He rose to go to the roof and see if herald embers were not already
alighting there. But the knocker clattered on the front door, and his
heart leaped at the sound of Patty’s voice.

He ran to meet her and take her pauper family under his roof, while
it lasted. But she was alone. She was explaining to her astonished
maid, Teen, that she had come home for clean clothes. She needed them
evidently, for her pretty gown was streaked and blackened.

She greeted her husband with a look as icy as the air she brought in
with her from the street:

“I see you haven’t blown up your own house yet, Mist’ RoBards. May I
take some of the things my poor father bought me before you ruined him?”

“Patty!” he groaned. It was some time before he dared go up the stairs
she had scaled at a run. He went as reluctantly into her room as he
had gone to the principal’s desk at the academy to be whipped for some
mischief.

His wife squeaked with alarm at his entrance. She had tossed her hat
on the bed and her gown with it. She had taken off her stays and was
still gasping with the relief. RoBards had vainly protested against her
habit of spending half an hour drawing her corset strings so tight that
she could hardly breathe, for the ridiculous purpose of distorting her
perfect form, to make her bust high and her chest narrow.

She stood before him in a chemise and petticoat, looking very narrow
without her great skirts, and startlingly the biped in her ribboned
garters and white silk stockings.

“Get out, will you!” she stormed, “and let me change my clothes.”

Instead he put out the hostile Teen, and closing the door, locked it.

“Now, Patty, you’re going to talk to me. Has the fire reached your
father’s home yet?”

A sniff was his only answer. It was enough.

“Then you’re not going back to it. You stay here.” He spoke with
autocracy, but his hands pleaded as he said: “I can’t tell you how
sorry I am that——”

“You can’t tell me anything. And if you lay your grimy hands on me,
I’ll scratch your eyes out.”

He stood off and gazed at her, helpless as a mastiff looking down
at a kitten with back arched and claws unsheathed. He could have
crunched her bones with ease, but she held him at bay by her very petty
prettiness.

He was so poor of spirit and resource that he stooped to say:

“Since you’re so interested in Harry Chalender, you may be interested
to know that the business of blowing up those buildings was his own
idea.”

He thought that this would either reinstate him in her respect or at
least debase Harry Chalender there. But she dumbfounded him by her
always unexpected viewpoint:

“It was a splendid idea!”

“Then why do you blame me for what I was going to do?”

“Because you destroyed my father’s fortune wantonly—for spite—without
any reason.”

“It was to save the city. The building would have burned soon anyway.”

“It would not have burned at all! It lies there now untouched. The wind
shifted and carried the fire away from it.”

He dropped to a chair, bludgeoned like an ox, and as bovine in his
enjoyment of this hellish witticism of fate.

Patty always loved to spurn him when he was down and she triumphed now:

“Besides, if you must bring Harry Chalender into it, I know that even
if Harry had blown up all the other buildings in the world, he would
have spared my father’s—especially if I had asked him to.”

RoBards nodded. That was probably true. But what was the uncanny genius
of Chalender? He was a very politician among women as well as men. He
allied himself with great causes and carried them greatly through, yet
always managed to see that he and his friends profited somehow.

For years he and his clique had been storming the public ear for a city
water supply, and had made prophecy of just such a calamity as this.
And now he and his partisans could stand above the smoking pyre of the
city and crow a gigantic, “I told you so!”

As RoBards sat inert and lugubriously ridiculous, Patty regarded him
with a studious eye. She dazed him by saying after a long hush:

“Since you don’t want me to go back to my father’s house, I’ll stay
here.”

He would have risen and seized her to his breast with a groan of
rapture if she had said this in the far-off ages before the last few
minutes of their parley. But now he grew even more contemptible in his
own mind. There was no note of pity or of love in her voice, and he was
so wretched that he muttered:

“Are you staying here because your father’s home is too gloomy to
endure, or because you can’t give up the pleasure of gloating over my
misery?”

Incomprehensible woman! When he tried to insult her, she always parried
or stepped aside and came home with a thrust of perfect confusion for
him.

And now that he had hurled at her the dirtiest missile of contempt
within his reach, instead of crying out in rage, marching off in hurt
pride, or throwing something at him, she laughed aloud and flung
herself across his lap and hugged his neck with bare, warm arms till he
choked.

“You are the stupidest darling alive. But every now and then, when you
get horribly superior or hideously downcast you say the wisest things!
Why is it that you understand me only when you are mad at me?”

He put lonely, hunting hands about her lithe, stayless waist, and
smothered his face among the white hawthorn buds in the snowy lane of
her bosom.

Men were still calling women “mysterious” because women’s interests
were different from men’s. The males, like stupid hounds, found
cats occult simply because they said “mew!” instead of “wow!” Patty
completely puzzled her husband when she chuckled:

“You are a beast, and an imbecile, and my father hates you and blames
me for bringing you into our family, so I’ll have to be a mother to
you.”

He winced at being cherished as an idiot child, but anything was better
than exile from that fragrant presence, and he clung to her with
desperation.




CHAPTER IX


Now that love had bridged another of the abysses that kept opening in
the solid ground of their union, they fell a prey to curiosity. They
decided simultaneously to go visit the scene of the ruins.

The streets were a-crawl with men, women, and children hurrying to
the crater of the volcano. Many of the hasteners were persons who had
slept through the night and set out to open their shops at the usual
hour, only to find them fuming heaps of refuse. People who dwelt as far
out as Bleecker or Houston Street had been generally unaware of the
disaster.

Some of the late arrivals were still able to drag from their cellars,
or from the jumbled streets in front of them, a certain portion of
their stocks. A coffee merchant salvaged cartloads of well-roasted
bean; a dealer in chewing tobacco shoveled up wagonloads of dried
weed and sold it later; drygoods men rescued scorched bolts of calico
and worsted to furnish forth bankrupt sales. Patty wailed aloud to
see heaps of fine lace blackening on the ground and bolts of silk
still blazing. One china shop was melted into ludicrous clusters, as
of grapes from a devil’s vineyard. Zinc and copper roofs had formed
cascades that were hardened as if a god had petrified a flood.

From toppling ruins whence the floors were stripped, iron safes hung
in their crannies, their warped doors having long since betrayed the
guarded records and securities to destruction. Incessant salvos of
thunder shook the air, as walls fell in mountain-slides and sent up new
flurries of smoke and flame.

Poking about wherever the ashes were cool enough, were beggars and
thieves and harrowed owners. Little boys and girls and drunken hags
from the slums paraded in lace and silk. Cavalry and infantry and
marines went here and there, trying to drive back the dishonest, and to
distinguish between the owners of the ruins and those who merely hoped
to steal a profit from the disaster.

Caravans of weary cart-horses staggered drunkenly out of the fallen
city, dragging forth dripping wains of merchandise. Dog-tired firemen
were returning to their engine-houses for rest, and RoBards felt
that he was a shirker. Before long he restored Patty to her home and
returned to duty, warmed by her farewell embrace and the dewy rose of a
perfect kiss.

For thirty-six hours the fire blazed on before the exhausted New York
and Newark firemen and the four hundred Philadelphian reinforcements
determined its final boundaries at the wall of exploded buildings. It
had been confined at last to the business district and few important
homes were touched. But forty-five crowded acres, the richest
forty-five acres on this side of the ocean, had been reduced to
rubbish. Seventeen million dollars had gone up in smoke and spark. All
of the old Dutch realm that had survived the fires of ’76 and ’78 had
been consumed forever.

New York had no longer any visible antiquity. Henceforth it was mere
American. A fortnight later, when Christmas had passed, the black
Brocken was still a sight that drew visitors from the countrysides
about. People from Long Island forgot to hunt deer in the wilds there,
and came over to stare at the little plumes of smoke that wavered above
the jumbled prairie. For weeks there was an all-night sunset above
Manhatto’s isle.

After the gigantic debauch of fire came the long days of
penalty-paying. The merchants turned to the insurance companies to
reimburse their losses. The insurance companies were overwhelmed by the
catastrophe. Not one of them could pay ten cents on the dollar. For a
time it seemed that all of them must go into one general bankruptcy.
But first they called upon their stockholders with disastrous
assessments.

Three old-maid cousins of Patty’s were assessed five thousand dollars
on account of their stocks, and came to her father’s house weeping to
find themselves stripped to poverty. Being respectably bred women, they
had no recourse but the charity of relatives. They could not work, of
course. But old Jessamine met them with a face of abjection. He was
a pauper likewise, and in his own destruction he foresaw a general
collapse.

When RoBards, after his three days’ campaign with the Fire Kings, got
home at length, he learned that Patty had returned to her father’s
house. She left him a note, explaining that her father was almost out
of his mind.

Hurrying to Park Place, RoBards found that old Jessamine was indeed
maniac with the sudden change in his fortunes. His very prudence had
mocked him. He had been a man who combined rigid economy with daring
experiment. He had pushed agents into China and chartered ships
to bring home his wares. Caution had made him build his warehouse
expensively of fireproof materials. He had been extravagant in nothing
so much as in the equipment against flames and in the amount of
insurance he carried.

Yet fate had made a fool of him. Officials of the city had authorized
officers of the navy to set off kegs of powder in his temple and
scatter his wealth to the winds.

And the flames had turned aside from the building in front of his! That
had been surrendered to the fire, yet it stood now unharmed, mocking
the obscene garbage of the Jessamine Company.

And he could collect no fire insurance for his unburned ruins, despite
the premiums he had squandered. He was too sick with disgust to attend
the mass meeting of citizens called by the mayor, and stirred to
courage by James Gore King. His name was left off the Dudley Selden
committee of one hundred and twenty-five important men. The city voted
a loan of six million dollars to the insurance companies for cash
payments, but he received never a cent. He could not even accept a dole
from the moneys subscribed by sympathetic Boston, Philadelphia, and
other towns.

His very home was no longer his own; creditors who had been proud to
honor his notes were now wolves at his door.

In his frenzy he cast all the blame on RoBards, and roared that his
own son-in-law had led the vandals into his warehouse. Such excuses as
RoBards could improvise were but turpentine to his flaming wrath.

When RoBards offered the old man the shelter of his home in St. John’s
Park, Jessamine was a very Lear of white-haired ire. But he accepted
the proffer of Tuliptree Farm, because it would take him far from the
scene of his downfall; it would afford him a wintry asylum where he
could gnaw on his own bitterness.

Before he set forth into the snowy hills of Westchester, he made one
stern demand upon RoBards:

“You call yourself a lawyer. Well, prove it, sir, by suing this
diabolic city for its wanton destruction of my property!”

To appease him RoBards consented to undertake the case. He entered
suit against the mayor and the aldermen in the Superior Court for two
hundred thousand dollars.




CHAPTER X


Both fire and water conspired to embitter RoBards against New York, for
both had laid personal hands upon his home and his career, invaded his
very soul.

The first mood of the stricken city was one of despair. Then anger
mounted. Scapegoats were sought. Some laid the blame on the piped gas
that had come into vogue ten years before. Samuel Leggett had been
the first to light his house with the explosive and his guests had
felt that they took their lives in their hands when they accepted his
hospitality. He had been one of the leaders of the Bronx River party,
too.

Others complained that the fire had gone beyond control because the
unchecked insolence and greed of the builders had led them to pile up
structures as high as five or six stories. So an ordinance was passed
forbidding future Babel towers to rise above the fourth floor.

The true cause of the fire was proclaimed from many pulpits as a
magnificent rebuke from heaven upon a city in which extravagance had
gone mad and sin flourished exceedingly. One text for a scathing sermon
was: “Is there evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?” Another
preacher chose the fall of the tower of Siloam upon sinners as his
parallel.

But if God punished the new Nineveh, it paid him little heed, for a
revel of crime ensued; burglaries were countless. Vice ruled and people
danced and drank with desperate zeal.

More amazing yet, a fever of prosperity followed. When lots in the
burned district were offered at auction, the first of them brought
prices above anybody’s dreams. A panic of enthusiasm made skyrockets of
values. People who had a little cash laid it down as a first payment
on property far beyond their means, and then borrowed money to build
with. New shops and tenements began to shoot up, and of a statelier
sort than before. Brick and marble replaced wood, and the builders were
so active that the editor of the _Mirror_ was reminded of his classics
and quoted the scene in Vergil where Æneas watched the masons and
architects of Tyre raising Carthage to glory.

It was ominous, however, that most of these buildings were founded
upon mortgages. There was frenzy, not sanity, in the land speculation.
Wildcat banks were opened everywhere. Prices for all things soared till
flour reached fifteen dollars a barrel and wheat two dollars a bushel.
The poor grew restive. Everybody grew restive.

War broke out against the Catholics. In the Protestant pulpits they
were assailed as worse than atheists. The monasteries and nunneries
were described as dens of vice, and the populace was finally so aroused
that a Protestant mob attacked Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and would
have set it afire if it had not been turned into a fortress of armed
men with rifles aimed through walls crenelated for defense. There was a
riot also in a theatre.

New York was all riot. Mobs gathered at every pretext, and nothing
would stop them but bullets or the threat of them. The only subject on
which there was even partial agreement was water. The one insurance
policy that could be trusted was offered by the Croton Company. The
aqueduct would cost only four and a half millions. They said “only”
now, for the fire had burned up seventeen millions in a night or two.

In April the engineers went out upon the mellowing hills and began to
pound stakes again, to re-survey and to wrangle with the landholders.

The people of Tarrytown and the other communities met to protest that
the taking of their land was unconstitutional, but nothing could check
the city’s ruthlessness. The Water Commissioners, unable to buy, were
authorized to condemn and to take over at their own appraisement. But
the landholders made a hard fight, and some of them brought their
claims to RoBards’ office. They found in him a ready warrior, for he
understood the spirit that actuated them.

Lawyer though he was, RoBards could never keep his own heart out of his
cases. If he had been a surgeon he would have suffered every pang that
his patients endured; he would have gone frantic with rage against the
mysteries of anguish, the incomprehensible, immemorial torture-festival
that life has been. He would either have howled blasphemies at his God
for his inhumanity, or he would have taken refuge in atheism from the
horror of blaming a deity for infinite cruelties, the least of which,
if inflicted by a man upon an animal, would have caused his fellowmen
to destroy him as a hydrophobic wolf.

The law was a like insanity to RoBards. Since it is a condition of
human nature that almost every man sees a sacredness in his own rights
and a wickedness in every claim that conflicts with his own happiness;
and since such rights and wrongs crisscross inextricably and are
intertangled in such a Gordian knot as only a sword can solve, it is
inevitable that cheap or bitter humorists should continue to find
material for easy satire or fierce invective in the lawyers and judges
who endeavor to reach peace by compromise.

Lawyers can prosper only as doctors do, by stifling their passions
and devoting their intellects to their professions as a kind of noble
sport. But RoBards was not a sportsman.

The suit of Jessamine vs. The City of New York should have been a cold
matter of dollars and cents and justice, but nothing has ever been
hotter or more passionate than money wars. When RoBards appeared before
the Superior Court to secure damages against the city for the ruination
of Jessamine’s property, the corporation counsel demurred to his
Declaration against the Mayor _et al._ on the ground that the Mayor and
the aldermen had statutory authority. The demurrers were sustained. Of
course, RoBards appealed to the Court of Errors, and of course it would
take eleven years for his case to come up again.

This embittered him against the city as a personal enemy. Having
accepted the Westchester standpoint as to the farmers’ rights, every
motive and activity of everybody south of the Harlem River was an added
tyranny.

Chalender and his crowd might accuse the farmers of pettiness because
they would not surrender their fields to the thirsty myriads of the
city. But RoBards felt that this was only a new campaign in the eternal
combat between town and country. He felt that if certain kinds of
mankind had their way, every stream would be chained to a wheel, every
field would contain a tenement or a shop. A snuff factory and a linen
bleachery had all too long disgraced the lower stretches of the Bronx.

New York was pushing its beautiful wheatfields further and further
north. The old pond, called “The Collect” (and well pronounced “the
colic”) had long since been drained to a swamp and replaced by the
hideous crime-nest of The Five Points. The waters that ran through
Canal Street were hidden gradually from the light of day as a covered
sewer. Taverns and gin hells had taken root in the outlying regions
above Madison Square, and the distant roads were noisy with horse
races, brandy guzzling, and riotous conversation. Even on the Sabbath
the New Yorkers sent their wives to church and went out into the fields
for unholy recreation.

RoBards entered the lists as the champion of the rights of God’s free
soil. New York was to him a vast octopus thrusting its grisly tentacles
deep into the fairest realms to suck them dry and cover them with its
own slime. If it were not checked, it would drive all the farmers from
Manhattan Island. The real estate speculators talked of a day when the
city would be all city up to the Harlem River, as if that time would be
a millennium instead of a pandemonium.

Seeing his ardor and hearing his eloquence, more and more of the
Westchester patriots engaged RoBards as their attorney. His battle
ground was the Chancery Court, where the fate of the lands was settled.

He lost every case. The city’s claim to water was ruled paramount
to any American citizen’s rights to his own land. RoBards might cry
that New York was repeating the very tyranny that had brought on the
Revolution against England. He might protest that the Revolutionary
heroes of Westchester had incarnadined their own hills with their blood
in vain, if the greed of New Amsterdam were to wrest their homes from
them after all.

But the judges only smiled or yawned at his fervor. They would discuss
nothing but the price to be paid for the condemned property, and
RoBards could do nothing but sell his clients’ lands dear and delay the
final defeat as long as he could.

He and his colleagues made New York sweat for its victory. Already the
original estimate of the cost of the aqueduct was nearly doubled and
three and a half millions added to the amount to be raised. The city
was held in check for two years, and in those two years prosperity was
lost—the lawless prosperity that had hoisted even bread beyond the
reach of the poor and sent them into such a rage that they attacked
warehouses where flour was stored, and flinging the barrels to the
street, covered the pavements with wheaten snow.

Suddenly the banks began to topple, as a house of cards blown upon. A
ripple went along the line of banks and every one of them went down.
With them went other businesses in an avalanche. Prices shot from the
peak to the abyss in a day. The fall of New York was but the opening
crash. The whole proud nation fell in the dust, and the hardest times
ever known in the New World made the very name of the year 1837 a
byword of disaster. The favorite policy of the day was repudiation.
Beggars, bankers, merchants, cities, states, blandly canceled their
debts by denying them.

“Now,” RoBards announced to his clients, “Now we’ve got the old wolf by
the throat. His teeth and claws are falling out and he’ll have to let
go of us as he is letting go of everything else.”

But this was not to be. The great aqueduct that was to rival the works
of Rome offered the despondent town a vision and a pride it needed
and would not relinquish. It seemed all the more splendid to defy the
hardship of the times and rear an edifice that would defy time. If
the city were to be buried in poverty, it would at least have left a
monument above its head.

Even RoBards could not resist the fire of this resolve. After all
he was an American, and New York was the American metropolis. And,
besides, he was a lawyer and he loved an opponent who knew how to fight
and had the guts to fight hard.

And so the embattled farmers of Westchester knuckled to the inevitable,
and the construction of the aqueduct began in the very hour of the
general disaster.

The legislature at Albany had all along been coerced by the members
from New York City. It had made no difficulty about granting a right of
way across the lands of the State Prison.

Through this unhappy territory went the Sing Sing Kill, and the
kidnapped Croton River must be conveyed across that brook on a great
stone bridge, with an arch of eighty-foot span, and twenty-five-foot
rise with stout abutments of stone.

In the allotments of the first thirteen sections of construction, Harry
Chalender secured the Sing Sing field. RoBards would have been glad to
see him inside the walls of the penitentiary, or in one of the chained
gangs that constructed roads thereabout.

But Patty was afraid that some of the desperate convicts might attack
him, and she was as anxious for him as if he had gone to war.




CHAPTER XI


One day, while sinking an exploratory shaft, Chalender came upon a vein
of the snowflake marble that underlay that region. He bored a tunnel
through this frost that had become stone; and laid a royal pavement for
the rural Croton to march upon to town.

The first slab of marble that Chalender cut served him as a pretext for
a visit to Tuliptree Farm. He brought it across country in a wagon and
laid it down at Patty’s feet. He said he had been writing a poem all
the way over, but the jolting of the wagon had knocked the meter askew,
and the sight of RoBards had knocked the whole thing out of his sconce.

That was his way. He had hoped not to find RoBards at home. Finding
him there, he was impudent enough to conceal his dismay in its own
exaggeration. He pretended to be caught in a rendezvous and played the
scene with an imitation of the bombast of the popular young actor,
Edwin Forrest.

Patty laughed equally at Chalender’s burlesque of guilt and at her
husband’s efforts to pretend amusement. Then she insisted that the slab
be set down before the fireplace as a hearthstone, to replace the old
block of slate that had been quietly cracking and chipping for years.

This whim of hers offended her husband exquisitely, but she thwarted
him by a show of hysterics, and he dared not protest; for she was
once more in one of those states of mind and body where she must not
be crossed. She was like a rose-tree budding every year with a new
flower. Her third baby had died in the spring following the great fire.
Still Nature would not relent, and another was already aglow within
her protesting flesh. And in the fall of 1837, that baby followed its
brother to the grave. But that was to be expected.

Nobody counted on raising more than half the children the Lord
allotted. It was a woman’s duty to bear enough to have a few left to
mature. Since nobody had discovered a preventive of disease, it was
evidently Heaven’s pleasure to take back its loaned infants after
running them through a brief hell of whooping cough, chicken pox,
measles, fits, red gum, and scarlatina.

Patty was an unheroic mother. She fought the doctor’s and the nurse’s
orders to keep the babies bandaged tightly, and she was impatient with
the theory that it was a good thing for a baby to cry all the time, and
that it was well to have all the diseases and get them over with—or go
under with them.

Heaven was pleased that a wife should multiply her kind. What else was
she for? If Heaven subtracted, that was the pleasure of Heaven. The
orders were to bear much fruit. Families of sixteen or more children
were not unusual, and a dozen was hardly more than normal. Most of the
family would soon be found in the graveyard, but that had always been
so. The death rate among mothers was horrible, too; but they died in
the line of duty and their husbands remembered them tenderly—unless
their successors were over-jealous. And it was a man’s duty to keep on
taking wives so that the race should not perish—as it was a soldier’s
duty, as soon as one charger died under him, to capture another.

Patty grew almost blasphemous over the curse upon her sex. She resented
her seizure by one of the wandering souls, and the long exile it meant
from “the pursuit of happiness.” She called it “unconstitutional!” When
the day of travail came she screamed like a tormented child, and when
her hard-won puppet was taken from her she wept like a little girl
whose toy is wrested away.

Those weird deaths of souls hardly yet born were devastating to
RoBards. He frightened Patty so by the first hideous sob she heard from
him that he concealed his grief from her and sought only to console
her as if he had lost nothing. It cost him heavily to deny himself the
relief of outcry.

On one subject at least he and Patty did not disagree. She would not
have her lost babies taken to either of the graveyards at White Plains
and Armonk. She asked to have their hardly tenanted bodies kept on the
farm, and chose for them a nook where a covey of young tulip trees had
gathered like a little outpost of sentinels.

Always she vowed that she would have no more children: it hurt too
much to see them die. And RoBards, though he longed for a forest of
sons about him, felt a justice in her claim that she should have the
decision since she carried the burden. But she was so tempting and so
temptable that now and again passion blinded them again to peril, and
she was trapped anew. Sometimes, in his black agonies of mourning,
RoBards believed that these children were snatched from them because
they were conceived in tempests of rapture, and not in the mood of
prayer and consecration with which the preacher, Dr. Chirnside,
declared the parental altar should be approached.

But Patty mocked RoBards’s solemnity when he broached the subject,
and giggled at him as she peeked between her fingers and snickered,
“Shame on you!” She had two weapons that always put him to utter rout—a
naughty smile of pretended shock, and the quivering upper lip and
tremulous wet eyelids of being about to cry.

Often when her frivolous hilarities angered him and he made ready to
denounce her, the mere tightening of the silken threads of her eyebrows
and the puckering of her thimble chin admonished him that a shower of
tears was in her sky, and he forbore. He could not endure to give her
pain. His whole desire was to make her life one long, long blissfulness.

Yet he seemed disqualified for this. He could rarely achieve
entertainment. She did not find the luxury in his society that he found
in hers. He had her beauty to bask in and she had only his tiresome
earnestness or labored humor. Nowadays when he was kept in the city for
a week or two during the sessions of the courts, she would not go to
town with him. She pretended that it was the quiet contentment of the
farmstead that held her, but he was not convinced.

Patty’s father and mother still lived at Tuliptree Farm, and both were
so querulous that Patty could hardly endure them. Yet she would not
stay in town.

It was more than a coincidence that Harry Chalender was neighbors with
her now. He carried the city with him. He was New York enough for her.

The times being hard and fees hard to collect, RoBards closed up the
house in St. John’s Square. He could not rent it, but it was expensive
to keep up, and lonely; so he took a room at the gorgeous new Astor
House.

Often when he came to the farm from the hot town he would note a
strange elusiveness in Patty, the guilt of a mouse caught nibbling a
cake. Or, else, she would be a little too glad to see him. The most
suspicious trait was her occasional unusual solicitude for him: her
anxiety to be sure just when he would return.

Sometimes when he rode into the yard Cuff would say, “You jest missed
Mista Chalenda.” He felt that he read a veiled disappointment in the
ivory eyeballs as they rolled away from his scrutiny. But how could he
ask an ex-slave such questions as rose to his tortured mind? How could
he resent a servant’s unspoken criticism, without exposing the whole
problem of his wife’s integrity?

He would say to Patty carelessly:

“Anybody been here?”

But what could he say when she answered:

“Only that stupid Harry Chalender, with his eternal talk of culverts
and protection walls and drunken teamsters, and the prospects of a
strike.”

He had long ago learned that beneath her yawn was a readiness to fight.
He was usually worn out with the worry and fag of the law courts where
even the judges sat in shirt-sleeves and spat tobacco between their
cocked-up feet. He came home for peace; but to Patty, a hot argument
brought refreshment from a day of languor or of boredom from her dull
parents, or of light coquetry with a flattering gallant.

She always whipped her husband out. She would whimper and make him a
brute, or she would rail and storm till he implored her for quiet, to
cheat the hungry ears of the servants or to appease the two terrified
children who hung about his knees; or to escape the sullen glare of
Patty’s father and mother.

He felt that, instead of browbeating or being browbeaten by a delicate
woman, he ought to go over to Sing Sing and horsewhip Harry Chalender.
But that also had its inconveniences, and he had no stomach for adding
his own name to the list of knockabouts that accompanied the building
of the aqueduct.

For, all along the right of way, as the landholders had prophesied,
there was drunken brawling. A river of alcohol paralleled the dry bed
for the Croton. Farmers turned their homes into grog shops. Village
tavern-owners and city saloon-keepers set up shanties under the dusty
trees, whether the easily corrupted magistrates gave them licenses or
not.

Together with drink came every other form of dissipation. Gamblers and
cheap tricksters abounded, and those burly harpies strangely miscalled
“light women” came out of their overcrowded lairs in town until the
innocent countryside was one sordid bacchanal.

Whipped up with liquor and the mad eloquence it inspired, the laboring
men began to talk of their rights and wrongs and, above all, of their
right to organize. In England the first efforts of the lower classes to
combine against the upper, and form a new Jacquerie had been dealt with
sharply, but without permanent success.

The laws of the United States were strict enough, but loose talk of
democracy was undermining them, and the toilers were gaining a sense of
unity. They called themselves “Workies” with an affectionate self-pity,
and early in 1838 they achieved a turn-out (or, as they called it
recently, “a strike”) for higher wages.

This mutiny had a short life, for the hard times and the vast mobs of
unemployed made it easy for the contractors to replace the strikers,
and the magistrates were severe. The contractors caused a panic by
agreeing never on any terms to re-employ the ringleaders, and there
were soon no ringleaders. The others made haste to beg for mercy and to
resume their picks and shovels with gratitude.

One day Patty, to escape from the gloom of her parents, ordered Cuff to
hitch up the carry-all and drive her over to see the construction camp.
As she sat gossiping with Harry Chalender, who pointed out the rising
walls of masonry, a quarrel arose between two laborers in a ditch.
They bandied words like Hamlet and Laertes in the tomb of Ophelia, and
then as if the first and second gravediggers had fallen afoul, they
raised their picks and began a dreadful fencing match that set Patty to
shrieking and swooning.

Chalender was capable as any other carpet knight of prodigies of valor
so long as a lady’s eyes were upon him. He left Patty’s carriage wheel
and ran shouting commands to desist. When the battlers paid him no
heed, he was foolhardy enough to leap down between them. One pick dealt
him a glancing blow on the skull, while the other struck deep into the
sinews across his shoulder blades.

Cuff told RoBards afterward that Miss Patty, instead of fainting at the
sight of Chalender’s blood, sprang to the ground across the wheel and
ran to him like a fury, slashing at the laborers with her fingernails.

The workmen were aghast enough at the white victim they had unwittingly
laid low, and they lifted him from the ditch. Patty dropped to the
heap of fresh soil and took his bleeding form into her arms, tore away
his shirt and with desperate immodesty made bandages of her own white
pantaloons and stenched the gouts of red.

Then she ordered that Chalender be picked up and placed in her own
carry-all. And she brought him home with her.

When RoBards came up from New York, Cuff told him the story before he
reached the house. On the doorsill Patty confronted him with white
defiance. She waited for him to speak.

She dared him to speak. What could he say?

She had saved the life of a wounded man. She had brought home a dying
friend. The Good Samaritan had done no more and no less.

RoBards could have wished the victim had been anyone else in the world,
but he could hardly have wished his wife unequal to such a crisis.

She stood waiting for him, grim, wan, her nostrils wide and taut, her
lips thin and tight, her eyes ransacking his very soul.

And so he said:

“You are wonderful!”

And then she broke down across the arm he thrust out to catch her; and
she wept upon his heart, caressing his cheek with stroking hands, while
she sobbed:

“I love you. You are so sweet. Poor Harry, I thought they had killed
him! He was so stupid! But you are so sweet!”

And never was word bitterer in a man’s ears than that reiterated
“sweet.”




CHAPTER XII


Fiends of suspicion laughed at the tenderness in RoBards’ heart as he
upheld his wife. The fiends called it “complacency.” Fiends of irony
mocked that complacency and told him that it was not lofty idealism
or even consideration for her that withheld his wrath, but only a
voluptuous unwillingness to surrender the possession of her pretty form.

But whatever his true motives, he was more helpless than Chalender,
where he found him prone on a couch in the library, biting on a
mouthful of tufted quilt and stuffing it down his throat to stifle his
howls of pain as the country doctor swabbed with a coarse towel the
dirty red channel in his back.

Chalender rolled his eyes up whitely at RoBards from the pit of hell,
and then his gaunt face turned into snowflake marble as his head fell
forward and he fainted.

All that night RoBards acted as nurse for him, and forgiveness
bled from him for any real or imagined injury he had received from
Chalender. Hating the man as he did and believing that Chalender had
seduced his wife’s interest and perhaps her very honor, he could not
but feel that the wretch was doing penance enough.

At midnight he had to walk out under the star-sprinkled roof of the
tuliptree to give his eyes repose from the sight of anguish. The night
brooded above, so beautiful, so benign that he wondered how God, the
indubitable God who stared down at his little world he had made, could
endure the hell he had created for the punishment of his creatures.

A few hours had drained RoBards’ heart of resentment against the one
rival in his one love, yet it was said and preached that God kept
in the center of this world an eternal vat of liquid fire where
numberless children of his parentage screamed everlastingly in vain
for so much as a drop of water on their foreheads. And all because six
thousand years before one man Adam had broken a contract imposed upon
him.

Lawyer and believer in laws, RoBards could not fathom such
ruthlessness, such rigor in a code of entailed sin. Humanity was
growing kindlier toward its prisoners. Thirty or forty years ago, the
French under the lead of Doctor Pinel had relapsed to the old Greek
theory that the insane were innocent invalids, and should be treated
kindly, not flogged and chained and reviled. This seemed to cast a
doubt upon the belief that the mad folk were inhabited by devils, but
the effects of gentleness were amazing. And recently this infection of
modern weakness and effeminacy had led to a theory of softer methods
toward criminals.

Good and pious men had protested against the cessation of capital
punishment for thieves, but theft had not been increased by mercy.
In the British Navy, the flogging of sailors had been discontinued
and there were sentimentalists who pleaded that American sailors also
should be protected from the horror of being stripped and lashed till
their bare backs bled. But this dangerous leniency had not yet been
tried.

Over at this Sing Sing prison, however, where Chalender was building
his section of the aqueduct, so called “prison reform” was under
trial, and no great harm had come of it as yet. Where three thousand
lashes with the cat-o’-six tails had been the monthly total, less than
three hundred were inflicted now. Women were reading the Bible to the
prisoners now and then. All the good old rigidities of discipline were
giving way.

The world was turning slowly and painfully from the ancient faith in
cruelty and in men made crueler by a most cruel God, and RoBards felt
his power to hate Chalender seeping out of his heart like sand stealing
from the upper chamber of an hourglass. He tried to hold it, because
it seemed indecent to endure the existence of one he suspected of so
much as an inclination toward his sacred wife. But it slipped away in
spite of him. When he needed his hate, it was gone.

Night after night he fell asleep in his chair at the bedside of
his panting enemy, who moaned when he slept, but when he was awake
smothered all sound and simply sweat and stared and gnawed at the quilt
like a trapped rat.

When RoBards woke he would often find Patty at his side, staring at
Chalender while big tears slipped from her cheek and fell, streaking
the air with a glistening thread of light. And she mopped with a little
handkerchief the clammy forehead of Chalender, on whose knotted brow
big drops of sweat glowed like tears from squeezed eyelids.

RoBards was too tired to resent. He would lift himself heavily from his
chair and go to his breakfast, and then to the gig that was to carry
him to New York. He would sleep for miles, but his horse knew the way.
He slept through hours of courtroom boredom, too, but at night in his
room at the Astor House he was wide awake.

Below him Broadway roared in the flare of its gas lamps, the busses
going to and fro like vast glowworms. But his thoughts were in
Westchester.

He was further depressed by a hanging. At the new Tombs prison the
first execution had just taken place. The dead criminal had murdered
his wife, the pretty hot corn girl, whose cry, “Lily white corn! Buy my
lily white corn!” rang in RoBards’ ears. It seemed impossible that any
man should destroy so pretty a thing, a thing that he must have loved
much once. The thought of the pretty girl made him anxious for his own
pretty Patty. He was glad that he had not throttled her in one of his
onsets of mad justice. He longed to hurry home to hear her voice and be
sure of her.

But he could not go back for many days. And then a shift in the docket
suddenly released him and he set out at once. The long drive was an
ordeal, but there was a wonderful sense of perfectness in his heart
when his dusty horse at last turned into the road that gave his
home to his eyes. He was the pilgrim whose strength just lasts the
pilgrimage out. There was his Mecca, the Jerusalem of his heart’s
desire! His home, the place established by his father, the fireside
where his wife awaited him, the fane where his children were gathered.

It was the spirit of the time to let the poetic mood exult in high
apostrophic strains. He felt a longing to cry out something beginning
with “O thou——!” He could not find the word enormous enough for his
love, but the inarticulateness of his ecstasy shattered his soul with a
joyous awe.

Oh, that House where it waited on its hill, throned on its hill and
reigning there! Thou Tulip Tree! that standest there like a guardian
seneschal! or like the canopy above a throne! like something—he knew
not what, except that it was beautiful and noble and beyond all things
precious.

As the horse plodded up the steep road, RoBards’ heart climbed, too. He
was uplifted with a vague piety, such as he had felt when first he saw
the dome of the Statehouse at Albany and felt the glory of citizenship,
felt the majesty of his State. This home was the capitol of that people
which was his family. It bore the name he bore, as a franchise, a
title, a dignity, and therewith a mighty responsibility.

It was his duty, it must be his pride, to keep that name clean and
high; to keep that home a temple of unsullied honor. No enemy must tear
it down, no slander must soil its whiteness, no treachery must dishonor
it from within.

The sun, sinking behind it, threw out spokes of light as from the
red hub of a tremendous invisible wheel. The sun had the look of an
heraldic device.

The home was as quiet, too, as an armorial bearing. The children were
taking their afternoon nap, no doubt, in the nursery. No doubt the old
people were asleep in their upper room. His wife, where was she? He
would love to find her stretched out slumbering across her bed like a
long Easter lily laid along a pulpit.

He did not see even Cuff, the old negro, who was doubtless asleep in
the barn on a pile of harness. RoBards tied his horse to the hitching
post and moved with a lordly leisure to the porch. He had actually
forgotten that there was a stranger in his house. His heart had been
too perfectly attuned to admit a discord.

He paused on the top step and surveyed his domain. Along the contour
of the horizon—and his horizon was his own—a team of big white horses
moved, leaning against the collars that ruffed their necks. The plough
they dragged through the soil flashed back the sunset as its keen share
bounded from a sharp stone. After it plodded the farmer, the lines
about his loins, his whip sketching a long scrawl across the sky. He
was going to put in his winter wheat.

Along another hill an orchard was etched, the sky visible beneath the
branches that joined to form arches in a green colonade. Old fences
of rail and stone staggered up and down the slopes, each of them a
signature of some purchase his father had made, some parcel of land
bought from some dead farmer. Beneath RoBards’ eyes, was the little
garrison of tulip trees where his babies slept on earth. There was dew
on his lashes and an edged pebble in his throat as his lips knit in
a grimace of regret. Yet there was a holiness about his pain, and a
longing that nothing should disturb this Sabbath in his soul.

He turned to enter the open door, but he heard murmurs and a kind of
hissing whisper that surprised him. He moved toward his library, and
there, stretched out on the couch where he himself had sometimes rested
when worn out with his lawbooks, he saw Harry Chalender lying on his
right side. The quilt had fallen from one shoulder, since his left arm
was lifted to enfold the woman who sat curled on a hassock before him
and had just laid her lips upon his.

RoBards could not move, or speak. He seemed not even to think or feel.
He merely existed there. He was nothing but a witness, all witness.
After a long kiss and a long sigh of bitter-sweet bliss, Patty murmured:

“How wicked we are! how wicked!”

[Illustration: “HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!”]

Then she turned her beautiful head and stared across her shoulder
and saw RoBards. He could think of nothing but of how beautiful she was.

Chalender did not turn his head; but the amorous curve of his lips was
fixed in a mask of love—inane, and petrified.

Patty waited for RoBards to speak. But he did not know what to say, or
to think. And he could not move.




CHAPTER XIII


If Chalender had only risen in self-defence or reached for a weapon
or spoken a word, whether of bravado or cowardice, it would have been
easy for RoBards to rush him. If his lip had merely quirked with that
flippant smile of his at life, it would have been a rapture to throttle
him.

But his lip was still pathetic with an arrested kiss, and in his eyes
was the pain of desire. He did not know that RoBards was looking at him.

The animal instinct to destroy the man who had won his wife’s caress
was checked by an instinct equally animal: the disability to attack the
helpless and unresisting.

First wrath had thrust RoBards forward. But his feet grew leaden
upon the floor, as a multitude of impulses and instincts flung out
of his soul and crowded about his will, restraining it like a mob of
peacemakers, a sheriff’s posse of deputies.

He had come from thoughts of piety before the meaning of his home,
and his heart was devout. His eyes had just left off embracing with a
mighty tenderness the graves of his two little children.

The bare imaginations of their mother’s infidelity and its punishment
were like sacrilegious rioters abusing the calm church within him.

In his revolt, he could have called his eyes liars for presenting his
wife to him in another man’s arms, and before he could see through the
haze that clouded his vision, she was standing erect and staring at him
with a dignity that defied either his suspicions or his revenge. He
could have killed Patty for her own recklessness with her honor, which
was his now. He understood in a wild flash of thought-lightning why the
husband of “the pretty hot-corn girl” must have struck her dead.

Chalender had not moved, did not suspect. He was wounded; his fever was
high. He might not live.

Perhaps he had been in a delirium. Perhaps Patty had been merely trying
to quiet him. But she had been saying, “How wicked we are!” as if
cheaply absolving herself of sin by confession.

Suppose RoBards charged her with disloyalty and she denied it. What
proof had he? He was the only witness. He could not divorce her for
merely kissing a wounded visitor.

Divorce! How loathsome! Nobody had yet forgotten old Aaron Burr’s
brief marriage to old Betty Jumel or the recent noisome lawsuit that
followed, in which Burr flattered her with four corespondents to her
one for him.

As a lawyer RoBards had many divorce trials brought to him and he
abominated them. He had never had a nightmare so vile as the thought
that he might have to choose between clamorous divorce and smothered
disgrace.

He wanted to die now rather than make the choice. To kill Chalender
would seem almost a lesser horror. But that also meant exposure to the
public. The burial of Chalender would but throw open his own home like
a broken grave. It was only a detail that Chalender had saved his life
the night of the fire when RoBards could not climb back to the wharf
and no one else heard or heeded him.

To butcher a wounded man, guilty so ever; to strip a woman stark before
the mob, evil so ever; to brand his children, to blotch his home with
scandal—pure infamy! But, on the other hand, to spare a slimy reptile;
to be the cheap victim of a woman’s duplicity; to leave his children to
her foul ideals; to make his home a whited sepulcher—infamy again. He
felt that the children must be first to be considered. But which way
was their welfare to be sought?

Then the children themselves ran in upon his swooning mind, Imogene
and Keith. He felt their tendril fingers wrap about his inert hands.
He heard their piping cries of welcome. He fell back from the door
and was so weak, so sick that they easily pulled him to his knees and
clambered on his back and beat him, commanding “Giddap!” and “Whoa,
Dobbin!”

The very attitude was a degradation. He was actually crawling, a brute
beast on all fours with his young on his back. When he flung them off
Keith bumped his head and began to cry, Immy to howl and boo-hoo! And
they ran to their mother protesting that their Papa was mean, and
hurted them. They turned to Chalender for protection. And this was
Chalender’s first warning that RoBards had come home—home! what a
dirtied word it was now—“home!”

RoBards scrambled to his feet and dashed out of the intolerable place.

Only the old tulip tree had dignity now. With a Brahmanic majesty it
waved its long-sleeved arms above him and warned him that he must not
let life drive him mad. His decision one way or the other did not
matter much. Nothing he did or left undone mattered much. The leaves
would come and go and come anew. The farmer was still striding along
after his plough in a silhouette cut out against a scarlet west.

Just one thing seemed important: the house pleaded with him not to
dishonor it. It was older than he. It had cradled him. It had cradled
his children. It wanted to cradle their children’s children. The
lengthening shadow of the chimney had crept along the grass now till it
lay like a soft coverlet on the beds of the little twain that had been
lent him for a while. The very chimney had a soul of its own, and a
good name. It seemed to implore him not to brand it as a place of evil
resort.

His knees gave way and he dropped to the ground, rendered idiot by the
contradiction of his impulses. He saw old negro Cuff staring at him.
The farmer’s wife paused at the back door to wonder. At an upper window
Patty’s Teen leaned out to fix on him the white stare of her black face.

Then someone came stepping toward him as timidly as a rabbit in
dew-chilled grass. Someone sank down by him with a puff of floating
silk and a drift of perfume across his nostrils. And then his wife
spoke in the coldest calmest voice he had ever heard from her, as if
his discovery of her had discovered her to herself and had aged her in
a moment.

“Mist’ RoBards!” she pleaded, “Mist’ RoBards if it will save you any
trouble, I’ll kill myself. I’ll fling myself down the well, or let you
kill me if you would like that better. Some day you were bound to catch
us together, Harry and me. I’m almost glad you did at last. I’ve been
bad enough to destroy my own soul, but don’t let me break your heart or
ruin your life. I’m not worth your grieving for, Mist’ RoBards. I’ve
been as wicked as I could be and for a long while, and now you’ve found
me out—and I’m glad. Even if you kill me, I’m glad.”

But he was not glad. Suspicion had burned and hurt, but knowledge was a
knife through the heart; it was mortal. It killed something in him. One
soul of his many souls was slain. His other souls were in a panic about
its deathbed, as Patty went on, her voice queerly beautiful for all the
hideous things it told:

“Harry doesn’t know that you saw him—us. Nobody does. He isn’t in his
right mind. He is weak and sick and I made myself pretty just to make
him quit laughing at me. And if he dies, it will be my fault.

“And that would be funny—for such a worthless little fool as me to
cause so much trouble for two men, two such fine men. He is fine, in
spite of all his wickedness, and he’s doing a great work that must go
on. Let me go away and disappear somewhere. I’ll drown myself in your
river, if I can find a place deep enough. And Harry need never know
why. I don’t want him to know that you saw us. I couldn’t stand that.
It’s of you I’m thinking. I don’t want him to know that you know about
this terrible thing. It isn’t so bad, if he doesn’t know you know. For
then you’d have to kill him, I suppose.

“But please don’t kill him, for then they’ll try you and send you to
prison or hang you and choke you to death before all the people. Oh,
don’t let that happen, David. You couldn’t be so cruel to me as to let
them kill you and hurt you and bury you in the Potter’s Field on my
account—don’t do that to me, Davie. I’ve loved you. In my way, I’ve
loved you. I’m not good enough for you, but—if any harm should come to
you, I’d die. Don’t look like that, Mist’ RoBards! Oh, don’t look so
helpless and heartbroken and so unhappy. Don’t torture me to death that
way!”

And then it was he that sobbed and not she. He could feel her clutching
at him and lifting him from the grass reeking with his tears. She
drew his head into her soft arms and into her lap and set her lips
against his cheek, but dared not kiss him, though her tears beat on his
clenched eyelids like the first big drops of a long rain.

One little mercy was vouchsafed him and that was the sinking of the sun
behind the hill; the blessed twilight came with its infinite suavity
and the impalpable veils it draws across the harsh edges of things and
thoughts.

He saw the tide of the evening wind where it eddied along the grass
and overflowed his hands and his face. He heard the farmer go up the
dusty lane that muffled the tread of the tired horses, but not the
little clink-clink of the harness rings. He supposed that the farmer
was staring and wondering at him as he himself stared inside his own
eyelids at the world within him, and wondered at that.

It grew cold. His wife’s hands chilled as they clenched his. He could
feel her shiver. He could just hear her whisper through her chattering
teeth:

“Please come in, Mist’ RoBards.”

He put away her arms and got to his feet. Then his dignity took on the
look of mere sulkiness. When he saw Patty unable to rise, and huddled
in a dismal heap, he bent and lifted her to her feet. She seemed unable
to stand or walk; so his arm of its own volition or habit went round
her to hold her up.

And at that she threw her arms about him and buried her face in his
breast and sobbed. He looked through blurred eyes at the ambiguous sky
where stars were thrilling in the rosy afterglow. In the dark house
someone was lighting lamps. The lamps and the stars were tenderly
beautiful, but they came only when all else was black.

From the hall door a rug of warm yellow ran across the porch and down
the steps into the path. The children began to call, “Mamma! Papa!
where are you?”

The house yearned toward him with its deep bosom. Something with the
arms of a spirit reached out from it and drew him in.

It was wrong to yield, but he had an utter need of peace for a while.
He was wounded worse than Chalender, and needed more care.

All that night it was as if Indians prowled about the house, savages
that longed to drag forth the people within, to howl slanders and
truths about them, to fasten them to stakes and dance a torture dance
about them, cut off their eyelids and blind them with ruthless light.
There were no Indians to fear now, save the stealthy reporters and the
more merciless newspapers.

But the house baffled them; it was a strong stockade. They should not
have its children yet a while. It had won another day in its long
battle against the invading strangers.




CHAPTER XIV


That night RoBards slept apart from his wife—in the spare room. He owed
that much to his wrongs and she dared not try to wheedle him into the
dangerous neighborhood of her beauty.

But first they heard the children’s prayers together. It was bitter to
hear their sleepy voices asking forgiveness for their tiny sins and
murmuring, “God bless Mamma and Papa and Mister Chalender! Amen!” Then
the wet little good-night kisses scalded the cheeks of the divided
parents who leaned across the cradles as across coffins and waited till
sleep carried their babes away to the huge nursery of night. Then they
parted without a word, without the challenge of a look.

He slept, too. All night he slept, better than ever. His strength had
been shattered in a moment as if a bolt of lightning had riven him. He
was a dead man until the morning brought resurrection and the problems
of the daylight.

The first thing he heard was a loud shout:

“Jump her, boys! jump her! No water! There’s no water! We’ve got to get
some gunpowder! Up she goes! Down she comes!”

It was Harry Chalender in a delirium fighting the Great Fire again. His
frenzy gave him the horrible sanctity of the insane.

The doctor came over after breakfast. He shook his head. The wound was
dangerous: the pick-blade had made an ugly gouge and gangrene might
set in. There was pus in the wound. There was fever, of course, high,
racking fever that fried his flesh till the very skin seemed to crackle.

RoBards had not expected to go back to town for several days. He had
needed the cool remoteness of his farm. But now the solitude was like
that uttermost calm into which the angels fell and made it Pandemonium.
Now the place was crowded with invisible devils gibbering at him,
shaking their horned heads over him in hilarious contempt, tempting him
to everything desperate.

He made an excuse to Patty that he had to return to the city. He spoke
to her with the coldest formality. She made no effort to detain him,
but this was plainly not from indifference, for she answered like a
condemned prisoner in the dock.

“All right, Mist’ RoBards. I understand.”

It broke his heart to see her meek. All the fire of pride was gone out
of her. She was a whipped cur thing, and he could not put out his hand
to caress her.

Something in him, a god or a fiend, tried to persuade him that she was
not to blame, that she had been the prey of currents stronger than
herself. But whether the god or the fiend whispered him this, the other
of the two spirits denied it as a contemptible folly.

According to the law, women, as soon as they married, lost all rights
to their souls, wills, properties, and destinies: yet if men were
to forgive their wives for infidelities no home would be safe. This
new-fangled mawkishness toward the wicked must have a limit somewhere.

He had to go into his library for a lawbook that he had brought with
him on an earlier visit to his home—“visit” seemed the nice, exact
word, for he was only a visitor now. Harry Chalender was the master of
the house.

RoBards expected to find the usurper in a delirium. But Chalender was
out of the cloud for the moment. With a singularly fresh and boyish
cheer, he sang out:

“Hello, David! How’s my old crony? Don’t let me keep you out of your
shop. Go ahead and work and don’t mind me. I’m pretty sick, I suppose,
or I’d take myself out of your way. Forgive me, won’t you?”

He asked forgiveness for a possible inconvenience, but kept in his
black heart the supposed secret of his treachery! Yet something
compelled RoBards to laugh and say that he was to make himself at home
and feel right welcome. The dishonest glance he cast toward Chalender
was met with a look of smiling honesty that reminded David of some
lines he had heard the English actor Kean deliver at the theatre:

    “My tables—meet it is I set it down,
    That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”

Yet he smiled himself, and felt that many a villain was more the hero
than he. He hurried out of the room, fleeing from the helpless sick man
who smiled and had no conscience to trouble him.

He found that his horse had gone lame and could not take him all the
way to New York. He drove the limping nag only so far as White Plains,
and sent Cuff back with him. He waited in front of Purdy’s Store until
the Red Bird coach was ready to start. He saw Dr. Chirnside waiting
for the same stage, and he dreaded the ordeal of the old preacher’s
garrulity. But there was no escape. The parson had come up to look over
the churches in the Bedford Circuit and he was pretty sure to indulge
in one of his long tirades against the evils of the times—especially
the appalling atheism of the country, an inheritance from the
Revolutionary sentiments. The colleges were full of it—of atheism,
drunkenness, gambling—but Dr. Chirnside seemed to dread atheism far
less than he dreaded the other sects of his own faith. Methodists,
Baptists, Presbyterians were gaining a foothold in the countryside and
he almost choked when he referred to the Catholics.

All the way down to New York Dr. Chirnside’s tongue kept pace with the
galloping horses. He began with the stage itself. He remembered when
even carriages were almost unknown in the rural districts. Gentlemen
rode horses and carried their necessaries in valises swung from the
saddle; ladies rode on pillions. Then light wagons came in, and
carioles next, gigs, chaises, and chairs. And now stages with their
luxury and their speed of nearly ten miles an hour!

As if that were not enough, a steam railroad was to ruin the peace of
the country. Had Mr. RoBards ridden behind one of the engines that now
drew the railway cars from the City Hall all the way to Harlem? No? He
had been fortunate in his abstemiousness.

“The speed of these trains is only another instance of our mad passion
for hurry. After a time people will return to their sanity, and the
stage coaches will drive the fire-breathing monsters back to the
oblivion they came from.

“Another evil of the railroad is that it will bring more and more of
the wicked city element into the country. The aqueduct has practically
ruined an entire region. Have you seen the hollow Chinese wall they are
building for the Croton water? Ah, yes! Indeed! Most impressive, but if
man’s work destroys God’s beautiful country where will be the profit?

“The Continental Sabbath will soon destroy the rural peace as it has
already destroyed New York’s good name. The chains are no longer drawn
across Broadway before the church services and any Tom, Dick, or Harry
may now drive his rattletrap past the sacred edifice on his way to some
pagan holiday.

“In the good old days even taking a walk on Sunday was recognized as a
disrespect to the Lord. Nowadays men go driving! And not always without
fair companions of the most frivolous sort. In my day a gentleman,
passing his most intimate friend on the way to church, would greet him
with a cold and formal nod. Nowadays people smile and laugh on Sunday
as if it were merely a day like another! Where will it end? I tremble
to think of it.

“I have just witnessed an example of the extent to which the new
lawlessness is carrying us. Fortunately I was able to deal with it
sternly.”

He told how some of the aqueduct laborers had spent their Sunday off,
not in pious meditation and fasting, but in sauntering about the
country. Their paganism had gone so far that when they came upon a
patch of wild whortleberries growing by the roadside, they brazenly
began to pick and eat them and gather others to take to their camp.

“Driving home from the service I chanced to see them, and I determined
to put a stop at once to this violation of the laws of God and man. I
ordered the county sheriff to arrest the culprits. They were fined a
shilling each for the sacrilege.

“Unfortunately, this was not the end of it. The depths of human
depravity were disclosed in the behavior of these gross men. Only last
Sabbath, instead of going to church, they hung about the village. Most
unluckily, the sheriff’s daughter carelessly went into the garden and
picked a few currants for the midday dinner. Whereupon the laborers
called on her father and demanded that he arrest his own daughter. He
had to do it, too, and pay her fine of a shilling. It will be a lesson
to the wicked girl, but it rather undoes the good I was able to impress
on the laborers.”

Dr. Chirnside was aghast at such levity, such contempt for sacred
things, but RoBards took no comfort in the thought that, since man’s
quenchless thirst for horrors could be slaked with such trivial
atrocities, his own tragedy was only one example more.

He felt an almost irresistible impulse to seize the clergyman by the
sleeve and cry:

“What would you say if I told you of what has been going on in my own
home? My wife is a member of your congregation; she has been brought up
with every warning against immodesty of thought or action, and yet—and
yet——”

He could not frame the story even in thought. He could not tell it. Yet
if he did not tell, the secret would gnaw his heart away like a rat
caged within.

Dr. Chirnside could hardly have found appropriate gloom for this
disaster since he was already in such despair over the habits of the
modern women, that he had no superlatives left for their dishonor.

As the stage swung down into the city, lurching through mudholes that
occasionally compelled it to take to the sidewalk and scatter the
pedestrians like chickens, he pointed out a girl strolling along with a
greyhound on the leash of a blue silk ribbon.

“See how our girls walk abroad unattended,” he gasped. “That young
female has at least a dog to protect her, but it is appalling how
careless parents are. No wonder our foreign critics are aghast at
the license we allow our ladies. They go about without a father or
a husband to guard them from the insolence of bystanders. It is the
custom, too, to permit couples who have been formally betrothed to be
alone together without any guardian. In most of the homes sofas have
been imported for them to sit upon. No wonder that New England people
say that their old custom of bundling was less immodest. The very word
sofa implies an Oriental luxury.

“The dress of our women, too, is absolutely disgusting. When I was
young there was an outcry against a new fashion of shortening the
skirts in the rear so that the heels were visible. People frankly cried
‘Shame!’ at the sight of them. Nowadays ankles are openly exposed. Look
at that pretty creature stepping across the gutter. She is actually
lifting her petticoats out of the mud. No wonder those men all crane
their necks to ogle! And her satin shoes are hardly more than cobwebs!

“Their immodesty does not stop at the ankles. The bare bosom is seen!
Really! I blush to mention what young females of excellent family do
not blush to reveal.

“It is perilous to health, too. You see our ladies gadding about in the
bitterest weather with their necks uncovered, while gentlemen shiver
under their great coats with five or six capes and heavy stocks and
mufflers besides.

“But the men are hardly more modest. This new fashion of—dare I refer
to it?—of buttoning the pantaloons down the front instead of on the
sides! It is astounding. One or two sermons have already been preached
against it and I think I shall refer to it myself next Sabbath. Pardon
me!”

There was a respite while he took out his pocketbook and made a note of
this urgent matter. RoBards remembered his own memorandum that a man
may smile and be a rake as well. He could hardly keep from plucking at
the parson’s sleeve and confessing:

“When you are in your pulpit, cry out also that one of the town’s pets,
the popular Harry Chalender, has ruined the good name of my wife and
our children and stained the old RoBards mansion with the wreckage of
the Seventh Thou-shalt-not!”

But Dr. Chirnside was putting up his pencil and putting forth his lean,
cold hand for a farewell clasp. The stage was nearing City Hall Park
and he must get out his fare and get down at his parsonage.

And a little further below was the Astor House, which RoBards must call
home henceforth.

Dr. Chirnside had referred for his “thirteenthly” to the barbaric
luxury of the new hotel, and to the evil influence of such hostelries
on home-life. It had a bathtub on every floor! What Oriental luxury
would come next? In many of the more religious states bathing was
a misdemeanor, but in New York every crime flourished—and every
slothfulness. The modern woman, unlike her mother, was too shiftless
to care for her own household or even to oversee her servants: she
preferred to live in a hotel and have more time and convenience for her
idle mischiefs.

But RoBards mused dismally that his home had gone to wrack and ruin
first, and that the hotel was his only refuge.




CHAPTER XV


The sumptuousness of the Astor House only emphasized RoBards’ exile.
From his window he would look down upon the seething throngs along
Broadway, the tall beavers of the men and the poke bonnets of the women
bobbing along as on a stream.

He would seek escape from solitude overlooking the multitude by
retreating to the inner court and the fountain flaunting its
crystal plumes in the turfed garden. But there was that quadrangle
of many-windowed walls about him, and he felt Argus eyes upon him
everywhere. Behind every curtain somebody seemed to be watching him.
The expense of the luxurious hotel was heavy—a dollar a day it cost
him, but he could not face boarding-house inquisitiveness.

In his office he would sit and brood across his pine table with its
green baize cover, and stare at the pine boxes that held his books and
the files of his cases tied with red tape. He would dip his quill into
the inkstand of gray stone and make careless scratches on the paper
before him. When he looked at them afterward they made him wonder if
he were going mad. These crazy designs would serve as evidence for his
commitment to any asylum.

On the margins of his briefs he would wake to find that he had been
making crude contours of Patty’s scoop hat, her big eyes, or the nape
of her neck. He would blot her out in a fury of rage, and attack his
work.

The case of Jessamine vs. the City of New York was still hanging fire.
Many of the claims of people who were forced to sell their lands for
the aqueduct were still unsettled though their farms were covered with
stone and trenched with ditches.

Yet now RoBards felt that the city had its justice. He had fought for
the country and the country had betrayed him. Vile wickedness had found
shelter and prosperity in the gentlest seclusions.

It was a mockery that he should be the counsel for old Jessamine. What
did he owe the dotard except hatred for bringing into the world so
pretty a perjurer? The father had made Tuliptree Farm almost untenable
by his whimpering stupidity and the daughter had driven him into exile
by her ruthless frivolity.

From his law office and his hotel RoBards would flee to a club. He had
joined the fashionable Union Club just formed, but the members always
asked him about his wife, and he had to speak of her with affection and
respect.

The affection was still in his heart, but the respect—he marveled at
his ability to adore one whom he despised, to hang his whole life on
the broken reed of a little woman’s wavering fancy.

He frequented the theatre but he found discomfort there, since almost
all the stories dealt with tragic or comic flirtations. He liked to go
to the Bowery Theatre, but it was always burning down. Mary Taylor,
“Our Mary” as they called her, puzzled him because she had a reputation
for private morality and yet she was a convincing actress of spicy
rôles. Patty was not an actress at all—she was positively imbecile in
the drawing-room plays she had taken part in; yet her private life
proved that her home was but a stage to her. Behind the private life of
people there was so often another private life. And he had never been
admitted until now to the green room of his own domestic theatre. Patty
was a convincing actress of Innocence.

Moods of retaliation were frequent. There were opportunities enough. It
amazed him now that he was alone in the city to see how many chances
were offered him to make some other husband a fool. Young girls
of fifteen or sixteen, who had not yet been married, or were only
betrothed, dazed him by the black wisdom in their eyes. They scampered
and made pretenses of terror before him like kittens or puppies begging
him to pursue them.

Others were to be had of a more public character. It was estimated that
there were ten thousand downright wicked women in the town. The streets
at night were so crowded with them that innocent young girls, poor
seamstresses or polite damsels whom some emergency forced to be abroad,
were not only ogled and bespoken, but sometimes seized and kissed by
the loiterers.

The haunts of evil were well known, some of them foul dens, but others
mansions. Yet the very sense that Patty had absolved him of obligation
to her; that she herself had severed their contract, annulled the
temptation. What excitement could he find it taking sneakingly what
nobody could prevent his taking openly?

Besides, as a lawyer he knew that the traps of blackmail lay all about
the town—springes to catch woodcocks. The heads of many families were
paying perennial taxes on such indiscretions. He knew of one banker who
had been mulcted of thirty thousand dollars just because he chanced to
be in the house where Helen Jewett was murdered. The trial of the young
clerk charged with the crime was enormously exploited by the noisy
newspapers.

That clerk was ruined for life, and he might well have wished that he
had been employed by Mr. Tappan, the abolitionist silk merchant who
compelled each of his clerks to sign a pledge never to visit a theatre
or make acquaintance with actor, actress, or other person of evil life,
never to be out of his boarding house after ten o’clock at night, never
to miss the two prayer meetings a week, or the two Sunday services, or
fail to report of a Monday morning the church, the preacher, and the
text of the day before.

A final check upon any recklessness in RoBards’ lonely humors was the
feeling that if he also sinned he would be robbed of his precious
indignation against Patty. He was no prig, no prude. He had lived.
But just now the one food of his soul was the sense of being cruelly
wronged. It was gall, but it sustained him somehow.

In the eyes of the law a husband’s infidelity was almost negligible,
but RoBards felt that if he were to break his vows he would acquit
Patty of blame for being false to hers. There were families in town,
according to gossip-mongers and the gossip papers, where husband and
wife were mutually and commonly disloyal. But he could think of nothing
more hideous than such households.

He was Saint Anthony in a lonely cavern, but only one devil tried
his soul and that was the bewitching spirit of his pretty wife.
Patty drifted through his dreams like a wind-driven moth. She poised
and flitted and opened her arms like a moth’s wings. And it seemed
impossible that he should long resist her.

One morning he read in the _Herald_ (whose editor Mr. Bennett had
recently had a knockdown fight with General Webb of the _Courier_) a
statement that Mr. Henry Chalender had recovered from his wound and was
once more active in the completion of his section of the aqueduct. The
_Herald_ added that this news would give relief and pleasure to the
numberless admirers of the popular idol.

This paragraph filled RoBards with mixed emotions. During his long
indecision, his Hamlet-like soliloquies and postponements, nature had
healed the wound in Chalender’s flesh, and, though he would not admit
it, had nearly healed the wound in RoBards’ soul.

There was a relief of tension at least. The world was going on.
Chalender was well and busy—perhaps he was renewing his amour with
Patty. Perhaps, deserted and lonely, she would yield again. That would
be a double damnation. Anyone might sin and recover, but to slip back
again was to be lost forever.

Yet who was to uphold her in the hour of weakness? Who was to drive the
wolf away from the ewe?

Insidiously the temptations RoBards had denounced as complacency,
servility, wanton desire took on now the aspect of duty. It was his
duty to go home and take up wedlock again, to save the little silly
beauty he had married from becoming a monster of iniquity.

Now that his house was freed of the intruder, homesickness came over
him like a fever. He yearned for the hills of Westchester, those
earthen breakers foaming with trees, and carrying on their crests
houses like ships anchored on waves that never moved.

His long sojourn in New York began to attract open comment,
particularly as the heat was so vicious that it looked curious for
anyone to remain who could get out. There was nobody in town now but
nobodies.

What excuse had he to linger? He had to rise and go back. He had
not slain Chalender. This abstention in itself had amounted to an
acquittal. If he were not going to punish Chalender, why should he
punish himself? If his aim were to escape gossip, why encourage it?

He went home. Patty was in the yard playing a game with the children.
They seemed to have grown amazingly since he left. They ran to him
screaming welcome. It was bliss to feel their warm hands clutching him.

He could see that Patty was afraid to move either toward him or away.
She had never written to him, but he had felt that this was meekness
rather than neglect. She waited now struggling between a cry of joy and
a fit of tears.

He pretended that it was for the children’s sake that he called out:

“Hello, Patty!”

“Hello, David!” she murmured. Suddenly her eyes were gleaming with
tears.




CHAPTER XVI


The old Jessamines stared at him, but summed up their curiosity and
their resentment in a “Well! So you’re back?”

“Yes,” he said, the answer sufficient to the question.

He was embarrassed to find that a cousin of his wife’s was visiting the
farm and the spare room was filled. He had to go back with Patty. But
they were like two enemies in the same cell.

Sometimes he would wake suddenly in the night from a hell of
self-contempt. He would both sweat and shiver with remorse for the
shame of having let Chalender live.

In his half-insanity it seemed a belated duty to go out and
assassinate the villain. To shoot him down openly would be too noble a
punishment—like shooting a spy. To garrote him, string him up squirming
from a tree limb would be best. Major André had wept pleading to be
shot, but they had hanged him—not far from Tuliptree Farm. And only
recently people had dug up his grave and found the tiny roots of a tree
all grown about his curly hair.

Chalender had sneaked into RoBards’ home and Patty had played the
Benedict Arnold to surrender the citadel to the enemy. He deserved
to be put out of the way like a poisoned dog, a sheep-killer, a
lamb-worrier.

Sitting up in his bed with night all about him RoBards would enact
some grisly murder, often while Patty slept at his side unheeding the
furies that lashed her husband and mocked him for his forgiveness like
Christ’s of the woman brought before him.

In the restored innocence of sleep, Patty’s face was like a little
girl’s with its embroidery of her curls, one shoulder curved up, a
round white arm flung back above her head, her bosom slowly lifting and
falling with her soft breath.

Sometimes as he gazed at her, his heart welled with pity for her; at
other times he was frantic to commit murder because of her.

But the big tree at the window would try to quiet him like an old
nurse; it would go “Hush, hush!” The house would seem to sigh, to creak
as if its bones complained. And it, too, would counsel him, “No! no!”

The ferocity of such debates would wear him out more than a prolonged
contest in court, and he would sink back and draw sleep over him as a
black blanket of respite from thought.

At other times when Patty was gracious and full of laughter, when she
was in a mood to be a child with her children and play with them, there
would be a heavenliness in life that made RoBards cry aloud within
himself, “Thank God I kept the secret.”

By and by there was a child again at Patty’s little breast—the fifth in
number, the third alive. She had resigned herself to motherhood now.
She nursed the babe and took all the care of it without complaint. She
met RoBards at night when he came up from town, with stories of the
wonderful things the new son had achieved or the older babes had said.

It pleased him quaintly to find his wild, restless Patty becoming
a subdued and comfortable matron, telling unimportant anecdotes
importantly. She kept her grace and her beauty and she could never grow
slattern; but she was maternal now to her marrow.

Regarding the deep peace of his country family, RoBards was profoundly
glad that he had forgone the swift passionate delights of revenge. If
he had slain Chalender or published the scandal in the courts, Patty
would not have been his now. That child whom she had named after
himself, David Junior, would have been doomed to an unhonored name.
This house would have been pointed to as a monument of scandal. It
would be neglected, empty, haunted.

The neighbors never dreamed of the hidden shame. They said: “Nothin’
ever happens up your way. You’re one lucky man.”

Nearly every other dwelling had some scandal hung upon it like a
signboard from a tavern. Not many miles up the road was a house of a
strange memory. A widow lived there—she called herself a widow, but
the neighbors called her “a queer un.” They told how a negro preacher
freed by his master had settled up in New Hampshire fifty years before
and been so much respected that he had married a white woman and had
many children; and these children had had children. And one of them
had married this woman when she was young and high-stepping. The first
she knew of her husband’s grand-parentage was when a gossip twitted
her with it. She said nothing, but made an excuse for a trip to the
Bermudas with her husband. As soon as she got him there, she sold him
at a good price into slavery, and came home calling herself a widow.

For that matter, one of the presidents of the United States had been
sued in the open courts by a negress for the support of their child; it
was said that he sold many of his mulatto children, and that his only
indulgence was that when any of his own escaped he would not hunt them
with hounds, but laughed and let the rascals escape if they could.

The present president of the United States had been in the divorce
court and had turned Washington inside out with domestic bickerings.

Nearly all the founders of the republic had been plastered with
scandal. Many of them were infidels and Dr. Chirnside was always
bewailing the decay of religion under the republic.

So RoBards reasoned that if there were scandal in his home, it was
only what every other home had. The good thing was that his shame
was hidden. His house was looked upon as a place of honor. It was
unsullied. It must be kept of good repute. There was a certain kind
of hypocrisy that was wholesome and decent and necessary to good
citizenship.




CHAPTER XVII


Time was spreading its rust and its vines over everything, eating away
the edges of his passions and fastening the hinges of his will so that
it could not turn.

The hate he felt for Chalender was slowly paralyzed. Having forborne
the killing of him lest the public be apprised of what he had killed
him for, it followed that Chalender must be treated politely before
the public for the same reason. Thus justice and etiquette were both
suborned to keep people from wondering and saying, Why?

Being unable to avoid Chalender, he had to greet him casually, to pass
the time of day, even to smile at Chalender’s flippancies. Under such
custom the grudge itself decayed, or retreated at least to the place
where old heartbreaks and horrors make their lair.

There was much talk of Chalender’s splendid engineering work. His
section of the aqueduct prospered exceedingly. He had a way with his
men and though there was an occasional outburst, he kept them happier
and busier than they were in most of the other sections.

He had a joke or a picturesque sarcasm for everyone, and the men
were aware that his lightness was not a disguise for cowardice. They
remembered that when two of them had fought with picks, he had jumped
into the ditch between them. He could now walk up to drunken brutes of
far superior bulk and take away their weapons, and often their tempers.
He composed quarrels with a laugh or leaped in with a quick slash of
his fist on the nearest nose.

People said to RoBards: “Fine lad, Harry Chalender, great friend of
yours, isn’t he? Plucky devil, too.”

That was hard to deny without an ugly explanation. It would have been
peculiarly crass to sneer or snarl at a man held in favor for courage.

So the tradition prospered that Chalender and RoBards were cronies.
It was a splendid mask for the ancient resentment. And by and by the
disguise became the habitual wear, the feelings adapted themselves to
their clothes. He would have felt naked without them.

RoBards had to shake himself now and then to remind himself that he was
growing not only tolerant of Chalender, but fond of him.

This was not entirely satisfactory to Patty. She had a woman’s
terrified love of conflict in her behalf. A woman who sees a man slain
on her account suffers beyond doubt, but there is a glory in her
martyrdom. Patty’s intrigue had ended in a disgusting armistice, a
smirking truce. It was comfortable to have a husband and a home, but it
was ignominious to have the husband at peace with the intruder.

       *       *       *       *       *

The aqueduct was all the while growing, a vast cubical stone serpent
increasing bone by bone and scale by scale.

It still lacked a head, and RoBards the lawyer like a tiny Siegfried
continued to assail the dragon everywhere, seeking a mortal spot.

The Croton dam was yet to be built, as well as two big bridges and two
great reservoirs in the city. It grew plain that the seven miles within
the island of Manhattan would cost nearly as much as the original
estimates for the whole forty-six.

And the times were cruelly hard. The estimates rose as the difficulty
of raising money increased. Four and a half million dollars were
disbursed without the error of a cent, and the devotion and dogged
heroism of all the water army won even RoBards’ admiration.

By the beginning of 1841 thirty-two miles were finished, including
Harry Chalender’s section. He was called next to aid the work of
completing the dam. A new lake now submerged four hundred acres of
hills and vales with a smooth sheet of water.

Then the laborers on the upper line struck for higher wages and marched
down the aqueduct, driving away or gathering into their own ranks all
the workmen they met. They overawed the rural police, but when the
Mayor of New York called out the militia, the laborers were forced back
to their jobs.

The building of the dam was a work of titanic nicety. The rock bottom
of gneiss was so far down that an artificial foundation had to be laid
under a part of the wall, while a long tunnel and a gateway must be
cut through living rock. A protection wall was building from a rock
abutment, but there came a vast rain on the fifth of January and it
fell upon the deep snow for two days and nights. The overfall had been
raised to withstand a rise of six feet, but the flood came surging up a
foot an hour until it lifted a sea fifteen feet above the apron of the
dam.

Foreseeing a devastation to come, a young man named Albert Brayton
played the Paul Revere and ran with the alarm until he was checked by a
gulf where Tompkins Bridge had stood a while before. Then he got a horn
and played the Angel Gabriel: blew a mighty blast to warn the sleeping
folk on the other shore that their Judgment Day had come.

The earthen embankment of the dam dissolved and took the heavy stone
work with it. Just before dawn the uproar of the torrent wakened the
farmers miles away as the catapult of water hurtled down the river,
sweeping with it barns, stables, homes, grist mills, cattle, people,
and every bridge across the Croton’s whole length, till it flung them
upon the Hudson’s icy waste.

The Quaker Bridge, which carried the Albany stages, went swirling;
also the Pines Bridge that Washington and his men had traversed time
and again. At Bailey’s iron and wire mills the snarling wave fell so
swiftly upon the settlement that it made driftwood of the factory and
flung fifty women and men from their beds into the current. There was
such a fleet of uprooted trees afloat that all of the people were saved
except two stout men who overweighted the boughs they clung to. A Mr.
Bailey waded breast deep carrying his father and a box of gold in his
arms and got them both to safety.

Harry Chalender played the hero as usual. After one laborer on the dam
had lost his outstretched hand and was drowned, he ran along the black
waters and darting in here and there brought forth whatever his hand
found, whether girl or babe, lowing calf or squeaking pig. He brought
one swirling bull in by the tail and had like to have been gored to
death for his courtesy. But with his wonted nimbleness he stepped
aside, and the bull charging past him plunged into another arm of the
stream and went sailing down with all fours in air.

The collapse of the dam was a grave shock to the public confidence. It
meant a heavy loss in precious cash and its time equivalent, but the
Crotonians grew only a little grimmer, a little more determined.

There was much blazon of Chalender in the newspapers, and a paragraph
describing how meek he was about the strength and courage of his own
hands and how proud of the fact that his section at Sing Sing had stood
the battering rams of the deluge without a quiver.

Patty’s comment on this was a domestic sniff: “I suppose he got his
feet so wet he’ll catch a terrible cold. Well, I hope he doesn’t come
here to be nursed. If he should I’ll send him packing mighty quick,
I’ll tell you.”

Comment was difficult for RoBards, to whom the mention of Chalender’s
mere name was the twisting of a rusty nail in his heart, but his mind
leaped with a wonderful meditation:

There had been progress not only in the building of the aqueduct but in
the laying of a solid causeway under the feet of his family. A sudden
storm had swept Patty’s emotions over the dam of restraint and wrecked
their lives for a while, but now the damage was so well repaired that
she could speak with light contempt of the man who had carried her
heart away; she could say that she would shut in his face the door to
the home he had all but destroyed. Plainly the house was now her home,
too, and Chalender vagrant outside.

This thought filled RoBards’ heart with a flood of overbrimming
tenderness for Patty. He watched her when she tossed the newspaper to
the floor and caught her more exciting baby from its cradle to her
breast. She laughed and nuzzled the child and crushed him to her heart
and made up barbaric new words to call him. Calling him Davie Junior
and little Davikins was in itself a way of making love to her husband
by the proxy of their child.

The sunlight that made a shimmering aureole about her flashed in her
eyes shining with the tears of rapture. RoBards understood one thing at
last about her: She wanted someone to caress and to defend.

He had always read her wrong. He had offered to be her champion and to
shelter her under his strong arms. But Chalender had won her by being
hungry for her and by stretching his arms upward to drag her down to
him.

RoBards felt that he had never really won Patty because he had always
been trying to be lofty and noble. She had rushed to him always when he
was dejected or helpless with anger; but he had always lost her as soon
as he recovered his self-control.

He wished that he might learn to play the weakling before her to keep
her busy about him. But he could not act so uncongenial a part at home
or abroad.




CHAPTER XVIII


After years of waiting and wrangling, labor conflicts, lawsuits,
political battles, technical wars, and unrelenting financial
difficulties and desperate expedients, through years of universal
bankruptcy, the homely name of the Croton River acquired an almost
Messianic significance in the popular heart.

There was already a nymph “Crotona” added to the city’s mythology. The
thirsty citizens prayed her to hasten to their rescue from the peril of
another fire, another plague, the eternal nuisance of going for water
or going without.

Other history seemed of less importance, though tremendous revolutions
had been effected in the democracy. The property qualification had been
at last removed and the terrible risk assumed of letting all men vote
without regard to their bank accounts. The religious requirements for
office holders had also been annulled in all the states. There had been
fierce riots, of course, but the promised anarchy had not followed.
This gave a new boldness to the annoying fanatics who asked for three
downright impossibilities: the abolition of slavery and of liquor, and
the granting of equal rights to women.

Numbers of shameless females broke into public life and some of them
into breeches. Mobs of conservatives raided their meetings, and chased
them hither and yon; but still they raved and several effeminate or
half-crazed men openly preached against slavery in the South. The bulk
of the clergy of all denominations was, of course, against them.

[Illustration: THE SUNLIGHT THAT MADE A SHIMMERING AUREOLE ABOUT HER
FLASHED IN HER EYES, SHINING WITH THE TEARS OF RAPTURE]

The Marquis of Waterford had made himself notorious with his riotous
gayety and his clashes with the night watchmen, the Leatherheads. A
fifty-year-old veteran of Waterloo had married a sixteen-year-old
heiress in a boarding school secretly and had received enormous
attention from the newspapers.

Fanny Elssler had danced herself into the favor of the people and the
horror of the pulpit. Daniel Webster had thundered for the Whigs. The
streets had roared with the campaign cry of “Tippecanoe and Tyler,
too.” Hard cider had become a slogan and log cabins a symbol. A log
cabin had been built at Harrison’s, a few miles from Tuliptree Farm.
It served later as a schoolhouse. Then President Harrison died of
indigestion a month after his inauguration.

The hard times grew harder and harder. The inpour of foreign
immigrants increased till New York became almost a foreign city. The
Native-Americans anxiously formed a party and their nominee received
all of seventy-seven votes; he was a painter named S. F. B. Morse who
had invented a curious toy he called the telegraph. He wanted Congress
to help him stretch a wire from Washington to Baltimore for him to play
with.

The churches started an hegira uptown. One of them was set out as far
as Tenth Street on Fifth Avenue, which had recently been opened through
the farms beyond Washington Square. A mission had been established in
the foreign world of the Five Points, where it amused the populace of
the brothels and crime cellars.

Crime increased and flourished appallingly and the newspapers were
unfit for the home. The murderer Colt, having cut up the body of his
victim, salted it, and shipped it to New Orleans; was caught, tried,
and convicted; then, having married a foolish woman in his cell,
stabbed himself to death and died while the guards of the Tombs fought
a fire of mysterious origin.

The “beautiful cigar girl” furnished another mystery and an excuse for
revolting journalism. RoBards had bought tobacco of her during his
exile in town and had watched with sardonic disdain the wily smiles she
passed across the counter to her customers who came more for flirtation
than for weeds. One day she vanished and after a time her body was
found drifting in the river near the Sibyl’s Cave in the beautiful
Elysian Fields at Hoboken. She had evidently fought a desperate battle
with her murderer, but had been flung bruised and beaten into the
water. Her murderer was never discovered. People said he was a naval
officer, but they could not prove it.

One of the cheap and popular newspaper men named Edgar Allan Poe made
an ephemeral mystery story out of it. It was exciting but, of course,
not literature. His name was never included in the list of dignified
authors whom the defenders of American art compiled to prove to the
English critics that good writing was possible on this side of the
Atlantic.

Dr. Lardner came over from England and proved conclusively that steam
was impracticable for crossing the ocean. Shortly afterward a steamer
brought across the popular English serial writer, Charles Dickens,
and the people lavished on him attentions which he rewarded with
infuriating contempt. Captain Marryat and other Englishmen, and women
like Mrs. Trollope, began a book bombardment against the pride of the
new republic, and roused it to fury.

But all the while the city panted like a hart for its Croton water
brooks, and the engineers redoubled their efforts. They decided not to
wait for the High Bridge and improvised a temporary passage across and
under the Harlem River. The hope was revived that water would come into
the city on Independence Day.

Swarms of masons toiled at the two reservoirs until they stood at last
waiting, like vast empty bowls held up to heaven for a new Deluge. The
flood was to be received at the Yorkville reservoir, carried on by iron
pipes to Murray’s Hill, and distributed thence by pipes about the city,
with a special dispensation to the old well and tank that had been
erected in 1829 at Thirteenth Street to feed the hydrants that replaced
the foul old public cisterns.

Everywhere the streets and the houses were torn to pieces, pipes were
laid in all directions and fountains built. The plumber was the hero of
the hour.

The test of fashion was a faucet in the kitchen.

On a hot day in June the Water Commissioners and the engineers,
including Harry Chalender, began a strange pilgrimage through the
thirty-three miles of tunnel, for a last anxious inspection. It took
them three days to make the patrol on foot.

The vents along the way for the escape of water from deep cuttings
and leakages were closed once for all. And on the twenty-second of
June the Croton River began its march upon New York. At five o’clock
in the morning the head of the stream was admitted and on the primal
tide, some eighteen inches deep, a boat was launched. The _Croton Maid_
weighed anchor to descend upon New York with the “navigable river” from
the north.

Harry Chalender made one of the four passengers on that “singular
voyage” through the great pipe at the rate of a little better than a
mile an hour. The “Maid” came up for air at the Harlem River the next
day, a Thursday, soon after the first ripple of the water laved the
borders of Manhattan Island.

The Commissioners formally notified the Mayor and Common Council that
the Croton River had arrived and would proceed after a brief rest to
Yorkville Reservoir.

On Monday afternoon the Governor of the State, the Lieutenant Governor,
the Mayor, and other distinguished guests drew up in solemn array and
greeted the “extinguishing visitor,” while the artillery fired a salute
of thirty-eight guns.

When the _Croton Maid_ sailed into the reservoir she was made grandly
welcome and then presented to the Fire Department, with appropriate
remarks on the “important results pecuniary and moral which may be
expected to flow from the abundance of the water with which our
citizens are hereafter to be supplied.”

On the Fourth of July Queen Crotona resumed her royal progress and
proceeded the necessary parasangs to Murray’s Hill, pausing to fire the
salute of a beautiful jet of water fifty feet in air at Forty-seventh
Street.

It was noted by one of the observers that when the waters of the Croton
gushed up into the reservoir they “wandered about its bottom as if to
examine the magnificent structure or to find a resting place in the
temple toward which they had made a pilgrimage.” That river was as much
of a god to the New Yorkers as old Tiber ever was to Rome, or Nilus to
Egypt.

But thereafter the stream, like another conquered Andromache, became
the servant of New York, pouring into its thirsty throat twelve million
imperial gallons of pure water every day.

The people congratulated themselves upon this achievement of their
city single-handed in a time of national financial prostration. In the
memoir written by the chief engineer, J. B. Jervis, he proudly compared
the new aqueduct with the great works of Rome, built under contracts
with private speculators, paid for with the plunder of ruined peoples,
and “cemented with the blood of slavery.” The Croton work was a triumph
of a city of 280,000 inhabitants, who wrought a task, said Jervis,
“on a scale greatly beyond their actual or any near future wants, but
which, designed to endure for ages, would bear record to those ages,
however distant, of a race of men who were content to incur present
burdens for the benefit of a posterity they could not know. Magnificent
as may be the works of conquerors and kings, they have not equaled in
forecast of design, and beneficence of result, the noble aqueduct,
constructed at their own cost, by the freemen of the single city of New
York.”

Much eloquence, much of the bold and braggart Yankee eloquence so
distasteful to foreigners and to foreign-hearted Americans, was
squandered on that feat of theirs; but before they talked, they had
toiled; they sweat before they boasted; they fought the epic before
they chanted it; and their words were not so big as the stones they
heaved into place. Their phrases were less ponderous than the majestic
forty-six-mile sentence in stone they wrote across the green valley of
the Westchester hills, through rock and air, over hills and ravines,
through villages and streams, across the Harlem River and down into
the heart of Manhattan Island.

But the massive High Bridge was yet to build and the Croton had yet
to reach the lower fountains and the homes of the citizens. They had
waited long for it, and it meant miraculous relief to have the river
from far away magically bubbling in the very houses at the wizard twist
of a faucet handle, and sending up geysers of beauty in the hot parks.
Many of the New Yorkers who marveled told how they had in their day
paid a penny a gallon for water from the carts that peddled the product
of the “Tea Water Pump.” Even David and Patty RoBards could remember
when they fled the town and thought it doomed to die of drouth and
pestilence.

The city felt that this immortal benison must be commemorated
fittingly. When the New River had entered London the Lord Mayor had
addressed it in his full splendor. When the waters of Lake Erie had
come through the canal to New York they had been married to those of
the ocean with grandiose ceremonial.

So now the Board of Aldermen appointed a committee, and the committee
called upon General George P. Morris to write an original ode and the
Sacred Music Society to sing it. “The Society’s vocal performers were
rising two hundred, male and female.” The bells of the churches were
bidden to ring; the artillery to fire salutes. All the distinguished
personages on the continent were invited to attend and witness the most
resplendent procession ever devised.

The date was set for the fourteenth of October and the citizens devoted
themselves to the preparation of banners, uniforms, and maneuvers, and
the polishing of fire-engines, swords, shoes, and phrases.

An invitation was addressed to the President of the United States, but
Mr. Tyler was prevented by “circumstances”; and the ex-President John
Adams by “indispensable engagements at home.” Ex-President Van Buren
found it not in his power to avail himself of the polite invitation.
Governor Seward had “a severe indisposition,” but accepted. The
British Consul accepted “with feelings of no ordinary kind,” and
remarked that “tyrants have left monuments which call forth admiration,
but no work of a free people for magnitude and utility equals this
great enterprise.” The Consul of France presented his compliments
and would be happy to join with them. The Consul of Prussia had much
pleasure in accepting. The Consul of the Netherlands had the honor of
joining. The Consul for Greece and Count Heckscher, the Consul for
Mecklenburg, regretted, but the Consuls of the Two Sicilies, the Grand
Duchy of Hesse, Frankfort, and Venezuela accepted. The Consul of Mexico
was prevented by absence, and the Consul of Texas, the recent republic
of Texas, feared that his “engagements of the day would deprive him of
the pleasure.”

Officers of the navy, the army, the bench, governors, mayors,
engineers, bankers, and others innumerable accepted or declined. The
common people prepared to turn out in a body.

The enthusiasm was so pervasive, that even the children felt the thrill
of the epochal day. The RoBards youngsters, little Keith and his sister
Immy, were feverish. The very baby at Patty’s breast seemed to beat
the air and crow like chanticleer at the mention of the Fourteenth of
October.

The one sure bribe for good behavior was a promise to go to New York
for the parade; the one effective punishment a threat of being left at
home.

Hardly an account of the aqueduct or the festival omitted Chalender’s
name, and RoBards grew so accustomed to it that he all but forgot the
horror it had once involved.

He was himself infected by the glory of the hour. It was like seeing
one of the Pyramids dedicated, or the Sphinx christened.

Time that makes us grateful for our defeats and turns our victories
to chagrin dealt so with RoBards. Though he had hampered the work and
denounced its trespass on the rights of the landholders, he felt glad
now that he and they had been defeated. Chalender was gracious in his
triumph, and felt all the more genial since the victory had been
enhanced by the high mettle of the opponents.

So everybody was happy and proud, and the aqueduct itself took on
something of the sanctity of a long, long temple, a source of health
and security and of unbounded future growth.

RoBards spoke of this to Patty and said that the names of the men who
had fought this long battle through would be immortal.

“Who are they?” she said with a disconcerting abruptness.

And to save him he could not think of them, though he knew the names of
many picturesque criminals, and of persons whose only importance was
some fashionable prestige. He knew the names of many who had pounded
out a little poem or braided a piece of clever fiction. He knew the
names of manufacturers of popular soaps and razor strops, but he could
not recall the giants who had wrested the rocks from the hills and laid
down the new channel for the river that would redeem the chief city of
the continent.

He had to refer to the memoir of the Commissioners and to read aloud
the passage: “Samuel Stevens, Esq., was the presiding officer of
the Board of Commissioners in 1829, whose name and services will be
recorded with those of Stephen Allen, and Douglas and Jervis, for the
enduring gratitude of the distant generations, whose health, comfort,
and safety will, ‘while grass grows and water runs,’ continue to be
promoted by the great work to which these gentlemen devoted such
faithful and intelligent care.”

Patty nodded: “Well, I’m sure I’m much obliged to them for making New
York safe to live in. We can go back now, can’t we?”

“Isn’t it beautiful up here?” he sighed, without much enthusiasm.

“Yes, but the nights are bitter cold and the days are getting raw,
and the leaves are nearly all gone. I’ve been here for years and the
children have had all the diseases there are and got over them.
They’re out of danger. Let’s go back, David.”

When she called him by his first name it was like taking his heart in
her soft fingers. He had no will to resist. Besides, the house had
lost its integrity. It had played him false. It had permitted evil to
prosper, and he had sacrificed his dignity and his revenge to conceal
its shame.

Nothing worse could happen in the big city than in the stealthy
country. So he sighed again:

“All right! let’s go back!”

She sprang from her chair and kissed him and he took a poltroon delight
in the syrup of her lips. She became amazingly a girl again and
assailed with a frenzy the tasks of packing up for the removal to town,
the closing of the country home, and reopening of the house in St.
John’s Park.

She urged that she and Teen and Cuff should drive in and clean the
house, air it out, get the new water pipes put in and—while they were
at it, why not install gas? It was dangerous but so convenient! All
you did was turn a key and set a match and there you were! And what
about one of the new hot air furnaces to replace the odious stoves and
fireplaces?

She laid plans for such fairy improvements with a spendthrift
enthusiasm and proposed that her husband should stay comfortably at
home in the country with the two older children while she made the
house ready.

She was passionately domestic for the first time and when she offered
as a final inducement to take her father and mother to town with her,
RoBards could not deny her the toil or himself the repose. He wanted
a few days of communion with the ideal he was resigning. He wanted to
compose his soul anew for the new city life, the country good-by.

The children, Immy and Keith, made a great to-do about their mother’s
knees, clinging to her and begging her not to go. And the babe-in-arms,
the miniature David, howled in trio, vaguely understanding that
something ominous was afoot. Patty was the center of the battle. She
held the infant under one arm while with her free hand she tried to
clasp both Immy and Keith. Her voice was soft among the clamors, and
she promised them everything if they would only be good for a few days
while she made the home ready in the great city.

She looked up at her husband and he could see the weird pride in
her eyes. She, the frail, the pretty, the soulful, had been as an
apple-branch that bore these buds to flower and fruit from within
herself somehow. And they hated to let go, as perhaps the apple is
reluctant to be tossed into space by the wind that rends the twig.

RoBards had noted this cohesion in trees that were hard to fell and
split. Some woods would almost welcome the teeth of the saw and the
keen edge of the ax; they divided at a tap. But other trees fought
the blade, twisted it and flung it off and made a strange noise of
distress. And when the ax fell upon them they turned it aside, caught
it in withes of fiber and tore it from the helve.

Families were like that: some broke apart at the first shock; others
clung together as if they were all interlaced, soul and sinew. He hoped
that his household would be of this infrangibility.

Patty diverted the children from their grief by loading them with tasks
and warnings; the first was to take good care of Papa; the rest were
to take care of themselves amid the infinite risks that make a jungle
about children.

She murmured to her husband: “Watch out for those Lasher children.
That boy Jud has grown to a big hulking brute. He hangs about the
place—wants to steal something. I suppose. Drive him off if you see
him. And don’t let the children play with the Lashers. They come by in
the road, and they’re—not nice at all.”

She made the children promise to abstain from friendship with the
Lashers and from numberless other adventures; and at last she broke
from them and hurried to the carry-all. Cuff and Teen had gone ahead
in the wagon with the luggage. RoBards helped Patty and the baby to
the front seat and took his place beside her. Her father and mother
were already bestowed in the back of the carriage. RoBards drove away,
calling to the children that he would soon be home.

He and Patty had little to say of either their secret prides or shames;
old age had its eyes upon their shoulder blades, and was perhaps subtly
understanding from the glum wisdom of experience that this young couple
was gathering also much cargo that could never be thrown overboard and
must always be hidden away in the deepest hold.

The length of the journey to New York was wonderfully shortened now.
RoBards put Patty and her parents and the servants on the stage and she
had only to ride as far as Harlem, where she would take the New York
and Harlem Railroad train. It had a steam engine and a double track
clear to City Hall, and some day it was going to be extended to White
Plains, and eventually perhaps to Chatham.

When he had seen the stagecoach whirl off with Patty and had seen her
handkerchief flaunt its last farewell through the dust, RoBards drove
home.

Or was it home now? Home seemed to be a something cloudlike trailing
after his wife. Home was the immediate neighborhood of his love.

His heart ached with anxiety for her. What if she should not arrive
safely? The number of stagecoach accidents was astounding: drunken
drivers, runaway horses, capsizings, collisions, kept up an endless
succession of deaths and cripplings.

Thinking of Patty as perhaps doomed already he thought of her with
overwhelming tenderness. The very road backward was denuded of the
aureole she lent it. It stretched dour and stark in the harsh outlines
of autumn. The trees were stripped of leaves; the lanes of their soft
borders. Everything was naked and harsh. The wind was ugly, cynical; it
tormented the flocks of fallen leaves, sent them into panics of flight
with hoarse little cries and scurries.

This was no place for a rose like Patty.

He rode past the home of the Lashers. It was always autumn there.
However, the wild flowers of spring held picnics in the lanes and the
weeds put on their Sunday calico; however the peach trees and the plums
and cherries in their disordered companies broke forth into hosannas of
bloom and pelted the yard and the house with petal confetti, this house
and this fence always sagged and creaked; the shutters hung and flapped
in the breeze; the family slumped, eternally exhausted from the sheer
neglect of industry.

None of the men was to be seen to-day; though the mother of the family,
as always, hung over the washtub, bobbing up and down like a Judy on
a string. She alone toiled, while the good-for-naught men dawdled and
leered. They were as vicious as the filthy dogs that ran from the yard
now and hurled themselves yelping at RoBards’ horses, trying to nip
them while dodging their hooves. RoBards drove them off with whip and
yell and the horses bolted.

As he approached his own house at length, still fuming with anger at
the Lashers and their dogs, he saw his boy running toward him along the
road. He was shrieking: “Papa! papa! papa!”

When Keith came up alongside the carry-all, he was gulping for breath,
in such pain of fear and suffocation that he had to lean against the
wheel a moment before he could speak.

But his trembling hands pointed and his eyes were wild with fear as he
gasped:

“Papa!—bad man!—Immy!”

“What? where? when?”

“Just now—me and Immy play in the Tarn—big man comes—says to
Immy—‘Hello, little girl!’ She don’t say anything. He comes up
closeter. He reaches out. She cries—runs—he runs—grabs Immy. I run and
pound him with my fists and he won’t let go. He kicked me into the
Tarn. Yes, he did so! Then he runs away with Immy.

“Who was it, do you know?”

“Jud Lasher.”

RoBards gave his horse a swift long slash with the whip and the
carry-all went into the yard on two wheels. He flung the lines on the
horses’ backs and, leaping across the wheel, ran madly past the house
and up the shaggy hillside toward the place that he and Patty called
“the Mystic Tarn.”

The boy followed, stumbling, holding his hand to his side where the
little heart thumped. His young eyes were aghast with the awe of a
terror beyond his ken.




CHAPTER XIX


Back of the house and above it on a hilltop too rocky for clearing,
too rough for pasture even, was a little pool ringed around with huge
boulders. No one could explain them, though the Indians had believed
that they had been hurled in a battle of giants.

Tall trees stood up among them and canopied the pool with such shadow
that on the hottest days there was a chill there.

RoBards had brought Patty hither on their first visit to Tuliptree Farm
as bride and groom fugitive from the cholera plague. She had cried out
in delight at the spookiness of the place and he had called it the Tarn
of Mystery. He was not quite sure what a tarn might be but the word
had a somber color that he liked. And Patty had shuddered deliciously,
rounding her eyes and her lips with a murmurous “ooh!” like a girl
hearing a ghost story late at night.

He had helped her to skip from rock to rock like an Alpine climber
among glaciers, but when they came close to the pool glowing as an
emerald of unimaginable weight, she had recoiled from it in disgust,
because it seemed to her but a sheet of green scum. He explained to
her that what revolted her was an almost solid field of drenched tiny
leaves. But he could not persuade her to come near and admire. She
hated the look of it, and when she saw a tiny water snake wriggling
through it in pursuit of a frog, she fled in loathing.

In the fall the leaves came down from the trees in slow spirals. They
lay on the surface of the pool, which had not water enough to draw them
into its plant-choked shallows. The sharpening winds swept them across
the surface in little flocks.

The children loved to play beside the Tarn, though Patty told them
stories of Indians that had murdered and been murdered there. She
whispered to RoBards that when she saw the Tarn it always hinted of
suicide or assassination. The farmer, Mr. Albeson, laughed at this, but
his wife, Abby—even the children called her Abby—said they was stories
about the place. She had forgotten just what they was, but like as
not they was dead bodies there. Folks enough had vanished during the
Revolution, and maybe some of them was still laying out there waiting
for Judgment Day to rouse them up.

It was to this moody retreat that RoBards hurried now. He took one
rail fence at a leap and landed running, like a hurdler. He stumbled
and fell and was up again. Keith clambered after his father, crawled
through the fence and over the rocks till he came where Immy lay
bruised and stunned. Keith saw his father drop to his knees and lift
the child, clench her to his breast, and shake his head over her, then
raise his eyes to the sky and say something to God that the boy could
not hear.

The boy had always been reproached for tears and had been told, “You’re
a big man now and big men don’t cry.” Yet he could see that his father
was crying, crying like a little frightened girl. This strange thing
twisted the boy’s heart and his features and he pushed forward to
comfort his father. He was near enough to hear his sister moaning:

“Papa—papa—I’m hurt—Immy’s hurt!”

Before the boy could touch him, RoBards lowered Immy gently in the
autumn leaves and put up his head and let out a strange sound like a
wolf’s howl.

Then he struggled to his feet, and ran here and there, looking,
looking. He climbed one of the high boulders about the Tarn and stared
this way and that; leaped down and vanished.

Keith ran past Immy whimpering and struggled up the steep slab of the
same boulder on all fours. Before he reached the top he could hear
voices, his father’s in horrible anger, and another voice in terror. It
was Jud Lasher’s voice and there was so much fear in it that Keith’s
own heart froze.

Sprawling at the peak of the boulder, he peered over, and there he saw
his father beating and kicking and hurling Jud Lasher about on the
sharp stones. He swung his fist like the scythe the farmer swung and
slashed Jud’s head and swept him to the ground; then picked him up and
raised him high in the air and hurled him flopping against a rock; and
plunged down upon him.

His father was like a mad dog that Keith had seen worrying a sheep
once. The froth streeled from his mouth and his teeth were gnashing; he
snarled like a mad dog.

At last he shoved and knocked Jud over into the green pool, all misty
now with dead weeds and brown fallen leaves. The pool was so shallow
that Jud’s face was not covered and he threshed about, bawling,
choking, begging for mercy.

But RoBards knelt on him and twisted his face round and held it under
the water. Keith hardly knew his father; the look on his face was so
strange.

The boy was so afraid of the great fear that filled the Tarn with a
cold wind that he let go his grip on the rock and rolled and scuffled
down the side of the boulder to the ground.

His father heard him fall. Forgetting Jud Lasher, he ran to Keith. The
boy cowered, expecting to be beaten, but when his father drew near, his
face was so charged with tenderness that he was surely a different man.
The boy wondered who it was that had just been destroying Jud Lasher.
RoBards knelt by Keith and felt about him to see if any of his bones
were broken, lifted him and set him on his feet, and said in a hoarse
tone:

“Run back to Immy and wait.”

Keith started to return and was slipping through a narrow cleft between
two boulders when he heard his father’s voice and turned.

He saw Jud Lasher stumbling weakly from the pool on all fours. He was
slimy and weedy as a green-brown snake. But his face was white, washed
clean with water and terror.

When he sprawled at the edge of the pool and tried to rise, Keith saw
his father move forward and set his foot on Jud’s hand; heard him say:

“Listen! Can you hear me? Then listen hard! You’re dead by rights. I
was killing you. I will kill you—if ever I see you again. Only one
thing holds me back. It’s no pity for you. You’ve got no call to live.
But people might learn about Immy if they found you dead. It would
follow her all her life. But if you’ll get out of our sight forever,
I’ll let you live. Go kill yourself somewhere—or run away—anywhere you
please, so I never see you. For if I ever find you, by God, you’re
dead! Do you hear?”

From the thing that cringed on the ground came a whine:

“Ye-yessir, thanky, sir. But where could I go, mister? I can’t think
very good. Where could I go? What’d I tell Ma?”

There was a silence and Keith could feel in the tormented toss of his
father’s head that it was hard for him to do the thinking for this
dolt. But at last he muttered:

“Tell your mother you’re going to sea—on a whaler—anything. My God,
have I got to help you to get away from me?”

Jud hung panting and slavering like a dog that had been run over by a
heavy wagon and waited to be put out of its misery. RoBards spoke again
at last:

“Tell your mother you’re going to New Bedford and ship before the mast.”

“Where’s New Bedford, mister? how’d a feller git there?”

“I don’t know! What difference does it make how you get there—or where
you go? The thing is to get away from this country. Haven’t you brains
enough to run off and save your own life? Look here, do you know the
way to Poughkeepsie?”

“Yessir; yessir; I been there.”

“Well, there are whaling vessels there. Go there and ask them to take
you. Tell your mother you’re going to sea.”

“She’ll cry awful hard. She always does when I talk about runnin’ away.”

“Let her cry! She’ll cry harder if I kill you, won’t she? And I will if
you let her keep you here! But don’t tell her why you’re going. Don’t
tell her what happened here. Just get away—far—far! and never come
back. Oh, you poor thickwitted toad! Oh, God, that such a beast should
befoul such a flower! Oh, Immy, Immy! my baby! my little girl.”

He fell against a tree and beat upon its harsh bark and wept, wagging
his head and twisting his mouth like a boy’s, while the tears came
pelting down.

Keith dared not go to him. He felt that he ought not to spy on his
father’s agony. As he slipped through the gap in the rocks, his last
backward glance showed him Jud Lasher scrambling weakly to his feet and
shambling off into the thicket.

Keith went to his sister where she lay among the trampled leaves. She
was crying so softly and wearily that he was afraid to speak to her.

He stood wondering what to do, until, by and by, his father came
lurching up and dropped down to her side. Her voice rose at once to a
loud wail:

“Papa! bad, bad man—hurt Immy!”

“Hush! hush, sweetness! Don’t tell—don’t tell! Promise papa you’ll
never tell anybody about this—not anybody on earth.”

“Not Mamma?”

“No—never—never!”

“Not Abby?”

“Nobody on earth!”

“God?”

“He knows, honey.”

“Why did God let that man——”

“Hush, my baby. Don’t!”

The torn and bruised child was hardly more baffled than her father. He
picked her up and went on, as dazed as any little girl whose doll has
been torn by a playful dog.

Keith tagged after them, wondering. His father took note of him at last
and paused to turn on the boy and say with pleading anxiety:

“You’re not going to tell?”

“No, papa, ’course not. Big men don’t tell things.”

His father did not take comfort from this braggart wisdom. He groaned:

“That two little children should have such a secret to keep!”

“Just what is the secret we’re to keep, papa?”

“Nothing!”

“How can we keep it, then, papa!”

“Never speak to anybody about Jud Lasher—never say his name—never think
of it.”

“All right, papa. I p’omise.”

He could not speak the word, but he accepted the pledge.

The top of the hill was almost as high as the crest of the big tulip
tree, and as they descended to its level the tree seemed to grow
upwards above them.

Halfway down the rough slope, they saw Mrs. Albeson clambering toward
them difficultly, fat as she was and short of breath and full of
autumnal rheumatism. She sent her garrulous voice ahead of her:

“What o’ mercy’s happened up there? What’s the voices I heard? Sounded
like murder bein’ done.”

RoBards could not answer her in words. She glanced from his white face
to the torn lamb he carried and she tried to thrust from her mind the
hideous guess it made:

“Not—not?—Aw, no!”

“Hush!” said RoBards. And she knew.

She wavered a moment and wanted to faint or die, but was not used to
such comfortable escapes from reality. Revulsion shook her big frame;
then her soul seemed to scold her for a cowardice. She raised her head
and put out her arms, saying:

“Gi’ me the pore little martyr.”

And RoBards was glad to surrender to this big woman the tiny woman in
whose invaded sanctity he felt himself all the more forbidden for being
her father.

His last word was: “You won’t speak of this to your husband—or anybody.”

Abby gave him a look of reproach and drew the child into her own
breast, smothering the little fainting wail: “Abby—big bad man——”

“Hush!” said Abby.

“Hush!” said the tulip tree, as always, and kept reiterating its
watchword at the window of the library where RoBards sought the dark
quiet and paced the floor, wringing his hands and beating back into his
mouth the mad yelping atheisms that came up as vainly as the bayings of
a hound against the imperturbable moon.

He did not see his boy hiding among the young tulip trees about the
children’s graves. There was a little hillock there and Keith could see
into the library and see his father weaving to and fro like a caged
fox. He wondered what it was all about. There was something terrible
beyond the terrible fact that Jud Lasher had hurt Immy. But the mystery
was impenetrable to his little mind. And his father would not tell him.

Keith wanted to go to him and help him, but he knew that he wanted to
be alone. Fathers did not call for little boys to help them at such
times.

It might have aided poor RoBards a little to feel that he himself
was at just such a distance from his own heavenly Father, and He as
helpless to explain. But that would not comport with any theology he
understood. And he paced his cage.




CHAPTER XX


When RoBards had cried out all the blasphemy in his heart he fell to
praying for some divine miracle to undo the past, to erase the truth
and turn it into a nightmare. But soon he was put into God’s place and
proved himself as adamant to prayer.

He had walked until he fell upon the old sofa. He rose from that,
remembering that Harry Chalender had lain there when he was wounded. He
went to a big chair and sank into it, a mere heap of weary bones and
flaccid muscles.

Then his eyes paced the room, walking along the shelves, reading the
names of books: lawbooks, philosophies, fiction, poetry—all of them
records of the vanity of human efforts to conquer the storms that swept
spirit and flesh. Every title was a monument of defeat.

To escape these reminders, his eyes went longingly to the window where
they could release their vision like the raven set free upon the
flooded world.

He rose and leaned upon the casement and stared into the sky, and
saw nothing but blue emptiness, the infinite idle azure, soulless,
sorrowless, loveless, hateless, deaf, dumb, indifferent, without shame
or mercy, morals or duties; the inverted ocean of the heavens, the
topless pit where souls went hurtling when the earth flung them into
its depths to drown in eternity, to emerge upon some inconceivable
shore and crawl forward to the feet of judgment for everlasting doom or
everlasting bliss.

It was said that Eyes looked down from there and saw the sparrow fall,
saw the least quirk of a finger, saw through the brain and watched the
darkest thoughts that stole like thieves through the night of a mind.

Yet the sparrow fell, or went soaring away in the claws of the hawk;
the little children died or lived to be trodden and gored and seared
and crazed with fright. And the child’s cry for help was as unheard or
unheeded as the sparrow’s.

Rebellious thoughts stirred RoBards to mutiny. He was ready to defy
heaven and denounce its indifferent tyranny, as Lucifer had done and
the other angels. Better to be thrust over the jasper walls and to fall
for seven days into hell than not to protest.

And then he was himself put to the test of an appeal for his mercy. He
heard a voice below him and glanced forth from his window as from a
little heaven to a petitioner on earth.

“Please, sir, could I have a word with you, if you please, sir.”

As he looked down and with a kind of divinity understood beforehand
just who was praying and what the prayer would be and that it would not
be granted, he felt that God must find it hard at times to look into
some of the wrinkled old faces that are upturned in desperate appeal,
like shriveled flowers praying for rain.

“I’m Mrs. Lasher, sir, of down the road a bit. You’re always passin’
our house. It’s not much to see and I’ve not had luck with my children,
for all they’re so many; but to-day I—would you—could you spare me a
minute of your precious time, sir—could you?”

He was afraid to ask her in or to encourage her at all; for he dreaded
his own weakness. He sat on the window sill and, abstaining from any
temptation to courtesy, said:

“Go on.”

She took complete discouragement from his manner, and went into a
panic, pursing her lips and doddering and mixing her fingers together
in a silly restlessness as she spoke:

“It’s about my son, Jud, sir. He says he’s goin’ to sea for a sailor.”

“Why?”

“His only reason is because you gave him the advice to go.”

“Well, why not?”

“Oh, if it comes to that! He’s not much brains and he knows nothing
of the ships. He is none too good here in this lonely place and what
wouldn’t he be were he to mingle with sailors and the like? They must
be terrible people from all I hear—and the danger, sir. They say they
fall off masts and they go mad and jump in the sea and the sharks
follow them and in the ports they get drunk and get killed and for
the least thing they tie them to masts or whatever they are and whip
their poor bare backs till the blood streams and they hit them with
iron weights and—oh, from all they tell me it’s a hell’s own life, if
you’ll excuse the saying. And at best my boy would be gone for maybe
five years or more and we never hearing a word of how he is, or if he’s
alive even. Oh, I couldn’t abear it, Mr. RoBards. I need Jud at home.
He’s strong and helps me sometimes and when the strange tempers are not
on him he’s as good a boy to his mother as ever boy was; and when the
strange tempers are on him, he needs his mother more than I can tell
you.

“To-day now, he came home all bloody and battered like, and I misdoubt
he was trespassin’ on your property, often as I’ve told him never to
bother you. He said he fell out of a tree into your pond up there
whilst he was robbin’ birds’ nests. I don’t believe him and it’s likely
you had to thrash him. I see your knuckles is all scarred and I’m sorry
for any trouble he gave you, and welcome you are to whip him whenever
he annoys you, and the punishment is what he needs, but don’t send him
away, Mister RoBards.

“To-day I could wash his wounds and tie them up and put him to bed
where his father won’t find him and whip him again. But oh, if he was
at sea and was hurt or punished, who would wash his wounds for him and
tie them up and give him a little petting when he needs it?

“He’s a lonely boy, sir. He’s like a haunted house sometimes, full of
ghosts and queer notions and—but I’m taking too much of your valuable
time. I came over only to ask you, would you take back your advice and
tell him not to go to sea, sir!—if you please, sir!”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lasher, very sorry, but I can’t.”

“Oh, but to send him away whalin’! Five years gone into the storms and
the wickedness, with nobody to pray for him or give him a kind word.
The wickedness of the sailors——”

“There’s wickedness everywhere, Mrs. Lasher.”

“But not up here where everything’s so clean and sweet and beautiful.
There’s wickedness of course here in plenty, but it’s nothing to what
the ships has on them. It’s as good as sending my boy to hell to send
him to sea.”

“I can’t help you. I’m sorry—very sorry.”

Her wildly beseeching eyes fell before the sad sternness of his. She
nodded meekly:

“All right, sir. Thank you, sir. You know best, I suppose.”

And with this Thy-will-be-done she accepted her fate. She was used to
being denied her prayers. She turned and moved across the grass toward
the gate. She paused once or twice to look back, as if hoping that he
would relent. RoBards gazed at her with profound pity, but he could not
grant her plea. Finding that he would not beckon her to return, Mrs.
Lasher nodded, slipped through the gate, and moved on to what must be
almost the funeral of her boy.

She left RoBards in as much confusion as his benumbed spirit could
feel. The reptile Jud had evidently told his mother only a part of
the story. He had remembered enough to lie about the cause of his
punishment. But how long could he be trusted to keep the rest concealed?

Who could keep a secret? Immy’s pitiful future was already at the mercy
of her own babbling, of her little brother’s wondering, of the farmer’s
wife who loved gossip, and of twist-wit Jud.

RoBards was afraid even of his own power to keep it inviolate. Suppose
he himself talked in his sleep and Patty heard him? Suppose that in one
of his wild tempers, when wrath like a drunkenness made him eager to
fling off all decencies and rave in insults, he should hurl this truth
at Patty or someone else?

In many of the rocks on the farm the roots of trees had made little
rifts and squeezed and squirmed and grown until they split granite
asunder. What heart could withstand the relentless pressure, from the
irresistible gimleting of a secret?

Once the truth was uttered, it could no more be recalled than the dead
itself. It was cruelly easy in this world to do, to say, to think;
and hideously impossible to undo, unsay, unthink. One could only add
repentance and remorse to guilt or carelessness.

Repentance and remorse were dangerous, too, to the soul, for one could
repent a good deed, a mercy, an abstention as easily as evil. He found
now in his conscience nothing but regret that he had let that filthy
serpent crawl away. The copperhead had struck and he had merely bruised
it and left it alive with all its venom, and the forked tongue and
hissing of gossip.

In this room he had sorely repented two deeds of pity: sparing
Chalender’s life and Jud Lasher’s. What a poltroon thing pity was,
after all!

The next day he rode over to White Plains and found a letter from Patty
among his mail. He read it on the way home, letting the reins lie in
the mane of the horse while he conned the pages. They were dashed off
in a mood of girlish hilarity. New York was a fountain of renewing
youth to her. It had grown enormously, she said, since she left it a
few months ago. The railroad journey was a sensational adventure. Like
most of the other passengers, she had been fairly choked with smoke and
riddled with cinders and one of them had stuck in her eye a long while.
But New York with even half an eye was heaven.

She hoped that he would come soon. She would have the house ready for
him in a few days. St. John’s Park that had been way uptown when they
moved in was already slipping downtown. It was mighty pretty, though,
and the water when it came would make it a paradise of convenience. She
reminded him to keep the children off the highway and away from those
miserable Lashers.

Her solemn edicts were as girlishly innocent as her gayeties. It made
bitter reading, that warning—that _ex post facto_ warning—against the
Lashers. Whatever happened she must never know this blighting truth.

In a few days Immy was playing in the yard again. She seemed to have
forgotten her experience as she forgot the nightmares that sometimes
woke her screaming from sleep. But now and then she would cast upon
her father a look of amazement. In her games with Keith she shrieked
more easily in a wilder alarm. Her shrieks stabbed RoBards and made
him dread that the experience had worked some permanent injury in the
fabric of the child’s soul.

All the ignorance that had been wrapped about her youth for her
protection was gone now. The blindfold had been snatched from her eyes.
The questions that she had been rebuked for asking, were brutally
answered and yet left unanswered. The beauty, the mystery, the holiness
of innocence had been torn like the rent veil in the temple, and only
the uglier knowledge vouchsafed.

And a stain had been cast upon her indelibly. She would be regarded
with pity and yet with horror forever. She was branded with all the
curses of abominable sin, though she had had no choice, no share, no
understanding of it.

And such things could happen in a world where the fall of a sparrow was
marked—marked but not prevented!

Immy must at all costs be sheltered from any further hazards. It seemed
unwise to take her to the city, where dangers thronged everywhere,
and pollution increased hourly. But when he hinted that it might be
better not to go to town for the procession, Immy almost went into a
convulsion of protest. She pleaded that she had a special right to see
the parade because she had been so badly hurt.

RoBards granted the prayer to silence the argument. He wondered if Jud
Lasher had left yet, but dared not ask. When he rode past the hut,
he put spurs to his horse lest the mother accost him again, but his
sidelong glances never caught a glimpse of Jud.

He did not know that the wretch had lain abed for days while his
bruises mended and that when he was up again and saw RoBards in the
road, he ran and hid, stealing out again to shake his fist at the
vanishing figure and gibber new threats.

At length the parade day drew near. Mr. and Mrs. Albeson decided to
go in the farm wagon drawn by their own team. Mrs. Albeson would not
risk her bones in the steam railroad and she quenched her husband’s
enthusiasm for an experimental ride on the devil-wagons. She cooked a
dinner and a supper for RoBards and the children and set the table for
them and drove off.

RoBards had promised the children a ride on the steam-cars and planned
to leave the house the next morning. After the Albesons had clattered
away, he went to his library to select such books as he might want in
town during the winter. He walked now and then to the window to watch
the children playing on the lawn.

As he stood there once he caught sight of a lone pedestrian, a hulking
youth who carried his belongings in a bag hung on a stick slung across
his shoulder. He recognized Jud Lasher—evidently on his way to sea.

Without telling them why, RoBards called the children indoors. They
scampered about his feet for a while, then their game led them
gradually into the hall. There they played hide and seek, with long
silences broken by loud outcries and a racket of running and laughter.

After a vague period he woke from a reverie like a deep sleep and
realized that he had not heard their voices for a long time. He called;
there was no answer. He cried their names up the stairway. A sense of
some uncanny horror set his heart athrob. He went back to the library
window puzzled, calling.

Then he caught sight of Keith standing chubbily against a huge
tulip tree with his hands over his eyes. He was counting loudly.
RoBards smiled at the solemnity of the everlasting game of
hide-and-seek—grown-ups and infants hiding their eyes and hiding
themselves and making a sport of what should be a serious business.

He looked about for Immy, expecting to see her crouching behind a
crimson rambler’s trellis or some other concealment. He heard a faint
cry, so faint and far away that it might have been a distant bird.
His gaze darted here and there. A moving figure caught his eye on a
hillside. He saw that it was Jud Lasher, and that he was running toward
a thicket on a ledge of rocks. In his arms he held something that
struggled. RoBards knitted his brows and shaded his eyes to peer into
the glare of the afternoon sun. He heard again that delicate call. It
sounded like Immy’s voice; it frightened him.

He pushed through the window and dropped to the lawn. He saw his horse
grazing near; saddled, the reins trailing along the ground. RoBards ran
to him, caught him as he whirled to bolt, threw the reins back over his
neck, set foot in stirrup and rose to the saddle.

As the horse reared, RoBards struck him between the ears with his fist
to bring him down, then sent him flying to the gate. He turned him into
the main road and the horse, catching terror and rage from his rider,
beat the dust into a rolling cloud.

At the point where he had seen Jud running, RoBards jerked the bridle
and, setting the horse to the low stone wall, lifted him over before he
had time to refuse. Up the hill RoBards kept him on the run. He caught
sight of Jud Lasher as Jud Lasher caught sight of him. Only a little
way the fugitive went before he flung Immy down like a bundle, and
darted into a chaos of rocks and thistles and of tall sycamores holding
out naked branches livid with leprous white patches.

RoBards did not pause by Immy’s side but rode on, his heels beating a
tattoo on the horse’s ribs.

Jud Lasher was mad with fright, but terror made him as agile as a
weasel. He slipped easily through mazes that the horse must blunder
over or around.

RoBards was so intent upon him that he did not see a heavy sycamore
bough thrust right across his path until it swept him from the saddle.
But he kept clutch on the reins, dragged the horse’s head round and
brought him to earth.

RoBards was up and in the saddle before the horse could rise. He
charged on up the hill and overtaking Jud Lasher in a clearing, rode
him down. The youth fell begging for mercy, but when the horse swerved
to avoid him RoBards lifted his head so sharply that he went up beating
the air with his forehoofs. Then he came down with them upon the
prostrate body like a great two-tined pitchfork.

Keith who had stood watching his father’s pursuit from a long distance
hid his head in his arm. Immy watching from where she lay, covered her
eyes with her hands. They saw their father slip from the saddle and
disappear behind a shelving boulder. There was a brief hubbub, then
silence.

After a long time of awful emptiness, their father came down the
hillside leading the horse.

He went to Immy and lifted her in his arms, and kissing her, mumbling:

“Did he scare you?”

She nodded, almost more afraid of her father than of Jud.

“He won’t scare you again. He’s gone now.”

“Far?”

“Far.”

“I’m glad! I was hiding behind the big rose bush and he grabbed me like
a big bear would; and he runned off with me. I’m glad he’s gone.”

She laughed, but her father set his palm across her mouth quickly and
hugged her to his heart so hard that she cried out.

He made her promise that she would say nothing also of this and when
she asked him why Jud wouldn’t let her alone, he said:

“He will now. But if you tell anybody he will come back for you.”

He scanned the landscape, but nobody was to be seen except little Keith
waiting in a daze.

He took the two children into the house and once more solemnly pledged
them never to mention the name of Jud Lasher, or the efforts he had
made to steal Immy.

When supper time came RoBards waited on the two children, but did not
eat.

He put them early to bed, and heard their prayers, and waited till he
was assured they were sound asleep. They felt his kisses upon their
brows as they sank away into oblivion.




CHAPTER XXI


It was black when Keith woke suddenly. Some little sound had pierced
the depths of his profound immersion in sleep. He imagined Indians or
Cowboys or Skinners. His ears seemed to rise like a terrier’s; his skin
bristled with attention. He wondered if thieves were about; or lions or
tigers or any of the witches or hobgoblins that peopled the night.

It was the good old custom to invoke all manner of demons for the
discipline of children. Good children never asked questions or never
delayed to sleep. Bad children were watched not only by an unsleeping
God of remarkable vindictiveness but by swarms of demons, child-eating
animals, ogres that made ginger-bread of babies, or so-called saints
who broiled them on live coals in a kitchen called hell. It was a hard
world for children here and hereafter.

The nightmares that attended waking hours were horrifying, but at
night alone upstairs, with the dark smothering and blinding the wide
eyes that could see little and imagine much, and the room a very lair
of shapeless monsters that could see without being seen, it was the
supreme torment. Even to cry aloud to nurse for help or a bit of light
was to incur an added punishment. To run wildly out of the cavern and
seek shelter in parental arms was to incur ridicule and often to shock
strange guests and bring shame upon father and mother.

Even grown-up people lost their senses when they were awake in the dark
and made spooks and ghosts of dark chairs and tables, heard groans and
clanking chains in the night-wind noises and the creaking of restless
timbers.

RoBards as a child had run the gauntlet of such agonies. He tried to
save his children from them, but in vain. The lonely babies concocted
fiends of their own, and nurses, impatient to be free of their
importunities, added traditional atrocities.

RoBards had caught one or two of the nurses at the ancient game and
discharged them, only to be looked upon as a meddler. He had threatened
the dusky Teen with a return to slavery if she did not try to disabuse
the children’s minds of savagery. But she believed too much herself to
be relied upon to inculcate atheism.

Keith was a brave little knight, however, and an investigator by
instinct. Instinctively he pitted his inborn skepticism against the
tyrannies of imagination, and when he could not exorcise a fiend by
denying it, he met it with bravery. His bedroom was a little Thermopylæ
and he Leonidas fighting the swarming hosts.

Sometimes he surrendered and buried his head under the pillow.
Sometimes he put them all to ignominious flight. He had an ally
of mystic powers who now and then gave unconscious aid: an old
crack-voiced rooster, a tenor who had seen better days, who dreamed
aloud at midnight of his former glories and snored a sleepy
cock-a-doodle-doo long before the young beaux started their morning
fanfare.

This old rooster’s drowsy utterances always reminded Keith that dawn
would come again and the sun with its long broom of light would
sweep the room clear of its child-hating mobs. The blessed sun would
explain the panther about to spring as an old rocking chair, the
broom-straddling witch at the window as a tulip tree bough, the pirate
with uplifted cutlass as a pile of clothes.

Keith loved realism. He was educating himself in the night school
to disbelieve the dark, to rely upon hard facts and distrust his
terrifying fancies. A dawning scientist was evolving so fast that each
week covered an æon of human experience.

Besides, he had an explorer’s curiosity, a soldier’s curiosity, a
willingness to bet his safety against any mystery that threatened or
nagged him.

He had put to flight no end of Indians, Skinners, and bogies by
simply pointing his forefinger at them, snapping his trigger-thumb and
observing, “Bang! bang!”

To-night he quaked only a few minutes before he realized that whatever
the menace was it was downstairs. His first theory was that Jud Lasher
might be stealing back to make another attempt to carry Immy away. The
why of Jud’s persistence baffled him—as well it might. His best guess
was that Jud wanted to take Immy with him on the whaling ship that his
father had commanded him to join.

This thought substituted anger for terror. Keith’s little heart plunged
with resentment and he slipped out of bed. The first sweat of fear
chilled as he stood barefoot on the creaking floor. Then, like a child
ghost in his long white nightshirt, he stole from his room to the hall.
He peered into Immy’s room and saw that she was asleep in safety.
He padded stealthily to his father’s room and, lifting the latch as
silently as he could, swung back the door. He was stunned to find the
room empty, the bed unoccupied, the covers still smooth and taut.

His father might be at work in the library. He peered over the
banisters, but the library door was open and no light yellowed the
hall carpet as he had so often seen it when he had wakened on other
occasions and made adventurous forays about the house in search of a
drink or reinforcements against the armies in his room.

Sometimes he had dared to steal down into the pantry and loot the
cooky-jar. The thought of the pantry emboldened him now. He descended
the stairway slowly with the awe of an Orpheus in Hades.

The moon poured down on the front of the house; and, streaming
through the glass in the front door, carpeted the lower hall with a
swaying pattern of moon-dappled tree-shadows. Keith felt as if he
waded a little brook of light as he flitted here and there. The sound
continued, but always from below.

He went at last to the cellar door. This house boasted to all
passers-by that its builders had not placed the cellar out in the yard
but had tucked it under the ground floor. There were two doors to the
cellar, one in the kitchen, one on the outside of the house.

Keith was interested to find a little glow of light on the kitchen
floor, seeping in from the cellar. He listened and heard someone moving
about, heard a mystifying chipping noise, such as the stone-cutters had
made when they put the new marble hearthstone in place and when they
had recently enlarged the cellar and strengthened the foundation with
a course or two of stone. The cellar walls were eleven feet thick in
places.

They were made, Mr. Albeson said, “in the good old days when builders
were honest and houses were solid—none of your modern flimsies.”

Keith had spent much time there on the cellar stairs watching the
masons and asking questions. He had learned much of the chemistry of
mortar and the dangers of quicklime. He had seen it smoke like milk on
fire. He had been told that if he fell in it he would disappear, be
just eaten up bones and all.

What could be going on down there now? Masons did not work at night. A
burglar would hardly try to cut his way through stone foundations when
the windows were usually left unlocked.

Keith reached up and putting his fat hand on the thumb-latch pressed it
down with all the gentleness he could command. Not a sound did he make,
and the door came open silently. But a damp draught enveloped him and
icy water seemed to flow round his ankles.

With the wind that poured up the stairs came a stream of light, and an
increase of sound. He leaned through the door and stared down.

He saw his father in rough old clothes splotched with white. He looked
like a mason and he was dragging from the thick wall of the chimney a
big stone. On the cellar floor were many others ragged with old mortar.
In the chimney was a big hole and his father was making it bigger.

Keith’s darting eyes made out a long box of white lime fuming and
simmering with a long something half buried in it.

He watched his father in a stupor of bewilderment while he cleared a
sort of oven in the wall. He had never seen such a look on his father’s
face. At length he took the lamp and set it in another place, and bent
to draw that something from the quicklime box.

As he hoisted it awkwardly out of the shadow into the light, Keith saw
that it was Jud Lasher.

He seemed to be asleep, for he hung all limp in white clothes and he
made no sound.

Keith saw his father carry the gaunt, gangling form to the chimney and
stuff it into the hollow. It would not fit, and he began frantically
thrusting at the arms and legs to crowd them in. The head rolled across
the edge and Keith caught sight of the face.

Jud was not asleep! He was——

The boy pitched forward; slid and thudded down the cellar stairs head
first.

He fell and fell. The next thing he knew was the feel of his bed about
him. His head was on his pillow. The covers tucked under his chin.

His head was swimming and there was a big throbbing lump on his
forehead. As he put his hand to its ache, his eyes made out a tall
figure standing by him.

“That you, Papa?”

“Yes, Keith.”

“Papa! what happened?”

“You must have had a dream, honey.”

“But my head hurts.”

“I heard you scream and I found you on the floor.”

“In my room?”

“Yes.”

“That’s funny! I thought I fell down the cellar stairs.”

“That would be funny!”

“I thought I saw you in the cellar.”

“What would I be doing in the cellar?”

“You were—papa, where’s Jud Lasher?”

“He’s gone to sea, hasn’t he?”

“Will he come back? Ever?”

“Not unless you talk about him. He might if you do.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“There are ghosts and ghosts. Foolish people talk about the imaginary
ones. The real ones—big men don’t talk about them at all, and you’re
getting to be a big man, aren’t you?”

“Yes, papa; yes, sir.”

He was dizzy. He swung like a blown rag on a clothesline—or like a
sailor on a—a whaler. A sailor on a whaler.

The old rooster snored. His father’s hands came out across the ocean
and drew the covers over the sailor’s hands. He—he was—was——

It was morning.

It takes girls a long while to dress, and Keith was always downstairs
long before Immy. This morning he was quicker than ever. He wanted to
get to that cellar and see it by daylight.

He met his father in the hall, pacing up and down. His father looked at
him queerly as if he were afraid. That was a silly thing to think, of
course, but his father looked sick—as if he hadn’t slept well or any at
all.

The boy thought it best to be frank.

“Papa, was that a dream? All of it?”

“Was what a dream?”

“About me being in the cellar and seeing you taking stones out of the
wall.”

“Let’s go down and look at the cellar.”

Keith loved that. When in doubt, visit the scene of the legend.

He went down the steps. The morning light came in through little
windows smeared with cobwebs.

Keith missed first the heap of stones on the floor, the hole in the
foundation of the chimney, the box of quicklime. The stones were in
place. There was no hole in the wall, no quicklime. The cellar floor
was clean—cleaner than usual.

“I guess it was a dream, papa.”

He took his father’s hand. The hand felt funny, gritty and clammy, as
if it had been washed very hard. He glanced down and the nails were
white along the edges.

He said nothing as they started upstairs, but his backward look noted a
thing he thought he ought to speak of:

“Papa, the stones in the chimney look like they’d been chiseled out and
put back in again with fresh mortar.”

“Do they?” his father gasped, and sat down hard on the cellar steps. He
nodded and groaned wearily.

“They do look that way.”

He thought a while, then rose and took an old broom and jabbed it into
spider webs on the windows and whisked them away and spread them across
the fresh lines.

“Does that look better?”

“If you could get the spiders to move there it would.”

Now the boy felt that he was made an accomplice. His father took his
criticism and acted on it.

It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to the boy. He
was saving his father from some mistake. The greatest lawyer in the
world was taking Keith’s advice. He groaned with delight and hugged his
father’s arm, murmuring:

“We’re like pardners——”

“Partners we are.”

“I’m a big man now at last. Couldn’t you let me know ever’thing, so’s I
could help you when you needed me?”

His father gazed at him devotedly and kissed him. He did not like that
kissing business. Big men did not indulge in such girls’ play. Still he
remembered the story of Nelson’s death in the sea battle and how the
fearless admiral’s last words were a plea to another officer to kiss
him.

But in spite of this burst of affection his father would not explain
the Lasher mystery; he said the boy was too young to know. Yet he
was not too young to tell enough to let other grown-up people know.
RoBards, haggard with loss of sleep and the storms he had barely
weathered, was frantic to prevent the children from publishing the
devastating news.

Curiosity would work in them like a yeast and the instinct to ask
questions could only be overcome by some overwhelming injunction.

He led Keith to the library and fetched out the vast family Bible, and
set the boy’s little hand on it and said:

“Swear that you will never mention Jud Lasher’s name to anybody, or
breathe a word of what he did or what I did to him. Do you swear?”

“Yes, papa, I swear, and I p’omise——”

“Do you know what happens to people who break their oaths?”

“Oh, yessir, they burn in hell-fire forever and ever, amen.”

His father paid the boy a noble homage when he made the appeal to his
chivalry above his fear:

“Worse than that, it would mean that if you told, your little sister
would be shamed before everybody as long as she lived. Everybody would
think of her as if she were worse than wicked; nobody would ever marry
her. She would be afraid to be seen anywhere. She would cry all the
time and never smile.”

“That would be worse’n me burning in hell. Oh, yessir, I won’t tell,
sir.”

“This promise won’t wear out in a few days or months, will it? This
house will be yours when I am gone. It must never be sold; never be
torn down till I am dead and gone. After Immy dies it won’t matter so
much. Does your poor little brain understand all this?”

His accurate soul answered: “I don’t understand it, no sir; but you do,
and what you want is enough for me. I wish you would trust me.”

“I do. And one last word: don’t tell Immy what I’ve told you. Don’t let
her talk about it. And always remember that the least word you let slip
might mean that the policemen would come and take me away and hang me
before all the people.”

The boy screamed at that and was hardly soothed back to calm.

[Illustration: “SWEAR THAT YOU WILL NEVER MENTION JUD LASHER’S NAME TO
ANYBODY”]




CHAPTER XXII


RoBards was afraid to leave the house. How could he trust it to keep
the secret? There would be nobody to guard the cellar from intrusion.
Yet no intruder would be interested in studying the stone walls. Anyone
who entered the house would seek jewelry or silver or clothes.

He dared not ask the children to deny themselves the visit to the city.
They were already nagging him to make haste lest they be too late for
the parade.

So he locked the house up and drove away. When he cast his last glance
back he sent a prayer in his eyes to the house to be good to him and to
protect him and its other children.

The tulip tree stood at attention, solemn and reliable.

He approached the Lasher hovel with dread and tried to make the horses
gallop past, but Mrs. Lasher stood in the middle of the road and held
up her arms.

He had to face her, and he checked his horses while his heart plunged
and galloped. But all she said was:

“I just wanted to tell you that Jud left home yesterday to go to sea.
It broke my heart, but I hope you’re satisfied.”

RoBards took reassurance from the irony of this taunt, sorry as he felt
for the poor, life-beaten woman before him. He nodded and touched his
hat, and she stepped aside to let him pass.

He could only hope that she would not visit the house in his absence.
He caught a quick look from Keith’s eyes—a look of proud complicity.
During the long drive the boy’s hand kept stealing round his arm and
patting it encouragingly.

They reached the railroad station just in time. The cars were so
crowded that it was hard to squeeze aboard. It seemed that the whole
countryside was drained of its populace.

Everybody was bound for New York. Everybody had on his best or hers.
The day was glorious and the world in a holiday mood. Many of the
people carried baskets of food. The silliest joke brought guffaws of
success and idiotic repartee.

RoBards was hailed by clients and other acquaintances: “Here’s lawyer
RoBards!” “How air ye, Jedge?” “Well, we put up a good fight, but I
guess it was a good thing we got licked.” “That’s right; you never know
your luck.” “Bigger N’ York grows, the better it’ll be for all of us.”
“They’ll want plenty o’ butter ’n’ eggs down to the setty. We got water
enough to dieloot the melk and then spare some for the pore town rats.”

The engine whistled. Everybody jumped. The bell rang. Everybody
cheered. The locomotive puffed and strained and jerked and the
carriages began to move.

Keith leaned far out of the window while his father held his heels. He
saw the engine rolling round a curve with a brave choo-choo. Immy was
content to wonder at the people, their funny hats and gay clothes. But
Keith wanted to know how the engine ran without horses. His father had
such a hard time explaining the modern miracle, that Keith offered to
bet they had a couple of horses hidden in the old engine somewhere.

It was appalling how fast they went. The landscape was a blur. “The
horses are running away!” Keith yelled and then came in yowling,
bringing an eyeful of coal dust. It was hard to get him to open his
eyes till the grime was washed out. RoBards found an allegory in that:
how human it was to clench the eyes and the heart tight upon what hurt
them most; how hard it was to persuade people to let go what they could
not endure.

The carriages rocked and threatened to capsize. Women squealed
and baskets came tumbling down from the racks. An umbrella almost
transfixed the hat of one fluttering farm-wife.

Everybody agreed that the steam locomotive was the devil’s own
invention—something unchristian about it; folks would soon go back to
horses like God meant them to. No wonder some God-fearing souls had
risen to forbid the use of the schoolhouse for meetings in the interest
of this contraption of Beelzebub.

But in an incredibly short time the train was running among streets.
They were in New York already and the city was decorated “like as if
they was a weddin’ in every last house.”

Loops of bunting and marvelous clevernesses of flag arrangement
bedecked all the homes, and throngs were hastening south to the heart
of the city and the grandest parade of modern times.

One pitiful, forlorn little old woman was seemingly the only human
being left behind to guard Westchester County till its populace
returned from the excursion to New York City. Westchester had presented
the metropolis with one of its rivers, and it went down to make the
bestowal formal.

Mrs. Lasher had not the money nor the time for such a journey. Water to
her was the odious stuff she lugged from the well to the washtub or the
stove. New York meant scarce more to her than Bombay or Hong-Kong. She
hardly lifted her eyes from her toil to note who passed her hovel or
in which direction. Yet she had watched for RoBards and had run out to
taunt him with his cruelty to her.

And now she was multiplied in his eyes into an endless procession of
visions more terrible to him than an army with banners, more numerous
than the parading hosts that poured along the streets of New York.

While the bands thumped and brayed and the horses’ hoofs crackled on
the cobblestones, and the soldiers and firemen and temperance folk
strutted, he seemed to see only that little despondent hag wringing
her work-tanned fingers over the loss of her good-for-nothing son. She
was bitter against RoBards for sending the lout away to be a sailor.
What would she have said if she had known—what would she say when she
learned as learn she surely must—that RoBards had saved her boy from
the perils of the seven seas by immuring him in the foundation walls of
his home?

The Russians had been wont to build a living virgin into the walls they
wished to sanctify. He had sacrificed a lad and he was doomed to stand
guard over the altar. He was as much a prisoner as the dead Jud—chained
to a corpse.

It terrified him to think that the half-crazed old mother had the
franchise of Tuliptree Farm for this day, since there was never a soul
left on the place to prevent her wandering about. What if she chose the
opportunity to visit the home where she had never been invited to call?
Just to see how her betters lived, she might climb in at a window and
wander about the rooms. He saw her in his fancy gasping at the simple
things that would be splendor to her pauper’s eye.

What if the blood of her son should cry aloud to her like Abel’s from
the ground, and draw her to the cellar? What if she should see through
the clumsy disguise of spiderwebs and begin tearing at the foundation
stones with those old hen’s-claw fingers of hers?

It was a ridiculous image to be afraid of, but RoBards could not banish
it.




CHAPTER XXIII


The children had apparently forgotten all about the tragedy. The
newness of the train-ride, the fear of missing something, of being late
somewhere, of not being everywhere at once, kept their little minds so
avid that there was no thought of yesterday.

They entered the city as if they were wading into the boisterous surf
at Rockaway Beach. The crowds broke about them with a din of breakers
thundering shoreward. Yet they were not afraid.

When they descended from the train at the station, RoBards could hardly
keep them in leash long enough to get them into a hack. As it bounced
across the town to St. John’s Park, he had only their backs and heels
for company. Each child hung across a door and stared at the hurrying
mobs.

At length they reached the home and all their thoughts were forward.
Nothing that had ever happened in the country could pit itself against
the revelry of the city.

Their young and pretty mother looked never so New Yorkish as when
she ran down the front stoop to welcome them. When she cried the old
watchword, “How have you been?” they answered heedlessly, “All right!”
Immy, of all people, answered, “All right!”

Even RoBards forgot for the brief paradise of embracing his gracious
wife that everything was all wrong. She had to take him about the house
and show him the improvements she had made, especially the faucet in
the kitchen for the Croton water when it should come gurgling through
the pipes. From a parlor window she pointed with delicious snobbery to
the hydrant at the edge of the front porch. Most marvelous of all was a
shower-bath that she had had installed upstairs. It would be possible
to bathe every day! There was something irreligious and Persian about
the apparatus, but RoBards rejoiced for a moment in the thought of what
musical refreshment it would afford him on hot mornings after long
nights of work.

The children were so impatient to get them gone that they had hardly
a glance to spare at the new toys, the faucets and hydrants, the
municipal playthings which would prevent fires in the future or at
least make the life of a fireman a pastime instead of a vain slavery.

Patty’s mother had been caught in the new craze for “Temperance” and
she called the Croton water as much of a godsend as the floods that
gushed out from the rock that Moses smote. Since the city had removed
the old pumps there had been no place for a man to quench his thirst
except by going to a grocery store and asking for a cup of water as a
charity. Few people had the courage to beg for water, so they either
went dry or paid for a glass of brandy. This, she said, had kept up the
evil of drunkenness that was undermining the health and character of so
many men and women. Once the pure Croton water was accessible and free,
intoxication would cease.

But old man Jessamine, himself a child now, belittled the significance
of the Croton day. It would be nothing, he said, to the great day when
the Erie Canal was opened and the first boat from the lakes started
its voyage through the canal to the Hudson and down the river to the
sea. He held the frantic children fast while he talked ancient history:
described the marvelous speed of the news.

“The very identical moment the first drop of Erie water entered the
canal at Buffalo, a cannon was fired. Eight miles away stood another
cannon and the minute that cannoneer heard the first shot, he fired the
second cannon. Eight miles away was another, and so on all the way to
Sandy Hook. For more than five hundred miles the cannon were lined up
eight miles apart and it took only an hour and twenty minutes for the
news to reach New York, and then they sent the news back to Buffalo the
same way; and so it took less than three hours to send a message more
than a thousand miles. Wasn’t that wonderful?”

The children wriggled impatiently and said, “Please, grampa, the bands
are playing. We’d better hurry.”

The old man held them tighter and went on:

“When the canal boats reached New York there was a grand procession
of ships, and there were two elegant kegs of Erie water with gold
hoops and Governor Clinton emptied one of them into the ocean to marry
the sea to the lakes; and another man poured in phials of water from
the Elbe, the Rhine, the Rhone, and all the rivers and seas. And the
land parade, you should have seen that! All the societies had wagons:
the Hatters’ Society with men making hats before your very eyes;
the Rope-makers with a ropewalk in operation; the comb-makers, the
cordwainers, the printers printing an ode. To-day will be nothing to
what people did when I was young, for in those days——”

But the children had broken away from his sharp knees and his fat
stomach and his mildewed legends. The band outside was irresistible,
and their father was waiting to say good-by to them.

Keith was mighty proud of his father in his fireman’s uniform. But when
RoBards seized Immy, tossed her aloft and brought her down to the level
of his lips, she was as wildly afraid as Hector’s child had been of him
in his great helmet. Immy was easily frightened now. Her scream pierced
the air, and she almost had a fit, squirming in her father’s arms and
kicking him in the breast as he turned her over to Patty, who received
her, wondering like another Andromache.

“What’s the matter? what on earth?” Patty cried. And Immy sobbed:

“I thought Papa was Jud Lasher.”

“What a funny thought! Why should you——”

Patty’s father called to her opportunely, demanding with senile
querulousness, who had hidden his walking stick and where. RoBards
forgave the old man much for playing providence this once.

As Patty turned aside, Keith seized Immy’s foot and warned her to
“keep still for heavem’s sakes.” She understood; her eyes widened and
she pleaded with her father to forgive her. He was as afraid of her
penitence as of her terror; but somehow in the flurry of leaving the
house, Patty forgot her curiosity, and the incident passed over.

The loyalty of Keith and his quick rally to his father’s protection
from Immy’s indiscretion touched RoBards deeply. The boy had evidently
inherited the family love of secrecy for the family’s sake.

But RoBards was sick with fear, realizing on what slender threads the
secret hung. He dreaded to leave the children with their mother, lest
they let slip some new clue to the agony he loved Patty too well to
share with her. But he had to take his place with his fire company,
though the sky fell in his absence.




CHAPTER XXIV


That procession was seven miles long, and everyone who marched or rode,
and each of the massed spectators had his or her terror of life at the
back of the heart. But RoBards knew only his own anxiety.

The Fire Kings had left their engine house by the time he reached the
place and he had to search for them in the welter of humanity. The
Battery was the point from which the parade was to start and every
street within two miles of it was filled with men and horses and mobs
of impatient people already footsore with standing about on the sharp
cobblestones.

At last the serpent began to move its glittering head. The Grand
Marshal, General Hopkins, set forth with a retinue of generals and
aids, guards and riflemen. The horse artillery and various guard
regiments followed with seven brass bands. The second division under
Major General Stryker consisted of the Governor and his staff, the
state artillery, State Fencibles and cadets, councilmen from various
cities, foreign consuls, and members of the Society of the Cincinnati,
escorting the water commissioners and engineers, all in barouches. The
third division included officers of the army and navy and militia,
“reverend the clergy,” judges, lawyers, professors, and students; the
chamber of commerce and the board of trade. The firemen made up the
fourth division. Four other divisions tailed after.

It seemed that there could be nobody left to watch when so many
marched. But the walks and windows, porches and roofs were a living
plaster of heads and bodies. New York had more than doubled its
numbers since the Erie Canal festival and had now nearly three hundred
and fifty thousand souls within its bounds, as well as thousands on
thousands of visitors.

It gave RoBards’ heart another twinge to stand an obscure member of a
fire-gang and watch Harry Chalender go by in a carriage as one of the
victorious engineers.

RoBards had fought him and his ambitions and must haul on a rope now
like a harnessed Roman captive, while his victor triumphed past him in
a chariot, or, worse, a barouche.

Life had defeated RoBards again and again. With the loftiest motives
he had been always the loser, and he could not understand things.
Chalender was a flippant fencer with life; yet somehow he fought always
on the winning side and the worthier side. His mortal offense had been
condoned, outlawed, and the offended ones helped to conceal his guilt.

It was bitter for an earnest man like RoBards to go afoot after such a
rake as Chalender. Why should he have killed and hidden Jud Lasher in a
wall, and let Harry Chalender, who had been as evil, ride by in state
showered with the cheers due a hero, a savior of New York?

RoBards would never cease to shudder lest it be found out that he had
spared Chalender; and he would never cease to shudder lest it be found
out that he had punished Jud Lasher. A jury would probably acquit him
for killing Lasher, but only if he exculpated himself by publishing
the disaster that had befallen Immy. If he had killed Chalender and
published his wife’s frailty, a jury would have acquitted him for
that, too. But why should it have befallen him to be compelled to such
decisions and such secrecies?

Now his wife, holding his daughter in her lap, would wave salutations
to Chalender, and remember—what would she remember? And would she blush
with remorse or with recollected ecstasy? RoBards turned so scarlet
at the thought that when the Fire Kings halted for a moment, one of
his companions told him he looked queer and offered him a nip at his
hip-flask of brandy.

RoBards said it was the heat, and then the command to march resounded
along the line. The Fire Kings resumed the long trudge round Bowling
Green up Broadway all the distance to Union Park, round the Park and
down the Bowery, through Grand Street and East Broadway and Chatham to
City Hall Park, where they were to form on the surrounding sidewalks
during the exercises.

The fire division was led by a band of music from the Neptune Hose
Company of Philadelphia. Engines and hose carts from there and other
cities followed, all smothered in flowers and ribbons. The New York
Fire Department was preceded by its banner, borne on a richly carpeted
stage drawn by four white horses elegantly caparisoned, each steed led
by a black groom in Turkish dress.

That banner was a masterwork. On one side widows and orphans blessed
the Fire Department for its protection, while a “hero of the flames”
attended them. Neptune towered above them, “evidently delighted with
the victory he had accomplished over his ancient enemy, the Demon of
Fire, by the aid of his skillful and intrepid allies, the firemen of
New York.”

On the other side of the banner was the Queen of Cities pointing to the
Croton Dam. The banner of mazarine blue, with crimson and amber fringe,
tassels, and cord, was surmounted by a carved wood trumpet and helmet,
ladder and trumpet, and an eagle with extended wings.

Hundreds of firemen followed in glazed caps, red flannel shirts, and
pantaloons of various colors. The devices were wonderful, a scene
from the tragedy of _Metamora_, a scene from _Romeo and Juliet_, a
phœnix, many phœnices, Neptunes galore, burning churches, a mother
rescuing a child from an eagle’s nest, an Indian maid parting from her
lover, Liberties, sea-horses, tritons, Hebes, the Battle of Bunker
Hill, Cupids, mottoes like “From our vigilance you derive safety,”
“Duty, though in peril,” “We come to conquer and to save,” “Industry
and perseverance overcome every obstacle,” “Combined to do good and
not to injure,” “Semper paratus,” “We are pledged to abstain from all
intoxicating drinks.”

Among the fascinating objects carried in procession were the Bible on
which George Washington had taken the first presidential oath; the
printing press used by Benjamin Franklin in London, and a modern
press, for contrast, striking off an ode written for the occasion; a
foundry; a group of millers up to their eyes in meal as they ground
corn and bagged it; sections of Croton water pipe of every dimension
with examples of all the tools; a display of gold and silverware of
several thousand dollars’ value.

The Temperance Societies attracted especial attention. They included
gray-haired men, boys, mothers and daughters, and numerous reformed
drunkards. Their banners were inspiring. The Bakers’ Temperance
Benevolent Society carried a banner showing on one side all the horrors
of intemperance, “the lightning destroying the false light that has
already enticed the ship of the Inebriate to his destruction; the
moderate drinker coming on under easy sail, just entering the sea
of trouble; the first glass making its appearance on the horizon; a
figure representing beastly intoxication, another just throwing off the
shackles of intemperance; the Anchor of Hope firmly planted in the Rock
of Safety with the pledge of total abstinence for its cable extending
across the abyss of destruction and winding through the land. On the
other side, the Genius of Temperance offered the Staff of Life and the
Cup of Health; the Temple of Science and Wisdom divided the picture
with Peace, Commerce, Mechanics, and Agriculture flanking. A smaller
banner showed the interior of a Bake House with the Temperate Bakers
cheerfully performing their work.”

Other banners were even more comprehensive.

The procession moved along with the usual open and shut effect. There
would come an abrupt halt with everybody in a jumble. Then a quick
start-off and a lengthening gap that must be closed on the run. It was
annoying, wearisome, and soon began to seem foolish. Why should one
half of the town wear its feet off marching past the other half of the
town whose feet were asleep with the long sitting still?

By a stroke of luck, the Fire Kings made a long pause near the
residence on Broadway where Patty and her two families, old and young,
had been invited to watch the parade. RoBards was as confused as a
silly child when his son Keith recognized him and advertised him
with loud yells of “Papa!” He and Immy then came bolting to the curb,
followed by Patty.

People stared and made comments on the amazing thing that a man’s wife
should violate decorum with such public friendliness. It was as bad
manners as greeting a friend cordially on a Sunday.

Patty edged close to her husband and said—as if she knew it would help
him on his journey:

“Did you see how fat Harry Chalender is getting? He looked like an
idiot sitting up there while a man of your ability walks. It’s simply
disgusting!”

Oh, mystic comfort of contempt—the lean man’s for the fat; the fat
man’s for the lean; the failure’s for the conqueror! By the alchemy of
sympathy, RoBards’ anger was dissipated by finding its duplicate in his
wife’s heart. He smiled at her earnestness in a matter that had but
lately driven him frantic. It is thus that men prove women excitable.

Then the bands ahead and abaft struck up at the same time but not with
the same tune and he had to move on, his mind and his feet trying in
vain to adapt themselves to both rackets.

It was two o’clock before the advanced guard of Washington Grays
galloped up in front of the City Hall. It was half past four when the
last man had passed in review, and Samuel Stevens, Esq., president of
the Board of Water Commissioners, began his address.

He cried: “The works of Rome were built by soldiers and by slaves. Ours
was voted for by freemen, was constructed by freemen—and we make the
aspiration that in all ages to come it may bless freemen, and freemen
only!”

The president of the Croton Aqueduct Board followed, saying: “The
obstacles have disappeared! The hill has been leveled or pierced, the
stream and the valley have been overleaped, the rock has been smitten!
Nature, yielding to human industry, perseverance, and skill, no longer
withholds the boon she had before denied us. A river, whose pure
waters are gathered from the lakes of the mountain-range, arrested and
diverted in its course, after pouring its tribute through a permanent
and spacious archway for more than forty miles, at length reaches our
magnificent reservoirs, from whence it is conducted by subterranean
conduits, extending one hundred and thirty additional miles, throughout
the greatest portion of our city.”

When he had finished, the ladies and gentlemen of the Sacred Music
Society sang the ode which General George P. Morris had written at the
request of the Corporation of the City of New York:

    “Gushing from this living fountain,
       Music pours a falling strain,
     As the Goddess of the Mountain
       Comes with all her sparkling train....

    “Gently o’er the rippling water,
       In her coral-shallop bright,
     Glides the rock-king’s dove-eyed daughter,
       Deck’d in robes of virgin white....

    “Water leaps as if delighted
       While the conquered foes retire!
     Pale Contagion flies affrighted
       With the baffled demon, Fire!...

    “Round the Aqueducts of story,
       As the mists of Lethe throng,
     Croton’s waves in all their glory
       Troop in melody along.”

From his post on the sidewalk RoBards could hear snatches of the
speeches, bursts of song. He joined in the “nine hearty cheers for the
City of New York and perpetuity to the Croton Water” when the Grand
Marshal called for them.

Then the ceremonies were over and a cold collation was served in the
City Hall, with Croton water and lemonade, but no wine or spirituous
liquors. Patty sent the children home with her parents and joined her
husband at the feast.

Mayor Morris offered a toast to the Governor and he responded,
remarking that New York “but yesterday a dusty trading mart,” had now
“the pure mountain stream gushing through its streets and sparkling in
its squares. To the noble rivers with which it was encircled by Nature,
is now added the limpid stream brought hither by Art, until in the
words of the Roman poet, alike descriptive and prophetic, her citizens
exult,

    “_inter flumina nota
     Et fontes sacros._”

The night was as brilliant as the day. All the places of public
amusement were crowded and at the Tabernacle a sacred concert was
given. The fair at Niblo’s was suffocatingly frequented, and the
fireworks were splendid. At Castle Garden there were fireworks and a
balloon ascension. The museums and hotels were brilliantly illuminated;
and at the Astor House seven hundred window lights were hung.

The Common Council caused a silver medal to be struck in commemoration
of the occasion, showing on one side the reservoir on Murray’s Hill, on
the other a cross-section of the aqueduct. It would savor of boasting,
perhaps, to aver that this medal was the ugliest in the history of
medalurgy.

Better than all the fireworks of oratory or powder, more blithe than
all the brass music, the roar of cannon and the rattle of firearms,
the bunting and the glitter, was the sudden outburst of the fountains.
The water that had come running down from the Croton dam leaped into
the air and fell with a resounding uproar. It reveled in the light and
bloomed in gigantic blossoms whose frothy shapes hardly changed, though
the drops that made them were never for a moment the same, but always
a new throng that rushed up and lapsed with a constant splashing and
bubbling.

In the City Hall Park the Croton flung itself sixty feet in the air and
came back diamonds. Eighteen jets were so arranged that they designed
various figures, “The Maid of the Mist,” “The Croton Plume,” “The
Dome.” In Union Park there was a willow that wept gleaming stars.
In Harlem there was a geyser more than a hundred feet tall. And the
sunlight thrust rainbows in among the silvery columns. At night colored
fireworks made them uncanny with glamor.

The people felt that the curses of thirst and plague and fire were
indeed banished forever. Time would blight this hope as it upsets all
other reckonings upon perfection, but for the moment hope announced the
millennium and everybody believed her.

By midnight the town was as weary as a boys’ school after a holiday.
When Patty and her husband reached home they found Keith awake and
waiting for them. Immy was asleep, her head enarmed like a bird’s head
curled under its wing. But Keith was staring from his cot. His little
eight-year-old head was athrob with gigantic plans that made doorknobs
of his eyes.

“Papa, I been thinkin’. You know when I was little I was going to be
the man who lights the street lamps; an’ ’en I was goin’ to be a night
watchman when I got grown up; an’ ’en I was goin’ to be a lawyer like
you are, and help you. But now I guess I’ll be a nengineer an’ build
waterworks an’ aqueducks an’ things like that—like Uncle Harry did the
Croton. And some day they’ll have a percession for me, too. You just
wait and see.”

There was no need for restraint of the laughter with which oldsters
mock youngsters’ dreams. That fatal reference to Chalender wrung the
lips of Patty and her husband with sardonic misery. They had once been
innocent, too, and they were still innocent in ambition. It was life
that made fun of them. What sport would it make of their children?




CHAPTER XXV


The next morning RoBards was awake very betimes, driven from needed
sleep by an onslaught of terrors. A thousand little fiends assailed him
and bound him like Gulliver held fast with threads. RoBards would never
take anxiety lying down, but rose and fought it. So now he broke the
withes of remorse and prophetic frenzy and met the future with defiance.

He took up the morning paper to make sure that yesterday’s pageant had
actually occurred. He glanced hastily through the pages first to see if
his own history had transpired. He half expected to read some clamorous
announcement of a mysterious body found in an old house in Westchester
near Robbin’s Mills.

There was no mention of such a discovery, and he read of the immortal
yesterday, “the most numerous and imposing procession ever seen in any
American city.”

The town had apparently solved its chief problem. His own had just been
posed. How long could he hope to escape discovery? Perhaps the news was
already out. Perhaps the jaded revelers returning to Westchester had
been met by Mrs. Lasher screaming like a fury. Perhaps the house had
caught fire and the cellar walls had broken open with the heat and the
collapse of the timbers, as he had seen big warehouses during the Great
Fire broken open like crushed hickory nuts.

An unendurable need to make sure with his own eyes of the state of
affairs goaded him to action. He ran upstairs to tell Patty some lie
about the necessity for the trip. She was so heavenly asleep that he
could not break the spell. The children were asleep, too.

So he told Cuff to tell them that he had been called back to the
country.

He had the luck to meet a cab and the driver had a good horse that
reached the City Hall Station of the New York and Harlem Railroad just
in time to catch a train North.

As the carriages rolled through Center and Broome Streets and up the
Bowery and on out through the mile-long cut and the quarter-mile
tunnel through solid basalt, RoBards blessed the men that invented
steam-engines, and the good souls who borrowed the money and paid the
good toilers to lay these rails of stout wood with iron bands along the
top. He blessed the men who ran that blessed locomotive. A demon of
haste inspired them and they reached at times a rate well over twenty
miles an hour. He covered the fourteen miles to Williamsbridge in no
time at all compared to stage speed; and the fare was but a shilling!
He had now only eighteen miles to make by the old-fashioned means.

He was a little cruel to the horse he hired and spared the poor hack
neither uphill nor down. But then he was fiercelier lashed by his own
torment.

At last his home swung into view—benign, serene, secure. No lightning,
no fire, no storm had ripped open its walls. There was no excitement
visible except in the fluttering of of a few birds—or were they belated
leaves? The tulip tree stood up, awake, erect, the safe trustee of the
home.

When he passed the Lasher place, he was afraid to go fast lest his
guilt be implied in his haste. He let the galled jade jog. He even
turned and looked the Lasher hovel straight in the face. As the guilty
do, he stared it right in the eyes.

But Mrs. Lasher did not even turn to look at him. She was splitting
wood and her bony fleshless arms seemed to give the ax three helves.
Her head was simply an old sunbonnet. She was faceless, blind and deaf
to everything but work—an old woodpecker of a woman hammering at a
life that was hard and harsh. Yet it was not quite satisfying to have
her so stupid. It was not pleasant to remember that Jud himself was
notoriously worthless.

Strange, that to assassinate a Cæsar or a Henry of Navarre, to put
a Socrates to the hemlock, was of a certain cruel nobility, but to
annihilate an imbecile infamous! It was like stepping on a toad in the
dark.

And this modern theory, that the insane and the criminal and the
witless were poor sick people to be sorry for, was disturbing. Once
the abnormal people had been accused of selling themselves to devils,
renting their bodies to hellish tenants, earning an everlasting home in
hell. But now it was the fashion to say that they were poor souls whom
fate had given only broken or incomplete machines to work with, and
that their punishment was a crime.

If it were true, then he had beaten to death a sick boy whose fearful
deed had been the fumbling of a dolt. Even if it were untrue, he had
sent a wicked youth to hell and Jud would now be frying and shrieking
somewhere under RoBards’ feet.

RoBards fell into such abysmal brooding that he did not notice how
the horse, a stranger to these roads, had turned into a lane and was
no longer advancing but browsing on autumnal fare, nibbling with
prehensile lip at an old rail. The horse himself was an imbecile of his
kind.

For a long while RoBards struggled with black thoughts, each more
dreadful than the other. He was like a man held at the bottom of the
sea by a slimy devilfish, with searing poison and cold fire in the very
touch of each writhing, enveloping arm.

He tore himself loose from all the arms at once with a wild resolve,
like an outcry:

“I’ll not think about it any longer! I’ll go mad if I do!”

He heard his own voice clattering across the fields, woke, looked
about, and felt lost before he realized that he was in one of his own
meadows.

He turned and backed the gig, and reached the highway again. The
farmer, Albeson, was waiting for him, laughing:

“I seen you leave that old fool of a horse go his own sweet way, so
I knowed you was fig’erin’ out some old law-soot or other. I was
wonderin’ haow long you’d set there. Wall, it was a gre’t day yes’day,
wa’n’t it?”

RoBards could laugh with the farmer heartily, for it showed how
innocent his reverie looked to a witness; it showed that Albeson had
not discovered anything amiss about the home.

He breathed elixir in the air and drove on to the house, finding it as
always a mirror to his humor. It had been in turn an ancestral temple,
a refuge from plague, a nuptial bower, a shelter for intrigue, a whited
sepulcher. The tree had been a priest, a hypocrite, and now a faithful
sentinel.

He was brought down again when Mrs. Albeson met him with a query:
“How’s pore little Immy?”

She whispered, though there was no one else in the house.

“Mis’ Lasher has been takin’ on terrible along of her boy Jud lightin’
out for sea. Pity you let him live, for they do say a man what’s borned
to be hung won’t never git drownded.”

This was an exquisite plight: to be blamed for sparing the life he
had already taken. But he dared not give the noisy woman more of his
confidence. Immy’s fate was enough in her power.

He dared not visit the cellar till the farmers had gone to bed, and
then he went down into it as into a grave. It was morbidly cold and the
lamp shivered in his hand.

He found everything as he had left it, and marveled at the neatness of
his work. Yet it seemed not to be his work, but the work of somebody
who had borrowed his frame and used his scholarship for cunning
purposes.

He went back to the library. In this room his soul had found its world.
But now it was an impossible place. The hearthstone there—Chalender
had brought it—it was a headstone over a buried honor. He had often
resolved to tear it out and break it to dust. But now it covered Jud
Lasher, and served him as an anonymous memorial.

What was the quicklime doing down inside there? His heart stopped.
Perhaps it would not work sealed away from the air. He ought to open
the walls and see.

And this set him to trembling in utter confusion, for he recognized
in his own bewilderment the unintelligent maudlin reasoning of the
criminal.

Already he had revisited the scene; already debated an exhumation;
already longed to talk to someone, to boast perhaps.

He was afraid to trust himself to the house, and, making an excuse of
having come for some books and papers, set off again for the city.

When he got down from the cab in front of his home he found Keith in
the bit of front yard. The boy was so absorbed in his task that he
greeted his father absently, as if RoBards were the child and he the
old one. He had dug a shallow channel from the hydrant to the iron
railing, and was laying down pipes of tin and cardboard and any other
rubbish he could find.

“I’m buildin’ an aqueduck from our house to London,” he explained.
“London got burned down once and so the king has sent for me to get
him some water right away, so’s the folks won’t get burned up again.
They’re goin’ to give me a big immense parade and I’m goin’ to ride in
a gold barouche like Uncle Harry did.”

RoBards managed a wry smile and went in. Patty met him with an ancient
look of woe and motioned him into the drawing room. She spoke in a
voice like ashes stirred with a cold wind.

“Immy told me,” she began and dropped into a chair sobbing. “She didn’t
mean to, but she screamed again at nothing and let slip a word or two,
and I got it out of her. She has cried herself sick with remorse at
disobeying you. How could you let that monster live? How could you?”

“He’s dead,” RoBards sighed, and sank on an ottoman, crushed with
weariness.

But Patty was startled to new life. She demanded the whole truth, and
he told her in a dreary, matter-of-fact tone. He told her everything,
including the secret of Jud’s resting place.

The story came from him with the anguish of dragging a sharp chicken
bone from his throat. It cut and left a bleeding and an ache, but it
was wonderful to be free of it.

Patty listened with awe, wide-eyed and panting. There was such need
of being close together under the ruins of their life, that, since he
could not find strength to lift his head or a hand, she leaned forward
toward him till she fell on her knees to the floor and agonized across
the space between them and, creeping close into his bosom, drew his
arms about her, and wept and wept—with him.

Their only words were “oh!” and “oh!” eternally repeated, yet they felt
that only now were their souls made one in a marriage of grief. They
had no bodies; they were mere souls crushed under the broken temple of
their hopes, bruised and wounded and pinioned together in their despair.

Yet there was a kind of pitiful happiness in groping and finding each
other thus, and a bitter ecstasy in being able to love and be loved
utterly at last.




CHAPTER XXVI


Thereafter Patty and RoBards felt a need of keeping close. They slept
together after that, her throat across his left arm. She called it “my
arm,” and when his travels to distant courts took him away from her,
that arm of “hers” was lonely.

Like galls that torment old trees for a while but grow at last into
their structures, the secrets that began as cancers became a part
of the hard gnarled bark that people and trees acquire or perish.
The RoBards home was being held together by misfortunes as much as
affection. The longing for utterance that makes secrets dangerous was
satisfied by common possession. Patty and her husband knew the worst
of each other, and their children, and they made league against the
world’s curiosity.

She was insatiably curious about the secrets of other homes while
protecting her own, but this was hardly so much from malice as from a
longing to feel that other people had as much to conceal as she.

The children had talked the thing over with their parents and the
strain was taken from their minds. Immy less often slashed the silence
with those shrieks of hers. She and Keith were busy growing up and
playing in the toyshop of new experiences.

RoBards tried lawsuits with fair success, and his fees were liberal; he
often secured fifty dollars for a case requiring no more than two or
three days in court. His house rent was six hundred dollars a year, and
his office rent and clerical expenses took another five hundred. This
left enough to give Patty and the children all the necessary comforts,
including two hired women, though most of these were ignorant,
impudent, and brief of stay, even though their wages had gradually
trebled until some of them were demanding as high as two dollars a week.

While RoBards practiced the law, Patty visited the shops and the gossip
marts, went to church, and indulged in modest extravagances of finance,
scandal, and faith.

The baby grew and another came, and went; but Patty never became quite
matronly. She took fierce care of her figure, lacing herself to the
verge of suffocation and trying all the complexion waters advertised.

Patty was the very weather-vane of the fashion-winds. She was not one
of the increasing class of women who boldly invaded the realms of
literature and politics; her battlefield was amusement. She was one of
those of whom a writer in the New York _Review_ said: “The quiet of
domestic life has been lost in this stirring age; nothing will satisfy
but action, notoriety, and distinction.”

Like all the other women, who could (or could not) afford it, Patty
dressed in the brightest of colors and flaunted coquetry in her
fabrics. Visitors from overseas commented on the embarrassments they
had encountered from mistaking the most respectable American wives for
courtesans because of their gaudy street dress, their excessive powder,
their false hair, and their freedom from escort.

The chief cross in her life and her husband’s was the burden of her
parents’ company. They were not interested in modern heresies and
manners, found them disgusting. Patty was bored to frenzy by their
tales of the good old times of their memory.

The old man grew increasingly impatient of the law’s delay. He had less
and less time to spend on earth, and that two hundred thousand dollars
the city owed him grew more and more important.

It seemed impossible, however, to speed the courts. One or two similar
suits against the city on account of buildings similarly blown up to
check the fire of 1835 were won by the city, and RoBards dreaded the
outcome of his father-in-law’s claim. He dreaded the loss of the vast
sum at stake even less than the effect of the loss on Mr. Jessamine’s
sanity.

The fire had died out and its ravages were overbuilt for ten years
before the case drew up to the head of the docket at last. As Mr.
Jessamine grew more and more frantic, he felt less and less confident
of his son-in-law’s ability to win the action. He insisted upon the
hiring of additional counsel and cruelly wounded RoBards by his frank
mistrust. But he could not make up his mind what lawyer to employ, and
since he was out of funds, he must depend on his son-in-law to advance
the fee for his own humiliation.

Patty herself was zealous for the splendor that two hundred thousand
dollars would add to the establishment which she found all too plain in
spite of her husband’s indulgence. And she shamed him woefully by her
lack of confidence. She saw his hurt and added exquisiteness to it by
constantly saying:

“Of course, I think my Mist’ RoBards is the finest lawyer in the world,
but can the judges be relied on to appreciate you?”

Lying on his arm she would waken him from slumbers just begun by
crooning:

“Two hundred thousand dollars! Think of it! Papa and Mamma are too old
to spend it, so we should have the benefit. I’d buy you a yacht so that
you could join the new club, and I’d buy myself—what wouldn’t I buy
myself!”

“First catch your cash, my dear,” RoBards would mumble, and try in vain
to drown himself in a pool of sleep that would not accept him, though
Patty sank away to blissful depths of oblivion.

       *       *       *       *       *

One hot July New York daybreak had just begun to annoy his unrested
eyes when the fire bells broke out. He had promised himself and Patty
long ago to resign from his company, but a sense of civic duty had kept
him in the ranks.

Patty slept so well among her visions of wealth that she did not heed
when he withdrew his arm from under her head, nor hear him getting into
his uniform.

Remembering the icy December night of the disaster of 1835, he rejoiced
in the absence of wind and the plentitude of the Croton water. Neptune
would soon prevail over his enemy element, as in the banners of the
parade.

The Fire Kings, who had been frost-nipped on that other night, were
dripping with sweat this morning when they drew near the origin of
the fire in a New Street warehouse. This contained a great mass of
stored saltpeter, and it exploded just as the Fire Kings coupled up
their hose. The world rocked about them. Buildings went over as if an
earthquake had rattled the island. The glass of a thousand windows rang
and snapped and the air rained blocks of granite, timbers and chimneys.

Two of the Fire Kings were struck dead at RoBards’ side, and he was
bruised and knocked down. The whole fire army was put to rout and the
flames bounding in all directions were soon devouring a hundred and
fifty buildings at once, most of them new structures that had risen in
the ashes of 1835.

Once more the fear of doom fell upon the city, but after three hundred
and sixty-five of the city’s most important buildings were piled in
embers, the Croton came to the rescue.

Once more the heart of the city’s commerce was eaten out. Again the
insurance companies went bankrupt in the hour they had assumed to
provide against. Once more financial dismay shook the stout frame of
the town.

Yet carpenters and masons were at work before the ruins ceased to
smoke, though they had to wear gloves to protect them from brick and
stone too hot to be touched with naked hands.

When RoBards came home after the fire, Patty was still blessedly
asleep. She woke with a little cry of petulance when his helmet fell
from his bruised hand as he lifted it from his bleeding forehead and
dropped sickly into a chair. But when she saw how hurt he was, she was
at his side in an instant, hurrying like a slipperless Oceanid to
comfort him. The battered hero’s wounds were made worth while when they
brought the delicate ministrations of the barefoot nymph in the flying
white gown, so thin that it seemed to blush wherever it touched the
flesh beneath. Patty looked all the bonnier for the panic that left her
nightcap askew upon the array of curl papers bordering her anxious brow.

And the fire had another benefit. It brought to old Jessamine the
first grin of genuine contentment RoBards had seen on his twisted lips
since 1835. For the old wretch chuckled to realize that many a wealthy
merchant whose carriage dust he had had to take afoot for ten years was
now brought down to his own miserable level.

If only he could drag his two hundred thousand out of the city, he that
had been poor among the rich, would be rich among the poor. That would
be repayment with usury.

He could hardly endure to await the day when he should regain his
glory, and he smothered Patty when she brought home the inspiration
that promised to hasten his triumph.

She brought it home from a party, from a dinner so fashionable that it
was not begun until seven o’clock. In only a few years the correct hour
had been shoved further and further down the day from three o’clock
in the afternoon until deep into the evening. At the same time the
fashionable residence district had pushed out into the country until
it was necessary for the RoBards’ hired carriage to travel for this
occasion out Hudson Street for two miles to Ninth Avenue and nearly a
mile more to Twenty-eighth Street. And Patty laughed into his ear:

“It’s nice to be bound for the North Pole on so hot a night.”

She was blissful as a new queen in her peculiarly lustrous dress of
peach-blossom silk.

RoBards marveled at the perverse heroism with which she and other women
endured these martyrdoms to vanity. He had ridiculed Patty’s devotion
to tight stays for years, with the usual effect of male counsel on
female conduct. She was not likely to yield to a husband’s satires,
since her sex had mocked at similar opinion since the beginning of
the world. Preachers had denounced corsets in vain; the word was
not considered decent, but a man may say anything across a pulpit.
Physicians had uttered warnings in private and public. They had traced
all the evils of modern infirmity to corsets; but their patients
groaned and persevered. Anatomists described the distorted livers and
lungs of ladies they found in _post-mortems_—in vain.

King Joseph II. had forbidden stays in orphan schools and convents
and had put them on female convicts, in the hope of diminishing their
prestige, but the women went their sweet way with secret laughter.

When RoBards quoted the parsons against the corsets, Patty answered:

“If God didn’t want women to wear corsets, why did he fill the seas
with whales and fill the whales with whalebone? What else is it good
for?”

Heaven was an appellate court that RoBards did not practice in, and he
dropped the case.

To-night he had watched Patty devoting half an hour of anguish to
the throttling of her waist. She slept in “night stays” now to make
the daytime constriction easier, but the new peach blossom silk had
demanded too much—or too little.

After three efforts to pull the strings to the necessary tightness, she
had sunk into a chair, bathed in sweat, pleading for help. And RoBards
was so sorry for her that he actually put his strength to the infamous
task of lacing his own wife into an impossible cone. But she thanked
him for the torture and pirouetted before her mirror in rapture.

And now in the carriage, though she could hardly sit up straight, she
was so happy that RoBards, delighting in anything that could delight
her, leaned near to press his lips against her cheek.

She was the mother of a long family, yet she was still a girl, and a
girl by virtue—or by vice—of avoiding the penalties of growing up. Her
extravagances, her flippancies, her very determination to evade the
burdens of grief and responsibility, her refusal to be in earnest
about anything but beauty, were, after all, the only means of keeping
beauty.

At such moments, he felt that she and her sort alone were wise; and
that those who bent to the yoke of life were not the wise and noble
creatures they thought themselves, but only stolid, sexless, stupid
oxen. She still had wings because she used them always, was always
fugitive.

At this bright dinner there were many eminent women among the eminent
men in the drawing room. There were two mayors, Mr. Havemeyer, newly
elected, and Mr. Harper, of the Native American Party, who had failed
of re-election but had won the city’s gratitude by discarding the old
night watchman system of “Leatherheads” for a police force of eight
hundred men in uniform—and none too many in view of the prevalence of
all manner of crime.

Commodore Stevens of the new yacht club was there; also Mr. A. T.
Stewart, who was building a great store in Broadway, and sealing its
doom as a street of homes.

A picturesque guest was Mrs. Anne Cora Mowatt, who had written a
successful play called “Fashion,” though she had never been behind the
scenes, and who had followed it up by becoming an actress and playing
“The Lady of Lyons” after one rehearsal. And she had triumphed! This
was a new way for a woman to repair her broken fortunes.

Across from her and somewhat terrified by the situation was the Rev.
Dr. Chirnside, who abhorred the playhouse and never failed to view with
alarm the fact that New York already had eight theatres and that they
were rebuilt as fast as they burned down—which was pretty fast. Against
these there were only a hundred and sixty churches, including nine
African, six Catholic churches and four synagogues.

RoBards’ heart lurched as always when he saw Harry Chalender in the
drawing room. He heard him saying:

“They tell me that the number of theatres in town has not increased
in years, though the churches have tripled in number. Yet crime has
mightily increased. How do you explain that?”

“You are flippant, sir!” said Dr. Chirnside.

When Patty made her entrance, swimming in like a mermaid waist-deep in
a peach-blossom billow, all the babble stopped. All the eyes rolled her
way. Her husband following her, slim, black, and solemn, felt a mere
lackey, and yet was proud to lag at heel of such a vision.

His pride sickened and his heart lurched when he saw Harry Chalender
push forward and lift her hand to his lips. RoBards had once seen those
lips on his wife’s mouth, and he felt now that he ought in common
decency to crush them both to death.

But, of course, he did not even frown when he shook Chalender’s hand.
After all, Chalender had saved his life once—that black night in the
fire of 1835, and he felt a twisted obligation.

Another twisted emotion was his delight when he saw Chalender crowded
away from Patty by other men. He felt that a man ought either to cage
his wife in a cell or give up all respectable ideas of monopoly or
monogamy. One might as well accept these insane notions of women’s
rights to their own souls. And with the souls would go the bodies, of
course. And then the home, the family, society, the nation were lost.
He could not imagine the chaos that would ensue. His own heart was a
seething chaos in little.

And then all the men were eclipsed by the entrance of Daniel Webster—no
less a giant than Daniel Webster. As a citizen RoBards felt an awe for
him; as a lawyer, a reverence.

Patty gasped with pride at meeting the man. She bowed so low that she
almost sat on the floor. And Webster, looking down on her, bent till
his vast skull was almost on a level with Patty’s little china-doll
head.

Her humility was such a pretty tribute to his genius that his confusion
was perfect. His mastiff jaws wagged with the shock of her grace. His
huge eyes saddened in a distress of homage. For once he could find no
words. There was only a groan of contentment in that columnar throat,
equally famous for its thirst and for the eloquence of the angelic
voice that stormed the senate chamber and shook the judicial benches,
yet purled like a brook at a female ear.

Patty almost swooned when she learned that she was to go out on
Webster’s arm.

When the black servants folded back the doors, a table like a lake of
mahogany waited them, gleaming with a flotilla of heavily laden silver,
platters, tureens, baskets, and bowls in a triple line.

Patty and the leonine Daniel followed the lady of the mansion, and
when she was formally handed to her throne, the clatter began. The
servants fairly rained food upon the guests, soup and fish and ham and
turkey, venison and mutton, corn and all the vegetables available,
sweets of every savor, cheeses and fruits, claret and champagne and a
dulcet Madeira brought down from the attic where it had spent its years
swinging from the heat of the sun-baked roof to the chill of the long
winters.

RoBards noted that many of his old schoolmates, still boys in his
eye, were far older than Patty had allowed him to be. And their wives
were as shapeless as the haunches of meat whose slices they attacked
without grace. Patty made a religion of little manners and charming
affectations. She took off her gloves with caressing upward strokes
and folded them under her napkin. She sipped her soup with a birdlike
mincing that was beyond cavil.

And when Mr. Webster, with old-fashioned courtesy, challenged her to
champagne, she accepted the challenge, selecting the wine he named,
held her glass to be filled, and while the bubbles tumbled and foamed
to the brim and broke over it in a tiny spray, she looked into the
monstrous eyes of the modern Demosthenes, and with the silent eloquence
of her smile, nullified the ponderous phrases he would have rolled upon
her.

He found his voice later, but RoBards could hear Patty’s voice now and
then, tinkling like raindrops between thunders. And finally he heard
her murmur in little gasps:

“Oh, Mr. Senator!—if only you—you!—would take my father’s case—against
this wicked, wicked city—then—justice would be done—at last—for once at
least.”

A faintness, less of jealousy than despair, made RoBards put down his
Madeira glass so sharply that a blotch of the wine darkened the linen
of the cloth. He set the glass above the stain lest the hostess see him
and want to murder him. And this blunder completed his misery.

But Patty stared up into Webster’s eyes as if she had never seen a man
before.

By this time Mr. Webster was well toward the befuddlement for which he
was noted, and his reply was more fervent than elegant:

“My dear, ’f you want my assisshance in your father’s—your father’s
lawsuit, I shall consider it a prilivege, a glorious pril—op’tunity to
pay homage to one of mos’ beau’iful wom’n, one of mos’ charming—Madam,
I shallenge you to champ—champagne.”

Patty went through the rites again, but put her hand across the glass
when the servant would have refilled it. She finished her dessert, and
deftly resumed her gloves before the hostess threw down her napkin
and rose to lead the ladies to the dressing room. Patty, for all her
accepted challenges, was one of the few women who made the door without
a waver.

Her husband followed her with his eyes and longed to go with her and
unpack his heart of the grudge it held. In his very presence she had
asked another lawyer to supply the ability she denied him. But he had
to stay and watch with disgust the long tippling and prattling and male
gossip.

A few of the men told stories of excellent spice, but some were as
loathsome to his mood as one of the worm-eaten walnuts that he bit into
before he realized its estate. He had no stomach for Harry Chalender’s
gabble, and found nothing but impudence and bad taste in the problem
Chalender posed to poor old Dr. Chirnside. Harry said that he had made
a ghastly mistake. In talking to a well-bred young female who had
snubbed him for insulting her by offering to help her on with her
shawl, he had somehow let slip the obscene word, “corsets.” The young
lady pretended not to have understood, but blenched in silence.

An old lady who overheard him, however, told him that she was old
enough to advise him to apologize for the slip. He promised rashly, but
was at his wit’s end for the procedure.

“I appeal to you, Dr. Chirnside,” he said, “for spiritual help. How
shall I apologize to that young gazelle for using the word ‘corsets’
in her presence—without once more using the word ‘corsets’ in her
presence?”

Dr. Chirnside took refuge in offended dignity, stated that a word unfit
for the female ear was equally unfit for the ear of a gentleman. He
choked on a last gulp of port, and moved to the drawing room with more
rectitude in his head than his legs.

Chalender was rebuked by a solemn gentleman who regretted the
increasing indelicacy of manners. If women’s innocence were not
protected where would human society look for safety?

“My wife had a most shocking experience recently,” he said. “We sent
our daughter to Mrs. Willard’s school at Troy and what do you suppose
they taught that poor child, sir? I should not have believed it if my
wife had not told me. She could never have believed it if she had not
seen it with her own eyes.

“A woman teacher, a most unwomanly teacher, drew on a blackboard, sir,
pictures of the internal organs of women, the heart, the arteries, and
the veins! Yes, sir, by God, sir, she did! My wife and several mothers
who chanced to be visiting the classroom rose in their indignation
and left the room. They were too shocked to command their daughters
to violate the discipline of the school. But I shall withdraw my
daughter from such precincts, I assure you. Is nothing to be sacred? Is
everything to be spoken of openly in these atheistic times? I ask you,
sir, I ask you!”

Chalender winked at RoBards while the old gentleman’s tears of
wrath salted his port. Chalender wailed, “But nobody tells me how to
apologize for saying corsets.” He was incorrigible.

RoBards felt that his own predicament was as silly as Chalender’s, yet
it was of equal torment. How could he rid himself of Mr. Webster? How
could he endure his ponderous association?

The giant grew less and less awesome as he absorbed more and more
liquor. RoBards began to hope that all memory of his pledge to Patty
might be lost in the enormous ache which that enormous head would feel
the next morning.

It was not.

On the next morning, Patty received a note from the Astor House where
Mr. Webster lived when in New York. She took it to her father with a
cry of pride:

“See, papa, what I’ve brought you, Mr. Webster’s head on a platter.”

All that RoBards could say in self-defense was a rather petty sarcasm:
“I hope that Mr. Webster doesn’t do for you what he did not long ago:
he drank so much that he tried the wrong side of the case.”

Patty snapped back at him: “Yes, but before he sat down, someone told
him of his mistake, and he went right on and answered all his own
arguments—and won for his client: as he will for Papa.”

“I hope so,” RoBards groaned, wondering if he really hoped so.

Old Jessamine was so sure now of his two hundred thousand dollars that
he decided to spend more of it in making doubly sure. He would engage
the next best lawyer in America, Benjamin F. Butler.

“With Webster and Butler as my counsel,” he roared, “I’ll make even
this old city pay its honest debts.”

RoBards’ head drooped as he noted that his own name was not even
mentioned, though he had fought the case for ten years at his own
expense and must instruct the two Titans in all its details.

He felt a little meaner than ever when Patty noted his shameful
distress and said:

“Don’t forget, papa, that you have also the distinguished assistance of
the eminent Mr. David RoBards.”

“Umm—ah—yes! Yes, yes, of course, of course!”

But lesser alarms were lost in greater. And when RoBards went to the
post office he found there a letter from his farmer:

  Mr. D. RoBards esqe.

 Las nite in the big storm here youre chimbley was strok by litening
 and the seller wall all broke wat shall I do about it or will you get
 a mason from the sitty with respects as ever youre obed. servt.

  J. ALBESON

 P S. Too cows was also strok by litening and a toolup tree.

  J. A.

The letter was itself a lightning stroke in RoBards’ peace. Time and
security had almost walled up Jud Lasher’s memory in oblivion. And
now he seemed to see the body disclosed by a thunderbolt from heaven
splitting apart the stones to show it grinning and malevolent.

After the first shock he realized that the body could not have been
revealed or Albeson would have mentioned it. This gave him one deep
breath of relief.

Then fear took the reins and made his heart gallop anew; for how could
he expect a mason to repair the walls without tearing deep into the
foundation of the chimney?




CHAPTER XXVII


The mystery and terror of the sky-flung thunder were restored to their
old power over RoBards’ soul by the news from Tuliptree Farm.

The lightning had suffered a distinct loss of social prestige when Ben
Franklin coaxed it out of the clouds with a kite-string and crowded
it into a pickle jar. Its immemorial religious standing had been
practically destroyed. To complete its humiliation from the estate
of divine missile, Professor Morse had recently set it to carrying
messages, writing dots and dashes, and racing back and forth along a
wire like a retriever.

But now again it took the form of God’s great index finger thrust from
the heavens to point out the deed too safely buried in the walls of
RoBards’ home.

He could have wished that Professor Morse’s lightning might have
brought him instant news of the actual appearance of the shattered
chimney. There was a wire all the way between New York and
Philadelphia, but the far-writer had not been extended north as yet.

So RoBards must take the train. Fortunately the New York and Harlem
Railroad had already reached White Plains, and he had only five miles
more to ride on a horse of flesh and blood. His eyes scanned the
horizon fiercely, and his heart beat with such a criminal’s anxiety
that he would almost have welcomed the exposure of his crime—if crime
it were.

The first thing that topped his horizon was the great tulip tree
overtowering the house. Its lofty plume was untarnished. Some other
tree, then, must have been blasted. Next, the roof-line rose to view.
It looked strange with the chimney gone.

As the road curved in its approach, he saw where the brick were torn
away, the clapboards singed with the streaked fire, and the foundation
stones ripped open.

The farmer met him at the gate with cordial homage and a crude
buffoonery more pleasant to his ear than the most elegant epigram,
since it proved him still ignorant of what the walls contained.

“Thar lays your chimbley, Mr. RoBards,” he said, “jest as the Lord left
her. I ain’t teched e’er a brick, and I told the wife not to heave none
of ’em at me when she lost her temper—so to speak, seein’ as she don’t
seem to have ever found it, haw haw haw!”

“He will have his joke!” Mrs. Albeson tittered.

“A sense of humor certainly helps you through the world,” said her
husband as he took the horse in charge. Mrs. Albeson waddled after
RoBards, and checked him to murmur:

“Haow’s pore little Immy?”

That eternal reminder hurt him sore. She startled him by adding, “Old
Mis’ Lasher keeps hangin’ about. More trouble! One of her girls has
ran away with a hired man from the city, and she’s more lost than the
boy that’s went a-whalin’. Mis’ Lasher prob’ly seen you drive past and
she’ll likely be along any minute naow.”

“Yes, yes; very well; all right,” said RoBards, impatient to be alone.
And Mrs. Albeson went back to her kitchen, taking her snub patiently.

RoBards studied the course of the thunderbolt and was glad that he had
not been present to see it smite and hear it. He would probably have
died of fear. He shivered now with the bare imagination, and cravenly
wondered if any thrill of it could have stirred Jud Lasher.

He was so absorbed in this fantasy that he jumped when Albeson spoke
across his shoulder:

“Looks like to me, the mason would have to pull the whole thing daown,
shore up the walls, dig out the foundation, and set her up all over
again!”

“Nonsense!” said RoBards.

“All right! It’s your haouse. Mend it the way you want to.”

RoBards sent him to White Plains to fetch a mason, and remained to
study the crevice that split the thick foundation as if Achilles had
hurled his own unequaled javelin of Pelian ash into the tomb of another
Patroclus. The fabric of the cellar wall was not opened all the way,
but the wedge of the gap pointed right at the burial chamber.

As he wondered how soon some casual inspector would follow the lead of
that arrow head and break open the wall, RoBards heard at his elbow
that well-remembered querulous sniffle of Mrs. Lasher’s:

“H’are ye, Mist’ RoBards? Too bad what the lightnin’ done to your nice
house, ain’t it? But the Lord has his reasons, I expect. Here he hits
your home where there’s never been any wickedness and leaves mine
alone, as if there had ever been anything else there.

“What I wanted to ask you was this, please; I was talkin’ to you about
the boy Jud goin’ away to sea. Well, I ain’t heard a word from the pore
child sence. Where d’you s’pose he could be now?—ridin’ out on a mast
most like; or sinkin’ in a whaleboat that some whale has knocked to
flinders with one swat of his tail. A friend of my husband’s was here
recent, and he’d been on a whaler and he told me terrible things.

“Poor Jud! There ain’t never a night but I pray the Lord to look after
him and be a mother to him, but I do’ know. Sometimes of nights I dream
about him. I see him drownin’ and callin’ to me, ‘Maw! Maw! save me!’
I wake up all of a sweat and tremblin’ like mad, but his voice goes on
callin’ me. Sometimes it follers me all day long. I can see him out in
that terrible big ocean—just one pore boy in all that sea with nobody
to call to but his mother. Oh, God, sir, it’s no fun.”

It would have been a mercy of a sort to end her nightmares with a word
of assurance that her son would never die of drowning. But RoBards
had his own children to consider. It seemed to him that a man must
sometimes lie for posterity’s sake. This legacy of truth he had no
right to entail upon his children. He must take his deed and all its
consequences to hell with him.

So there they stood, the murderer and the mother, staring at the very
tomb of the boy; she thinking him at sea and he wondering whether or
no he were dancing in infernal flames. Perhaps those cries his mother
heard were not from the width of the Pacific but from the depths.

“But what I was gittin’ at,” Mrs. Lasher went on, “was my daughter
Molly—a pirty thing as ever was, but wild! She couldn’t see no future
up here. Nobody wanted to marry her or be honest with her. And so one
night she never come home at all. Where is she now? She’s in a deeper
sea, I guess, than her brother. A man was sayin’ there’s eighteen
thousand bad women in New York now—if you’ll excuse me mentionin’ it.
Something tells me she’s one of ’em, but I never could find her if I
went to look. I get lost so easy. She wouldn’t come back here if I
did. Why should she? But why should all my children go wrong? I was
wonderin’ if you could look for her or send somebody or do somethin’. I
don’t know anybody. But you know the town and you’re a good honest man
if ever they was one.”

“If ever they was one!” RoBards wondered if ever indeed there had been
an honest man. He had meant to be one, but he had lapsed into the
profound. And nothing so filled him with self-horror as his new and
protecting genius in hypocrisy. What a Judas he was—to stand here and
let the mother of the boy he had slain praise him, and pour out praise
upon him! What a hypocrite this house itself must be! What liars those
stolid walls that embraced and concealed the dead, and even in the face
of the denouncing thunderbolt kept their composure, and did not reveal
the cadaver in their deep bosom.

He promised to search for Molly, and the mother went away comforted,
to pray for her girl and to pray for the boy, and to pray for her kind
friend Mr. RoBards. And God took her prayers! had taken them and never
given her a sign that the boy she asked all-seeing Heaven to guard
a thousand leagues distant was lying immured at her feet! If Heaven
could lie so blandly by keeping silence, no wonder men could perjure
themselves by standing mute.

By and by Albeson returned with Failes, the bricklayer.

Little as he knew of the ancient art of masonry, RoBards was determined
that no member of that guild should bring a lawyer to the law.

Failes wanted to tear the whole foundation away and start all over.
Every art and trade has its religion, and this mason’s was a stubborn
belief in doing a job thorough. But he yielded at last to RoBards’
insistence, and charged an extra price for the surrender, and a further
sum for beginning at once.

As an excuse for his haste RoBards alleged the necessity of his
presence in town. When Failes said that he didn’t need any legal advice
about layin’ brick and patchin’ stone, RoBards made other pretexts for
delay. He dared not leave the house until the broken tomb was sealed
again.

Days went racking by while the mason’s leisurely procedure, his
incessant meditation upon nothing at all, his readiness to stop and
chatter, drove RoBards almost out of his wits.

But at last the chimney stood erect again, dappled with new brick and
crisscrossed with white mortar unweathered.

Then and then only, RoBards went back to New York, to tell more lies to
Mr. Jessamine, who wondered at his neglect of the necessary conferences
with Daniel Webster and Benjamin F. Butler, whom some called General
because he had been Attorney General under Jackson and Van Buren, and
some called Professor because he was the chief instructor at the City
University.

RoBards outlined the situation as he saw it and they accepted his
reasoning without demur. They would also accept a heavy fee without
demur.

The case was called in the in the City Hall building on a day of
stifling heat. There was something disheartening in the very air,
and RoBards gave up hope. The counsel for the city objected to the
reargument of the case on the ground that the legal principles involved
had already been decided in the city’s favor in the similar Fire Case
of Tabelee _et al._ _vs._ the Mayor _et al._

Old Jessamine knew nothing of legal principles and RoBards could hardly
keep him from popping up and blustering what he whispered to Webster:

“Legal principles! legal bosh! I’ve been poor for ten years now and the
city has grown fat and rich, and it has no right to send one of its
most honorable merchants down to a pauper’s grave for no fault of his
own. Make ’em give me my two hundred thousand dollars or they’ll murder
me with their ‘legal principles.’”

Mr. Webster nodded his great head and agreed that Mr. Jessamine was
right, but the law must take its course.

General Butler pleaded with the judges in their own language, and they
consented to hear the case, though it was plain that they wanted only
to hear Mr. Webster. They wanted to hear that trombone voice peal forth
its superhuman music. The words would mean no more than the libretto of
the Italian works sung at Palmo’s Opera House.




CHAPTER XXVIII


The assembly was worthy of the suit and of the vast amount involved. It
thrilled old Jessamine to be the man who dragged the metropolis itself
to the bar of its own conscience, and demanded penance.

The court was large and stately. In addition to the three judges of the
Supreme Court, and the Chancellor, the state senators were gathered in
judgment under the presidence of the Lieutenant Governor.

The trial was as long as it was large. As attorney for the plaintiff,
General Butler spoke for a day. Mr. Graham spent another day in defense
of the city. RoBards had his day in court, but his spirit was quenched
by the knowledge that he was heeded only as so much sand pouring
through the throat of the hourglass. Webster, who sat and sweat and
listened in silence, was the one thing waited for.

The news that he was at last to speak packed the courtroom with
spectators. The day was suffocating. The humidity thrust needles into
the flesh, and the voice of Webster was like the thunder that prowls
along the hills on a torrid afternoon.

For five hours he spoke, and enchanted people who cared little what
words made up his rhapsody. His presence was embodied majesty; his
voice an apocalyptic trumpet; his gestures epic; his argument rolled
along with the rhythm, the flood, the logic of an Iliad.

The audience would have given him any verdict he asked. Old Jessamine
wept with certainty of his triumph. It was sublime to be the theme of
such a rhapsody, and when the old man heard his rights proclaimed and
his wrongs denounced by Stentor himself, he felt himself an injured god.

For five hours Webster—well, there was hardly a verb for what he did.
Patty said that Webster just “websted.” Her word was as good as any.
Then the court adjourned for the day and the spectators went out to
breathe the common air.

The exhausted orator was led into the Governor’s Room in the City Hall,
where wine was brought him in quantity. He was soon refreshed enough to
receive congratulations on his achievement. But he shook his head and
groaned, “I was very uncomfortable. I felt as if I were addressing a
packed jury.”

The moan from the sick lion threw a great fear into old Jessamine’s
heart, and he listened with terror next day to the long argument of the
counselor who spoke for the city to a much diminished audience.

Waiting for the court to reach a verdict was worse than the trial. And
the verdict was doom—doom with damages. An almost unanimous decision
condemned Jessamine to poverty and decreed that he had no claim against
the city.

Patty ran to her father’s side and upheld him, while her mother knelt
and wept at his other elbow. But he was inconsolable.

He had counted on triumphing through the streets where he had shuffled.
He had spent magnificently the money he was going to get. They hurried
him home in a closed carriage, but he could not endure the calls of old
friends and enemies who came to express their sympathy. He collapsed
like the tall chimney the lightning had struck at Tuliptree.

It was Patty of all people who begged RoBards to take him and her and
her mother to the farm. Even she longed for obscurity, for she also had
squandered royally that money that never arrived.

They left the children at home with Teen, and set out as on a long
funeral ride, with their dreams in the hearse. The journey by train
was too public and the railroad was a new-fangled, nerve-wrecking
toy. It was dangerous, too—almost as dangerous as the steamboats that
were blowing up, burning up, and sinking on all the seas and rivers,
dragging their passengers to triple deaths. People were forgetting how
many people had been killed by horses. They seemed to think that death
itself was a modern invention.

Old Jessamine had to endure a hired carriage with a shabby driver who
talked and spat incessantly. When they reached at last the farm, the
senile wretch was racked of body and soul and they put him to bed, a
white-haired, whimpering infant.

The rest were so wearied of the effort to console him that they grew
disgusted with grief. Patty had just so much sympathy in her heart.
When that was used up, you came to the bitter lees of it. She began
to scold her father and at length produced a bottle of laudanum that
she kept to quiet the children with when they cried too long. She
threatened her father with it now:

“You big baby! If you don’t stop that noise and go to sleep this very
instant, I’ll give you enough of these sleeping drops to quiet you for
a week.”

She remembered afterward the strange look he cast upon the phial and
how his eyes followed it when she put it back in the cupboard’s little
forest of drugs and lotions that had accumulated there for years.

Her father wept no more. He lay so quiet that she put her mother to
bed alongside him. As she bent to kiss him good night, he put up his
ancient arms and drew her head down and whispered, like a repentant
child:

“I’m sorry, my sweet, to be so great a pest to everybody. Forgive me,
honey! I wanted to cover you with jewels and satins and everything your
pretty heart could wish, but—but—I’ve lived too long.”

“Now! now!” said Patty, kissing him again as she turned away to quell
the sobs that sprang to her throat.

Her mother was already fast asleep in her nightcap and her well-earned
wrinkles; her teeth on the bureau and her mouth cruelly ancient. Her
father stared at Patty with the somber old eyes of a beaten hound. Life
had whipped him.

Doleful enough, Patty lay down at the side of her husband, who was
even more forlorn than usual. She groaned:

“Oh, dear, such an unhappy world as this is!”

Then she sank away to sleep. She dreamed at length of hands snatching
at her, of Macbeth and his hags about the cauldron of trouble.

She woke to find her mother looking a very witch and plucking at her
with one hand, while she clutched at her own throat with the other. She
kept croaking something with her toothless gums. It was long before
Patty could make it out:

“Come quick! Your papa has k-k-k—your papa has k-k-killed himshelf;
killed himshelf!”

Patty flung away drowsiness as one whips off a coverlet, and leaped
from her bed, seizing her husband’s arm and shrieking to him to follow.




CHAPTER XXIX


Sleep was like laudanum in RoBards’ tired soul and he stumbled
drunkenly after his wife.

They found old Jessamine sprawled along the floor, his scrawny legs
thrust stiffly out of his nightgown, his toes turned up in all
awkwardness. His ropy neck seemed to have released the head rolled
aside on one cheek. Near an outspread hand lay the bottle of soothing
lotion. The cork was gone, but nothing poured from the bottle. It had
been drained. The cupboard door stood open.

Patty and her mother flung themselves down and implored a word from
the suddenly re-beloved saint. But RoBards knew that they called to
death-deafened ears. He could not feel frantic. A dull calm possessed
him.

The women’s screams woke the farmer and he was heard pounding for
admission. RoBards’ first thought was one of caution. He bent down by
Patty and said:

“We must get the poor old boy back in his bed. We mustn’t let anybody
know that he—that he——”

Patty looked up at him in amazement and he felt a certain rebuke of him
for being so cold-hearted as to be discreet at such a time. But she
nodded and helped him lift the unresisting, unassisting frame to the
bed and dispose its unruled members orderly.

Then he went down and unlatching the door confronted the Albesons with
a lie of convenience:

“Mr. Jessamine has been taken very ill—very ill. Saddle me a horse and
I’ll go for a doctor.”

There was a tonic in the privilege of action. He flung into his
clothes, and kissing Patty good-by, ran down the stairs and out into
the starlit deeps. He stepped from the porch right into the saddle, and
the horse launched out like a sea gull.

Startled from sleep, it was wild with the unusual call to action and
ran with fury along the black miles. RoBards’ hat flew back at the
first rush of wind but he did not pause to hunt it. The air was edged
with cold and watery with mist. Now and then the road dipped into pools
of fog. Riding in such night was like being drawn through the depths
of an ocean. RoBards swam as on the back of a sea horse. There was no
sound except the snorting of his nag and the _diddirum-diddirum_ of
hoofs that made no question of the road, but smoothed it all with speed.

The doctor they always summoned at night was Dr. Matson, a fierce
wizard who would never have been invoked if there had been a more
gracious physician available. Dr. Matson horrified ladies by asking
them blunt questions about the insides they were not supposed to have,
and by telling them things in horrible Anglo Saxon simples instead of
decent Latinity. He cursed outrageously, too. But he never let rain or
sleet or flood or ice or any other impoliteness of circumstances keep
him from a patient. He was not often entirely sober and now and then
he was ugly drunk. But he never fell off his horse; his hands never
hesitated, his knives rarely slipped, even though the patients leaped
and yelped. Though he battled death with oaths and herbs and loud
defiances, he fought. He fought like a swimmer trying to bring ashore
some swooning soul about to drown.

He was just putting up his horse after a long ride in the opposite
direction when RoBards reined in. Dr. Matson did not wait to be
invited, but slapped the saddle on the dripping back of his puffing
nag, climbed aboard and was on the way before he asked, “Well, what’s
the matter with who this time?”

Doctors and lawyers have a right to the truth in a crisis and RoBards
was glad of the dark when he confessed the shame of self-murder that
had stained the old house.

It was evident to Dr. Matson that he could be of no use as a physician,
and another might have turned back, but he knew there would still be
need of him. RoBards finally managed to say:

“Is there any way to—must we—have you got to let everybody know that
the poor old gentleman—that he—did it himself?”

Matson did not answer for half a mile. Then he laughed aloud:

“I get what you’re driving at. I guess I can fix it.”

RoBards explained: “You see, the blow of his death is enough for his
poor wife and my poor wife, and the—the disgrace would be too much for
them to bear.”

This did not please the doctor so well:

“Disgrace, did you say? Well, I suppose it would be, in the eyes of
the damned fools that folks are. But I say the old man did the brave
thing—the right thing. He died like a Roman. But it’s the fashion
to call such courage cowardice or crime, so I’ll fix it up. Down in
the city now, the undertakers have blank certificates already signed
by the doctors so the undertakers can fill in the favorite form of
death—anything their customers ask for. We ought to do as well up here.
All the modern conveniences!”

His sardonic cackle made RoBards shudder, but when the harsh brute
stood by the bedside and by laying on of hands verified the permanent
retirement of the old merchant he spoke with a strange gentleness:

“It was heart failure, Mrs. Jessamine. Your husband had strained his
heart by overwork and overanxiety for you. His big heart just broke.
That bottle had nothin’ to do with it.” He sniffed it again. “It’s only
an adulteration anyway. You can’t even buy honest poison nowadays.
That’s just bitters and water—wouldn’t harm a fly. Grand old man, Mr.
Jessamine. They don’t make merchants like him any more. It wa’n’t his
fault he wa’n’t the biggest man in New York. He fought hard and died
like a soldier. And now you get some sleep or I’ll give you some real
sleeping drops.”

He began to bluster again and they were grateful to be bullied. RoBards
regarded him with awe, this great strong man breaking the withes of
truth for the rescue of others.

Dr. Matson made out a certificate of heart failure, and nobody
questioned it. When Dr. Chirnside came up to preach the funeral sermon,
he said that the Lord had called a good man home to well-earned rest.
This old preacher was better than his creed. He would have lied,
too, if he had known the truth; for human sympathy is so much more
divine than the acrid theologies men concoct, that he would have told
the sweetest falsehoods he could frame above the white body of his
parishioner, for the sake of the aching hearts that still lived.

And this is the saving grace and glory of humanity at its best: that in
a crisis of agony it proves false to the false gods and inhuman creeds
it has invented in colder moods.




CHAPTER XXX


The old man joined his two little grandchildren in the cluster of young
tulip trees, and RoBards later built a fence about the knoll to make it
sacred ground.

The New York papers published encomiums upon Mr. Jessamine and called
him one of the merchant princes who had made New York the metropolis of
the New World. A stranger reading them would have imagined him a giant
striding through a great long day to a rich sunset.

But RoBards remembered him as one whose toil had been rewarded with
unmerited burlesque. And for nights and nights afterward he was wakened
by Patty strangling with sobs:

“Poor papa! I was so mean to him. The last word he had from me was a
scolding. He was afraid of life like a baby in the dark. Poor little
papa! I was so mean to you! and you asked me to forgive you!”

Then RoBards would gather her to his breast and his heart would swell
with pain till it seemed ready to burst. He would clench Patty to him
as if by that constriction their two hearts might become one. And
he would stare up at the invisible ceiling, as Dives looked up from
hell for a touch of some cool finger on his forehead. After a while
the mercy would be granted; he would know by the soft slow rhythm of
Patty’s bosom that she was asleep; and thanking God for that peace,
beatitude of all beatitudes, he would draw his eyelids down over his
eyes to shut out the black. His own breath would take up the cadence
of the tulip boughs lulled by the soft wind that fanned the window and
fingered the curtains drowsily.

And the walls of that tormented home would be filled with the stately
calm of the grave, until the resurrection of the next day’s sun.

The question of returning at once to town was answered by Mrs.
Jessamine’s inability to rise from her bed after the funeral of her
husband. She had had the harder life of the two.

She had been that woman so much praised, who effaced herself, spoke
with a low voice, went often to church, and often to childbed, who
brought up her children in the fear of God, nursed them, mended their
clothes and their manners, and saw them go forth to their various
miseries, to death, to marriage, to maternity. She had been a good wife
for a good long life and had taken passively what God or her husband or
her children brought home.

And the horror of that estate had been growing upon womankind through
the centuries until the greatest revolution the world has ever known
began to seethe, and a sex began to demand the burdens of equality
instead of the mixture of idolatry and contempt that had been its
portion.

Mrs. Jessamine had never joined any of the women’s rights movements;
nor had she joined in their denunciation. She had felt that her time
was passed for demanding anything. Her children had all grown beyond
even the pretense of piety toward her; but her husband had returned to
second childishness and renewed her motherhood.

She had suffered a new travail, but she had been needed, and that kept
her important. Now she had no further task to perform except to keep
a rocking chair rocking, and to knit the air with her restless old
bone-needle fingers.

Her husband had killed himself because he felt disgraced, cheated,
dishonorably discharged from the army of industry. She did not kill
herself; she just refused to live any longer. She resigned from the
church called life. She ceased to believe in it.

Dr. Chirnside when he came up again to her funeral said that she died
of a broken heart, and like a faithful helpmeet went to join the
faithful husband where he waited for her at the foot of the Throne.

And now another generation of the Jessamines was nothing more than an
inscription on headstones.

Hot as it was in the city, Patty and David went back to it to escape
the oppression of solemnity. Patty’s face was lost in thick black
veils, though her tears glistened like dew in the mesh.

After the hushed loneliness and the fragrant comeliness of billowy
Westchester, RoBards suffered from the noise of the train leading to
the noisy city.

The children greeted him with rapture, but Immy protested:

“Papa, please don’t call me baby any longer.”

“All right, old lady,” he laughed and winked at Patty, who winked at
him. And neither of them could see how childhood was already the Past
for this girl. It was only from the parental eyes that the scales had
yet to fall. Their daughter was another creature from what she looked
to the young men—and some not so young—who stared at her where she
walked or rode in the busses on her way to school, to church, to a
dancing lesson.

RoBards did not know that Immy was already undergoing ogling, being
followed, at times spoken to. She had entered that long gauntlet women
run. Sometimes the young roughs and “b’hoys” who made the policeless
street corners hazardous for women alone or in couples actually laid
hands on her. She never told her father or mother of these adventures,
because she did not want to worry them; she did not want them to know
how much she knew; she did not want them to forbid her going about. She
preferred freedom with risk to safety in the chains even of love.

Musing upon her ignorance and goodness one evening, her father was,
by a dissociation of ideas, reminded of his promise to look for Mrs.
Lasher’s girl Molly. It would be a partial atonement for destroying
the son, if he could retrieve the daughter from what was decently
referred to (when it had to be) as “a fate worse than death.” He rose
abruptly, and said that he had to go to his office. He left Patty with
a parlorful of callers who brought condolences for her in her loss of
both parents.

RoBards thought that nothing could make death more hateful than to
receive sympathy for it on a hot night in a crowded room.

As he sauntered the streets he thought that nothing could make life or
love more hateful than their activity on a hot night on crowded streets.

Mrs. Lasher had feared that Molly had joined the “eighteen thousand
women” of a certain industry. The number was probably inexact, but
RoBards was convinced that none of them all was idle that night. Every
age and condition seemed to be represented, and every allurement
employed from vicious effrontery to the mock demure. But he found no
one like Molly Lasher in the long, straggling parade.

He glanced in at many of the restaurants, the bar rooms, the oyster
palaces, the dance houses, the “watering places,” the tobacco counters;
but he dared not even walk down some of the streets where music came
faintly through dark windows. His face was known, his true motive would
not be suspected, and it would be priggish to announce it.

He saw much that was heartbreaking, much that was stomach-turning. He
ventured to drift at last even to the infamous Five Points. It was
foolhardy of him to wander alone in that region where human maggots
festered among rotten timbers. Mr. Charles Dickens, the popular English
novelist, had recently gone there with two policemen, and found
material for a hideous chapter in his insulting volume _American Notes_.

But RoBards felt that he owed Mrs. Lasher a little of his courage, and
he gripped his walking stick firmly. The policemen with their stars
glinting in the dark gave him some courage, but even the policemen’s
lives were not safe here, where murder was the cleanest thing that
happened.

The thronged hovels were foul enough, but their very cellars were
a-squirm with men and women and children. In some of these rat holes
there were filthy soup houses, bars, dance dives where blacks, whites
and mulattoes mixed. Such odious folk the whites were that RoBards
wondered how the negroes could mix with them. And children danced
here, too, with the slime from the wharves and the foreign ships.

The poverty was grisly. In one sink, three men with three spoons
drained one penny bowl of broth. A man shared a glass of turpentine
gin with his five-year-old son. Another fought with his shrieking wife
over a mug of bog-poteen. Men whiffed rank tobacco at a penny a load
in rented clay pipes they could not even buy, but borrowed for the
occasion.

On the cellar steps, in the gutters, on the door sills and hanging out
of the windows were drunkards, whole families drunk from grandam to
infant at a boozy breast. RoBards had trouble in dodging the wavering
steps of a six-year-old girl who was already a confirmed sot. Children
offered themselves with terrifying words.

Only the other day six little girls of respectable family had been
taken from one of these dives: their parents had supposed them to
be at school. There were ten thousand vagrant children in New York.
The little girls who swept crossings and sold matches or flowers or
what-not sold themselves, too. And the homeless boys who blacked boots
studied crime and learned drunkenness in their babyhood. Here was the
theory of infant damnation demonstrated on earth, with gin-soaked girls
of ten and twelve maudlin at the side of their spewing mothers. One
smutty-faced chit of twelve sidled up to the shuddering RoBards with
words that made him almost faint, and tried to pick his pocket as he
fled in horror.

Beggars for coin half besought, half threatened him. Thugs, male and
female, glared at him and cursed him for a nob, or meditated attacks
upon the “goldfinch,” but their brains were too drenched for action.

The very offal of poverty and crime reeled about his path, yet there
was laughter. In one rookery two hundred negroes sang and patted while
a juba dancer “laid it down.” Everywhere there was the desperate effort
to escape from the dung of existence by way of drug or sleep or song or
combat.

He reached the Old Brewery at last. The ancient distillery was now a
vast ant hill of swarming misery. In every dirty room, in the grimy
cellars beneath it, the victims of want, of disease, of vice slept or
quarreled, vomited aloud, whimpered in sickness, or died half-naked and
half-noticed. In front of it was a little barren triangle of ground,
surrounded by a wooden fence usually draped with filthy clothes. They
mocked it with the name of “Paradise Square.”

He glanced into the dark and stinking alley known as Murderers’
Lane, but he dared not thrid it. Baffled and revolted he returned to
Broadway, a Dante coming up from the pit of horror.

If Molly were in the Points she was beyond redemption. If she were in
a higher circle of hell, she would not listen to him. She might be
exploiting her youth in one of the secret “Model Artist” exhibitions of
nude men and women. She might be a banker’s friend, a street vendor, a
cigar girl, a barmaid, a chambermaid in a hotel or a boarding house or
in an honest home. She might have thrown herself in one of the rivers.
What else could a girl do for respite from hunger and loneliness but go
into menial service, or into the most ancient profession, or into the
grave? The stage was the only other open door except the convent, and
Molly had probably no genius for either life.

At any rate, he could not hope to find this one among the thousands of
New York’s “lost” women by seeking for her. He went slowly to his home
in St. John’s Square, despondent and morose, feeling himself soiled by
his mere inspection of the muck heap.

Afterward he kept his eyes alert for Molly, but it was months before he
found her. She had been dragged into court for working the panel-crib
game. She was not only a wanton, but a thief; using her grace and her
jocund prettiness to entice fools within the reach of confederates who
slid aside a panel in a wall and made off with their wallets after the
classic method.

She lured the wrong man once, a fellow who had no reputation to lose
and did not hesitate to set up a cry that brought the watch.

When she was arraigned, RoBards happened to be in court on behalf
of another client. He saw Molly pink and coquettish, impudently
fascinating, and so ready for deportation or conquest that when he
advanced to her, she accepted him as a gallant before she recognized
him as a neighbor.

“Aren’t you Molly Lasher?” RoBards asked.

“I was.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I’m on the cross.” He knew that she was “pattering the flash” for
being in thievery; but he answered solemnly:

“Your mother is on the Cross, too, Molly.”

“Poor old thing! I’m sorry for her, but it don’t do her no good for me
to hang there with her.”

He entreated her to go home, and promised that the judge would free her
at his request, but Molly was honest enough to say:

“It wouldn’t work, Mister RoBards. I ain’t built for that life. I’ve
outgrowed it.”

He spoke to the judge, who sent her to the Magdalen Home instead of to
Sing Sing.

But the odor of sanctity was as stifling to Molly’s quivering nostrils
as the smell of new-mown hay, and she broke loose from pious restraint
and returned to her chosen career. She joined destinies with a young
crossman. As she would have put it in her new language, she became the
file of a gonof who was caught by a nab while frisking a fat of his
fawney, his dummy, and his gold thimble. Molly went on a bender when
her chuck was jugged, and a star took her back to the Magdalen Home.

And of this it seemed to RoBards better to leave Mrs. Lasher in
ignorance than to certify the ghastly truth. He had trouble enough in
store for him within his own precincts.

War, for one thing, shook the nation. President Polk called for men and
money to confirm the annexation of the Texas Republic and to suppress
the Mexican Republic.

With a wife and children to support and the heritage of bills from his
father-in-law to pay, RoBards felt that patriotism was a luxury beyond
his means. But Harry Chalender went out with the first troops, and by
various illegitimate devices managed to worm himself into the very
forefront of danger.

Other sons of important families bribed their way to the zone of
death and won glory or death or both at Cerro Gordo, Chapultepec and
Churubusco. New York had a good laugh over the capture of General Santa
Ana’s wooden leg and the return of the troops was a glorious holiday.

Harry Chalender had been the second man to enter the gates of Mexico
City and he marched home with “Captain” in front of his name and his
arm in a graceful sling.

When he met Patty he said: “Thank the Lord the Greasers left me one
wing to throw round you.”

He hugged her hard and kissed her, and then wrung the hand of RoBards,
who could hardly attack a wounded hero, or deny him some luxury after a
hard campaign. RoBards saw with dread that his wife had grown fifteen
years younger under the magic of her old lover’s salute; her cheek was
stained with a blush of girlish confusion.

That night as she dressed for a ball in honor of the soldiers, Patty
begged her husband once more to lend a hand at pulling her corset
laces. When he refused sulkily, she laughed and kissed him with that
long-lost pride in his long-dormant jealousy. But her amusement cost
him dear, and his youth was not restored by hers.

For months his heart seemed to be skewered and toasted like the meat on
the turning spit in the restaurant windows.

And then the word California assumed a vast importance, like a trumpet
call on a stilly afternoon. It advertised a neglected strip of
territory of which Uncle Sam had just relieved the prostrate Mexico.
People said that it was built upon a solid ledge of gold. Much as
RoBards would have liked to be rich, he could not shake off his chains.

But Harry Chalender joined the Argonauts. His finances were in need of
some heaven-sent bonanza, and he had no scruples against leaving his
creditors in the lurch.

When he called to pay his farewells RoBards chanced to be at home. He
waited with smoldering wrath to resent any effort to salute Patty’s
cheek. The returned soldier had perhaps some license, but the outbound
gold-seeker could be knocked down or kicked on his way if he presumed.

The always unexpectable Chalender stupefied him by fastening his eyes
not on Patty, but on Immy, and by daring to say:

“You’re just the age, Immy, just the image of your mother when I first
asked her to marry me. The first nugget of gold I find in California
I’ll bring back for our wedding ring.”

This frivolity wrought devastation in RoBards’ soul. It wakened him
for the first time to the fact that his little daughter had stealthily
become a woman. He blenched to see on her cheek the blush that had
returned of late to Patty’s, to see in her eyes a light of enamored
maturity. She was formed for love and ready for it, nubile, capable of
maternity, tempting, tempted.

The shock of discovery filled RoBards with disgust of himself. He felt
faint, and averting his gaze from his daughter, turned to her mother
to see how the blow struck her. Patty had not been so unaware of
Immy’s advance. But her shock was one of jealousy and of terror at the
realization that she was on the way to grandmotherhood.

RoBards was so hurt for her in her dismay that he could have sprung at
Chalender and beaten him to the floor, crying, “How dare you cease to
flirt with my beautiful wife?”

But this was quite too impossible an impulse to retain for a moment in
his revolted soul. He stood inept and smirked with Patty and murmured,
“Good-by! Good luck!”

They were both pale and distraught when Chalender had gone. But Immy
was rosy and intent.




CHAPTER XXXI


Something more precious than gold came to light in 1846, something of
more moment to human history than a dozen Mexican wars—a cure for pain.

It came divinely opportune to Patty’s need, for her next child was
about to tear its way into the world through her flesh suffering from
old lacerations, and she prophesied that she would die of agony and
take back with her into oblivion the boy or girl or both or whatever it
was or they were that she was helplessly manufacturing.

And just then there came to RoBards a letter from a Boston client
stating that a dentist named Morton had discovered a gas that enabled
him to extract a tooth without distress; another surgeon had removed
a tumor from a patient made indifferent with ether; and that the long
deferred godsend would make childbirth peaceable. Patty sang hosannas
to the new worker of miracles.

“1846 is a greater year than 1776—or 1492. That man Morton is a bigger
man than Columbus and there should be a holiday in his honor. What
did the discoverer of America, or the inventor of the telegraph or
anything else, do for the world to compare with the angel of mercy
who put a stop to pain? The Declaration of Independence!—Independence
from what?—taxes and things. But pain—think of independence from pain!
Nothing else counts when something aches. And the only real happiness
is to hurt and get over it.”

She repeated her enthusiasm to Dr. Chirnside when he happened in on his
pastoral rounds. To her dismay the old clergyman was not elated, but
horrified.

Dr. Chirnside, who opposed everything new as an atheism, everything
amusing as a sin, declared that God decreed pain for his own
inscrutable purposes in his own infinite love. Since Holy Writ had
spoken of a woman crying aloud in travail it would be a sacrilege to
deny her that privilege. The kindly old soul would have crucified
a multitude for the sake of a metaphor. He had in his earlier days
preached a sermon against railroads because God would have mentioned
them to Moses or somebody if he had approved of having his creatures
hurled through space at the diabolic speed of twenty miles an hour. He
had denounced bowling alleys for the same reason, and also because they
were fashionable and more crowded than his own pews.

RoBards having seen operations where the patient had to be clamped to a
board and gagged for the sake of the neighbors’ ears, could not believe
that this was a pleasant spectacle to any respectable deity.

He almost came to a break with Dr. Chirnside, who seemed to see nothing
incongruous in calling that divine which men called inhuman.

All of the learned men called “doctors,” whether of divinity, medicine,
law, philosophy, or what-not, seemed to fight everything new however
helpful. Martyrdom awaited the reformer and the discoverer whether in
religion, astronomy, geography, chemistry, geology, anything.

The names of well-meaning gentlemen like Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall
had recently been howled at with an irate disgust not shown toward
murderers and thieves.

For the next twenty years a war would be waged upon the pain-killers,
and the names of Morton, Jackson, and Wells would inspire immediate
quarrel. Each had his retainers in the contest for what some called the
“honor” of discovering the placid realm of anæsthesia; and what some
called the “sacrilege” of its discovery.

It was written in the sibylline books of history as yet undisclosed
that Wells should be finally humbled to insanity and suicide; and that
Morton, after years of vain effort to get recognition, should retire to
a farm, where he would die from the shock of reading a denial of his
“pretensions.” They would put on his tombstone the legend: “By whom
pain in surgery was averted and annulled; before whom, in all time,
surgery was agony since whom science has had control of pain.” Yet
one’s own epitaph is a little late, however flattering.

RoBards shared Patty’s reverence for the Prometheus who had snatched
from heaven the anodyne to the earth’s worst curse. He made sure that
she should have the advantage of the cloud of merciful oblivion when
she went down into the dark of her last childbed.

Her final baby was born “still,” as they say; but Patty also was still
during the ordeal. That was no little blessing. RoBards was spared the
hell of listening in helplessness to such moans as Patty had hitherto
uttered when her hour had come upon her unawares.

But the high hopes from this discovery were doomed to sink, for man
seems never to get quite free from his primeval evils, and RoBards was
to find that the God or the devil of pain had not yet been baffled by
man’s puny inventions.

Longing for opportunities to exploit the suppressed braveries in his
soul, RoBards found nothing to do but run to fires. There were enough
of these and the flames fell alike upon the just and the unjust. Christ
Church in Ann Street went up in blazes; the Bowery Theatre burned down
for the fourth time; a sugar house in Duane Street was next, two men
being killed and RoBards badly bruised by a tumbling wall. The stables
of Kipp and Brown were consumed with over a hundred screaming horses;
the omnibus stables of the Murphys roasted to death a hundred and fifty
horses, and took with them two churches, a parsonage, and a school.
While this fire raged, another broke out in Broome Street, another in
Thirty-fifth Street and another in Seventeenth. The Park Theatre was
burned for only the second time in its fifty years of life; but it
stayed burned.

And then Patty succeeded in persuading her husband to resign from the
volunteers and remove his boots and helmet from the basket under the
bed.

This was the knell of his youth and he felt that he had been put out
to grass like an old fire horse, but his heart leaped for years after
when some old brazen-mouthed bell gave tongue. He left it to others,
however, to take out the engine and chase the sparks.

He had come to the port of slippered evenings, but monotony was not yet
his portion. For there were domestic fire bells now.

Patty and Immy were mutual combustibles. They had reached the ages when
the mother forgets her own rebellious youth as completely as if she had
drunk Lethe water; and when the daughter demands liberty for herself
and imposes fetters on her elders.

Patty developed the strictest standards for Immy and was amazed at the
girl’s indifference to her mother’s standards. All of Patty’s quondam
audacities in dress and deportment were remembered as conformities
to strict convention. Immy’s audacities were regarded as downright
indecencies.

Immy, for her part, was outraged at the slightest hint of youthfulness
in her mother. With her own shoulders gleaming and her young breast
brimming at the full beaker of her dress, Immy would rebuke her mother
for wearing what they called a “half-high.” Both powdered and painted
and were mutually horrified. Immy used the perilous liquid rouge and
Patty the cochineal leaves, and each thought the other unpardonable—and
what was worse, discoverable.

Breathless with her own wild gallopades in the polka and dizzy from
waltzing in the desperate clench of some young rake, Immy would glare
at her mother for twirling about the room with a gouty old judge
holding her elbow-tips; or for laughing too loudly at a joke that her
mother should never have understood.

Finally, Patty had recourse to authority and told her husband that the
city was too wicked for the child. She—even Patty—who had once bidden
New York good-by with tears, denounced it now in terms borrowed from
Dr. Chirnside’s tirades.

Immy was mutinous and sullen. She refused to leave and threatened to
run off with any one of a half dozen beaux, none of whom her parents
could endure.

This deadlock was ended by aid from a dreadful quarter. By a strange
repetition of events, the cholera, which had driven Patty into RoBards’
arms and into the country with him—the cholera which had never been
seen again and for whose destruction the Croton Water party had taken
full glory—the cholera came again.

It began in the pus-pocket of the Points and drained them with death;
then swept the town. Once more there was a northward hegira. Once more
the schoolhouses were hospitals and a thousand poor sufferers died in
black agony on the benches where children had conned their Webster’s
spelling books. Five thousand lives the cholera took before it went its
mysterious way.

Coming of a little bolder generation, Immy was not so panic-stricken as
her mother had been. But since all her friends deserted the town, she
saw no reason for tarrying.

The country was not so dull as she had feared. The air was spicy with
romance; fauns danced in the glades and sat on the stone fences to
pipe their unspeakable tunes; nymphs laughed in the brooks, and dryads
commended the trees.

The railroads made it easy for young bucks to run out on a train
farther in an hour or two than they could have ridden in a day in the
good old horseback times. A fashion for building handsome country
places was encouraged by the cholera scare. White Plains began to grow
in elegance and Robbin’s Mills changed its homely name to Kensico,
after an old Indian chief.

Before many days Immy was busier than in town. Young men and girls
made the quiet yard resound with laughter. The tulip trees learned
to welcome and to shelter sentimental couples. Their great branches
accepted rope swings, and petticoats went foaming toward the clouds
while their wearers shrieked and fell back into the arms of pushing
young men.

Picnics filled the groves with mirth, dances called gay cliques to
lamplit parlors and to moonlit porches. Tuliptree Farm began to
resemble some much frequented roadside tavern. It was as gay as Cato’s
once had been outside New York.

Immy seemed to gather lovers as a bright candle summons foolish moths.
Patty and her husband were swiftly pushed back upon a shelf of old age
whence they watched, incredulous, and unremembering, the very same
activities with which they had amazed their own parents.

Two lovers gradually crowded the rest aside. The more attractive to
Immy’s parents was a big brave youth named Halleck. He had joined the
old Twenty-seventh Regiment, recently reorganized as the Seventh, just
in time to be called out in the Astor Place riots.

The citizens had lain fairly quiet for a long while and had not
attacked a church or a minister or a theatre for nearly fifteen years.
But the arrival of the English actor Macready incensed the idolators of
Edwin Forrest and developed a civil war.

Young Halleck was with the Seventh when it marched down to check the
vast mob that overwhelmed the police, and drove back a troop of cavalry
whose horses were maddened by the cries and the confinement. The
populace roared down upon the old Seventh and received three volleys
before it returned to civil life.

This exploit in dramatic criticism cost the public thirty-four deaths
and an unknown number of wounds. The Seventh had a hundred and
forty-one casualties. Halleck had been shot with a pistol and battered
with paving stones. To RoBards the lawyer he was a civic hero of the
finest sort. The only thing Immy had against him was that her parents
recommended him so highly.

Love that will not be coerced turned in protest toward the youth whom
her parents most cordially detested, Dr. Chirnside’s son, Ernest, a
pallid young bigot, more pious than his father, and as cruel as Cotton
Mather. Patty wondered how any daughter of hers could endure the
milk-sop. But Immy cultivated him because of his very contrast with her
own hilarity.

His young pedantries, his fierce denunciations of the wickedness of his
companions, his solemn convictions that man was born lost in Adam’s sin
and could only be redeemed from eternal torment by certain dogmas,
fascinated Immy, who had overfed on dances and flippancies.

RoBards could not help witnessing from his library window the
development of this curious religious romance. Even when he withdrew
to his long writing table and made an honest effort to escape the
temptation to eavesdropping, he would be pursued by the twangy
sententiousness of Ernest and the silvery answers of Immy. There was an
old iron settee under his window and a rosebush thereby and the young
fanatics would sit there to debate their souls.

It was a godlike privilege and distress to overhear such a courtship.
His daughter bewildered him. At times Immy was as wild as a mænad. She
danced, lied, decoyed, teased, accepted caresses, deliberately invited
wrestling matches for her kisses. She rode wild horses and goaded them
wilder. She would come home with a shrieking cavalcade and set her
foam-flecked steed at the front fence, rather than wait for the gate to
be opened.

Seeing Immy in amorous frenzies RoBards would be stricken with fear
of her and for her. He would wonder if Jud Lasher had not somehow
destroyed her innocence; if his invasion of her integrity had not
prepared her for corruption. How much of that tragedy did she remember?
Or had she forgotten it altogether?

He would shudder with the dread that Jud Lasher, who was lying beneath
his feet, might be wreaking a posthumous revenge, completing his crime
with macaberesque delight.

Then Immy’s mood would change utterly. She would repent her youth as
a curse, and meditate a religious career. There was a new fashion for
sending missionaries to Africa and she was tempted to proselytize the
jungle. Ernest rescued her at least from this. He told her that she
must make sure her own soul was saved before she went out to save Zulus.

Sometimes RoBards, listening with his pen poised above an unfinished
word, would seem to understand her devotion to young Chirnside, her
acceptance of his intolerant tyranny and the insults he heaped upon her
as a wretch whom his God might have foredoomed from past eternity to
future eternity. He would talk of election and the conviction of sin
and of salvation.

And Immy would drink it down.

At last there came an evening when young Chirnside called in manifest
exaltation. He led Immy to the settee beneath the library window, and
RoBards could not resist the opportunity to overhear the business that
was so important.

He went into his library and softly closed the door. He tiptoed to a
vantage point and listened.

Young Chirnside coughed and stammered and beat about the bush for a
maddening while before he came to his thesis, which was that the Lord
had told him to make Immy his wife. He had come to beg her to listen to
him and heaven. He had brought a little ring along for the betrothal
and—and—how about it? His combination of sermon and proposal ended in
a homeliness that proved his sincerity. After all that exordium, the
point was, How about it?

That was what RoBards wanted to know. He waited as breathlessly as his
prospective son-in-law. Immy did not speak for a terrible while. And
then she sighed deeply, and rather moaned than said:

“Ernest, I am honored beyond my dreams by what you have said. To be the
wife of so good a man as you would be heaven. But am I good enough for
you?”

“Immy!” Chirnside gasped, “you’re not going to tell me you’ve been
wicked!”

“I’ve been wicked enough, but not very wicked—considering. The thing I
must tell you about is—it’s terribly hard to tell you, dear. But you
ought to know, you have a right to know. And when you know, you may not
think—you may not think—you may feel that you wouldn’t care to marry
me. I wouldn’t blame you—I’d understand, dear—but——”

“Tell me! In heaven’s name, tell me!”

RoBards was stabbed with a sudden knowledge of what tortured her
thought. He wanted to cry out to her, “Don’t tell! Don’t speak! I
forbid you!”

But that would have betrayed his contemptible position as
eavesdropper. And, after all, what right had he to rebuke such honesty?
She knew her soul. She was inspired perhaps with the uncanny wisdom of
young lovers.

The wish to confess—though “confess” was not the word for her guiltless
martyrdom—was a proof of her nobility. It would be a test of this
young saint’s mettle. If he shrank from her, it would rescue her
from a pigeon-hearted recreant. If he loved her all the more for
her mischance, he would prove himself better than he seemed, more
Christlike than he looked.

And so RoBards, guessing what blighting knowledge Immy was about to
unfold, stood in the dark and listened. Tears of pity for her scalded
his clenched eyelids and dripped bitter into his quivering mouth.

Unseeing and unseen, he heard his child murmuring her little tragedy to
the awesmitten boy at her side. She seemed as pitifully beautiful as
some white young leper whispering through a rag, “Unclean!”

What would this pious youth think now of the God that put his love and
this girl to such a test? Would he howl blasphemies at heaven? Would he
cower away from the accursed woman or would he fling his arms about her
and mystically heal her by the very divinity of his yearning?

RoBards could almost believe that Jud Lasher down there in the walls
was also quickened with suspense. His term in hell might depend on this
far-off consequence of his deed.




CHAPTER XXXII


A strange thing, a word: and stranger, the terror of it. Stranger
still, the things everybody knows that must never be named. Strangest
of all, that the mind sees most vividly what is not mentioned, what
cannot be told.

Immy, for all her rebellious modernness and impatience of old-fashioned
pruderies, was a slave of the word.

And now she must make clear to a young man of even greater nicety
than she, an adventure it would have sobered a physician to describe
to another. She gasped and groped and filled her story with the
pervividness of eloquent silences:

“It was when I was a little girl—a very little girl. There was a
big terrible boy—a young man, rather—who lived down the road—ugly
and horrible as a hyena. And one day—when Papa was gone—and I was
playing—he came along and he spoke to me with a grin and a—a funny look
in his eyes. And he took hold of me—it was like a snake! and I tried to
break loose—and my little brother fought him. But he knocked and kicked
Keith down—and took me up and carried me away. I fought and screamed
but he put his hand over my mouth and almost smothered me—and kept on
running—then—then——”

Then there was a hush so deep that RoBards felt he could hear his tears
where they struck the carpet under his feet. His eyelids were locked
in woe, but he seemed to see what she thought of; he seemed to see the
frightened eyes of Ernest Chirnside trying not to understand.

Immy went on:

“Then Jud Lasher heard Papa coming and he ran. Papa caught him and
beat him almost to death—but it was too late to save me. I didn’t
understand much, then. But now—! Papa made me promise never to speak of
it; but you have a higher right than anybody, Ernest—that is, if you
still—unless you—oh, tell me!—speak!—say something!”

The boy spoke with an unimaginable wolfishness in his throat:

“Where is the man?—where is that man?”

“I don’t know. I never saw him after that—oh, yes, he came back again
once. But Papa was watching and saved me from him—and after that I
never heard of him. Yes, I did hear someone say he went to sea.”

Another hush and then Ernest’s voice, pinched with emotion:

“I believe if I could find that villain I could almost kill him. My
soul is full of murder. God forgive me!”

He thought of his own soul first.

Poor Immy suffered the desolation of a girl who finds her hero common
clay; her saint a prig. But with apology she said:

“I ought never to have told you.”

He dazed her by his reply:

“Oh, I won’t tell anybody; never fear! But don’t tell me any more just
now. I must think it out.”

He wanted to think!—at a time when thinking was poltroon; when only
feeling and impulsive action were decent! Immy waited while he thought.
At length he said:

“If that man still lives he’ll come back again!”

“No! no!”

“He’ll come back and get you.”

“You wouldn’t let him, would you?”

“You belong to him, in a way. It is the Lord’s will.”

He could say that and believe it! The young zealot could worship a
god who could doom, ten thousand years before its birth, a child to a
thousand, thousand years of fiery torment because of an Adam likewise
doomed to his disobedience.

The young man’s own agony had benumbed him perhaps, but RoBards could
have leapt from the window and strangled him as a more loathsome,
a clammier reptile than Jud Lasher. But he, too, was numb with
astonishment.

Then the boy went human all at once and began to sob, to wail, “Oh,
Immy, Immy! my poor Immy!”

RoBards stepped forward to the window in a rush of happiness, and saw
Immy put out her hands to her lover. He pushed them away and rose
and moved blindly across the grass. But there was a heavy dew and he
stepped back to the walk to keep his feet from getting wet.

He stumbled along the path to the gate and leaned there a moment,
sobbing. Then he swung it wide as he ran out to where his horse was
tied. And the gate beat back and forth, creaking, like a rusty heart.

RoBards stood gazing down at his daughter, eerily beautiful in the
moonlight through the rose leaves. He saw her dim hands twitching each
at the other. Then they fell still in her lap and she sat as a worn-out
farm-wife sits whose back is broken with overlong grubbing in the soil
and with too heavy a load home.

For a long time he sorrowed over her, then he went stealthily across
his library into the hall, and out to the porch where he looked at the
night a moment. He discovered Immy as if by accident, and exclaimed,
“Who’s that?”

“It’s only me, Papa, only me!”

“Only you? Why you’re all there is. You’re the most precious thing on
earth.”

He put his arm about her, but she sprang to her feet and snapped at him:

“Don’t! If you please, Papa, don’t touch me. I—I’m not fit to be
touched.”

She stood away from him, bracing herself with a kind of pride. Then
she broke into a maudlin giggle, such as RoBards had heard from the
besotted girls in the Five Points. And she walked into the house.

He followed her, and knocked on her door. But she would not answer, and
when he tried it, it was locked.




CHAPTER XXXIII


The next morning RoBards heard her voice again. It was loud and rough,
drowning the angry voice of her brother, Keith. She was saying:

“I was a fool to tell him! And I was a fool to tell you I told him!”

“I’ll beat him to death when I find him, that’s all I’ll do!” Keith
roared, with his new bass voice.

“If you ever touch him or mention my name to him—or his name to me,”
Immy stormed, “I’ll—I’ll kill—I’ll kill myself. Do you understand?”

“Aw, Immy, Immy!” Keith pleaded with wonderful pity in his voice. Then
she wept, long, piteously, in stabbing sobs that tore the heart of her
father.

He knew that she was in her brother’s arms, for he could hear his voice
deep with sympathy. But RoBards dared not make a third there. It was no
place for a father.

He went to his library and stood staring at the marble hearthstone.
Somewhere down there was what was left of Jud Lasher. He had not been
destroyed utterly, for he was still abroad like a fiend, wreaking cruel
harm.

Immy spoke and RoBards was startled, for he had not heard her come in:

“Papa.”

“Yes, my darling!”

“Do you think Jud Lasher will ever come back?”

“I know he won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I just feel sure. He’d never dare come back.”

“If he did would I belong to him?”

“Would a lamb belong to a sheep-killing dog that mangled it?”

“That’s so. Thank you, Papa.” And she was gone.

A boy on a horse brought her a note that afternoon. She told no one its
contents and when Patty asked who sent it, Immy did not answer. RoBards
was sure it came from Ernest Chirnside, for the youth never appeared.
But RoBards felt no right to ask.

Somehow he felt that there was no place for him as a father in Immy’s
after-conduct. She returned to her wildness, like a deer that has
broken back to the woods and will not be coaxed in again.

How could he blame her? What solemn monition could he parrot to a soul
that had had such an experience with honesty, such a contact with
virtue?

Young Chirnside never came to the house. But he was the only youth in
the countryside, it seemed, that kept away. Patty tried to curb Immy’s
frantic hilarities, but she had such insolence for her pains that she
was stricken helpless.

Then Immy decided that the country was dull. The young men went back
to town, or to their various colleges. Keith went to Columbia College,
which was still in Park Place, though plans were afoot for moving it
out into the more salubrious rural district of Fiftieth Street and
Madison Avenue.

Keith met Chirnside on the campus, but he could not force a quarrel
without dragging Immy’s name into it. So he let slip the opportunity
for punishment, as his father had let slip the occasion for punishing
Chalender. Father and son were curiously alike in their passion for
secrets.

Keith had little interest in the classic studies that made up most of
the curriculum. He could not endure Latin and the only thing he found
tolerable in Cæsar was the description of the bridge that baffled the
other students with its difficulties.

He was an engineer by nature. He had never recovered from his ambition
to be an hydraulic savior of the city. And it looked as if the town
would soon need another redemption.

The citizens had treated the Croton as a toy at first. The hydrants
were free and the waste was ruinous. This blessing, like the heavenly
manna, became contemptible with familiarity. Children made a pastime
of sprinkling the yards and the streets. The habit of bathing grew
until many were soaking their hides every day. During the winter the
householders let the water run all day and all night through the open
faucets, to prevent the pipes from freezing. There were twelve thousand
people, too, who had water in their houses!

Already in 1846 the Commissioners had begun to talk of a costly new
reservoir as a necessity. For thirteen days that year the supply had to
be shut off while the aqueduct was inspected and leaks repaired. What
if another great fire had started?

In 1849 the Water Commissioners were dismissed and the Croton Aqueduct
Department entrusted with the priesthood of the river god and his
elongated temple.

So Keith looked forward to the time when he should be needed by New
York and by other cities. And he studied hard. But he played hard,
too. The students were a lawless set, and drunkenness and religious
infidelity were rival methods for distressing their teachers. Up at New
Haven the Yale boys in a certain class, feeling themselves wronged by
a certain professor, had disguised themselves as Indians and with long
knives whittled all the study benches into shavings while the terrified
instructor cowered on his throne and watched.

Vice of every sort seemed to be the chief study of such of the students
as were not aiming at the ministry. As one of the college graduates
wrote:

“Hot suppers, midnight carousals were too frequent with us and sowed
the seed of a vice that in a few years carried off a fearful proportion
of our members to an untimely grave.”

There was grave anxiety for the morals of the whole nation. The city
was growing too fast. By 1850 it had passed the half-million mark! The
churches were not numerous enough to hold a quarter of the population,
yet most of them were sparsely attended.

The American home was collapsing. Dr. Chirnside preached on the exalted
cost of living, and stated that church weddings were on the decrease.
The hotel was ruining the family. Rents were so exorbitant, servants so
scarce and incompetent, that people were giving up the domesticity of
the good old days.

Business detained the husband downtown, and he took his midday dinner
at Sweeny’s or Delmonico’s, where he could have poultry or sirloin
steak for a shilling and sixpence. And his wife and daughters,
unwilling to eat alone, went to Weller’s or Taylor’s and had a
fricandeau, an ice, or a meringue. Ladies’ saloons were numerous and
magnificent and wives could buy ready-made meals there; so they forgot
how to cook. The care of children no longer concerned them. Women were
losing all the retiring charm that had hitherto given them their divine
power over men.

The clergy bewailed the approaching collapse of a nation that had
forgotten God—or had never remembered him. There was a movement afoot
to amend the Constitution with an acknowledgment of the Deity and “take
the stain of atheism from that all-important document.”

These were the Sunday thoughts.

In contrast were the Fourth of July thoughts, when the country sang its
own hallelujahs and, like another deity, contentedly meditated its own
perfections. On these occasions every American man was better than any
foreigner, and American women were all saints.

And there were the Election Day moods, when the country split up into
parties for a few weeks, and played tennis with mutual charges of
corruption, thievery, treason. Then there was Christmas, when everybody
loved everybody; and New Year’s Day, when everybody called on everybody
and got a little drunk on good wishes and the toasts that went with
them.

David RoBards had his personal seasons; his feast days and fast days
in his own soul. Everybody treated him with respect as a man of
unblemished life in a home of unsullied reputation.

Then Patty met him with a doleful word:

“We’ve got to give an At Home right away. Don’t stand staring! We’ve
gone out dozens of times and accepted no end of hospitality. We simply
must pay our debts.”

“I’d like to,” said RoBards. “You and Immy have run up so many bills at
so many shops that I am almost afraid to walk the streets or open my
mail.”

This always enfuriated Patty and it angered her now:

“Since you owe so much you can owe a little more. But we owe something
to Immy. We must give a ball, and it must be a crack.”

“An orgy, you mean, if it’s to be like some of the others we’ve gone
to. Is that the most honest way to present a daughter to the world?”

“You’re getting old, Mist’ RoBards!” Patty snapped. “Orgies was the
name poor old Papa used to call the dances you and I went to in our
day.”

The upshot of it was that Patty won. The choicest personages in town
received an Alhambra-watered envelope containing a notice that Mr. and
Mrs. RoBards would be at home in St. John’s Park that evening week.
Patty sent cards also to a number of young men whom RoBards considered
far beneath his notice; but they were asked everywhere because
they could and would dance the tight polka, the redowa, the waltz,
the German; they could and would play backgammon and graces, write
acrostics, sit in tableaux, get up serenades, riding parties, sleighing
parties—anything to keep females from perishing of boredom. They all
dressed correctly and alike, parted their hair straight down the back,
posed as lost souls and murmured spicy hints of the terrific damnations
they had known in Paris. Some of them lived in twenty-shilling-a-week
boarding houses and curled each other’s hair.

But they could and would dance instead of standing about like wooden
Indians. Some critics said that the dancing in the American homes was
faster and more furious than anything abroad, except at the masked
balls in Paris where the girls were grisettes.

Some of the beaux won an added prestige by their cynicism. They
spoke with contempt of the sex they squired. In fact, everybody said
that the new generation lacked the reverence for women that had been
shown in the better days. Some blamed the rapidly increasing wealth
of the country with its resultant laxity of morals; some blamed the
sensational novelists for their exposures of feminine frailties.

Mr. Thackeray, an English lecturer and novelist, whose “Vanity Fair”
had been a ruthless picture of British wickedness in high circles, came
in for no little rebuke.

In an article on the subject RoBards found him blamed for the attitude
of “unfledged college boys who respect nothing in the shape of woman,
and exult in his authority to throw overboard the slight remains of the
traditionary reverence which inconveniently bridles their passions, and
restrains their egotisms.”

It was into such an atmosphere that the young girl Immy and the lad
Keith must emerge from childhood. In such a dangerous world they must
live their life. RoBards shuddered at the menace.




CHAPTER XXXIV


Patty had a linen cover stretched tight over the parlor carpet. She
got in an appalling amount of supper material; oyster soup in gallons,
_dinde aux truffes_ by the pound, ice cream in gallons, jellies,
custards, cakes, preserves; punch by the keg, and champagne bottles by
the regiment.

Everybody came. St. John’s Park was a-roar with carriages and bawling
coachmen and footmen, some of them in livery. Tactless people set
Patty’s teeth on edge by saying that it was well worth while coming
“downtown” to see her; and Immy such a lady! She’d be making Patty a
grandmother any of these days!

For a time RoBards enjoyed the thrill, the dressed-up old women and old
men and the young people all hilarious and beautiful with youth.

He had his acid tastes, too, for many of the people congratulated him
on the reported successes of his old crony, Captain Chalender. He was
reputed to be a millionaire at least, and one of the best loved men in
California—and coming home soon, it was rumored. And was that true?

“So I’ve heard,” RoBards must murmur a dozen times, wondering how far
away Chalender would have to go to be really absent from his home.

The house throbbed with dance music, the clamor and susurrus of scandal
along the wall line of matrons, the laughter; the eddies the dancers
made; young men in black and pink girls in vast skirts like huge
many-petaled roses twirled round and round.

It amazed RoBards to see how popular Immy was. She was wrangled over by
throngs of men. Her color was higher than her liquid rouge explained;
her eyes were bright, and she spoke with an aristocratic lilt her
father had never heard her use.

Keith was as tall and as handsome as any young blade there, and his
father could hardly believe that the boy could be so gallant, so gay,
so successful with so many adoring girls.

It was good to see so much joy in the home he had made for the children
whose sorrows had been so many and so real. But as the evening grew
old and the crowd thickened, his cheerfulness flagged. Perhaps he was
merely fatigued with the outgo of welcome, sickened by having to say
and hear the same things so many times.

But he saw the picnic becoming a revel. The dancers, whether waltzing
or polking, seemed to increase in audacity, in blind or shameless
abandonment to thoughts and moods that belonged to solitude if anywhere.

As he wandered about he surprised couples stealing embraces or kisses
slily, or whispering guiltily, laughing with more than mischief.
Sometimes it was Immy that he encountered; sometimes Keith.

What could he say or do? Nothing but pretend to be sightless and
guileless.

When the supper hour was reached, the rush was incredible. Men made a
joke of the crassest behavior, and a chivalric pretense that they were
fighting for refreshment to carry to their fainting ladies. But it was
neither humorous nor knightly to spill oyster soup over a lace dress,
to tilt ice cream down a broadcloth back, or to grind fallen custard
into the expensive carpet.

It was not pretty to empty the dregs of somebody’s else champagne into
the oyster tureen or under the table, and while refilling the glass let
the wine froth all over the table cover.

Many of the squires forgot their dames and drank themselves into states
of truculence, or, worse, of odious nausea. RoBards had to convey two
young gentlemen of better family than breeding up to the hatroom to
sleep off their liquor; and he had to ask some of the soberer youth to
help him run one sudden fiend out to the sidewalk and into a carriage.

While RoBards was spreading one of his young guests out on a bed
upstairs, another knocked over the cutglass punch-bowl and cracked
it irretrievably, together with a dozen engraved straw-stem glasses
Patty’s father had left to her.

When the German began at about midnight some of the men dared to carry
champagne bottles with them and set them down by their chairs for
reference during the pauses in the figures.

Hosts and hostesses were supposed to ignore the misconduct of their
guests, but it made RoBards’ blood run cold to see Immy go from the
arms of a decent respectful sober youth into the arms and the liquorous
embrace of a drunken faun whom she had to support.

He ventured to whisper a protest to her once. But she answered:

“Papa! don’t be ridiculous! A girl can’t discriminate. I can’t hurt a
poor boy’s feelings just because he can’t carry his liquor as well as
the rest. Besides, I’m the hostess.”

Her father cast his eyes up in helplessness at such a creed.

But even Immy and Patty could not ignore the ill fortune of Barbara
Salem, whose partner was so tipsy that he reeled her into a handsome
buhl escritoire and broke the glass door with Barbara’s head, then fell
with her to the floor and gaped while the blood from her slashed brow
ran through her hair and over her white shoulders and her white dress
and soaked through the linen cover into the carpet beneath.

Old Mr. and Mrs. Salem were aghast at the family calamity, while the
young man wept himself almost sober with remorse. Keith’s coat was
stained with red as he carried Barbara upstairs to a bedroom to wait
for the doctor.

In the ladies’ dressing-room, which Keith had to invade, two young
women had already fainted; both from tight stays, they said. One of
them was half undressed and unlacing her corsets with more wisdom than
her heavy eyes indicated.

Immy put Keith out and ministered to the casualties.

But the dance went on. Some old prudes were shocked, but the rest
said, “A party is a party, and accidents will happen.”

Dear old Mrs. Piccard said to Patty:

“You’re lucky in having only two carpets ruined, my dear. I had three
destroyed at my last reception. But it’s nothing to what went on in
the good old days, if the truth were told. My father was with General
Washington, you know. And really——! Papa was with the army that night
when General Washington himself danced with General Greene’s wife for
three hours without sitting down. Those were the heroic days, my dear!
And drinking! Our young men are comparatively abstemious.”

Finally the more merciful guests began to go home, leaving the dregs
behind. Young men who would doze and make mistakes at the counting
houses the next day, lingered as if it were the last night of earth.

There was torture for RoBards in Immy’s zest, in the look of her eyes
as she stared up into the unspeakable gaze of some notorious rake; and
in the welding of her sacred body to his in a matrimonial embrace as
they waltzed round and round giddily. Yet how much bitterer a wound it
was to see her transfer herself for the next dance to another man and
pour up into his fatuous eyes the same look of helpless passion!

The performance repeated in a third man’s bosom was confusion. RoBards
had either to turn on his heel or commit murder. And he really could
not murder all the young men whom Immy maddened. Indeed, he was not
sufficiently satisfied with his first murder to repeat the experiment.

Yet Immy kept her head through it all; flirted, plotted, showed the
ideal Arabian hospitality in her dances. But no one made a fool of her.

Keith, however, was overwhelmed. It was his first experience with
unlimited champagne, and he had thought it his duty to force it on
his guests and join them in every glass. It was disgraceful to leave
a heeltap. When he could no longer stand up or dance, he had to be
carried upstairs, moaning, “It’s a shame to deshert guesh.”

A boy and drunk! And weeping, not for being drunk but for not being the
last man drunk!

The world was ready for the Deluge! The American nation was rotten to
the core and would crumble at the first test.

This dance at the RoBards home was typical, rather more respectable
than many. All over town dances were held in dance halls where the
middle classes went through the same gyrations with less grace, and in
the vile dens of the Five Points where all were swine.

Patty was too tired to speak or listen when the last guest was gone.
She could hardly keep awake long enough to get out of her gown.

She sighed: “I’m old! I’m ready to admit it. I’m glad I’m old. I’m
never going to try to pretend again! I don’t want ever to be so tired
again. If anybody wakes me to-morrow I’ll commit murder. In God’s name,
will you never get those stay-laces untied?”

RoBards drew out a knife and slashed them and they snapped like violin
strings, releasing the crowded flesh.

Patty groaned with delight and peeling off her bodice stepped out of
the petticoats and kicked them across the floor. She spent a while
voluptuously rubbing her galled sides; then lifted her nightgown and
let it cascade about her, and fell into bed like a young tree coming
down.




CHAPTER XXXV


The rest of the family might sleep its fill on the morrow, but RoBards
had to go to court. Getting himself out of bed was like tearing his
own meat from his bones. He could hardly flog his body and mind to
the task. If it had not been for the new shower bath the Croton River
brought to his rescue, he could never have achieved it.

The house looked positively obscene in the morning light, with the
wreckage of the festival, and no music or laughter to redeem it. Cuff
and Teen were sullen with sleepiness and the prospect of extra toil.
They emphasized the fact that the dining-room carpet was too sticky and
messy for endurance. RoBards’ breakfast was served on the drawing-room
table.

He went to court to try a case for a strange old female miser whose
counsel he had been for many years. They called her the shrewdest
business man in town and she laughed at the fact that she was not
considered fit to vote, though the Revolutionary War had been fought
because of the crime of “taxation without representation.”

“Now that they’ve thrown away the property qualifications, every Tom,
Dick, and Harry can vote as often as he’s a mind to. But I can’t.
Every thieving politician can load taxes on my property to get money
to steal. But I have no say. My husband was a drunkard and a fool and
a libertine, and I brought him all the property he ever had. He used
it as an excuse for voting and I couldn’t even go to court in my own
protection for the law says, ‘Husband and wife are one and the husband
is the one.’

“The minute he died, I became a human being again, thank God. But I
have to have a man for a lawyer and men to judge my cases. The lamb has
to have a wolf for a lawyer and plead before a bench of wolves. But I
will say, you’re as honest a wolf as ever I knew.”

If anything could have destroyed RoBards’ faith in exclusively white,
male suffrage it would have been old Mrs. Roswell. But nothing could
shake that tradition, and he accounted her an exception that proved the
rule.

While he dealt with her professionally as if she were one of the shrewd
old merchants of New York, he treated her personally with all the
courtesy he displayed for more gentle females, and she was woman enough
to love that.

Miser that she was, she made him take higher fees than he ordinarily
charged, and they saved him again and again from despair in the face of
the increasing expense of his home.

In her desperate eagerness to fight off retirement from the ranks of
youth, Patty relied more and more on the dressmakers and hat-makers.
She developed a passion for jewelry and she spent great sums at the
Daguerrean galleries.

She would sit in frozen poses for six minutes at a time, trying to
obtain a plate that would flatter her sufficiently. But her beauty was
in her expression and especially in its fleetness, and the miracle of
Daguerre was helpless. The mist that clothed Niagara in a veil of grace
was not itself when winter made it ice. And Patty’s soul, so sweet and
captivating as it flitted about her eyes and lips, became another soul
when it must shackle itself and die.

Only a few colors were advantageous in the new process and those were
the least happy in Patty’s rainbow. Yet she dressed and fixed her
smiles and endured the agony of feeling a compelled laughter curdle
into an inane smirk. And she would weep with hatred of her counterfeit
presentment when it came home from Brady’s or Insley’s or Gurney’s.

Immy fared little better there for all her youth. And her costliness
increased appallingly, for she must keep pace with the daughters of
wealth. When she went shabby it reflected on her father’s love or
his success, and Patty could stifle his fiercest protest by simply
murmuring:

“Hasn’t the poor child suffered enough without having to be denied the
common necessities of a well-bred girl?”

This stung RoBards into prodigies of extravagance, and Immy’s wildest
recklessness took on the pathos of a frightened child fleeing from
vultures of grief.

He could not even protest when he saw that she was taking up the
disgusting vice of “dipping.” Snuff-taking had lost its vogue among the
beaux, and only the elders preferred it to smoking tobacco.

But now the women and girls were going mad over it. In the pockets
of their skirts they carried great horn snuff-boxes filled with the
strongest Scottish weed. Stealing away from the sight of men, they
would spread a handkerchief over their laps, open the boxes, and
dipping the odious mixture on a little hickory mop, fill their pretty
mouths with it and rub it on their teeth. They seemed to take some
stimulus from the stuff, and the secrecy of it added a final tang.

All the men were arrayed against it, but their wrath gave it the
further charm of defiant wickedness.

What was getting into the women? They would not obey anybody. Since
Eve had mocked God and had desired only the one forbidden fruit, they
seemed determined to enjoy only what was fatal.

And the books they read! RoBards came home one evening to find Immy
in tears and Patty storming about her like a fury. When he intervened
Patty said:

“Would you see what I caught this child devouring! Sitting with the gas
blinding her and her eyes popping over this terrible story by somebody
named Hawthorne. The title alone is enough to make a decent girl run
from it. _The Scarlet Letter._ Do you know what the letter was and what
it stood for?”

RoBards shook his head. He did not read light, popular fiction. The
affidavits he handled were fiction enough for him.

Patty drew him into another room and whispered the plot of the story.
RoBards gathered that it had to do with a Puritan minister who had a
secret affair with the wife of an absent citizen, and with the child
that resulted in the mother’s very proper appearance in the pillory.

“They ought to put the author there and sew a letter on his lapel.”
Patty raged. “No wonder the people of Salem put him out of office and
drove him out of town.”

There had been an article in the _Church Review_ about the book. Patty
fetched it and read a few lines to RoBards:

“Is the French era actually begun in our literature? We wonder what he
would be at: whether he is making fun of all religion. Shelley himself
never imagined a more dissolute conversation than that in which the
polluted minister comforts himself with the thought that the revenge of
the injured husband is worse than his own sin in instigating it.... The
lady’s frailty is philosophized into a natural and easy result of the
Scriptural law of marriage.”

That his daughter should read of such things sent a cold thrill into
RoBards’ heart. He forgot that she had no innocence to destroy. Jud
Lasher had wrecked that. Ernest Chirnside had rejected her for its
lack. And he himself had watched her dance.

But the printed word had a peculiar damnation. He knew that wickedness
was rife everywhere about him. He knew that Immy knew it, for the
gossip was everywhere like the atmosphere. The newspapers blazoned it.
The courthouses solemnized it.

Yet to print it in a story seemed infamous. And Patty added:

“I found her crying over it! Crying her heart out over that woman and
her brat! What can we do to save that child?”

“Ah, what can we do,” RoBards groaned, “to save ourselves?”

There was something in his look that checked Patty’s ire, made her
blench, shiver, and walk away. Perhaps she was thinking of—of what
RoBards dared not remember.

That night RoBards was wakened from sleep by a bewildering dream of
someone sobbing. He woke and heard sobs. They had invaded his slumber
and coerced the dream.

He sat up and looked about. Patty undressed and freezing had glanced
into the purloined romance; and it had fastened on her. She was weeping
over Hester Prynne and her child Pearl, and Dimmesdale, the wretched
partner in their expiation.

When RoBards drowsily asked what had made her cry, she sat on the edge
of his bed and read to him. Whether it were the contagion of her grief
or the skill of the author, he felt himself driven almost to tears.
He flung a blanket about Patty’s quivering shoulders and clung to
her, wondering at this mystery of the world: that lovers long dead in
obscurity, and lovers who had never lived at all, should be made to
walk so vividly through the landscapes of imagination that thousands of
strangers should weep for them.

Or was it for their woes that one wept? Or for one’s own in the
masquerade of other names and scenes?




CHAPTER XXXVI


The tenderest moods of devotion and shared sorrows alternated with
wrangles so bitter that murder seemed to hang in the air. Money was the
root of most of the quarreling.

When RoBards was about ready to give up and sink like a broken-backed
camel under the incessant rain of last straws, there came a wind out of
heaven and lifted the bills like petals swept from a peach tree.

Old Mrs. Roswell was found dead in her bed one morning. RoBards grieved
for the poor old skinflint, and wondered how he would get along without
her fees.

Then her last will was turned up and in it she bequeathed to him ten
thousand dollars in gold and a parcel of land which she had bought in
when it was sold for taxes. It lay out beyond the Reservoir on Murray’s
Hill, an abandoned farm.

But he had hopes that it would one day prove of value, for there
was talk of grading Fifth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street out to
Forty-fifth. And the World’s Fair which had been opened on July 4,
1852, in the magnificent Crystal Palace built next the Reservoir,
taught the public that Forty-second Street was not quite the North
Pole. And though it was a failure it had revealed the charm of this
region. There was, indeed, a movement on foot to create a great park
out there to be called Central Park. That would involve the purchase of
the land by the city. The “Forty Thieves,” as the aldermen were called,
would pay enough for it to leave themselves a tidy sum.

But RoBards was to learn that windfalls from heaven bring no permanent
rescue. Patty was incensed at the thought of devoting any of that
unforeseen ten thousand dollars to the payment of bills for worn-out
dresses and extravagances of the past.

She had given a ball for Immy on her nineteenth birthday in the
desperate hope that the girl would capture a husband before she began
to fade, but though there were lovers enough, none of them seemed to
account her a sufficiently attractive match.

And this was emphasized as a further proof of RoBards’ failure as a
father. All the summer of 1853 Patty complained of the smallness of
the house at Tuliptree. The children required separate rooms. They had
guests and there was no place to put them. When Immy had two visitors,
and one of his college friends came out to spend a week with Keith, the
two boys had to clear a room in the hayloft. They made a lark of it,
but it humiliated Patty, and she swore she would never go back to the
place until RoBards added a wing to it.

To add a wing would mean the opening of the foundation and the
demolition of the chimney, and the thought terrified RoBards. He had
grown so used to the presence of Jud Lasher there that only some
unexpected proposal of this sort wakened him to the eternal danger of a
revelation all the more horrible for its delay.

Patty found so many places for the spending of his ten thousand that
she could decide on none.

But the politicians smelled his money and he was visited by an affable
ward-heeler with a suggestion that he accept a nomination for a
judgeship in the Superior Court.

Though RoBards was revolted at the thought of receiving the ermine from
hands soiled with such dirty money, his heart longed for the dignity of
a judgeship, and he knew that he could never attain the bench without
the consent of the politicians. Once aloft he could purify the means by
the purity of his decisions.

So he gave his consent and promised to contribute the necessary funds
for the campaign. And that fall he won the election. On January first
he was to mount the throne.

Patty made all manner of fun of her politician, but she took pride in
his victory and thenceforth began to call him “Judge.” It was a change
from the ancient “Mister RoBards,” a little less distant, a little more
respectful.

But RoBards noted that Immy seemed indifferent to his success or his
failure. She pretended enthusiasm over his election, but her smile died
almost before it was born. She was distraught, petulant, swift to anger
and prompt to tears. She wept at nothing.

She took no delight even in gayety. She refused to go to dances. She
denied herself to callers.

Even when snow came and brought what foreigners called “the American
pastime known as sleighing,” and the bells thrilled the muffled streets
with fairy jubilation, she kept the house.

But the mere hint of calling in a doctor threw her into spasms of
protest.

One evening when the winter night overlapped the afternoon there came
a tempest of sleet and snow and RoBards had to call a hack to take him
home from the office. He was lashed as with a cat-o’-nine tails when he
ran from the curb to his door.

And when he entered the hall in a flurry of sleet, Patty said to him:

“We’ve got to go up to Tuliptree at once—to-morrow.”

“Why? what for? for how long?”

“I don’t know for how long, but we must lose no time in getting Immy
out of town.”




CHAPTER XXXVII


Another exodus. But they were scapegoats now, fleeing into the
wilderness with a mystic burden of guilt, anonymous guilt; for Immy
would not speak.

Complete was the contrast between that first flight from the cholera
and this fleeing where no man pursued, but all men waited.

Then David and Patty RoBards were part of a stampede, striving to save
their romance from the plague. Then they were bride and groom; now they
carried with them a daughter, unforeseen then, but older to-day than
her mother was when she married RoBards. But Immy’s bridegroom was
where?—was who?

In that other journey to Tuliptree Farm the streets were smothered with
dust and the waterless city stifled under a rainless sky.

Now water was everywhere. The fountains were still, but the pipes
underground were thick as veins and arteries. Water in the form of snow
lay on the ground, on the roofs, on the shoulders of the men, on their
eyelashes, on the women’s veils and in their hair and the feathers of
their hats. It lay in long ridges on the backs of the horses plunging,
slipping, falling. It plastered the panes of the lamp-posts and the
telegraph-posts that had grown up in a new forest all over town; it lay
along the wires that strung spider webs from wall and chimney and tree.

The banners that hung from all the shops and stretched across the
street were illegible. The busses and the hacks were moving dunes of
white.

There was a fog of snow. Everybody walked mincingly, except the
children, who rejoiced to slide on their brass-toed boots or on the
sleds that ran like great, prong-horned beetles among the legs of the
anxious wayfarers.

The RoBards trio was glad of the snow, for it gave concealment. Immy
was silent, morose, and with reason enough. If ever a soul had the
right to cry out against the unfairness, the malice of heaven, it was
Immy. She could have used the bitter words of Job:

“He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.... He will laugh at the
trial of the innocent.”

She did not feel innocent. She felt worse than wicked; she felt a fool.
But other people had been fools and vicious fools and no one learned
of it. She had been wicked and foolish before without punishment; with
reward rather, laughter, rapture, escape. Now for a flash of insane
weakness this sudden, awful, eternal penalty.

To her father and mother speech was impossible, thought almost
forbidden. If they had been taking Immy’s dead body up to a Westchester
burial, they could hardly have felt more benumbed. Only, if she had
been dead, the problem of her future would have been God’s. Now it was
theirs.

The gamble of it was that they could not foreknow the result of this
journey; whether it would mean one more life, or one death, or two.

In any case, RoBards must hasten back to his legal duties as soon as
he had placed Immy on the farm. Patty must stay and share the jail
sentence with her for—how long, who could tell?

At the railroad station they met friends, but satisfied them with a
word about the charm of the country in the winter. The train ploughed
bravely through snow that made a white tunnel of the whole distance.
The black smoke writhing in the vortex of writhing white seemed to
RoBards to express something of his own thoughts.

Travelers by rail usually expected death. Not long since, a train on
the Baltimore and Ohio had turned four somersaults in a hundred-foot
fall with frightful loss of life, and at Norwalk, Connecticut, a while
ago, forty-four people had been slaughtered and a hundred and thirty
mangled. But RoBards felt that such a solution of his own riddles would
be almost welcome.

Suddenly Patty leaned close to him and brought him down to realities.
She muttered:

“You must get the Albesons off the farm, somehow.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. You’re a lawyer. Think up something. They must not stay
there. They must not suspect. They know too much as it is.”

“All right,” he sighed. He realized the shrewdness of her wisdom, but
the problem she posed dazed him.

The rest of the way he beat his thought on an anvil, turning and
twisting it and hammering till his brain seemed to turn red in his
skull.

What simpler thing than to ask them to leave his farm? But they were
such simple souls that they would be as hard to manage as sheep. And
they must be sent away for a long time. He and Patty and Immy must
manage without a servant. But no sacrifice was too great.

The train ran all the way to Kensico now. Here they encountered trouble
in finding someone to drive them over the unbroken roads, but at length
they bribed a man to undertake the voyage.

The horses picked their way with insect-like motions, and went so
slowly that the bells snapped and clinked instead of jingling. The
runners of the sleigh mumbled and left long grooves in the white.

The rain of flakes upon the eyelids had the effect of a spell; it was
like this new thing everybody was talking about, “hypnotism,” a mere
disguise for the worn-out fraud of mesmerism.

Surging along in a state betwixt sleep and waking, RoBards’ mind fell
into a sing-song of babble.

Every man has in him at least one poem and RoBards, like most of his
profession, had a love of exalted words. He lacked the magniloquence of
Webster (whose recent death had swathed most of New York’s buildings in
black); but he could not resist even in a foreclosure proceeding or the
most sordid criminal case an occasional flight into the realm betwixt
prose and poesy.

And now he lulled himself with an inchoate apostrophe to the snow:

“O Snow! O down from what vast swan-breast torn? from what vast
swan-breast torn, to flutter, to flutter through the air and—and—What
swan, then, was it? is it? that died, that dies in silence, in grief
more like a song than—than silence: a song that has—that knows—that
finds no words, no tune, no melody, no tune; but only feeling, ecstatic
anguish, despair that faints, that droops, that swoons, and lies as
meek, as white, as white, as still as marble. O Snow, thou quell’st—O
Snow that quells the world, the countless sorrows of the world, the
plaints, the hungers, shames, to one calm mood, one White. O Peace! O
flawless Peace! This snow must be the drifting plumage from the torn
wide wings, the aching breast of heaven’s own dove, the Holy Ghost.”

He was as lost in his shredded rhythms as in the snow; as muffled in
himself as in the heavy robe and his greatcoat, and his thick cap. He
had not yet thought of a way to exile the Albesons. He had surrendered
himself as utterly to the weather as the hills themselves. The road
was gone, the walls rubbed out, the trees were but white mushrooms.
Everything was smoothed and rounded and numbed. Immy and her mother
were snowed under and never spoke. Even the driver made no sound except
an occasional chirrup or a lazy, “Git ap there!”

Then they were suddenly at Tuliptree. The snow had blurred the
landmarks, and the driver had to wade thigh-deep to reach the gate, and
excavate a space to swing it open.

The Albesons had neither seen nor heard them come, and the pounding on
the door and the stamping of feet gave them their first warning.

They were so glad of the end of their solitude, and put to such a
scurry to open bedrooms and provide fires and supper, that they had
little time for questions beyond, “Haow air ye all, anyway?” “Haow’ve
ye ben?” “Haow’s all the rest of the folks?” “Did ye ever see sich
snow?”

Mrs. Albeson embraced Immy with a reminiscent pity, and praised her for
putting on flesh and not looking like the picked chicken most the girls
looked like nowadays.

This gave RoBards his first idea and he spoke briskly:

“She’s not so well as she looks. Too much gayety in the city. Doctor
says she’s got to have complete rest and quiet. Mrs. RoBards and I are
pretty well worn out, too; so we decided just to cut and run. Besides,
I didn’t like to leave the farm alone all winter.”

“Alone all winter?” Albeson echoed. “Ain’t we here?”

“That’s what I came up to see you about. I have a client who lent a big
sum of money on a Georgia plantation, slaves and crops and all. He’s
afraid he’s been swindled—afraid the land’s no good—wants an honest
opinion from somebody that knows soil when he sees it. So I’m sending
you. And I’m sending your wife along to keep you out of mischief.”

“But Georgia! Gosh, that’s a million miles, ain’t it?”

“It’s nothing. You get the railroad part of the way. And it’s like
summer down there.”

The farmer and his wife and Patty and Immy all stared at RoBards, and
he felt as if he were staring at himself.

The odd thing about it was that the inspiration had come to him while
he was on his feet talking. He thought best on his feet talking. That
was his native gift and his legal practice had developed it.

While he had sat in the train and in the sleigh and cudgeled his wits,
nothing happened. Yet all the while there was indeed a client of his
anxious about a remote investment; he only remembered him when he began
to talk. The gigantic swindle known as the Pine Barren speculation had
sold to innocent dupes in the North thousands of acres of land that
was worthless, and hundreds of thousands of acres that did not even
exist. The result was pitiful hardship for hard-working, easy-believing
immigrants and a bad name for legitimate Georgian transactions.

The Albesons were more afraid of this expedition into the unknown than
if they had been asked to join the vain expedition Mr. Grinnell, the
merchant, had recently sponsored to search the Arctic Zone for Sir
John Franklin and his lost crew.

But RoBards forced his will upon theirs and after a day or two of
bullying carried the two old babes to New York and across the ferry and
put them on a New Jersey Railroad train. They would reach Washington
in less than sixteen hours—and by turning down the backs of two seats,
could stretch out and sleep while the train ran on. From Washington
they could go alternately by stage and rail all the way. This was
indeed the Age of Steam. There were thirteen thousand miles of railroad
in operation!

And now RoBards had exiled the two most dangerous witnesses—at
appalling financial cost. But if it saved Immy from bankruptcy, it was
an investment in destiny. RoBards had nothing more to do but wait, tell
lies to those who asked where he had hidden his wife and daughter, and
wonder what might be the outcome of all this conspiracy.

In the meanwhile he was installed as Judge, and Patty was not there
to see. Keith was in Columbia and much puzzled by the absence of his
mother and sister, and his father’s restlessness.

On one of RoBards’ visits to Tuliptree, Patty said with a dark look and
a hesitant manner:

“David, I’ve been thinking.”

That word “David” made him lift his head with eagerness. She went on:

“You remember how good Doctor Matson was when poor Papa died? How he
helped us conceal the terrible truth? I was wondering—don’t you suppose
if you asked him now—he always liked Immy, you know—and—if you appealed
to him——”

RoBards groaned aloud with horror.

“Hush! in God’s name! Would you ask a judge to compound a felony? to
connive at murder?”

“Oh,” Patty sighed, “I forgot. You used to be a father, and now you are
a judge.”

The little laugh that rattled in her throat was the most bloodcurdling
sound he had ever heard.

Its mockery of his ignoble majesty pursued him everywhere he went. He
heard it when he sat on the bench and glowered down at the wretches
who came before him with their pleading counselors. It made a vanity
of all dignity, of justice. And what was “justice” indeed, but a crime
against the helpless? First, their passions swept them into deeds they
did not want to commit; then other men seized them and added disgrace
to remorse.

Which was the higher duty—the father’s to fight the world for his
young? Or the judge’s to defend an imaginary ideal against the laws of
mercy?

His soul was in utter disarray and he found only shame whichever way he
turned. He went back to the country perplexed to a frenzy.

Patty greeted him with such a look as a sick she-wolf would give the
mate that slunk about the den where her young were whimpering. She
would not let him see his daughter.

He retreated to his library and was too dispirited to build a fire. He
stood in the bitter cold and stared through a frost-film at the forlorn
moon freezing in a steel-blue sky above an ice-encrusted world.

He was shaken from his torpor by a cry, a lancinating shriek, by cry
upon cry. He ran like a man shot full of arrows, but the door was
locked and Patty called to him to go away.

He leaned against the wall, useless, inane, while his child babbled and
screamed, then only moaned and was silent a while, then screamed anew,
and was silent again.

Agony rose and ebbed in her like a quick storm-tide, and he knew that
the old hag Nature, the ruthless midwife, was rending and twisting her
and rejoicing, laughing triumphantly at every throe. He wondered why he
had made no arrangements for Immy to be anæsthetized. It was too late
now.

This was that holy mystery, that divine crisis for which she was born.
He had endured the same torture when Immy was born. But then there was
pride and boasting as the recompense; now, the publication of shame,
the branding, the scarlet A, and the pillory.

Then the nurse had beamed upon him as she placed in his arms for a
moment the blessing of heaven.

Now, after a maddening delay, Patty would doubtless come to the door
and thrust upon him a squirming blanketful of noisy misery and of
lifelong disgrace.

He began to drift like a prisoner in a cell. Patty would not let him in
and he would have been afraid to enter. He went back to his library as
an old horse returns to its stall from habit. He paced the floor and
stood at the window, guiltily observing the road to see if anyone had
heard the clamor and were coming in to ask if murder were being done.

But no one moved. Even the shadows were still, frozen to the snow. Not
an owl hunted; not a field mouse scuttered. The moon seemed not to
budge. She was but a spot of glare ice on a sky tingling with stars.

The room was dead with old air. Yet his brow burned. He flung up
the window and gulped the fresh wind that flowed in. The jar of the
casement shook down snow and it sifted across the sill to the carpet.

On his sleeve a few flakes rested and did not melt. Their patterns
caught his attention. The wonder of snow engaged his idle mind.

The air had been clear. And then suddenly there was snow. Out
of nothing these little masterworks of crystal jewelry had been
created, infinitesimal architecture beyond the skill of the Venetian
glass-spinners or the Turkish weavers of silver.

And now the flakes were blinking out, back into nothingness.

The snow had come from nowhere in armies. Each flake was an entity,
unlike any other flake. And then the air had recalled it!

This baby that was arriving was but another snowflake. It would come
from nowhere—or from where? Whither would it go if it died? For die it
must, sooner or later. Invisible, visible, invisible!

What was the soul? what was the body? Who decreed these existences? How
could any imaginable god find the time, the patience, the interest to
build every snowflake, sketch every leaf, decide the race, the hue, the
figure of every animal, bird in egg, child in woman?

Was it to be a girl or a boy that Immy would produce? No one could know
in advance. Yet it meant everything to the soul crowded into the body.

If this human snowflake had been taken from a waiting multitude of
unborn angels, why had God sentenced this particular soul to life
imprisonment in this particular child of dishonor? What mischief had
it done in heaven to be sentenced to earth? Could it be true, as Dr.
Chirnside preached, that this soul had been elected from the beginning
of the world to unending damnation or unending rapture for the “glory”
of God? What a fearful idea of glory! The worst Hun in history, the
most merciless inquisitor, had never equaled that scheme of “glory.”

Who was the human father of this child-to-be? And what share had he
himself in it? The helpless grandfather of a helpless grandchild!
Why would Immy not tell the father’s name? Perhaps she did not know!
This thought was too loathsome to endure. Yet how could one unthink a
thought that has drifted into his mind like a snowflake from nowhere?

Why should the father of the child not even be aware of its birth,
when the howling mother must be squeezed as if she were run through a
clothes-wringer?

Two thousand children were born dead every year in New York—such a
strange long procession to the cemeteries! They were washed up on the
shores of life, like the poor little victims of the Children’s Crusade
who set out for Christ’s tomb and drowned in armies.

If Immy’s baby could only be born dead what a solution of all problems!
But it would splutter and kick, mewl and puke, and make itself a
nuisance to every sense.

And if the child died, where would it go? To hell if it were not
baptized first. That was sure, if anything were sure. Yet if it were
not of the elect it would go there anyway, in spite of any baptism, any
saintliness of its life.

If it lived, it would join the throng of illegitimate children. Of
these there were a thousand a year born in New York alone. What a
plague of vermin!

And what would its future be? It might become a thief, a murderer. It
might be sentenced to death for crime.

If RoBards continued his career as a judge, he would have many death
sentences to pass. His own grandchild might come before him some day.

What if he should sentence it to death now? In the good old times of
the _patria potestas_ a father could destroy an unworthy child without
punishment. Judge RoBards’ jurisdiction as a grandfather was doubly
authentic. By one curt act he could protect his daughter from endless
misery and frustration, and protect the world from this anonymous
intruder and protect this poor little waif from the monstrous cruelty
of the world.

This snowflake ought to go back to the invisible. Its existence was
God’s crime against his child. Yet he could be a god himself and by the
mere tightening of his fingers about that little wax-doll throat, fling
it back at God, rejected, broken—a toy that he refused to play with.

He owed this act to Immy. He had brought her into the world. He loved
her. He must save her from being enveloped in the curse of this world’s
hell. Let the next hell wait.

If God wanted to punish him for it forever—why, what of that? He had
committed one murder already and was already damned, no doubt. And even
God could not increase infinite torment or multiply eternity.

He laughed at the infernal mathematics of that conceit. He felt as
haughty as Lucifer challenging Jehovah. Yes, he would force his way
into that birth chamber and do his terrible duty.

The onset of this madness set him in motion. He had not realized how
long he had stood still before that open window and that bleak white
desert, where it was too cold to snow, too cold for a wind—a grim cold
like a lockjaw.

When he turned to pace the floor, his legs were mere crutches; his feet
stump-ends. It hurt to walk. He stood still and thought again.

Yes, yes! All he had to do was to close his hand upon that tiny
windpipe. It would be no more than laying hold of a pen and signing
a warrant of arrest, a warrant of death. The same muscles, the same
gesture. It would not be murder, simply an eviction—dispossess
proceedings against an undesirable tenant, a neighbor that would not
keep the peace.

He would cheat the newspapers of what they called their rights; but God
knew they had enough scandal to print without advertising his family
name. The gossips would lose one sweetmeat; but they never stopped
yapping. He would not let the men in the clubs call his grandchild a
bastard and his daughter a—the word was vomit to his throat.

With one delicate act of his good right hand he could rescue Immy
from a lifetime of skulking; save at the same time this poor little,
innocent, doomed petitioner from slinking crying down the years. He
could save Patty from a lifetime of obloquy and humiliation. He could
save his own name, his ancestors, his posterity, and the integrity of
this old house—all by one brief contraction of his fingers.

With a groan of joy in the magnificence of this supernal opportunity to
be a man, a father, a god, he rehearsed the gesture, put his hand to
the imaginary baby’s throat.

He drove his will into his fingers. But they could not bend. His hand
was frozen.




CHAPTER XXXVIII


Only now that he tried to use his hands and found them without hinges
or feeling did he realize how cold he had been.

Pain began in him, and fear. He had endured a stealthily creeping
paralysis and when he heard Patty’s step, he was almost afraid to speak
lest his words come forth brittle and fall breaking on the floor.

He turned in slow, thudding steps. Patty shivered in the frigid air and
hitched her shawl about her, tucking in her hands as she scolded:

“What on earth! The window open! Are you mad?”

No answer came from RoBards. His brain might as well have been snow. He
stood holding out his hands as if they were something dead. Patty ran
to him and seizing his fingers cried out in pain at them. He was alive,
he could be hurt. She began to chafe his fingers in hers, to blow on
them with her warm breath. She ran to the window and raising it scooped
up a double handful of snow and wrapped it about his hands. Snow was
warm to him, but bitter cold to her little palms. She was warm and soft
where she touched him. She bustled about for cold water to pour on his
hands, for anything that could save them. She sought for warm thoughts
to keep her world from icy inanition.

“I hate people who say that terrible things are for the best. But maybe
this is, for once. The baby—the poor little baby—I was alone and I
was so busy taking care of Immy, that I—I forgot till it was too late
to—to——”

RoBards groaned: “You don’t mean that the baby is dead?”

If Patty had looked away with shame he would have felt that she felt
guilty of a cruel negligence, but she stared straight into his eyes.
She seemed almost to lean on his eyes. And so he felt that she was
defying him to accuse her of what she had done.

He dared not take the dare. Then she began with suspicious garrulity:

“Maybe it was God that took the baby back. He has solved our problem.
If the poor little thing had lived—think! But now! It’s too bad,
but—well, Immy’s a girl again. And nobody knows, nobody knows! Nobody
need ever know.”

But they were not rid of the baby yet. It waited on the sill of their
decision. Its body, built in secret with so much mystic care and borne
with such agony, was empty, but as inescapable as an abandoned house.

The little house must be removed from the landscape it dominated,
before the neighbors grew aware of its presence.

While RoBards dully tried to set his thought-machinery going, Patty
murmured:

“I’ll have to tell Immy. She is too weak to wonder yet. She’ll carry on
terribly, but it can’t be helped. And she’ll be glad all the rest of
her days. But where shall we—what can we do with the baby now?”

“Huh?” gasped RoBards. “Oh, yes, what can we do with the—yes, that is
the question, what can we do? We’ve got to do something.”

But that could wait. Immy was faintly moaning, “Mamma! Mamma!” Patty
ran to her. RoBards followed and bent to kiss the wrung-out wisp that
had survived the long travail. She whispered feebly: “Where’s my baby?
I haven’t even seen it yet. Is it a boy or——”

Patty knelt and caressed her and asked her to be brave. Then, in order
to have done with the horror, told it to her in the fewest words.

Immy gave back the ghost of a shriek in protest against this miserable
reward of all her shame and all the rending of her soul and body. She
wanted to hold her achievement in her arms. She wanted to feel its
little mouth nuzzling her flesh, drawing away that first clotted ache.
Nature demanded that the child take up its offices in her behalf no
less than its own. Thousands of years of habit clamored in her flesh.

No one could say how much was love and how much was strangled instinct.
But she was frantic. She whispered Murder! and kept maundering as she
rocked her head sidewise, trying vainly to lift her weak hands in
battle:

“Oh, this is too much, this is just a little too much! How much am I
supposed to endure? Will somebody please tell me how much I am expected
to stand? That’s all I ask. Just tell me where my rights begin, if
ever. If ever! My baby! My little, little baby that has never seen me
and never can see me! Why, they won’t even let me hold my own baby in
my arms!”

RoBards stared at her in such pity that his heart seemed to beat up
into his throat. Patty knelt and put out her hands to Immy in prayer
for mercy, but Immy pushed them away, and threshed about like a broken
jumping jack yanked by an invisible giant child.

She turned her head to him and pleaded: “Papa! you bring me my baby.
You always get me what I want, papa. Get me my baby!”

Since life seemed determined to deny him his every plea,
RoBards resolved that he at least would not deny anyone else
anything—especially not Immy. He went to the big chair where the
blanketed bundle was and gathering the child into his aching arms
carried it to Immy and laid it in hers.

The way her hands and her gaze and her moans and her tears rushed out
to welcome it persuaded him that he had done the right thing. If ever
property had been restored to its owner, now was the time.

He could not bear to see the grief that bled about the child from
Immy’s eyes. She held it close under her down-showering curls and her
tears streamed over it like rain from the eaves on snow. They could not
waken roses or violets, but they eased the sky.

She wept no longer the harsh brine of hate. Her grief was pure regret,
the meek, the baffled yearning for things that cannot be in this
helpless world.

This was that doll that as a little girl she had held to her merely
hinted breasts and had rocked to sleep and made fairy plans for. Now
and then as she wagged her head over it, and boasted of its beauty,
she would laugh a little and look up with a smile all awry and
tear-streaked.

And that was what broke RoBards: to see her battling so bravely to find
something beautiful, some pretext for laughter in the poor rubbish of
her life. He wondered that it did not break God’s heart to see such a
face uplifted. Perhaps he could not see so far. Perhaps he turned away
and rushed across the stars to hide from her, as RoBards fled from her.

He hobbled into his library, that wolf-den of his, and he glared at it
with hatred of everything in it. He lighted the kindling laid crosswise
in the fireplace, to hear flames crackle, and to fight the dank chill.

There were lawbooks piled and outspread about his desk. He flung them
off the table to the floor. Laws! Human laws!

On the shelves there were philosophies, histories, a Bible, a Koran,
Confucius, the Talmud, Voltaire, a volume of Dr. Chirnside’s sermons.
He tore them from their places and tossed them into the air to sprawl
and scatter their leaves like snowflakes—and as full of wisdom. He
flung a few of them into the fire, but they began to smother it. And
somehow that made him laugh.

The abysmal vanity of his temper! He was more foolish and futile
than the books he insulted. Poor Job, whose God gave him to the
devil to torture on a bet, without explaining to his servant why.
Poor Kung-fu-tse trying to be wise. Poor Voltaire, with a mighty
cachinnation and a heart full of pity for the victims of persecution.
Poor Dr. Chirnside, anxiously floundering through the bogs of terror
on the stilts of dogma. Poor Jud Lasher, lying there in the walls!—or
where?

This wrestling, Jacob-wise, with invisible angels or fiends, took
his mind for a saving while from the unbearable spectacle of his own
child’s immediate hell.

There was silence again about the lonely house. By and by Patty came
into the room to say:

“She’s asleep. I gave her some drops. Too many, I’m afraid. And now—now
what?”

They leaned against the mantelpiece, tall shadows against the swirling
flames. Her head and his were lost in the dark as if they were giants
reaching to the clouds. And they were, indeed, in the clouds; lost
there.

They both thought of the same thing, of course: As usual with human
kind, they were concerned about keeping something secret from somebody
else. They wanted to make a decent concealment of their family shame.

RoBards’ eyes wandered and fell upon the hearthstone at his feet with
the firelight shuttling about it in ripples. Jud Lasher was under there.

He must not hide the child in these same walls. There would be
something burlesque about that. Strange, hideous, loathsome truth that
the most sorrowful things have only to be repeated to become comic!

He walked away from the hearthstone. It was too much like a headstone.
He went to the window. The night had not changed. The earth was
stowed away under a great tight tarpaulin of snow. The sky was a vast
steel-blue windowpane frosted with stars and the long ice-trail of the
Milky Way.

Through the snow a few trees stood upthrust. Among them the little
tulip trees huddled together slim and still. There beneath were the
bodies of his children and Patty’s. He had seen Patty cry over them
as Immy had done, and sway with their still frames, according to that
inveterate habit women have of rocking their children, awake or asleep,
alive, or——

Immy’s baby belonged out there with the family—with its tiny uncle and
its tiny aunt. They would not flinch from it or snub it because of the
absence of a marriage ceremony. It had not been to blame. There was
nothing it could have done to insist upon such a provision; nothing
to prevent its own arrival. It brought with it a certain sanctifying
grace. It brought with it a certain penitential suffering.

RoBards nodded to himself, went to Patty and told her his plan,
and then hastened to find in the cellar an axe and a shovel, and a
discarded empty box of the nearest size for its purpose.

He put on his heaviest coat, his boots and his gloves, and a heavy
scarf. In the meantime Patty had fetched the child. She whispered:

“When I took it from her, her hands resisted. Her lips made a kissing
sound and she mumbled something that sounded like, ‘Baby go by-by!’”

Patty had wrapped the little form in a silken shawl she had always
prized since it came out of China in one of her father’s ships—in
the wonderful days when she had had a father and he had had ships. A
girlish jealousy had persisted in her heart and she would never let
Immy wear that shawl. Now she gave it up because it was the only thing
she could find in the house precious enough to honor the going guest
and be a sacrifice.

RoBards pushed out into the snow with his weapons and his casket, and
made his way to the young tulip trees, which were no longer so young as
he imagined them.

The snow was ice and turned the shovel aside. He must crack its surface
with the ax, and it was hard for his frozen fingers to grip the handle.
Only the sheer necessity of finishing the work made it possible for him
to stand the pain. By the time he reached the soil deep below, he was
so tired and so hot that he flung off his overcoat and his muffler and
gloves.

The ground was like a boulder and the ax rang and glanced and sprinkled
sparks of fire. Before he had made the trench deep enough, he had
thrown aside his fur cap and his coat, and yet he glowed.

At last he achieved the petty grave, and set the box in it, and heard
the clods clatter on it; filled in and trampled down the shards of
soil, and shoveled the snow upon that and made all as seemly as he
could.

It was not a job that a gravedigger would boast of, but it was his
best. He gazed at the unmarked tomb of the anonymous wayfarer. There
should have been some rite, but he could not find a prayer to fit the
occasion or his own rebellious mood.

He was so tired, so dog-tired in body and soul that he would have been
glad to lie down in his own grave if somebody would have dug him one.

He hobbled and slid back to the house, flung the ax and the shovel into
the cellar from the top of the stairs, and went to bed.

The next morning he would have sworn that the whole thing was delirium.
At any rate, it was finished.

But it was not finished. Immy woke at last and before her mind was
out of the spell of the drug, her arms were groping for her baby, her
breast was aching; and when she understood, her scream was like a
lightning stroke in a snowstorm.

RoBards could stand no more. He told Patty that she would have to face
the ordeal. It was cowardly to leave her, but he must save his sanity
or the whole family was ruined.

As he left the house for the barn and the horse he kept there, he was
glad to see that snow was fluttering again. That little mound needed
more snow for its concealment.




CHAPTER XXXIX


When he reached New York, RoBards had to take his frozen hands to a
physician, who managed to save them for him, though there were times
when the anguishes that clawed them made him almost regret their
possession.

He was tempted to resign his judgeship, feeling that he was unworthy
of the high bench, since he had committed crimes, and had been ready
to commit others, and had on his soul crimes that he regretted not
committing.

But he lacked the courage or the folly to publish his true reasons for
resigning and he could think of no pretexts. He solaced himself with
the partially submerged scandals of other jurists, and wondered where
a perfect soul could be found to act as judge if perfection were to
be demanded. Even Christ had put to flight all of the accusers of the
taken woman and had let her go free with a word of good advice.

At times the memory of his own black revolt against the laws softened
RoBards’ heart when he had before him men or women accused of sins,
and he punished them with nothing more than a warning. At other times
his own guilt made him merciless to the prisoners of discovery, and
he struck out with the frenzy of a man in torment, or with the spirit
of the college boys who hazed their juniors cruelly because they had
themselves been hazed by their seniors.

Deep perplexities wrung his heart when poor souls stood beneath his
eyes charged with the smuggling of unlicensed children into the world,
children without a passport, outlaw children stamped with the strange
label “illegitimate.”

They and their importers wore a new cloak in RoBards’ eyes. They had
been hitherto ridiculous, or contemptible, or odious. Now he understood
what malice there was in the joke that passion had played on them. They
were the scorched victims of a fire against which they had taken out
no insurance. Like Immy they must have suffered bitter ecstasies of
terrified rapture, long vigils of bewilderment, heartbreaks of racking
pain, with ludicrous disgrace for their recompense.

The Albesons returned from Georgia with such a report as a Northern
farmer might have made on Southern soil without the trouble of the
journey. RoBards pretended to be satisfied. They found that Immy was
not so much improved as they expected—“Kind of peaked and poorly,” Abby
complained.

Immy came back to town and though she never quite lost that prayer
in the eyes known as the “hunted look,” she began to find escape and
finally delight in her old gayeties.

Then Captain Harry Chalender returned from California on one of the
Yankee clippers that were astounding the world by their greyhound
speed. It took him barely seventy-six days to sail from San Francisco
around the Horn to Sandy Hook, the whole trip needing only seven
months. It was indeed the age of restless velocity. Chalender came in
as usual with the prestige of broken records.

He was rich and full of traveler’s tales of wild justice, Vigilante
executions, deluges of gold, fantastic splendors amid grueling
hardships.

His anecdotes bored RoBards, who listened to them with the poor
appetite of a stay-at-home for a wanderer’s brag. But Patty listened
hungrily, and Immy was as entranced as Desdemona hearkening to the
Moor. Chalender brought Patty a handsome gift and dared to bring a
handsomer to Immy.

Even his cynical intuitions failed to suspect the education she had
undergone, but he noted how much older she was, how wise yet reckless.
And she found him perilously interesting beyond any of the young bucks
whose farthest voyages were bus rides down Broadway from their boarding
houses to their high desks in the counting houses.

There was nothing in Chalender’s manner toward Immy that Patty or David
could resent when they had their eyes upon him, but he took Immy far
from their eyes often. And RoBards was sure that Patty was harrowed not
only with a mother’s anxiety for a daughter, but with an elder beauty’s
resentment at a younger’s triumph.

On the next New Year’s Day Chalender came to the RoBards home late of
a snow-clouded afternoon. He explained that he had begun up north and
worked his way downtown; and St. John’s Park was the last word to the
south. This led Patty to remind RoBards with a sharp look that she had
been begging him to move up where the people were.

The year had begun with an exhausting day. The first guest had come
before nine and it was getting toward six when Chalender rang at the
closed door. The RoBards family was jaded with the procession of more
or less befuddled visitors, for everybody still called on everybody and
drank too much too often.

Harry Chalender had tried to see if he could not establish a record
in calls. He reached the RoBards house in a pitiable condition. He
was dressed like the fop he always was, his hair curled, oiled, and
perfumed; his handkerchief scented; his waistcoat of a flowery pattern,
his feet in patent leathers glossy as of yore. His breath was even more
confusedly aromatic with cloves than usual. He apologized thickly:

“Patty, I think I’ve done something to give me immortalily at lash.
I’ve called at shixy-sheven house between nine ’s morn’ and five ’s
even’n. And I’ve had ’s much cherry bounce I’m full of elasticicy.
I har’ly touch ground. And wines—oh, Patty! I’m a human cellar. And
food—stewed oyssers, turkey, min’ spies! But I always come back to you,
Patty, and to Immy. Seem’ you and your livin’ image, Immy, I can’t tell
whish is whish; I half suspect I’m seem’ double. Am I or—am I?”

Giggling fatuously over his wit, he fell asleep. Patty regarded him
with anger, and RoBards with disgust; but both were dazed to see that
Immy smiled and placed a cushion under his rolling head.

Drunkenness was beginning to lose its charm. In 1846 New York had
voted against the licensing of liquor dealers by a large majority.
Maine had followed with a law prohibiting the sale or manufacture of
all strong drinks under penalty of fine or imprisonment.

Three years later New York passed a copy of the Maine law and the
Temperance party’s candidate won the governorship. But nobody was
punished; clubs were formed with no other bond than thirst. The edict
was found to be a source of infinite political corruption, general
contempt for law, and tolerance for lawbreakers. It collapsed at last
and was repealed as a failure. All the old people agreed that the good
old times were gone.

Much as RoBards had despised the immemorial tendency of old people
to forget the truth of their own youth and prate of it as a time of
romantic beauty, he found himself despairing of these new times. The
new dances were appalling. The new drinks were poison. The new modes in
love were unheard of.

Once more he was wondering if it were not his duty to horsewhip
Chalender or to kill him. The horror of involving his wife in scandal
restrained him before; now his daughter was concerned.

He pleaded with Immy, wasted commands upon her, and was frozen by her
cynical smile. She laughed most at his solemnest moods just as her
mother had done. She would mock him, hug and kiss him, and make him
hold her cloak for her glistening bare shoulders, then skip downstairs
to take Harry Chalender’s arm and go with him in his carriage to
wherever he cared to go. One night it was to see the new play _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_, based on a novel written by a clergyman’s wife, with
pirated editions selling about the world by the hundred thousand—six
different theatres were playing the play at the same time in London.
Another night Chalender set Immy forth in a box at the Castle Garden
where Mario and Grisi were singing against the gossip of the whisperers
and starers at Chalender’s new beauty. On other nights Chalender danced
with Immy at fashionable homes where she could not have gone without
him. On other nights they did not explain where they went, and RoBards
was held at bay by Immy’s derisive, “Don’t you wish you knew?” or worse
yet her riant insolence, “You’re too young to know.”

Patty was frantic with defeat. She and Immy wrangled more like sisters
or uncongenial neighbors than like mother and daughter. RoBards was
constantly forced to intervene to keep the peace. By paternal instinct
he defended Immy against her mother and expressed amazement at Patty’s
suspicions, though they were swarming in his own heart. He tried to win
Immy by his own trust in her:

“My darling,” he said once, “you are too young to realize how it looks
to go about with a man of an earlier generation. Chalender is old
enough to be your father. And think of his past!”

“Think of mine!” she said with a tone less of bravado than of abjection.

This stabbed RoBards deep. But he went on as if to a stubborn jury:

“If Chalender were honest, he would want to marry you.”

“He does!”

“Oh, God help us all!” Patty whispered with a look as if ashes had been
flung into her face and as if she tasted them.

RoBards snarled:

“I’ll kill him if he ever crosses my doorstep again!”

To which Immy responded demurely:

“Then I’ll have to meet him outside.”

This defiance was smothering. She went on:

“Why shouldn’t I marry him? I don’t have to tell him anything. He
doesn’t ask me any questions. Doesn’t dare start the question game,
perhaps. He’s lots of fun. He keeps me laughing and interested,
and—guessing.”

This was such a pasquinade on the usual romantic reasons, that her
father could contrive no better rejoinder than:

“But my little sweetheart, such a marriage would be bound to fail.”

This soft answer drove Immy to a grosser procacity:

“Then I can divorce him easily enough. I can join the crowd and go to
Michigan. After two years of residence, I could get a divorce on any
one of seven grounds!”

“Immy!”

“Or Indiana is still better. I was reading that you can establish a
residence there after a night’s lodging. Men and women leave home
saying they’re going away for a little visit or on business and they
never come back, or come back single. If Harry Chalender didn’t behave,
I could surprise him. Besides, Harry would give me anything I want,
even a divorce, if I asked him. But don’t you worry, I’ll get along
somehow.”

And she was gone, leaving her parents marooned on a barren arctic
island.




CHAPTER XL


When his term as judge ended, RoBards declined to try for re-election,
and returned to the practice of law.

Once more the Croton River brought him clients—but also a civil war
with his son Keith. This was a sore hurt to RoBards’ heart, for he and
the boy had been mysteriously drawn together years before, and he had
found such sympathy and such loyalty in Keith’s devotion, that he had
counted upon him as a future partner in his legal career.

The water lust of New York was insatiable. As fast as new supplies were
found they were outgrown. And the more or less anonymous and gloryless
lovers of the city had always to keep a generation ahead of its growth.

The vice of water had led to the use of an average of seventy-eight
gallons a day by each inhabitant. Every Saturday the reservoir at
Forty-second Street was half drained. A new invention called the
bathtub was coming into such favor especially of Saturdays that some
legislatures made bathing without a doctor’s advice as illegal as
drinking alcohol. The ever-reliable pulpit denounced such cleanliness
as next to ungodliness: attention to the wicked body was indecent.

But already the need was urgent for a new reservoir. Another lake
must be established within the city. The Croton Department had been
authorized to acquire land. After much debate a thousand lots held by
a hundred owners were doomed to be submerged. They lay in a sunken
tract in the heart of a region set apart for the new park—to be called
Central because it was miles to the north of all access. Nearly eight
million dollars were voted for the purchase and improvement of this
wilderness. The project came in handy during the panic of 1857, when
the poor grew so peevish and riotous that the city was forced to
distribute bread and provide jobs. Twelve hundred hungry citizens and a
hundred horses were set to work leveling the Park.

But first the city had to battle with the landholders and many of them
engaged RoBards as their counsel. There were many houses on the bed of
the new lake, gardens and squatters’ cabins.

Keith protested against his father’s activity, and tried to convert him
to the great principles of the city’s higher rights.

The young man was frankly ashamed of his parent. It was like having
a grandfather who had been a Tory in the Revolution, or a Hartford
secessionist in 1812.

Keith had graduated from Columbia well toward the bottom of his class;
but he had a gift for leadership among the least studious students. He
preferred hydraulics to classics, and sneered at the law.

He was aided and abetted in his ambitions by Harry Chalender, who
continued to exert a malign influence over the home, though he never
came near it any more, and Immy never mentioned his name. If she saw
him she met him outside, under the cover of other engagements. Then one
day Keith came home swaggering:

“I’ve got a position as an engineer with the Croton Department. Uncle
Harry got it for me; took me to a firm of engineers and made them take
me in.”

That pet name “uncle” angered RoBards almost as much as the deed. But
he could not expose such feelings to his son, or thwart the boy’s
future.

The theatre of Keith’s labors was the long channel of the Croton River.
At first he had to tote surveying instruments and scramble over rough
ground. But the aqueduct was to him one of the majestic wonders of the
world. Patty was glad to move out early to Tuliptree Farm to be near
him, though Immy hated the place, and not without reason.

Repairs were incessantly required in the masonry imprisoning the
Croton, and one afternoon Keith came home to Tuliptree Farm worn out,
to tell of a strange breach:

“Near Sing Sing—in the section of the aqueduct that Uncle Harry
built—we found that a willow tree had sent one of its roots into the
crown of the arch. In six months it had bored a hole twenty feet right
through the solid stone.”

RoBards started up in his chair at this. The thought had thrust into
his mind: What if the great tulip tree growing out there had done the
like to the foundations of the house?

He could imagine the numberless invisible roots groping in the
dark, deep soil and fumbling along the foundation stone, pushing an
inquisitive finger into every cranny and burrowing with the persistent
curiosity of that tree which made a net of roots about the skull of
Major John André.

The high Tulip lost at once its dignity of guardianship. It became a
vast devil fish, a myriapod slimily prying and squirming, with the
house in its clutches.

It might even now be ready to swell and heave and overturn the house.
The scavenger might be even now wrapping its arms about Jud Lasher’s
corpse—slowly, patiently haling it forth to the light of day and the
eyes of men.

There seemed to be an unrelenting conspiracy in the world to bury
everything that man would preserve and expose everything that man would
conceal. In RoBards’ own conscience there was a something burrowing and
squirming, as if commanding him to disgorge the secret interred in his
brain.

The secret was like a growth creeping, growing and bulging toward the
surface and multiplying its pain with every hour of concealment. He
wondered how long he could withhold the proclamation of his crime.
He caught himself at long intervals just about to announce to any
bystander:

“I have committed my own little murder in my day. I am human, too. I
am not innocent because of any incapacity for crime. My respectable
reputation is due to my discretion, not to any flaccidity of character.”

Months would go by with no onset of this publishing instinct. Then it
would sweep over him like a vertigo.

Hearing Keith tell of the tender root that broke through the aqueduct,
he understood how even stone and mortar must eventually yield to the
intolerable nagging of a weak thing that never rested.

He rose and with a laborious pretense of dawdling sauntered to the
door, out and around the house to where the tulip tree stood. As if
idly, he leaned against the trunk and studied the sprawl of the roots.
Some of them were thicker than a young tree. They writhed and contorted
the ground. Standing still like pythons petrified, they yet seemed to
move with a speed the more dreadful for its persistence. Glaciers were
not more leisurely, nor more resistless.

The roots dived into the earth, some of them bent upon reaching the
foundation walls. They had but one instinct, the hunt for water, and
nothing could check them but death.

Down the outside stairway of the cellar went RoBards and stumbling in
the dark found the wall nearest the tree and passed his hands along it
like a blind man.

His anxious fingers encountered tendrils pleached against the rough
masonry. He made a light and found that the tulip tree was already
within the walls. The roots were like worms covered with mould. On the
cellar floor was a dust of old mortar, and bits of it slowly shoved out
from between the chinks. Some of the dislodged mortar was no older than
the night when he had lifted out stones and buried Jud Lasher somewhere
inside there and smeared fresh mortar in the crevices.

Terrified by the peril of this secret inquiry of the far-delving roots,
he went back to the outer air.

Either he must be surrendered to exposure or the tree must be executed.
The life of such a tree if let alone was far beyond the human span. The
strength of it was uncanny.

He stood a while, as motionless as the roots, charmed by their snaky
spell. Then an idea came to his rescue. He called to Albeson, who was
puttering about the yard in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’s with his collar
off for comfort.

“See those roots,” said RoBards. “They’re going to tip the house over
if we don’t kill them. Get your saw and ax and we’ll cut them off now.”

“No special hurry as I can see,” said Albeson.

“We’ll get it over with to-day.”

“In spite of its bein’ the Sabbath?” Albeson protested, making religion
an excuse for laziness.

“The better the day the better the deed.”

Albeson condensed the Declaration of Independence into a grumbling
dissent, then fetched the tools. All afternoon they worked, chopping,
digging, sawing, until they had severed all the Briarean arms on the
side next the house.

“Looks like we’ve killed the old tree,” Albeson groaned. “It’ll
naturally bleed to death.”

“Better lose the tree than the house,” RoBards retorted.

“Wall, they’re both your’n to do with as you’re a mind to,” said
Albeson, absolving himself of guilt and folly, as he went his way.
RoBards paused at the front steps to look back at his gigantic quondam
friend. It had been treasonably making ready to betray him. He did not
love it any more. The house itself was changing from a sanctuary to a
penitentiary. He could set it on fire easily, but the heat would only
crack the foundation walls apart. He could not burn those stones.

He had justly sentenced the tree to a partial execution. If it
perished, it had earned its fate.

It was beautiful, though. It stood lofty and shapely, the broad leaves
shimmering in an afternoon zephyr. It had a frank and joyous life
and he wondered if it would suffer much pain from the mayhem he had
committed on it.

He had visited a slow death of torture upon the patriarch. Would it
know that it was dying? Would it ache and struggle against its fate? He
was as sorry for it now as a man is for an overpowered enemy; he was
sorry he had been so harsh with it.

He thought of Immy as she had been when he revenged her upon Jud
Lasher. What, after all, had been the profit of that murder? He had
tried to shelter Immy from harm as if she were a sacred ark, death to
touch. And now she was the reckless companion of Harry Chalender in
his revels. He had guarded her ignorance as a kind of virginity, and
now there was nothing that she did not know.

He had taken a life with his own hands, to spare her so much as one
chance meeting with someone who might remind her of her lucklessness.
And now she flouted him to his face and was so bored with his society
that she devoted herself to a man whose name he could not hear without
rancor.

Well, if she would only be patient a while longer, her father would
find the means and the time to give her more attention. He would travel
with her to far-off lands, where she would be so fascinated with new
sights and new suitors that she would forget Chalender and find some
young and noble lover worthy of the Immy that she should have been.

The next day as he stood on the porch, he was startled to hear her
voice crying his name:

“Papa, papa!”

He paused, thinking it imagination, but he saw her coming to him in a
swift-rolling carriage. At her side was Chalender with exultance in his
smile.

The carriage whirled in at the open gate, and the moment the driver
stopped it short, Chalender leaped out, helped Immy to alight, and ran
with her to the steps.

And there the twain knelt in a laughing parody of homage, and
Chalender—Chalender his arch enemy, his chief annoyance upon the
earth—dared to mimic Immy’s word and exclaim:

“Papa!”

As RoBards’ eyes rolled in wonder, he caught sight of Patty at a window
staring unseen. She vanished almost at once, as if she had fallen.

Before RoBards could frame a question, Immy was up and at him in a
whirlwind. She had her arms about his neck and was crying:

“Papa dearest, Harry and I have just come across the border from
Connecticut. We went over there and the funniest old justice of the
peace you ever saw married us. And we’ve come home galloping to ask
your blessing. And I’ve come to pack some of my things.”

The habit of indulgence answered for RoBards before his slow wrath
could muster its forces. He stammered idiotically:

“Married! Well, what do you think of that? Well, well! This is a
surprise but—well—bless you, anyway.”

And his hands went up over them priestly.




CHAPTER XLI


He stumbled into the house in sudden need of Patty and her support in
his panic.

He found her lying on the floor of the parlor, where she had fainted.
Her big crinoline skirts belled out and she looked like a huge tulip
fallen on its side. Her feet sat up awkwardly on their heels; her limbs
were visible to the knees. It was the only ungraceful posture he had
ever known her to assume.

As he gathered her into his arms, Patty returned from her coma into a
kind of mania. She talked to herself or to some invisible listener.
Mostly she muttered unintelligibly some gibberish that made her
beautiful mouth ugly and unhuman.

She clung to her husband’s hands and arms, clutching at them when he
moved them to lift her to a chair and bent above her, pleading with her
to talk to him. She called him by his first name, babbling:

“David, David, oh, David! David, David!”

It was a long while before he could make out any other word and then he
caught faintly:

“They shan’t stay here! They can go to Europe or California or hell.
But they shan’t stay here! they shan’t, they shan’t!”

He could not persuade her to speak to them. When Immy came in radiant
and shaken with laughter, Patty laughed like a woman long insane, worn
down with some old ribald mania; but she would not speak, though Immy
wept and begged:

“Mamma, kiss me. Please, Mamma! If I did wrong, it’s too late to make a
fuss. Don’t spoil my first little chance of happiness, Mamma! Oh, come
on and kiss me and say you forgive me!”

At last Patty whispered, and patted Immy’s quivering hands, but as if
to be rid of her:

“I’ve nothing to forgive you, you poor baby, you poor little ignorant
baby. But—but——”

That was all, and she put out her cheek to Immy’s lips in dismissal,
but did not kiss her. Immy stole away baffled, disheartened.

The wise Chalender dared not approach Patty. His intuition of woman
warned him to stay out on the porch or wait by the carriage till Immy’s
trunk was brought down. Then he drove away with her and RoBards dared
not wave them good-by.

At last when there was silence and the hush of night, RoBards fell
asleep. He was wakened by a squeaking sound. He thought he saw a ghost
by the bureau. He rose slowly and went towards the wraith cautiously.
It was Patty in her nightgown. She was struggling to open the drawer
where he had kept an ancient dueling pistol for years against the
burglars that never came.

As he stood stock still, she got the drawer open and took out the
weapon. She caressed it, and nodded her head, mumbling drowsily, “Yes,
yes, I must, I must save her from him!” Her lips moved, but her eyes
were not open.

With all gentleness, he took her hand and lifted from her unresisting
fingers the pistol. Then he set his arms about Patty and guided her
back to bed. He lifted her feet between the sheets and drew the covers
over her.

She breathed the placid, shallow breath of one who sleeps, but she
clung to his hands so that he could hardly free them. Then he hid the
pistol under the mattress beneath his head and thanked heaven for one
horror at least that had been forestalled.

By and by Patty, still aslumber, turned into his bosom and laid her
little hands beneath his chin. He sighed, “Thank God for sleep!” But
even in her sleep there was purgatory, for she twitched and clutched
him in incessant nightmares.

The next morning she said nothing of her dream or her somnambulism.
And he felt no need of questioning her. The soul has its own torture
chambers, where even love has no right of entry, especially when it
knows too well what is within.

All that Patty said was: “I don’t feel well enough to get up to-day.
I’ll just rest here.”

Late that forenoon Immy drove up alone from White Plains, where she and
her husband had found lodging at a tavern. She led her father into his
library and said to him:

“Harry—my husband—and I have talked things over and he’s—we’ve decided
to go back to California. I think I’d be happier out there—away from
everything. I think Mamma would be happier. You haven’t congratulated
me yet, so I congratulate you on getting me honestly married off.
That’s something in these days. Besides, nobody will miss me much.”

As RoBards looked at her now, she was not the wife of Chalender or
anybody: she was the little, ill-fated girl he had defended in vain
against life. She had secured herself a new defender—against too much
sober thought about things. He realized how canny she had been, how
lonely and how afraid.

His arms went leaping out to her. She flung herself into his lap and he
clenched her fiercely, kissing the rippling curls along the top of her
bent head, and moaning:

“Oh, my baby, my baby!”

Then she broke into sobs:

“Don’t say that word, Papa! That’s the word I said when I lost my
baby—as you’ve lost yours. Where have they gone, Papa, your baby and
mine? Where have they both gone? Where does everything go that we love
and lose?”




CHAPTER XLII


The newspapers made a pretty story of the Chalender-RoBards marital
alliance. For once, they overlooked a horror and gave space to romance.
The retreat in Westchester had saved the family once more.

The editors praised Captain Chalender as “our popular and
public-spirited citizen, a soldier and a leader in civic affairs,
whose large interests compel his immediate return to the Golden Gate,
whither he takes as his bride, Miss Imogene RoBards, one of the belles
of the season.” They even had a word for ex-Judge David RoBards, “the
well-known jurist,” and continued, “The bride’s mother in her day was
one of the beauties of her generation and a toast of the town in the
gallant old times that are now no more.”

RoBards brought the paper home to the farm from town to show Patty. He
thought only of the comfort she should take from the glossing over of
the wretched misalliance. But Patty was numb to the fear of publication.

As soon as she spoke he wondered that he had lacked the common
intelligence to spare her the cruelest of wounds. She read the brief
notice and sighed:

“‘The bride’s mother—in her day—was!’”

She dropped the paper and smiled miserably: “They’ve got me in the
obituary column already.”

She seemed to die then.

He understood, and falling on his knees by the rocking chair, caught
her as she drooped forward across his shoulder. She had read her
death-warrant. Her head rolled as heavily as if the ax had already
fallen on the so kissable nape of her gracile neck.

What could RoBards say? He could and did protest that she was more
beautiful than ever, that eternal youth was hers, that she was his
greatest pride, that she had all his love, all his love.

But he protested too much. He could not stay the scythe of Time. He
thought of old, old phrases, ancient confessions of the dread meekness
of humanity before the ineluctable dragon, the glutton of charm and
fleetness and vivacity—_Tempus edax rerum_—_tarda vetustas_—the swift
fugacity of everything, youth that flows out of the veins as sand from
a shattered hourglass.

He clung to Patty, but less and less as one who might rescue her from
drowning, more as one who would prove his love by drowning with her.

He could give her no courage in a battle already irretrievably lost.
Rather, he took panic from her and began to understand that, while he
had no beauty to lose, he had already caught up with his future, and
was beginning to leave it behind, as a man who walks toward the west
all day overtakes his diminishing shadow and then leaves it lengthening
aft.

Youth had gone out of the house, too, now that Immy had taken with her
not only her trunks and her bright gowns and her jingling trinkets,
but her laughter, as well, her mischief, her audacities, her headlong
genius for peril.

But they rarely spoke of her, for her name meant not only Chalender,
but all the dangers of the sea, the infamous storms of the antarctic
waters, the long climb up the infinitely distant Pacific Ocean to the
equator and far, far beyond; and then all the fabulous hazards of the
San Francisco frontier. Between that new city and New York lay the
oceanic continent. Railroads and wagon-trains were pushing through the
vast wastes where the buffaloes swept in tides and the Indians lurked,
but letters were forever in coming, and Immy’s parents could know
nothing of her fate for half a year; if, indeed, they ever heard of her
again.

There were the other children. Keith had turned twenty, a young Viking
indifferent to girls except as clowns to amuse him—which gave Patty
almost her only comfort in the world.

But David the younger, whom they called Junior, was coming along to
the last of his teens, and he was as full of romance as an Orlando. He
did not stick poems on trees, but he carved linked initials in the bark
of the tulip trees and quickly gouged them out before his father could
discover what they were.

When RoBards reminded him that he was endangering the life of some
of the slenderer trees, he groaned, “All right, Dad; I’ll quit,” and
walked away as cheerful as Job.

His father and mother eyed him from a distance anxiously, and exchanged
glances of alarm over his sagging head at table, but they could not
imagine what siren had bewitched him; and he would not answer their
questions. They made light remarks about love, forgetting how important
it had been to them in their equal age, and how important it was to
them now.

But Junior rebuked them with eyes as old as those of Prometheus chained
to a cliff and torn by a vulture’s hooked beak.

The unsolved puzzle of David’s infatuation began to harass his parents
and frighten them, for he was wasting away to a melancholia.

They tried to keep track of him, to see which one of which neighbor’s
daughters he was frequenting. But he always managed to elude them. He
would lie coiled in a chair somewhere reading Walter Scott or Dickens
or Byron, or the morbid Poe, until they gave over watching him. When
they looked for him he had vanished.

They decided to take him back to the city, in spite of the heat of
the late September and the charm of the golden countryside. The
announcement staggered the boy. It dazed them to see one so young so
capable of despair—as if any age were immune to anguish; as if a little
pitcher could not overflow as well as a large.

One afternoon he got away from the house with a fox’s craftiness.
RoBards missed him immediately and, seizing his hat, set out in
pursuit, knowing that Junior had but little start of him.

He hurried to the gate and looked up and down the road. In neither
direction was anyone visible. What other way could the boy have gone?
The view before him was wide and clear; the hill fell away in such
broad billows that the eye commanded more of the scene than a man could
have covered, running.

The only region left to explore was above and back of the house.
RoBards had avoided that realm for years. Up there was the Tarn of
Mystery, where he had almost killed Jud Lasher; up there were the
thickets where he had hunted him down and ended him.

There was no pleasure in invading that accursed demesne of black
memories, but his frenzy for an answer to the riddle of his son
outweighed his reluctance.

He turned and marched grimly up the slope. It seemed to have
steepened since he ran up it so fleetly years ago. His breath was
shorter—excitement it was, no doubt, that made his heart beat faster
and more heavily.

Time had wrought upon everything up here. Bushes were clumps of
shrubbery; saplings were trees; trees were columns upholding the sky.
The very boulders seemed to have enlarged with age. The dead logs must
have grown higher and fatter. At the top he had to pause and sink to
the ground till his heart slowed up. Sitting here he could see afar.
The autumnal winds had torn away foliage like curtains pulled down,
discovering a wide expanse of the surging Westchester scene.

The last time he was up here there was hardly another home to be
descried except his own roof and the distant hut of the Lashers. Now
there were gables and chimneys and gateways everywhere. A few of the
houses were mansions, snowy colonial residences with high white pillars
reminiscent of Greek temples.

The Lasher rookery alone was not new. It was older, more ramshackle
than ever, though he had noted as he passed the growth of the little
brats to big brats.

The girl Molly who had run off to the city and gone to the bad, had
faded into oblivion after a few noisy struggles, like one drowning in
the sea.

RoBards had visited the Five Points occasionally, but he had seen
nothing of Molly. Perhaps it had grown too respectable for her, since
the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Church had
ventured into the human sewer and reformed the first few sots, then
called in Reverend Mr. Luckey, the former chaplain of Sing Sing. Under
this explorer of the underworld they had established themselves in a
room in the Old Brewery itself. Then they had bought the foul den,
cleared out its three hundred human maggots, and torn the whole thing
down, erecting in its place a clean new building devoted to reformation
of the prematurely damned.

And now a Children’s Aid Society was established there, teaching honest
industry and proffering opportunity for decency to the thousands of
boys and girls who had hitherto slept on cellar steps, or in barrels
or in dens of vice and earned what little food they got by picking
pockets, garroting drunkards, burglary, beggary, rag and bone hunting,
peddling matches, apples, flowers, newspapers, or their own dirty
bodies.

Girls could now be something better than crossing-sweepers or
twelve-year-old harlots and dance-hall lice.

RoBards had often been called to the Five Points to meetings of this
and other societies. There was horror enough there yet, but it was not
unmitigated. There was a manhole open above the sewer and those who
wanted to were aided to climb out into the air.

He had often looked for Molly Lasher among the girls going out to
decent tasks or returning from them. He had watched for her among the
throngs still plying the most venerable of trades. But her pretty,
vicious smile was no longer to be seen. Perhaps she had been murdered,
or sent to a prison; perhaps she had gone round the Horn to California,
perhaps she had gone West overland. She might be running a saloon
somewhere west, or conducting a salon as the pretentious wife of a
bonanza king.

Another Lasher girl had grown up to replace her in the hut, and perhaps
later to trace her footsteps on the streets of New York. RoBards had
seen her now and then as he drove past to the station.

Usually she leaned across the gate and dreamed wide-eyed of something
that made her wistful. Either she was paler than the other Lasher
young, or washed oftener, for there was a cleanliness about her skin
and in the clothes she was pushing through.

Thinking of her now, he was surprised to find that he remembered a
gradual change in her as she lolled across the gate. She had grown
higher, the arms that fell listlessly had lengthened and rounded; and
so had her once hollow chest, and her eyes and her mouth.

The last time he saw her her hair was combed. There might have been a
ribbon around it somewhere. He had an idea that her name was Aletta.

Her mother had mentioned some such name to him once when she had
checked him to whine:

“No word of my boy Jud yet. After all these years wouldn’t he ’a’ wrote
me a line, wouldn’t he ’a’ got home somehow in all these years, don’t
you think—if he was still alive?”

He did not like to consider old Mrs. Lasher and he rose to continue his
search for his own son, also lost in a sea of mystery, gone a-whaling
after some strange love.

RoBards avoided the Tarn of Mystery, so gayly named and so justified in
the event. But he saw no sign of Junior elsewhere, so he drew near the
loathsome spot, circling about it and coming closer reluctantly.

The old rail fence was almost rotted away, but he did not need to climb
across it, for there was a path that led to an opening where two of the
upper rails had been laid on the ground.

The great boulders were as before but less mysterious, if one could
believe a recent theory that they had been dropped there by a universal
glacier that had once covered all this part of the world with an ocean
of ice, whose slowly ebbing tide would flow back again perhaps and
cover all of man’s ambitious monuments.

He squeezed through a strait Cyclopean gateway of rock, and the little
green pond lay before him, still thick with submerged grasses, still
oversprinkled with curled autumn leaves.

He gazed at the spot where he had beaten Jud Lasher and used him as
a flail. He quivered with a nausea for that whole chapter in his
life, and was glad that his swinging glance discovered no other human
presence.

But as he was about to back through the narrow crevice between the
stones, he heard a voice floating above his head in the air, a girl’s
voice, as liquid and as sweetly murmurous as the voice should have been
of the nymph that should have haunted this viridescent pool.

It was very mournful and it said:

“All night I was reading the book you lent me. _The Lady of the Lake!_
Such a long beautiful story, and so sad! What a sad thing love is,
and how old! So many of us poor lovers have loved in vain—haven’t we,
honey? They’ll tell us that we’re too young to love, but oh, darling,
darling, I feel so old, so old! And how can I ever stand the years
that must go by before we can be together? You’ve got to finish your
college and make your way. I’d rather die than hinder you from being
the great man you’re going to be. And I can’t help you. I’m so poor and
friendless and ignorant.

“But when I think, when I think of the years, the years, the years, I
want to lie down in that water there and fold my hands and drown. For
even when you are rich and famous—what would your father and mother say
if you told them that you wanted to marry me? Your father is rich and
famous and everybody respects him. I’m just one of the Lashers.”

The boy had the RoBards talent for silence and he had listened as
quietly as his hidden father. Even now he only mumbled:

“I’ll marry you or nobody, Aletta. This is a free country!”

An eerie laugh broke from the girl’s throat as she cried:

“A free country! How could there be a free country anywhere? Least of
all here?”

RoBards was grimly glad that she had sanity enough to understand this
truth at least and the wildness of his boy’s infatuation. To marry the
impossible sister of the unspeakable wretch that his own father had put
to death—that would be impossible; if anything were.

He risked discovery and leaned out to have a look at this weird
creature whose voice had woven such unholy power about his son.

She was perched aloft on a little peak of rock a few yards away. The
boy lay along the slope of it, clinging to her right hand. There was
reverence in his manner. She was sacred to him and he to her in the
religion of young love. Her left hand held the book she had spoken
of. It rested like a harp on the wave of her thigh. Her feet were
bare, though the air was cold; they were shapely feet. She was shapely
everywhere, and there was a primeval grace, a loveliness about her
every outline. Womanhood was disclosing its growth and its spell,
straining at the scant and shabby dress and enveloping her in beauty
like a drapery of mist.

She might have been indeed the nymph of this pool, luring a faun to his
death in a fatal element. But to RoBards the life-fearing little pauper
had the terrifying power of a Lorelei throned on a storm-beaten cliff
and chanting his hapless son to shipwreck.

He wondered if the Lashers were not making ready to wreak upon his boy
a roundabout revenge for what he had done to theirs.

He was mortally afraid of this ragged girl. And there was nothing to
tell him of the tremendous forces that were gathering to overwhelm this
calamity with a greater.




CHAPTER XLIII


Afraid to intervene in this idyl; ashamed of the un-American snobbery
that made him wince at the prospect of a Lasher for a daughter-in-law;
aghast at the thought of having to ruin Aletta’s life after secretly
taking her brother’s life; and humbled by the praise he had overheard
her give him, RoBards was in the doldrums of uncertainty.

He could not declare himself to the two lovesick children. He could not
challenge them to a debate on the rights of youth to romance. He slunk
from the field, glad only of being able to sneak away uncaught.

As he hurried down the hill home to lay the problem before Patty, the
nearer he drew to her, the more clearly he foresaw that she would be
less of a help in its solution than herself a new complication.

She had suffered bitterly from Immy’s marriage to Chalender. The son
growing up should have been a support; but Junior was bound to be an
increasing burden.

No, he must not tell Patty what he had learned. But he wanted to be
near her in his own misery, and when he could not find her downstairs
he went up to her room.

She was so profoundly a-brood over some evident despair that she did
not hear him push back the door, slightly ajar. He stood on the sill
and studied her with the utter regret and impotency of a lover who
cannot buy or fetch new beauty for the old beauty of his sweet, nor
stay the waning of her radiance.

As vainly as a girl muses upon her outgrown dolls; as vainly as Dido
wished her love to come again to Carthage—Patty was scanning the
fineries she had taken pride in up to the doomsday when her daughter
married her own former lover.

She sat back and away from the bureau at a timid distance from the
wonderful looking-glass RoBards had bought her not long ago as the
novelty of the day: an oval reflector with a jointed rod to fasten
above the large mirror, so that the back of one’s head was visible
without turning and twisting. They called it the _miroir face et
nuque_, and Patty had reveled in the ease it gave her in coiling the
great braids and rolls of her coiffure.

But RoBards felt that the new contrivance had taken away something
charming in the mechanism of her toilet. Hitherto he had loved to
watch her trying to bend her lithe frame spirally while her hands
and arms dipped and tapped like twin swans as she labored over the
last disposition of the least thread of her beautiful hair. He had
found exquisite grace in her nymphlike contortions when she held
her hand-glass in various places behind her head and tried to look
around her own ears or up over her own eyebrows. He had laughed at her
impossible efforts, but he had loved them.

The _miroir face et nuque_ had made the process more efficient and less
amusing. But now she was afraid to look at herself fore and aft, or at
all.

On the bureau was a bracelet she had rejoiced in when he brought it
home as the latest importation from France: a jointed, green gold
serpent to wrap round and round her wrist; it had a fierce diamond in
its crest and bloodshot rubies for eyes. Next to it lay a tiny watch
from Tiffany’s in a locket no bigger than a shilling; also another
fantastic contrivance, a little diamond-sprinkled gold pocket-pistol
with a watch in the butt, and, hidden beneath it, a vinaigrette against
fainting spells; not to mention a bouquet-holder that popped out when
you pulled the trigger.

Spilled along the bureau was a loop of pearls her mother had worn as a
bride; yellowed they were with years. And a necklace of tiny diamonds
he had squandered an unexpected fee upon after a quarrel. Often and
often he had watched them luminously mysterious as they made a little
brook around her throat and laughed silently above the panting of her
spent heart after a dance.

But she would not wear them now. They were the loot of her youth,
doomed to the museum of age. She sat cowering away from them, slumped
with intentional lack of grace in a chair, her fingers nagging at a
sandalwood and silken fan she had fluttered against her breast or
dangled from her wrist in the last German she danced—a very riotous
German that had made the town gasp.

Never had RoBards loved her so much as at this moment. Never had she
seemed so beautiful. But it was the beauty of a maple tree in autumnal
elegy. He could not praise her aloud for this pitiable splendor. Still
less could he tell her that one more of her babies was impatient to
marry.

Junior was Patty’s final toy. She spoiled him and wanted for him
everything he wanted. But she could not wish him another woman to love,
a young beauty to worship even to marriage.

So RoBards said nothing more than a long-drawn “Well!” as he moved
forward. He bent and kissed her and she smiled as she had done when she
was in a bed of pain.

Pain in her body or her heart hurt him fearfully. He hated the world
most when it gave her pangs to endure. He rebelled against heaven then,
and he could never reconcile himself to the thought of the Rod when
it smote her. The text “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth” always
enfuriated him as the invention of a cruel zealot, ascribing to his
invented Deity his own patience with other people’s pains.

To-day, RoBards longed most for some anæsthesia of the soul, some drug
for the spirit, some nepenthe to avert and annul the slow surgery of
age that excises the graces and leaves scars everywhere; he yearned for
some mystic laughing gas to give Patty to carry her through the news
that another woman, a young woman, had wrenched her boy’s heart away
from his mother.

Lacking such an ether, he had recourse to a tender deception, and urged
that he must be getting back to town; he would shortly be needed in
the law courts; he could not face the long evenings alone in New York
without his beautiful wife for company. She beamed a little at his
good intentions, and rose to be at her packing.

This was better than an onset of grief, but he noted that she did not
receive the word of a return to the city with her usual clamor of joy.

It was her appetite that had dulled, and not the feast, for New York
offered all its former riches multiplied. Already there were eight
hundred thousand people in the welter of the city. It was greater than
Rome had ever been. It had passed Berlin, which had lost a hundred
thousand in the rebellion of 1848—most of them freedom-loving souls who
had come to America. New York was now ahead of Naples, Venice—of many
a proud capital. John Pintard’s prophecy made at the beginning of the
century still held good: he had predicted that the city would grow at
such a rate that by the year 1900 it would have a population of five
millions.

He did not foresee the cataclysm that would sharply and suddenly cut
its growth down to a third of what it had been. That cataclysm was now
silently preparing, like the hushed strain that at its exact moment
explodes an earthquake.




CHAPTER XLIV


Though Patty greeted the decision to leave the country dumbly, the boy
Junior emitted noise enough for two.

When his father asked him what difference it made to him, he dodged
awkwardly, talking of the beauty of the woods, the cider taste and
fragrance of the air, the ugliness and noise of the city. He waxed so
fervid that his father said:

“You ought to go in for poetry as a business.”

He could hardly accuse his son of hypocrisy, since he himself was
conniving in the secret for Patty’s sake.

He closed the argument by reminding the boy that his classes at
Columbia would soon require his presence. Whereupon Junior declared
that he was too old to go to school any longer. He wanted to get out
and make his own way in the world. He was a man now and—all the ancient
refrain of the home-building instinct.

It was a heartache to RoBards to see his child grown suddenly old
enough to be skewered with the darts of love; but the romance was
premature and it must be suppressed ruthlessly for the boy’s own sake.
And for this growing pain also there was no ether.

To town they went.

For a while Junior’s melancholy was complete; then it suddenly
vanished. He no longer spent his evenings at home writing long, long
letters. He no longer went about with the eyes of a dying gazelle.

Patty said: “He has forgotten his country sweetheart and found a city
one.”

From his superior information, RoBards made a shrewder guess that the
Lasher girl had come to New York and was supporting herself somehow. He
did not mention this suspicion to Patty, but he tried to verify it by
shadowing Junior through the streets as through the lanes.

New York, however, was a labyrinth of endless escapes. The boy seemed
to know that he was followed and after a long and apparently aimless
saunter, would always elude his pursuer.

His father hunted through some of the dance halls, the gambling dives,
through Castle Garden and other retreats where lovers sat like Siamese
twins, enveloped in their ancient communions. But he never found Junior
and he was ashamed to confess that he was searching, since his search
was vain.

He dared not ask the boy where he went lest he encourage him to lie, or
to retort with impudent defiance.

The eldest son, Keith, was thinking little of women. He was a man’s
man, full of civic pride and municipal works. When he was at his
business he took delight in being as dirty as possible. He wore the
roughest clothes, left his jaws unshaven, talked big aqueduct talk.

Then he would go to the other extreme and cleanse himself to a foppery.
But even this was mannishness, for he was a soldier.

He loved his family, his city, his nation, and his was that patriotism
which proves itself by an eagerness to be ready to defend his altars.

“Any man who really loves his country,” he would say, “will keep
himself strong enough to dig a ditch, build a wall, know a gun, and
shoot it straight.”

He had joined the Seventh Regiment as soon as he could get in, though
everybody knew that there was no chance of war and the soldiers were
counted mere dandies.

Then a civil war broke out at home. New York City fought New York
State. The Legislature at Albany, angered at the scandals of the city
police, set up in its place a state police. Mayor Fernando Wood, who
was always defying somebody, defied the Governor, the Legislature, the
Supreme Court.

The criminals reveled in the joyous opportunity while the two police
forces fought each other. When a warrant was issued for the Mayor’s
arrest the town police made the City Hall their citadel; the state
police besieged it.

The Seventh Regiment was marching down Broadway to take a boat to
Boston for a gala week in honor of the new Bunker Hill monument. It
passed by the battlefield of City Hall Park. Since it was a state
force, its colonel marched into the park and demanded the surrender of
the Mayor, who yielded forthwith. The Seventh thereupon went on its way
with brass band blaring, all the youthful hearts persuaded that they
were invincible.

The Seventh had hardly reached Boston when it was recalled to rescue
the town from a venomous mob that gathered in the Five Points, put the
police to flight, and promised to destroy the whole city. The mob broke
on the bayonets of the Seventh after six men had been killed and a
hundred wounded.

Keith came home to his horrified mother with a few bumps on the head.
She was still pleading with him the next day to resign from the
perilous life when he was called out with his regiment to quell another
riot.

A little later there was a parade in honor of the laying of an Atlantic
cable, which collapsed after two alleged messages were passed and was
voted a gigantic hoax. But while the town laughed at it, the poor
Seventh was dragged to Staten Island, where a thousand miscreants had
set fire to the quarantine buildings. For three months Keith had to sit
there on guard over the cold and malodorous ruins.

When war of this sort was not afoot, there were the ever-recurrent
parades under the hot sun, or in the fitful glare of the gas-lighted,
banner-blazing nights.

Very gay was the march past the two visiting princes from Japan, that
strange new country opened six years before by Commodore Perry. The two
royal delegates were almost drowned in wine. New York, just emerged
from a few years of legal drouth, spent a hundred thousand dollars
on an uproarious reception at which champagne corks blurted by the
thousand.

Patty, as the daughter of an old Oriental shipping merchant, went to
that reception and wore a scarf of celestial weave and mountain-laurel
color. One of the princes recognized the native stuff and advanced to
Patty crying, “Me likee! me likee!” To prove how authentic the fabric
was and how near and dear to him, he opened his silken robe at the
breast and pointed to a most intimate garment for which there was no
respectable name. It was of the very same material, and Patty might
have swooned if her crinoline had not upheld her.

His Highness’ two words were two more than she could speak, and he took
from his sleeve a paper handkerchief, mopped his gleaming brow, and
dropped it on the floor.

Besides the Japanese princes, came the French Prince de Joinville, and
Garibaldi, and finally the English heir apparent.

The change in Patty’s soul was so profound that when the Prince of
Wales came down from Canada and everybody fought for tickets to the
ball in his honor as if it were Judgment Day itself, she made no
plans at all. Could this be the same Patty, who, hitherto, would have
bankrupted RoBards for a supreme gown and played the Machiavel for a
presentation?

When at last even RoBards noted her neglect, and asked her what she
expected to wear, she sighed:

“I shan’t go at all. It’s a long time since the newspapers referred to
me as ‘the woman who was.’ The prince is nineteen years old and he is
not interested in grandmothers.”

Then for love of her and for pride of her, RoBards must plead and
compel. He must drive her to the dressmakers and whisper them that
nothing should be spared to drape her so that an emperor would stare
and a bashaw salaam. Men are odd cattle. He had stormed at her for
years for extravagance and now he was outraged by an economy!

Perhaps he was thinking a little of his own position as an important
citizen, an American prince; but his chief zeal was in the defense of
his beloved from that final fatal discouragement which ends a woman’s
joy in this world.

It was he, not Patty, that made sure of the invitation and toadied to
Isaac Brown, the burly old sexton of Grace Church who decided who was
to sit in what pew of his sacred edifice, and who was to be invited to
any affair meriting the high epithet “genteel.”

Even Ikey Brown recognized the solidity of Judge RoBards and his lady,
(who had been a Jessamine) and they received their tickets to the
Academy of Music and, besides, the almost royal honor of dancing in the
_quadrille d’honneur_.

The overcrowded floor gave way with a crash and had to be rebuilt,
but Patty escaped so much as the rumpling of her cherry satin train.
When she was presented to the young prince, her husband fancied that
he saw in those boyish eyes, so avid of beauty, a flash of homage for
the graces that had not yet gone. The cinder was still fierce from the
furnace.

But Patty when she was at home again wept all night. The only excuse
she would give was a whimpering regret that the far-away Immy could
not have been there and danced with the prince. But RoBards knew that
she mourned rather the yet more remote Patty of the long ago, who was
no longer present within her tight stays and her voluminous paneled
brocade. She wept over the grave of herself.

The next night he understood the ravages of the years yet more keenly,
for he must march as a veteran in the firemen’s parade under the
dripping, smoking, bobbing torches. Five thousand marched that night,
and it was his last appearance with the volunteers, whose own last
days were numbered. Philadelphia and Cincinnati already had steam fire
engines drawn by horses, and in a few years hired firemen would replace
the old foot-runners and hand-pumpers.

As RoBards limped along on strangely flagging feet, he thought he
caught a glimpse of his boy Junior and the Lasher girl at his side,
standing arm in arm at the curb. But in the twinkling of an eye-lid
they were gone.

Keith had marched, of course, with the Seventh, but the Sixty-ninth,
made up of Irishmen, had refused to pay honor to the Sassenach prince.
Its colors were taken away and it drilled no more.

When riot or parade or drill was not afoot, the aqueduct was forever
haling Keith forth. For the restless town kept hewing down the hills
that covered its upper regions, or cutting streets through and leaving
houses perched in air. In 1840 the Water Commissioners had decided that
the city would not reach Ninety-fourth Street “for a century or two”;
but it was crawling thither fast.

Like sculptors who, as they carve off the clay, uncover the iron
armature, the engineers were constantly disclosing anew their own
deep-buried water mains and they must needs sink them still deeper.
Often the pipes broke in their subterrene beds. This was like the
rupture of an artery inside a man, and it required quick surgery to
avert a fatal hemorrhage.

On a December midnight in 1860 two mains were rent open twenty feet
below the ground at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. The upwelling
flood turned the avenue into a swamp and endangered the foundations of
certain new buildings. Fortunately, they were few and unimportant so
far out of town, mainly crude shacks.

But all the factories in town had to be ordered to cease the use of
water, and the anxious city learned that the Croton was a vital aorta.
The vast accumulation in the reservoir at Forty-Second Street was
sucked down to within a foot of the bottom.

Chief Engineer Craven had his men at work within thirty minutes of the
disaster, and for fifty hours they dabbled in the muck, battling the
leaping waters while new pipes were crowded in.

Keith was among the fiercest toilers. He fought with the ardor of a
Hollander at a broken dyke, and would not give over till he fell prone
and had like to have drowned in the mud.

Shortly after this there was a strange break in the subterranean
financial waters: a mysterious panic shook the commercial peace of New
York. The reservoirs of credit dried up over night. Bankers, the least
unreliable of prophets, were smitten with a great terror, which their
clients promptly shared. Its meaning was public all too soon.

On December twenty-first there was another break in the water mains at
Sixty-fourth Street, where the pipes had been carried across a marsh in
a raised embankment.

As Keith worked with his men that morning his heart was shaken for
the morning papers had shrieked the telegraphic news that, on the day
before, the state of South Carolina had seceded from the Union, had
actually carried out what nearly everybody had pooh-poohed as a silly
threat. The South Carolina newspapers spoke of New York and other
states as foreign countries.

The Charleston _Mercury_ proclaimed: “This is War.” New York bankers
and merchants realized that they must, then, assume the chief burden of
furnishing men, munitions, and money.

RoBards’ heart sank within him. The great war had found him fifty-five
years old. He would never get to a war, never fight for his country.

But Patty’s heart leaped like a doe startled from a covert. It leaped
with a cry:

“My boy is in the first regiment that will go!”




CHAPTER XLV


The forty million Africans who had been raped from the Dark Continent
and distributed among the Christian nations at so much per head, had
made little active resistance to being swallowed, but had proved hard
to digest. The missionary movements just begun had made little progress
in Africa and some thought it an advantage to bring the Africans to
the country where they could have the benefits of training in the
true religion. But this training had a little too much to do with an
education in the arts of bloodhounds, in the vigor of overseers’ whips
and in the dramatic experiences of the auction block.

This transplanted race threw off such myriads of mulattoes, quadroons
and octoroons that the situation had social complications: involving
the future life as well as this. While most of the Americans were
undoubtedly going to hell, those who were going to heaven were not
comfortable at the prospect of flying around with black saints whose
haloes might get caught in their kinky hair. People were saying that
America “could not exist half black and half white”; some doubted if
even heaven could exist half black and half white.

The pestiferous abolitionists had survived mobs, courts, and the horror
of being unfashionable. Even the churches could not keep infidels in
their congregations from questioning the manifest will of God, who in
Mosaic law had imposed and regulated slavery, and in the New Testament
had commanded the return of a runaway slave. Numerous individual
clergymen had taken a conspicuous part in this form of sacrilege,
but the great majority were true to their creeds, and denounced the
heretics. The Methodist and other churches in official assemblies
repeatedly disciplined their anarchic parsons and forbade the attempt
to stir up useless hostility by advocating “emancipation.” But the
trouble-mongers would not be quieted. In spite of the efforts of the
respectables, there was, as one New York writer put it, a “lamentable
squandering of vast sums of money in an improbable and visionary
crusade, which might have conferred inestimable benefits had they not
been diverted from the legitimate channels of Christian benevolence.”

And now the outrageous disturbers had split the nation. Mayor Fernando
Wood, having failed to secede from the state, proposed that New
York City should secede from the Union. He was not heeded. Indeed
a number of prominent citizens held a meeting in Pine Street and
passed resolutions pleading with Mr. Jefferson Davis and the Southern
governors to return to the fold. RoBards was one of the signers of this
appeal.

To him and to others the great house of the republic could not be
divided. It was a pity to let a herd of ignorant blacks disrupt the
sacred compact. Numberless New Yorkers detested the abolitionists as
heartily as the Southerners did.

But the younger, hotter blood of the North demanded action. They did
not care much for the niggers, but they hated the secessionists. Keith
terrified Patty by his belligerent tone. He wanted to set out at once
and trample Richmond and Atlanta and Charleston into submission.

Strangely, very strangely, his martial humor brought on a sudden
amatory fever, and awoke a sudden interest in a certain young woman of
an old and wealthy family: Frances Ward, a relative of the banker Ward
who had moved into Bond Street when it began to rival St. John’s Park
as a select region.

At first Patty had been glad to have Keith seen about with the girl.
Patty had a wholesome and normal amount of snobbery in her nature, and
it pleased her to tell of the great people she had known, especially
the Ward sisters. They had been called “The Three Graces of Bond
Street,” until Julia had terrified everybody by going in for learning
to an almost indecent extent. Six years younger than Patty, she
had, at the age of seventeen, published a review and a translation
of a French book, reviewed German translations, and finally married
an outright philanthropist, Dr. Howe. She had become an abolitionist
and assistant editor of an anti-slavery paper! Not to mention her
activities as a mother, a poetess, the author of a play produced
at Wallack’s, and recently of a book on Cuba, which was forbidden
circulation in that island.

Still, much is forgiven to a banker’s daughter, and Patty encouraged
Keith to cultivate the relative of Julia Ward Howe. Frances took the
place of the aqueduct in Keith’s affections and Patty called her “the
Nymph Crotona” in proud ridicule. Every evening when Keith was not at
the Seventh Regiment in its armory over Tompkins market, he was at the
home of Miss Ward, or out with her in one of the great sleighs that
thrilled Broadway with tintinnabulation.

Keith sighed at the thought of love and roared at the thought of war.
He engaged in bitter wrangles with the supporters of the South, of whom
there seemed to be more than there were enemies. Often he came home
with knuckles bloody from the loosened teeth of disputants; but he
washed the gore away and went forth to woo.

Then suddenly he announced that he and Frances were to be married
immediately without even the splendid ceremony that might have given
Patty a medicine of excitement. She wailed aloud uncomforted. She was
losing another child by the half-death of marriage.

“I’d like to poison the girl,” she cried, “she’ll have me a grandmother
in a year! Immy’s children are so far away they don’t count. Still, if
it will keep Keith from the war, I’ll be a dozen grandmothers.”

But Keith was not thinking of marriage as a substitute for war. It was
a prelude. The war mood was causing a stampede toward matrimony.

Death overspread the horizon like a black scythe sky-wide. Terror
became a kind of rapture. Life looked brief; and every moment sweet
because moments might be few.

The warrior heart surged with the thought, “I may not be beating
long.” The woman heart mourned: “My love who clasps me may soon lie
cold in death on a muddy field.”

Fear grew to a Bacchanal whose revelry is fierce because the drab
dawn is near. Men were greedy in their demands and women reckless in
their surrenders because their world was on the brink of doom. To the
lover expecting the bugle to cry “March!” at daybreak, the night was
desperate with crowded desires, and the beloved wondered if it were not
less a virtue than a treason to deny him any last luxury she had to
offer.

It had been so in every war. It came so in this. It was the unsuspected
tragic aspect of that ancient farce when Vulcan flung out his steel net
and caught Mars and Venus in each other’s arms; exposed them to the
laughter of the gods. But the laughter of the gods is the suffering of
the clods; and with war hovering, amours that had been disgraceful in
peace looked pitiful, beautiful, patriotic.

Keith was married on a Thursday in April and set out for a brief
honeymoon at Tuliptree Farm. The next day the nation’s flag at
Fort Sumter was fired on. The next day after that—the thirteenth
it was—Major Anderson saluted the flag with fifty guns before he
surrendered. The Sunday _Herald_ carried the headline “Dissolution
of the Union” and stated that on the night before a mass meeting had
been held to force the administration to desist from Mr. Lincoln’s
expressed intention to coerce the seceding states. But the challenge
and the insult to the Stars and Stripes stung most of the waverers into
demanding the blood of the insolent Southrons.

Monday morning Mr. Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militia to
devote three months to suppressing the Rebellion. Nobody thought it
would take that long, but it was well to be safe.

The New York Legislature voted the amazing sum of three million
dollars; the Chamber of Commerce whereas’d and resolved that the
Southern ports should be blockaded; a hundred thousand people held a
mass meeting in Union Square. Patty was there, telling everybody that
when she was a girl Union Square was a paupers’ cemetery out in the
country. Judge RoBards was one of the eighty-seven vice-presidents
selected, along with Peter Cooper and historian Bancroft and W. C.
Bryant, Mr. William Bond, Mr. J. J. Astor, Mr. Lorillard, Mr. Hewett,
Mr. Morgan, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Fish—all the big ones.

The militia offered itself with a heroism all the finer for the
fact that it lacked only uniform, equipment, ammunition, drill,
organization, officers and men, and knowledge of war and of the more
perilous problems of taking care of the feet and the bowels.

One regrettable effect of the war spirit was the boldness of some of
the women. The ridiculous suffragists linked female freedom with black
liberty and asked that white women be granted what black men were to
receive. This impudence was properly quelled, but, in spite of all
the opposition, the regrettable influence of Florence Nightingale
encouraged restless women to offer their services in nursing—a nasty
business hitherto mainly entrusted to drunken and dissolute women of
the jails.

Before the wretched war was over, two thousand American women had
drifted into the most unladylike of activities. Sane people feared that
what was begun in war would be continued in peace, and that before long
ladies would be studying physiology and other subjects, at the very
mention of which nice females had fainted in the good old times.

While New York City was going mad with battle-ardor, up in Westchester
County a teacher in the city public schools began to form a company
called “The Westchester Chasseurs.”

One of the first to join was a lout named Gideon Lasher. RoBards saw
the name in a paper and it gave his heart a twist.

There was a mad explosion of war feeling and the irresistible noise
of war when the Sixth Massachusetts came to town one night on the
boat. The next morning the New Englanders went up Broadway with a
thumpity-thumpity-thump of drums and had breakfast at the Astor House;
then marched with gleaming bayonets and Yankee-Doodling fifes and
rolling standards through a sea of people. They met death first in the
Baltimore streets.

On Friday afternoon the Seventh New York pushed through the mob of
fathers, mothers, wives, sweethearts, sisters, brothers, on its way to
the transports. It hurried to the salvation of Washington, where the
Government was said to be packed in a valise for a backdoor escape.

Patty marched down Broadway clinging to the arm of Keith, embarrassing
him wonderfully, and none the less for the fact that she crowded his
wife aside.

Wives and mothers and girls betrothed were all agog over madly sweet
farewells. There was a civil war of love about Keith.

After a brief jostling match with Patty, Frances gave up the struggle
and with a last fierce hug and a hammering of kisses, fell away into
the mass of crumpled crinolines at the curb and was lost to Keith’s
backward gaze.

His heart ran to her but he could not rebuke the triumphant laugh of
his mother, who scuttered alongside, with hardly equal steps clinging
to him so tight that her hoop skirts must bulge out sidewise and
brush the throngs. She was no longer the radiant beauty, but only a
frightened little old lady whose child was striding off to all that
a mother’s heart could imagine for her anguish. And at last the hard
cobbles broke her little feet and made them bleed as her heart bled.
Her breath came in such quick gasps that she could not speak. Her
breath became a drumming of sobs and her eyes spilled so many tears
that she could not mind her way. Finally, realizing that her stumbling
threw her soldier out of step and out of the alignment of which the
Seventh was so proud; realizing blindly that her grief was beginning to
break his pride and would send him to war blubbering, she panted:

“Kiss me good-by, oh, my little boy, for I must let you go.”

He bent his head and drenched her cheeks with his tears, as their lips
met in salt. The soldier behind him jostled his heel and forced him
along. And that was the last he saw of his mother for four years.

Patty was flung back from the edges of the companies, going by like
the blades of a steamer’s wheel. She got home somehow, and it was
no consolation to her that thousands of other mothers joined her in
despair as regiment after regiment filled Broadway with the halloo of
trumpets and the thud of warward feet.

The Irish Sixty-ninth had not drilled since it refused to honor the
Prince of Wales, but now Colonel Corcoran begged that the colors should
be restored, and promised to march a thousand men in twenty-four hours.
He got his prayer and kept his word. And the Sixth and Twelfth and the
Seventy-first, and the Eighth and the Twenty-eighth and the others went
forth into the dark, so that numerals took on a sacred significance
once more.

Day after day, night after night, the streets throbbed like the
arteries of men who have been running. The glory and the pride of
war made hearts ache with a grandeur of neighborliness. The religion
of nationhood became something awesome like the arrival of a new
all-conquering deity upon the mountain tops. Suddenly the words “My
Country” conjured a creed. People vied with one another to die in
proof of their fealty to this vague thing that but yesterday had been
a politician’s joke, a schoolboy’s lesson in geography. This flag that
had been a color scheme for decorating band stands on Fourths of July
became an angel’s wing streaked with blood, a thing that filled the
eyes with tears, the soul with hosannas.

Then the hilarious victory of the Bull Run picnic was turned into
a panic of disaster, of shame, of dismay. Lists of dead men became
news, and the poor citizens gnashed their teeth upon their grief,
understanding how grim and long a game they had begun. Whichever side
won the game, both must lose infinitely precious treasures only now
valued truly.

All the songs were war songs; all the love-stories had either warriors
or skulkers involved; the rejoicings were over the disasters of other
Americans, other mothers and fathers; the highest of arts was the art
of destruction; the zest of life was in slaughtering and enduring. Life
had more beauty and glory than ever but no more prettiness, no grace.

One day RoBards brought home the paper, and after assuring Patty that
Keith’s name was not in any of the gory catalogues, he said:

“Our relative-in-law—Cousin Julia Ward Howe—has broken into poetry
again. It’s a war poem, very womanly for a blue-stocking; not bad.”

Patty took the paper and glanced at it carelessly. Being about silks
the verses caught her and her smile became a look of pain. RoBards
said, “Read it aloud to me. I used to love to hear you read aloud.”

She read. And because of the miracle there is in the voice, especially
to him in her voice, the poem seemed to him a thing of deeper sorrow
and more majesty than any of the bombast that filled the press. It was
a dirge for beautiful glad things:

    “Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
       To deck our girls for gay delights!
     The crimson flower of battle blooms,
       And solemn marches fill the nights.

    “Weave but the flag whose bars to-day
       Drooped heavy o’er our early dead,
     And homely garments, coarse and gray,
       For orphans that must earn their bread.

    “Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet,
       That poured delight from other lands!
     Rouse there the dancer’s restless feet:
       The trumpet leads our warrior bands.

    “And ye that wage the war of words
       With mystic fame and subtle power,
     Go, chatter to the idle birds,
       Or teach the lesson of the hour!

    “Ye Sibyl Arts, in one stern knot
       Be all your offices combined!
     Stand close, while Courage draws the lot,
       The destiny of human kind.”

Patty’s voice died away on the last stanza. RoBards, the lawyer, the
pleader, the juggler of words like cannon balls, admired the exalted
phrases, the apostrophic strain, but Patty was touched only by the
first and third stanzas and like a mournful nightingale she warbled
softly to a little tune made up of reminiscences of the opera:

    “Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms.”

Only as she trilled it it ran:

“We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-ons loo-oo-oo-ooms.”

It got caught in her thoughts and ran through her head for weeks,
until unconsciously she was always crooning or whispering the haunting
syllables.

It was odd that a city-bred banker’s daughter should have written the
most graceful of war elegies. It was odder yet that in a still darker
hour when discouragement gripped the unsuccessful North and recruits
were deaf to the call, this same woman should fire the country with the
most majestic of battle-hymns:

 “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
 He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

A shy little wife of a preacher wrote the most successful novel ever
written, and brought on the war; and a banker’s daughter gave it its
noblest voice.

No wonder that women were getting out of hand, and questioning the
ancient pretense of the male; calling his bluff. That song chanted
everywhere to the forward-marching tune of “John Brown’s Body” started
a new current of volunteers and brought the final resolution to many a
hesitant patriot. And Patty was proud again to claim relationship to
the daughter of money and of song.

But the Battle Hymn seemed to harrow the soul of her boy Junior. There
were dark secrets back of his eyes. Patty would fling her arms about
him to shut out the Lorelei-appeal of the bugles that rang through the
streets calling, calling. She tried to hide from his eyes the uniforms
that shamed his civilian clothes. And she would plead:

“Don’t leave me, Junior boy! Don’t leave your poor old mother! I’ve got
a right to keep one son, haven’t I? Promise me you won’t go.”

He would pet her and kiss her, but never quite give the pledge she
implored.

Then one day while Patty was standing at the window and her husband was
reading in a newspaper the story of the heroisms and tragedies of his
neighbors’ sons, Patty cried out:

“Mist’ RoBards, look! Come quick!”

He ran to her side and peered through the glass.

Below was a youth in uniform clinging to the iron fence, waveringly.
RoBards said:

“It’s just some young soldier who has drunk too many toasts.”

He turned back to his paper, but Patty whirled him round again:

“No, no, no! It’s Junior! He’s in uniform! He’s afraid to come in and
break my heart!”

RoBards’ own heart seemed to feel the grip of a terrible hand, wringing
the blood out of it; but he caught Patty to him and held her fast as if
to hold her soul to its treadmill duty. He mumbled:

“You’re not going to make it too hard for him?”

She shook her head; but tears were flung about, glittering. Her
frowning brows seemed to squeeze her very brain, to compel it to
bravery. Then she ran to the washbasin and bathed her eyes, slapped
them with cold water, and rouged and powdered her cheeks, to flirt with
despair! She straightened herself like an orderly sergeant a moment,
saluted, and said: “Now!”

Then she ran down the stairs, opened the front door, and called:

“Come in here, you big beautiful soldier!”

When Junior shambled up the steps with awkward poltroonery, she clapped
her hands and admired:

“My, my, my! how handsome we are! I’ll bet the Johnny Rebs will just
climb over one another to get out of your way.”

Junior was fooled by her bravado. He breathed deep of the relief of
escaping both her protest and the shame of not going for a soldier. He
was young and innocent, but RoBards was old enough to know what abysmal
gloom was back of Patty’s jocund eyes.

On his last night in town, Junior was away for two hours. When he came
home, he said he had been at the armory; but he was so labored in his
carelessness that Patty laughed:

“Did she cry very hard?”

Junior did not even smile at that. There was not much fun in Patty’s
laugh, either.

The next morning she rejoined the multitudes that crowded the curbs
and waved wet handkerchiefs at the striding soldiery while the high
walls of Broadway shops flung back and forth the squealing fifes and
thrilling drums and the ululant horns.




CHAPTER XLVI


There was acrid humiliation for RoBards in his inability to take a
soldier’s part in the field. He did what he could on the countless
boards, but he longed to be young, to ride a snorting charger along a
line of bayonets, or to shoulder a rifle and jog over the dusty roads
to glory in the flaming red breeches and short jacket of a Zouave.
The very children were little Zouaves now in tiny uniforms with tiny
weapons. One could not walk the streets without breaking through these
infantile armies.

RoBards had no military training and even the increasingly liberal
standards of the recruiting boards would not let him through to add
one more to the vast army that camp fever and dysentery sent to futile
graves. Most of all, he dared not leave Patty alone with no man to
comfort her.

Yet Harry Chalender, who was no younger than he and led the most
irregular of lives, managed to do the handsome thing—as always. Since
California, with no railroads to link it to the East, could hardly send
many troops to the war, Chalender left the Golden State, sped around
the Horn, and appeared in New York.

The first that RoBards knew of this was the flourish in the newspapers:
“With characteristic gallantry and public spirit, Captain Harry
Chalender has abandoned his interests in California and come all the
way to his native heath to lay his untarnished sword on the altar of
his country.”

RoBards hated himself for hating Chalender for being so honorable a
man; but he could not oust from his heart the bitter thought that
Chalender was rendering him one more insult.

Chalender had saved his life, dishonored his wife, married his
daughter, surpassed him in every way as a captor of the hearts of
women and men, as a breaker of the laws of God and man, and as a public
servant and a patriot. And RoBards was bound and gagged and could not
protest or denounce except in his own dark heart.

There was scant salve for his hurts in the low groan of wrath from
Patty as she flung the paper to the floor:

“If he dares come to our house! if he dares!”

But Chalender with that almost infallible intuition of his for escaping
bad quarters-of-an-hour, sent merely a gay little note:

 “Dear Papa and Mamma-in-law:

 “It grieves me deeply to be unable to call and pay you both my filial
 devoirs, but I am to be shipped South at once for cannon-fodder.

 “Our dear Immy sent you all sorts of loving messages, which I beg you
 to imagine. She is well and beautiful and would be the belle of San
 Francisco if she were not so devoted a mother to the three perfect
 grandchildren, whom you have never seen.

 “‘When this cruel war is over,’ as the song goes, I shall hope to
 come tramp-tramp-tramping to your doorstep. Until then and always be
 assured, dear Patty and David (if I may be so familiar) that I am

  The most devoted of
  “Sons-in-law.”

The next day’s paper told of his departure as the lieutenant colonel
of a new regiment. Before the regiment reached the front, he was its
colonel owing to the sudden demise of his superior. People died to get
out of his way!

The next they knew he was shot in the throat as he led a magnificent
and successful charge. He drew a dirty handkerchief through the red
tunnel, remounted, and galloped to the head of his line and hurdled the
Confederate breastworks as if he were fox-hunting again in Westchester.
As soon as possible he was brevetted a brigadier and with uncanny speed
a major general of Volunteers. His men adored him and while other
generals rose and fell in a sickening reiteration of disasters, his own
command always shone in victory or plucked a laurel from defeat.

His nickname was “Our Harry” or “Harry of Navarre,” but patriot as
RoBards was, he could find no comfort in the triumphs that led the
neighbors to exclaim:

“By gollies, it must make you proud to be the father-in-law of such a
military genius! It’s a shame Old Abe don’t give him a chance like he
gives those blundering butchers he picks out.”

Poor RoBards had to agree publicly that he was proud of New York’s
pet, but Patty would not stoop to such hypocrisy. She would snap at
Chalender’s partisans:

“Surely you can’t expect a good word for the wretch from his
mother-in-law.”

To escape from the irony of these eulogies, Patty and David went up
to Tuliptree, though it kept them longer from the newspapers, and the
daily directories of killed, wounded, and missing which made almost
their only reading.

One day Patty came across a paragraph in one of the Westchester papers
that called Lincoln a “tyrant,” and a “buffoon,” and the Abolitionists
“cowards,” in terms hardly to be expected north of Mason and Dixon’s
line. She read it to RoBards:

“Among the most recent victims of Abe Lincoln’s iniquitous war is
Corporal Gideon Lasher of Kensico, who was murdered at Elmira while
arresting a deserter. He had been previously wounded at Brandy Station
during the advance from Rappahannock.”

Patty looked up from the paper and said:

“Gideon Lasher! Could he have been a brother of the Lasher who——”

RoBards did not start. He nodded idly. It all seemed so far off, so
long ago as hardly to concern themselves at all. They had almost
forgotten what the word Lasher meant to them.

And when on his way to the railroad station he met Mrs. Lasher he found
her so old and worn-witted that she, too, had almost no nerves to feel
sorrow with. She almost giggled:

“They tell me my boy Gideon’s dead. Yes, sir; he went and got himself
kilt, up yonder in Elmiry. Funny place to get kilt, way up north
yonder! I can’t say as I’ve had much luck with my fambly. Jud—you
remember him likely, sir?—he never came home from sea. Went a-whalin’,
and ne’er a word or sign of him sence I don’t know when. My daughter
Aletty—she’s in town up to some mischief, I s’pose. Well, it’s the way
of the world, ain’t it? Them as has, gets; them as hasn’t, doosn’t.”

War or no war, RoBards found cases to try. There was a mysterious
prosperity hard to account for in many businesses. Cases poured in
on RoBards. Fees were high. However the tide of battle rolled in the
South, the trades of life went on somehow, and petty quarrels over
lands and wills and patent rights were fought out as earnestly as ever.

One evening as he set out for the Kensico train, he bought a paper, and
found the name he had been looking for every day in the list.

He was benumbed by the blow and all the way home sat with his elbows
on his knees and sagged like a bankrupt in the courts. He could hardly
understand what it would mean if his namesake boy should no more be
visible upon the earth. He hardly dared to grieve as a father must
mourn for a lost son; for he thought of Patty and the necessity for
carrying to her the news.

In his heart there was always a great wish that he might never come to
her without bringing some gift of flowers, jewels, or at least good
cheer. And he was always bringing her sorrow!

But that was marriage and it could not be escaped. He must try to be a
little glad that evil tidings should be carried to her by one who loved
her and would share her grief.

She was scraping lint for wounded soldiers when he came in as usual
with the paper that he always brought home from his office. But there
was a look about him, about the way he held the paper that shook her as
if the house were a tocsin smitten with a sledge. Their colloquy was
brief:

“Patty.”

“Has it come?”

“Yes, honey!”

“Keith?”

“No.”

“Junior!”

“Yes, sweet.”

“Wounded?”

“Worse.”

“Oh, not dead?”

“Missing.”

This was the bitterest word to hear, for it carried suspense and
dreadful possibilities. Was he a captive to suffer the horrors of
Southern prison camps where the jailers starved with the prisoners? Was
he lying wounded and perishing slowly under some bush in the enemy’s
lines, in the rain, at the mercy of ants, flies, wounds uncleansed? Was
he shivering with mortal cold and no mother to draw a blanket over him?
Was he among the unidentified slain? Had he run away in a disease of
cowardice? Would he come home crippled? Insane?

Days and days dragged by before the papers answered their questions.
Then it helped a little to know that, since their boy had died, he had
died quickly, and had brought honor to the family in the manner of his
taking-off.

In a series of bloody charges upon a line of high breastworks on a
hilltop, three standard bearers had been shot down—each snatching
the flag before it struck the earth. The dead were piled up with the
writhing wounded and they were abandoned by the Union troops as they
fell back and gave up the costly effort.

Under a flag of truce they pleaded for the privilege of burying their
dead. Deep in the wall of Northern bodies, they found a boy with his
blouse buttoned tight about him. A glimpse of bright color caught the
eye of the burial party and his story told itself. Evidently Junior
had been shot down with the flag he had tried to plant on the barrier.
As he writhed and choked he had wrenched his bayonet free and sawed
the colors from the staff, wrapped them around his body and buttoned
his blouse over them to save them from falling into the hands of the
enemy. Death found him with his thumb and finger frozen on the last
button.

The hideousness of the boy’s last hour was somehow transformed to
beauty by the thought of him swathed in the star-dotted blue and the
red and white stripes. He had been thinking solemnly, frantically all
his last moments of a flag.

Patty was not so jealous of this mystic rival as she might have been if
he had been found with some girl’s picture in his hand. For the first
time, indeed, the flag became holy to her. In her heart, her son’s
blood sanctified it, rather than it him.

Her sorrow was hushed in awe for a long while and her eyes were
uplifted in exaltation that was almost exultant. Then a wall of tears
blinded them and she saw the glory no more, only the pity of her
shattered boy unmothered in his death-agony.

She clutched her breasts with both hands, clawed them as if they
suffered with her for the lips they had given suck to, the lips that
they and she would never feel again.

She put on the deepest mourning, drew thick veils about her, and
moved like a moving cenotaph draped in black. She became one of the
increasing procession of mothers who had given their sons to the
nation. They had pride, but they paid for it.

She watched other mothers’ sons hurrying forth under the battle
standards slanting ahead and the flags writhing backward, and it did
not comfort other women to see her; for she was a witness of the
charnel their children entered.

The call for three months’ volunteers had been amended to a larger
demand for two years’ enlistments, and then to a larger still for three
years. The failure of the North to uphold the Union bred a growing
distrust of its ability to succeed, a doubt of its right to succeed, a
hatred for its leaders.

And always there was the terror that the next list would carry the name
of the other son she had lent to the nation with no security for his
return. She had Keith’s wife for companion, and they multiplied each
other’s fears. Patty had the excuse of knowing what havoc there was in
war. Frances had the excuse of her condition. She was carrying a child
for some future war to take away from her.

When Keith’s baby was born, Keith was in the travail of a battle and
the baby was several weeks old before the news reached him that the
wife he had not seen for nearly a year had given him a son that he
might never see.

Patty made the usual grandmother, fighting vainly for ideas that her
daughter-in-law waived as old-fashioned, just as Patty had driven her
mother frantic with her once new-fangled notions.

She felt as young as she had ever felt and it bewildered her to be
treated as of an ancient generation. She resented the reverence due her
years a little more bitterly than the contempt.

“I won’t be revered!” she stormed. “Call me a fool or a numskull; fight
me, but don’t you dare treat me with deference as if I were an old
ninny!”

RoBards understood her mood, for he felt once more the young husband
as he leaned over his grandson’s cradle and bandied foolish baby words
with an infant that retorted in yowls and kicks or with gurglings as
inarticulate as a brook’s, and as irresistible.

One day at his office where he sat behind a redoubt of lawbooks, he
glanced up to smile at a photograph of his grandchild, and caught the
troubled look of a young man who was reading law in his office.

“Well?” he said.

“Begging your pardon, sir, there’s a young woman outside wants to see
you. Says her name is—her name is—is——”

RoBards snapped at him:

“Speak up, man. What’s the terrible name?”

“Mrs. David RoBards, Junior.”

This word “Junior” wrenched an old wound open and RoBards whipped off
his glasses shot with instant tears. He snarled less in anger than in
anguish:

“What are you saying? My poor boy had no wife.”

“So I told her, sir. But she insists he did, and—and—well, hadn’t you
better see her? I can’t seem to get rid of her.”

RoBards rose with difficulty and stalked forth. Leaning against the
rail in the outer office was a shabby mother with a babe at her frugal
breast. RoBards spread his elbows wide to brace himself in the door
while he fumbled for his distance glasses.

They brought to his eyes with abrupt sharpness the wistful face of
Aletta Lasher, as he had seen her perched on the rock in the Tarn of
Mystery that day, when she bemoaned her helpless love for his son.

She came to him now, slowly, sidlingly, the babe held backward a little
as if to keep it from any attack he might make. To verify his wild
guesses, he said:

“My clerk must have misunderstood your name. May I ask it?”

“I am Mrs. David RoBards—Junior. This is our little girl.”

“But Junior—my boy Junior—is——”

“I am his widow, sir.”

“But, my dear child, you—he——”

“We were married secretly the day before he marched with his regiment.
He was afraid to tell you. I was afraid to come to you, sir, even when
I heard of his beautiful death. You had sorrow enough, sir; and so had
I. I shouldn’t be troubling you now, but I don’t seem to get strong
enough to go back to work, and the baby—the baby—she doesn’t belong to
me only. You might not forgive me if I let her die.”

The baby laughed at such a silly word, flung up two pink fists and two
doll’s feet in knit socks, and said something in a language that has
never been written but has never been misunderstood. The purport of its
meaning brought RoBards rushing to the presence. He looked down past
the sad eyes of Aletta into the sparkling little eyes of all mischief.
The finger he touched the tiny hand with was moistly, warmly clasped
by fingers hardly more than grape tendrils.

“Come in,” said RoBards. “Let me carry the baby.”

He motioned Aletta to the chair where never so strange a client had
sat, and questioned her across the elusive armload that pulled his
neckscarf awry and beat him about the face as with young tulip leaves.

Aletta had brought along her certificate of marriage to prove her
honesty and she told a story of hardships that added the final
confirmation, and filled RoBards with respect for her. His new-found
daughter had been as brave as his new-lost son.

But he dared not commit himself. He took the half-starved girl in his
carriage—he kept a carriage now—to St. John’s Park to consult his
partner in this grandchild.

He left Aletta in the parlor and went up the stairs with the baby.
Sometimes when he had a woman for a client he found it best to put her
on the witness stand and let her plead her own case to the jury. So he
took the baby along now.

When he entered Patty’s room she was sitting rocking by the window
gazing into nowhere. Her hands held a picture of Junior, and as RoBards
paused he could see the few slow tears of weary grief drip and strike.

He could find no first word. It was the baby’s sudden gurgle that
startled Patty. She turned, stared, rose, came to him, smiling
helplessly at the wriggling giggler. Up went two handlets to buffet her
cheeks as she bent to stare. She took the creature from her husband’s
arms, lifting it till its cheek was silken against her own. For a
little while she basked in contentment unvexed by curiosity, before she
asked:

“And whose baby is this?”

“Yours,” said RoBards.

“My baby? What do you mean? Who was it came in with you?”

“Your daughter and mine—a new one we didn’t know we had. Honey, this
is the little daughter of our blessed boy Junior.”

While RoBards was resolving her daze into an understanding of the
situation, the child was pleading away her resentment, her suspicion.
Before she knew the truth she was eager to have it true. She needed
just that sort of toy to play with to save her from going mad with age
and uselessness.

The hungry baby beat at her dry bosom in vain, but shook her heart with
its need.

She felt too weak to trust herself to the stairway and asked RoBards
to bring Aletta up. She waited in that great terror in which a mother
meets a strange daughter-in-law. But when the girl came into the room,
so meek, so pale, so expectant of one more flogging from life, Patty,
who would have met defiance with defiance, set forth a hand of welcome
and drawing the girl close, kissed her.

There were many embarrassing things to say on either side, but before
the parley could begin, the baby intervened with the primeval cry for
milk. There was no talking in such uproar and Aletta, noting that
RoBards was too stupid to retreat, turned her back on him and, laying
the child across her left arm, soon had its anger changed to the first
primeval sound of approval.

After a while of pride at the vigorous notes of smacking and gulping,
Patty murmured:

“What’s its name?”

“She has no name but Baby,” Aletta sighed. “I have been so alone, with
nobody to advise me that I—I didn’t know what to call her.”

Patty hardly hesitated before she said with a hypocritical modesty:

“I don’t think much of ‘Patty’ for a name but Mist’ RoBards used to
like it.”

Aletta gasped: “Oh, would you let my baby have your name?”

“Your baby is too beautiful for a name I’ve worn out. But how would you
like to call her by the name that was my last name when I was a girl
like you? ‘Jessamine’ is right pretty, don’t you think?”

“Jessamine RoBards!” Aletta sighed in a luxury, and added with a quaint
bookishness. “It’s another term for Jasmine. I had a little jasmine
plant at home. Oh, but it was sweet, and fragrant! My poor mother
always said it was her favorite perfume. She used almost to smile when
it was in bloom.”

This mention of her mother, their neighbor once so despised, since so
dreaded, gave Patty and David a moment’s pause. But only a moment’s,
for the little pink link that united the Lasher with the RoBards stock,
as if accepting the name she had waited for so long, began to crow and
wave her arms in all the satisfaction of being replete with the warm
white wine of a young mother’s breast.

And the grandparents embraced each other and their new daughter as they
meditated on the supine quadruped that filled their lonely house with
unsyllabled laughter.

When later Mrs. Keith RoBards came round to call with her richly
bedizened and bediapered son, Patty had such important news to tell
her, that Keith Junior’s nose would have been put out of joint if it
had been long enough to have a joint.

In gratifying contrast with Frances’ autocratic motherhood, Aletta
was so ignorant, or tactfully pretended to be, and so used to being
bullied, so glad of any kindness, that Patty took entire command of the
fresh jasmine-flower and was less a grandmother than a miraculously
youthful mother—for a while, for a respite—while before the world
renewed the assaults it never ceases long to make upon the happiness of
every one of its prisoners.




CHAPTER XLVII


Having lost one son in the war and expecting to hear at any moment that
her other boy was gone, Patty was bitter now against the mothers who
kept their sons at home, as she had tried to keep hers.

The fear grew that the war, which had already cost her so dear, might
be lost for lack of men to reinforce the Federal troops. Those whom the
first thrill had not swept off their feet, found self-control easier
and easier when they were besought to fill the gaps left by the sick,
the crippled and the dead in the successless armies.

Their apathy woke to action, however, when the hateful word
Conscription was uttered by the desperate administration. The draft
law was passed, and it woke a battle ardor in those who cling to peace
whenever their country is at war. For there has always been about the
same proportion of citizens who are inevitably against the government,
whatever it does. Sometimes they prate of loyalty to a divinely
commissioned monarch or a mother country, as in Washington’s day;
sometimes they love the foreigner so well that they denounce a war of
conquest, as in the Mexican war; sometimes they praise the soft answer
and the disarming appeal of friendly counsel, as in this war with the
fierce South.

Now, when the draft lowered, the New York pacifists mobilized, set the
draft-wheels on fire and burned the offices and such other buildings as
annoyed them. They abused Lincoln as a gawky Nero, and, to prove their
hatred of war, they formed in mobs and made gibbets of the lamp-posts
where they set aswing such negroes as they could run down.

They killed or trampled to death policemen and soldiers, insulted
and abused black women and children, and, in a final sublimity of
enthusiasm, grew bold enough to charge upon the Negro Orphan Asylum
on Fifth Avenue near the Reservoir. Somebody led the two hundred
pickaninnies there to safety through the back door while the mob
stormed the front, and burned the place to ashes.

For three days the city was a monstrous madhouse with the maniacs
in control. Thousands descended on the central police station and
would have destroyed it if a few hundred police had not flanked them
with simultaneous charges down side streets, and clubbed them into a
stampede.

Editors who supported the government would have joined the black fruit
ripening on the lamp-posts if Mr. Raymond’s _Times_ had not mounted
revolving cannon in its defense and Mr. Greeley’s _Tribune_ had not
thrust long troughs out of its upper windows as channels for bombshells
to drop into the rabble.

Troops came hurrying to the city’s rescue and sprinkled canister upon
certain patriots to disperse them. Then and only then the war-hating
wolves became lambs again. The Seventh was recalled too late to defend
the city from itself, but Keith did not come home with it. He had been
commissioned to another regiment. A thousand lives had been lost in the
Draft Riots, but the rioters were unashamed.

The Governor had called them “my friends” and promised them relief; the
draft had been suspended and the city council had voted two millions
and a half, so that those who were too poor to afford substitutes could
have them bought by the city ready-made at six hundred dollars apiece.

In Westchester County rails had been torn up, wires cut, and drafting
lists set ablaze, and mobs had gone wandering looking for Republicans.

But fatigue brought order and the sale of volunteers began. A Lasher
boy of sixteen earned a fortune by going as a substitute. The war was
already a war of boys on both sides. The hatred of Lincoln, however,
was so keen that Westchester County gave two thousand majority to
General McClellan in his campaign for the Presidency against Lincoln.
That harried and harrowing politician barely carried the state, and
served only a month of his new term before he was shot dead. He looked
very majestic in his coffin and those who had laughed at him wept with
remorse. In his death he won to the lofty glory his good homeliness
had earned, though it brought him contempt while he lived. But that
apotheosis was as yet months away, and unsuspected.

Toward the last of the war, RoBards had noted that Patty was forever
holding one hand to her heart. He assumed that it was because a
canker of terror was always gnawing there on account of Keith, always
wandering somewhere through the shell-torn fields where bullets
whistled, or the devils of disease spread their gins and springes.

This pain was never absent, but there was another ache that she hardly
dared confess to herself. She thought it petty selfishness to have
a distress when so many thousands were lying with broken bodies and
rended nerves in the countless hospitals.

She put off troubling the doctors. Few of them were left in the city or
the country and they were overworked with the torn soldiers invalided
home.

Finally the heartache grew into a palpable something, and now and then
it was as if a zigzag of lightning shot from her breast to her back.
And once when she was reading to her husband about the unending siege
of Petersburg where the last famished, barefoot heroes of the South
were being slowly brayed to dust, a little shriek broke from her.

“What’s that?” cried RoBards.

“Nothing! Nothing much!” she gasped, but when he knelt by her side
she drooped across his shoulder, broken with the terrible power of
sympathy, and sobbed:

“Mist’ RoBards, I’m afraid!”




CHAPTER XLVIII


Within the silken walls of Patty’s body, still beautiful as a jar of
rose leaves, a secret enemy was brooding, building. A tulip tree, a
tree of death was pushing its roots all through her flesh.

There had been no pain at first and nothing to warn her that life was
confusedly conspiring against itself.

Then there were subtle distresses, strange shafts of anguish like
javelins thrown from ambush. Her suspicions were so terrifying that she
had feared to see a doctor.

But now RoBards compelled her to go with him to consult an eminent
surgeon. She endured his professional scrutiny, his rude caresses. At
last he spoke with a dreadful kindliness and did not rebuke her as of
old for indiscretions or neglects. He told her that there was trouble
within that needed attention as soon as she was a little stronger. She
smiled wanly and went out to the waiting carriage.

To RoBards who lingered for a last word, Dr. Marlowe whispered: “For
Christ’s sake, don’t tell her. It’s cancer!”

If death could have come to him from fright, RoBards would have
died then. He toppled as if he had been smitten with the back of a
broadsword.

He turned eyes of childlike appeal to the dismal eyes of the physician,
who was more helpless than his victims since he knew better than they
how much woe is abroad.

Dr. Marlowe laid a hand on RoBards’ shoulder as a man might say: “I
will go to the guillotine with you. The only dignity left is bravery.
Let us not forget our etiquette.”

But to be brave for another’s doom! To be plucky about the fact that
his wife, his sweetheart, the infanta of his love, was to be torn to
pieces slowly by the black leopard of that death—this was a cowardly
bravery to his thinking. He was brave enough to confess his utter,
abject terror. He went through what thousands had once felt when their
beloved were summoned to the torture chamber.

He fought his panic down lest Patty be alarmed. He wrestled with the
mouth muscles that wanted to scream protests and curses; and he made
them smile when he went out and sank in the carriage beside her and
told the driver “Home!” as one might say “To the Inquisition!”

And Patty smiled at him and hummed:

“We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-ons loo-oo-oo-ooms.”

She knew that the doctor was glazing over his fatal discovery. She knew
that her husband’s smile was but the grimace of one poisoned with the
sardonic weed. She was afraid, though, to reveal her intuition lest she
lose control of her own terrors, leaping and baying like mad hounds at
the leashes of her nerves.

The only hope the coupled humans had of maintaining a decent composure
was in keeping up the lie. They were calm as well-bred people are
when a theatre catches fire and they disdain to join the shrieking,
trampling herd.

They had tickets for a play that night. It seemed best to go. The play
was sad at times and Patty wept softly. RoBards’ hand hunted for hers
and found it, and the two hands clung together, embracing like the
Babes in the Wood with night and the wild beasts gathering about them.

After a dreadful delay, there was a more dreadful operation, and once
more RoBards blessed the names of Morton, Jackson, and Wells for the
sleep they gave his beloved during the nightmare of the knives. But
only for a while, since the pain, after a brief frustration, flowed
back like a dammed river when the dam gives way.

When he demanded more of the drug, the physician protested: “We must
not be careless. It is a habit-forming drug, you know.”

But pain was a habit-forming poison, too. The operation was too late to
do more than prolong the day of execution.

All over the world men were delving into the ancient mystery. But
nobody knew. Nobody could find out a why or a wherefore. Some day
somebody would surely stumble on the cause and then the cure would turn
up. The answer would be simple perhaps.

But it would be too late for Patty.

What followed was unspeakable, too cruel to recount, beyond the reach
of sympathy. Minutes seemingly unbearable heaped up into hours, hours
into mornings, afternoons, slow evenings, eternal, lonely nights. Days
and nights became weeks, months.

The doctor, weary of the spectacle of Patty’s woe, gave the drug
recklessly. It had passed the point of mattering whether it were
habit-forming or not.

And then immunity began. As the disease itself was the ironic parody
of life, so the precious gift of immunity became the hideous denial of
relief.

The solace in drugs lost all potency. The poor wretch was naked before
the fiends. The hell the Bible pronounced upon the non-elect was
brought up to earth before its time.

Dr. Chirnside slept now with his fathers, but his successor called upon
Patty to minister comfort. He was a stern reversion to the Puritan type
that deified its own granite. When he was gone, Patty was in dismay
indeed. For now the torture was perfected by a last exquisite subtlety,
the only thing left to increase it: the feeling that it was deserved.
Remorse was added to the weapons of this invisible Torquemada.

From Patty’s blenched, writhen lips, between her gnashing teeth slipped
the words:

“Honey, it’s a punishment on me for my wickedness.”

“No, no, no! What wickedness have you ever done?”

“Oh, you know well enough. You cried hard enough once. And there have
been so many cruel things I have done, so many mean evil thoughts,
so many little goodnesses I put off. God is remembering those things
against me.”

“You make God more cruel than man. How could he be? It’s blasphemy to
blame him for your misery.”

He thought, of course, of Harry Chalender. Harry Chalender!—Harry
Chalender, who had never repented a crime, never reformed, never spared
a home or a virtue or failed to abet a weakness. Yet he was hale and
smirking still at life, an heroic rake still fluttering the young
girls’ hearts, garnering the praises of men. If God were punishing sin,
how could he pass Harry Chalender by, and let him live untouched?

But Patty’s head swung back and forth:

“God can never forgive me, I suppose. But you do—don’t you, honey?—you
forgive me?”

“I have nothing to forgive you for. You have been my angel always. I
adore you.”

She clenched his hand with gratitude and then she wrung it as a throe
wrung her. It was RoBards that cried, screamed:

“Oh, I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I
can’t stand it!”

He was in such frenzy of sympathy that she put out her pale, twitching
hand and caressed his bowed head, and felt sorry for his sorrow.

But night and day, day and night!

She groaned: “The worst of it is, honey, that there’s no end of it till
there’s an end of me. If I could only die soon! That’s the only remedy,
dear heart. I pray for death, but it won’t come. I used to be so afraid
of it, and now I love it—next to you.”

Again and again the surgeons took her away, and brought her back
lessened. Sometimes she pleaded with RoBards against a return to
that table, clinging with her flaccid little fingers to his sleeve,
imploring him not to let them hurt her, if he loved her. And his love
of her made him drive her back.

She sighed again and again in a kind of aloofness from herself:

“Oh, my pretty body, my poor little, pretty, pretty body, how sorry I
am for you!”

And once, as they carried her along the corridor she whispered to her
husband:

“I always wanted to be good, honey. And I tried to. I always wanted
to be all that you wanted me to be; and you always wanted me to be
everything that was—wonderful. But somehow I couldn’t be—wonderful. You
forgive me, though, don’t you? I always loved you. Sometimes it must
have seemed as if I cared more for somebody else. But that was just
weakness—restlessness—something like a fever or a chill that I couldn’t
help. But all the time I loved you. And you have loved me gloriously.
That is all the pride my poor body and I have left—that we were loved
by so good a man as you.”

She suffered most perhaps because of the flight of her beauty before
the ravages of her enemy.

But underneath the mask of her pain, RoBards could always see the
pretty thing she was when she was a bride asleep against his shoulder
on the long drive up to Tuliptree Farm. And when at last they let her
go back there to escape the noise of the city, he rode beside her again
behind slow-trotting horses. But now they were in an ambulance lent
them by one of the military hospitals.

They were far longer than then in getting out of the city into the
green, for the city had flowed outward and outward in a tide that never
ebbed, never surrendered what fields it claimed.

But as the last of the city drew back into the distance, she sighed
wearily:

“Good-by, New York. I always loved you. I’ll never see you again.”

He remembered how she had bidden it farewell on that first flight from
the cholera. She had married him in terror, but he was glad that she
was not the wife of that Chalender who was still in the battle front,
winning more and more fame while Immy languished on the Pacific coast,
and Patty here. RoBards owned Patty now. He had earned her love by a
lifetime of devout fidelity. And she was won to him.

As he looked down at the pallid face on the pillow it was still that
winsome face in the scuttle hat, that pink rose in the basket, jostling
against his shoulder while she slept.

She sighed often now: “I’m not nice any more. I’m terrible. Go away!”

But the lavender of memory kept her sweet.




CHAPTER XLIX


The old house gathered her in and comforted her for a while. But
chiefly it comforted her because it let her cry out without fear of
notice from passers-by in the street or the neighbors in St. John’s
Park.

And there she abode until the war was over, and the troops came home,
saddened in their triumph by the final sacrifice of poor Mr. Lincoln.

When the regiment whose colonel was Keith flowed up Broadway, Patty was
not there to run out and kiss his hand, as she would have done if she
could have seen him on his horse with his epaulets twinkling on his
shoulders, and his sword clinking against his thigh.

His father watched him from a window and then hurried up side streets
to meet and embrace him when he was free of his soldiers. RoBards had
to wait, of course, until Keith had hugged his wife and tossed aloft
the child he saw now for the first time. Then the author of all this
grandeur came meekly forward and felt small and old and foolish in the
great arms of this famous officer.

“Where’s mother!” Keith cried.

“Up at the farm.”

“Why couldn’t she have come down to meet me?”

“She’s not very well of late.”

Keith’s pique turned to alarm. He knew his mother and he knew that
nothing light could have kept her from this hour. But Frances turned
his thoughts aside with hasty chatter, and dragged him home.

The next day he obtained leave from the formalities of the muster-out
and was ready for a journey to Kensico. His father, who had to be in
town for his business’ sake and to gain new strength for Patty’s needs,
went with him.

On the way up Keith said:

“What’s all this mystery about mother?”

“She’s pretty sick, my boy. You’ll find her changed a good deal. You’ll
pretend not to notice, of course. She’s proud, you know.”

Then the grisled colonel, who had grown patient with so much that was
terrible, looked at his father as he had looked sometimes when he woke
from bad dreams, screaming “Mamma! Papa!”

He turned his frightened eyes away from what he saw in his father’s
eyes.

Quietly, since it was an old, old story to him, RoBards told him the
truth, and Keith wrung his hands to keep from startling the passengers
in the crowded car with the mad gestures of protest he would else have
flung out.

He wanted to charge the clouds and battle in his mother’s behalf.

But when he entered her room he was as brave and calm as at a dress
parade. He smiled and caressed and spoke flatteries that cut his throat
and burned his lips.

He hurried back to disband his regiment, then brought Frances and his
son up to Tuliptree with him, and established himself in the nearest
room to his mother’s. He tucked her in and babied her as she had babied
him when she was younger than he was now.

Patty’s famous hair was her only remaining pride, the inheritance
from the Patty Jessamine who had combed and brushed and coiled it and
wrapped it in strange designs about her little head.

She was always fondling it as if it were a fairy turban, a scarf of
strange silk. Even in her bitterest paroxysms she would not tear at her
hair.

The nurse would braid it and draw two long cables down her shoulders
and praise it, and Patty would not brag a little, saying:

“It is nice, isn’t it?”

The fate that took away every other comfort and beauty and every last
luxury spared her tresses.

They had not even turned white except for certain little streaks—a fine
line of silver here and there that glistened like the threads of the
dome-spider’s gossamer shining in the morning dew when the sunbeams
just rake the lawn.

She would lay her hair against her cheeks and against her lips and she
would hold it up to RoBards to kiss, and laugh a wild little laugh.

He loved it as she did, and thought it miraculous that so many strands
of such weave should be spun from that head of hers to drip about her
beauty.

Then she would forget it in another call to martyrdom. Her bravery
astounded her husband and her brave son. It was the courage of the
ancient heretic women who had smiled amid the flames of the slow green
fagots that zealots chose for their peculiar wretchedness.

Sometimes she would seem to be whispering something to herself and
RoBards would bend down to catch the words. Usually she was crooning
that song:

      “We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-y-ons loo-oo-ooms.
    To deck our girls for ga-a-ay delights.”

The war was over, the looms were astream with silks again, but not for
Patty Jessamine RoBards.

One night when he had fallen asleep from sheer fag, drained like an
emptied reservoir, RoBards was wakened by her seizure upon his arm. It
terrified him from some dream of a lawsuit. He was a moment or two in
realizing that it was Patty who had seized him. The lamp had gone out,
the dawn was stealing in. She was babbling:

“I can’t stand it any more. Not another day! Oh, God, not another day!
Don’t ask me that, dear God!”

He tried to take her out of herself on to his own galled shoulders.
He seized her hands and put his face in front of her glazed eyes and
cried to her to talk to him and let him help her through this one more
Gethsemane.

Her desperate eyes stared past him for a while. Then their blurred
gaze slowly focussed upon him. She nodded in recognition and talked to
him, not to God:

“I’d ask you to give me a knife or a pistol or something to kill myself
with, but I’m afraid. Dr. Chirnside said once that self-murder was a
sin, a cowardly sin, and that hell waited for the craven one. Hell
would be even worse than this, I suppose, and it would never end—never.
Isn’t it funny that God could build hell and keep it burning from
eternity to eternity? Why if you were God, and there were only me in
hell, you’d weep so many tears they would put out the fires, wouldn’t
you? And you’d lift me up in your arms and comfort my poor scorched
body. For you love me. But oh, if only somebody would love me enough
to kill me. No, I don’t mean that. You would, if I asked you. You’d go
to hell for me forever. I know you, Mist’ RoBards—Davie. You would,
wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t let you, though. No! If hell must be gone through I’d
rather be the one. To be there in hell and think of you in heaven
feeling sorry for me would help a little.

“But if only some of these burglars that kill strange people would
shoot me by accident! If only an earthquake should come or a fire
should break out, so that I could be killed honestly! If only—if
only—oh, I can’t stand another day, Davie! I just can’t. That’s all
there is about it. I can’t.”

Then she forgot her thoughts, her theology, her hopes in the utter
absorption of her soul in her body’s torment. She was very busy with
being crucified.

RoBards suddenly realized that an opportunity was offered him to cure
this unpitied sufferer. A choice that had long been before him was only
now disclosed to his clouded soul. He wondered at his long delay in
recognizing how simple a remedy there was for the disease called life.

He did not know that his son Keith had risen from his bed, and stolen
from his room to pace the hall outside his mother’s door. He did not
know that Keith had been eavesdropping upon this sacred communion of
theirs.

Keith was a soldier. He had been killing his fellow-Americans in great
numbers for their own sakes and their country’s. He had been sending
his own beloved men into traps of death and had acquired a godlike
repose in the presence of multitudinous agonies.

He, too, when he heard Patty’s appeal for release, wondered why he had
been so dull and so slow, so unmerciful through brutish stupidity.

He had not hesitated in the field to cry “Charge!” and lead the long
line like a breaker pursuing a fleet rider up a beach, a breaker
crested with bright bayonets. This duty before him was not so easy to
meet. Yet it seemed a more certain duty than his lately finished task
of slaying Southern men.

If he did not kill his mother, his father must. He could save them both
by one brief gesture. Yet he shrank from it, fought within himself a
war of loves and duties. Then he heard his mother’s wailing again and
he set his teeth together fiercely, laid his hand upon the knob, turned
it softly, and softly thrust the door ajar.




CHAPTER L


When he had been confronted with the opportunity to end the life of
Immy’s baby and with it numberless perils, RoBards had hesitated until
the chance was taken from him.

But now he did not even question the high necessity for action. Whether
he were insane from the laceration of his sympathies or superhumanly
wise, his mind was made up the instant the idea came to him.

As if some exterior power considered and ordained the deed, his mind
was made up for him. He felt it his solemn duty to give Patty surcease
of existence. He wondered only at his long delay in recognizing the
compulsion.

The patriarch Abraham in the Old Testament had heard a voice in the
air bidding him despatch his only son for a burnt offering; he did not
waver, but clave wood and piled it upon his son’s back and lured him to
an altar and drew his knife against him. The curious god who could take
pleasure in a child’s blood was amused at the last moment to send an
angel to order the tortured old man to substitute a ram caught by his
horns in the thicket. And the poor ram was burned instead. But Abraham
had been ready to slash his boy’s young throat across at the divine
whim and to watch him roast.

There was a priestliness in RoBards’ soul, too; but he was not going
to slay his wife to appease any cloudy deity. She was already a burnt
offering alive and he was ordered to sacrifice her flesh to end its
tyranny over her hopeless soul.

He was puzzled only about the means.

His brain ran along an array of weapons; knife, poison, pistol,
throttling fingers. He read the list as if a hand held a scrolled
catalogue before his eyes. He discarded each as it came. It was too
brutal.

He stared at Patty, tossing there alone, and his heart sickened with
love. Then he was more than ever afraid for her. For now she was in
such an extreme of blind woe that she was snatching at her hair!

She had lost her last interest in beauty. She was tearing at her hair,
crisscrossing it over her face, biting and gnawing at it, sawing it
through her teeth.

He ran to her to rescue that final grace. He took her hands from it and
smoothed it back from her brow. It was soft beyond belief beneath his
palm. It was deep and dense and voluptuously velvety.

He knelt and, holding her hands tight, kissed her lips and her cheeks
and kissed her eyelids, as if he were weighting them finally with
pennies. And he groaned: “Good-by, honey!”

Her eyelids opened under the kisses he had left upon them. She gasped:

“Good-by? You’re not going to leave me? Don’t! ah, don’t!”

He shook his head and groaned:

“I’m not going to leave you, it’s you—it’s you that are—it’s you
that are leaving me. And may God send somebody to meet and care for
you on the long lonely road, oh, my beloved, my blessed, my baby, my
beautiful!”

She seemed to understand. Whether she thought with fear of the hell he
was damning himself to, or dreaded after all to let go of life, the one
thing certain, however evil, she shook her head in a panic of terror,
and fluttered,

“No, No! No!”

He knew that his deed must be done swiftly. At once, or never. So he
reached above her and took into his hands all the treasure of her hair
where he had spread and smoothed it across her pillow. He drew it down
like a heap of carded silk and swept it across her face, smothering her
with it.

She struggled and writhed, writhed to escape from under it. She seized
his hands and tugged at them, dug her nails into them.

Her breast beat up and down for breath; her heart must have plunged
like a trapped bird. But he gathered the hair more and more thickly
across her mouth. He bent down once and kissed her hot, panting lips.
Her mouth was like a rose in a tangled skein of floss. Then he closed a
double handful of her hair over her face and held it fast.

It was cruel hard that after so long a life of devotion her last look
at him should be one of horror; her farewell caresses given with her
nails. But love asked this proof.

His chief concern was whether his strength would abide the end. Her
hands fought at his hands more and more feebly. It was easier to resist
their battle than their surrender. When her hands loosened, that was
the hardest time. He imagined the prayers she was screaming dumbly
at him and at God. But his love prevailed over his humanity, and he
watched over her gaunt white bosom as the storm subsided from tempest
to slumber, to sleep.

He held her, drowned in her own hair, long after the ultimate pallor
had snowed her flesh; long, long after her hands had fallen limp and
wan, their empty palms upward like an unpitied beggar’s.

When at last he was sure that she would never groan under another of
this earth’s fardels, he lifted away her wanton tresses, as if he
raised her veil.

The first sight of her soulless face broke him like a thunderbolt.

Tears came gushing from him in shattered rain. He drew her hands
prayer-wise across her bosom, and fell across her body, loving it,
clutching at it. He could not cling, but he sank by the bed and spilled
his limbs along the floor in a brief death.

As if his soul had run after hers to make sure that it got home safe.




CHAPTER LI


All this while Keith had stood watching, as motionless as a statue, and
with as little will.

He had opened the door just as his father bent and kissed his mother
through her hair. He had understood what was being done, and saw that
his intervention was too late. He could not save his mother as he had
planned. He had to watch her hands blindly fighting for escape, and to
abstain from help. He could not rescue his father from that ineffable
guilt, or rob him of his divine prerogative.

He felt as if he had stumbled upon a parental nakedness and must be
forever accursed; but he could move neither forward nor back, to
prevent or retreat.

The first thing that recalled his power to move was the touch of
Aletta, the widow of David Junior. After hours on a rack of sympathy,
she had fallen asleep at last with the covers stuffed over her ears to
shut out the wails of her husband’s mother, whom she had learned to
call “Mamma.”

The silence had startled her awake, the strange unusual peace, the
deep comfort of the absence of outcry. She had leaped from the bed and
hurried barefoot to the room.

She encountered Keith rigid on the sill and, glancing past, saw RoBards
on the floor. She thought he had fallen asleep from exhaustion. In the
bed Patty lay blissful.

Aletta whispered:

“Poor Mamma! She’s sleeping, isn’t she?”

Keith turned as if his neck were of marble and stared with a statue’s
eyes. She ran past him and knelt by RoBards. He protected his eyes from
the innocent trust in hers by drawing his eyelids over them.

Then he hoisted himself to his feet. Life came back to his every member
in a searing current. His mind turned traitor to itself, and he felt
that he was the most hideous criminal that ever soiled the earth.

To make sure that he had not merely dreamed it all, he bent and touched
the hand of Patty, set his finger where her pulse had once throbbed
like a little heart, felt no stir there; kissed her lips and found them
cold.

He turned to Aletta and said:

“Your mamma—your mamma—our darling is—is——”

Aletta screamed and ran to the bed and verified the message, then
dashed from the room aghast, crying for help. Soon the house was awake,
trembling with feet. Lamps were lighted, children whimpered questions
sleepily.

Keith took his father’s hand and murmured before anyone else could come:

“I saw what you did.”

His father recoiled in horror, but Keith said:

“I came too late to save you by doing it myself.”

RoBards needed, above all things just then, someone to understand,
to accept, to approve. He was like a man dying of thirst in a desert
when he looks up and sees a friend standing by with water and food and
strong arms.

He fell into his son’s embrace and clenched him tight, and was clenched
tight. There was no need for RoBards to ask his boy to keep this
secret. The child was a father and a husband and he understood. They
fell back and wrung hands, and RoBards winced as he saw that the backs
of his hands were bleeding from the marks of Patty’s fingernails.

Then the room filled with the hurried family drowsily regarding death:
Keith’s wife with her child toddling, upheld by a clutch of her
nightgown; Aletta and the tiny Jessamine, whom Patty had named; the old
nurse whom RoBards had sent off to bed hours ago.

Everybody was ashamed of the thought that it was best for Patty to be
no more, for it was too hideous a thing to say of a soul. It was a
villainous thought even to think that Patty was better dead.

When the venerable Doctor Matson was fetched at last, RoBards was glad
to have Aletta tell him how she came in and what she saw:

The Doctor looked unconvinced, puzzled, then convinced. RoBards feared
that Matson would look at him with dismay. In the morning, before a
stranger, his passionate deed did not look so tender, so devoted as in
the night. But the Doctor avoided any challenge of RoBards’ gaze and
contented himself with saying:

“She was a beautiful little lady.”

And that made RoBards remember how Patty had looked when she read in
the paper the terrible word, “was”—a terrible word for beauty, youth,
joy, but a beautiful one for pain, weeping, and being afraid.

Though new churches were being established in Kensico, with their
ex-members asleep about them, RoBards wanted Patty near him and the
children in the little yard where the tulip trees had grown high.

The funeral was held in the house, and there was a throng. The road was
choked with carriages. It was Patty’s last party.

Even Mrs. Lasher hobbled over in a new black dress. Her daughter Aletta
had seen to her comfort; and the pride she took in being related to the
RoBardses was so great that her tears were almost boastful.

Since the famous son-in-law, Harry Chalender, Major-General of
Volunteers, was still in the East, of course he was present at the
obsequies. RoBards watched him with the eyes of a crippled wolf seeing
his rival stalwart. The insolent dared even to ask if he might stay the
night at the house, and RoBards could not turn him out.

But the thought of Chalender added gall to his grief. He was standing
by his window late that night, looking out at the tulip trees under
whose enlarging branches his family was slowly assembling, when there
came a knock at the door. He turned. It was Chalender—coming right in.
He wore that wheedling look of his as he said:

“I can’t sleep either, Davie. By God, I am afraid to be alone. Do you
mind if I sit with you awhile?”

He did not wait for permission, but sank down on the old couch. It
creaked and almost gave way under him.

“Don’t sit there!” RoBards shouted, as if he feared an accident, but
really because he could not endure the memory of the time he had seen
Chalender there with Patty kneeling by him. It leaped back at him,
rejuvenating his forgotten wrath. Again he wanted to hurl himself at
Chalender’s throat. And again he did not.

Chalender, perhaps remembering too, shivered, rose, and went to the
fireplace, thrusting his hands out, and washing them in the warm air as
he mumbled:

“Many’s the cold night I’ve stood by the camp fire and tried to get my
hands warm. That’s the only sign of my age, Davie: it’s hard to keep my
hands warm. They’re half frozen all the time.”

He did not note that RoBards made no comment. He was thinking of that
circle in Dante’s Inferno where the damned lie imbedded in ice. But
Chalender glanced down at the hearthstone and asked:

“Isn’t that the marble I brought over from Sing Sing when I was an
engineer on the aqueduct? Why, I believe it is! There was a poem I
started to write. I have always been a poet at heart, Davie, plucking
the lyre with hands all thumbs, trying to make life rhyme and run to
meter. But I had no gift of words.

“I spent half a night and fifteen miles trying to write a poem to go
with that slab. It ran something like—like—ah, I have it!—

    “Marble, marble, I could never mould you
       To the beauteous image of my love,
     So keep the blissful secret that I told you
       Tell it only to—

“And there I stuck and couldn’t get on to save me.”

He bent his arm along the mantel and laid his forehead on it as he said
with an unusual absence of flippancy:

“I loved her, Davie. You stole her from me when I was dying. You ran
away with her to this place. When I called for her and they told me
she had married you, my heart died. I got well. My body got well. But
my soul was always sick. I laughed and pretended, flirted and reveled,
but I never loved anybody else—only Patty—always only Patty.

“And she—when she was afraid of life or death, she ran to you; but when
she wasn’t afraid of life——”

As he struck his chest and opened his mouth to proceed, RoBards yelled:

“You say it and I’ll kill you!”

“You—kill anybody?” Chalender sneered, and RoBards sneered again:

“Oh, I’ve killed one or two in my day.”

Chalender apparently did not hear this mad brag, for he was bragging on
his own account:

“You couldn’t kill me; nor could ten men like you. Thousands have tried
to kill me. For four years the Rebels kept shooting at me and whacking
at me with their sabers, jabbing with their bayonets and searching for
me with grape and canister, but I didn’t die. It seems I shall never
die. Maybe that’s because I’ve never quite lived. I loved Patty and you
got her. You oughtn’t to be hurt to learn that another man loved your
love. But if it makes you mad to hear me say it, maybe you could kill
me. Then my blood would run out on this marble that I brought to her
when she was young and pretty. Oh, but she was pretty, a pretty thing,
a sweet thing. What a damned, ugly world, to let a pretty thing like
Patty Jessamine suffer and die!

“Oh, Davie, Davie, what a darling she was, in what a dirty world!”

He put out his hand hungrily in the air and something—as if it were
Patty’s ghost smiling irresistibly—persuaded RoBards’ hand forward to
take Chalender’s and wring it with sympathy.

So two souls, two enemies on earth, meeting in hell, might gaze into
each other’s eyes and find such agony there that they would lock hands
in mutual pity.

RoBards and Chalender looked straight at one another for the first
time perhaps; and each wondered at the other’s sorrow.

By and by Chalender sighed and murmured:

“Thank you, David. I think I shall sleep now. Good night, old man; and
God help us all.”




CHAPTER LII


Fleeing from the oppressiveness of the farm, RoBards returned to St.
John’s Park to find it alive with memories of Patty. He loved to
recall their quarrels, her vanities, her extravagances, her fierce
unreasonable tempers, the impudent advantages she took of his love, her
hostility to all laws and orders, the flitting graces she revealed. He
loved her for them, more than for her earnest moods, her noble whims,
her instants of grandeur. A swallow for its wildness, a humming bird
for its teasing, a kitten for its scampers—a woman for her unlikeness
to a man’s ideals—we love them for what they will not give us!

Only a little while could RoBards revel in his lavendered memories, for
St. John’s Park was taken over by a railroad company as the site for a
big freight station. All of the inhabitants were evicted like paupers
from a tenement. The quondam retreat of gentility in search of peace
was now a bedlam of noisy commerce, of thudding cars and squeaking
brakes.

RoBards wanted to seal the house like a sacred casket of remembrances,
but it was torn down in spite of him and the place of it knew it no
more.

The city seemed to pursue RoBards. The people swarmed after him and
never retreated. Keith took a house in town, and asked his father to
live with him, but RoBards, thinking of what a burden old Jessamine had
been in his own home, would not risk a repetition of that offense.

Again he lived at a hotel and at his office. Having nothing else to
fill his heart, he gave all his soul to the law and became a mighty
pleader in the courts. As the city grew, great businesses developed and
ponderous litigations increased, involving enormous sums. His fees were
in proportion and, finding that his value seemed to be measured by the
size of his charges, he flattered his clients by his exorbitance.

For his own satisfaction he took up now and then the defense of a
criminal, a murderer, a murderess, anybody who had passionately smashed
the laws of God and man. And it fascinated him to rescue the culprit
from penalty of any sort; to play upon the public and its twelve
senators in the jury box until they all forgave the offense and made a
martyr of the offender, applauded the verdict of “Not Guilty.”

After all, RoBards thought, justifying his seeming anarchy: who is
truly guilty of anything? Who would shoot or poison another except
under the maddening torment of some spiritual plague?

And if one must say, as the pious pleaded, that Heaven was all-wise
and all-merciful and all-loving even though it sent cancer and cholera
and mania and jealousy to prey upon helpless humans, why should one
abhor a human being who followed that high example and destroyed with
ruthlessness?

In this ironic bitterness, RoBards saved from further punishment many a
scandalous rebel and felt that he was wreaking a little revenge on the
hateful world for its cruelty to Patty, saving other wretches from the
long, slow tortures she endured.

But nothing mattered much. His riches annoyed him, since they came too
late to make Patty happy with luxuries. It was another sarcasm of the
world.

It amused him dismally to furnish old Mrs. Lasher with money to spend;
with a coat of paint and new shingles for her house, and credit at A.
T. Stewart’s big store. This gave her a parting glimpse of the life she
had missed; and when she died, he provided her with a funeral that put
a final smile on her old face.

This was not in penance for what he had done to her son. That was only
a dim episode now, with condemnation, forgiveness, and atonement all
outlawed beyond the statutory limitations. Time does our atoning for
us by smoothing sins and virtues to one common level.

Aletta was a more profitable investment for money. He made her so
handsome that she attracted suitors. And one day she tearfully
confessed that she was in love with a man who besought her in marriage.
This meant that Mrs. David RoBards, Junior, would cease to keep that
sacred name alive, and when Junior’s daughter should grow up she would
also shed the family name.

But nothing mattered much—except that people should get what they
wanted as fully and as often as possible. He made over to Aletta a
large sum of money, on the condition that she should keep its source a
secret.

The habit of secrecy concerning deeds of evil grew to a habit of
secrecy concerning deeds of kindliness. He tended more and more to keep
everything close, the least important things as well as the most.

He could not be generous often to his son Keith; Keith was too proud
of his own success to take tips. He had chosen wisely when he made a
career of hydraulic engineering, for water seemed to be the one thing
that New York could never buy enough of.

The reservoir in Central Park, Lake Manahatta, had been opened in the
second year of the war and though it held a thousand and thirty million
gallons, it sufficed but briefly. Sometimes, riding a horse in the new
pleasance, RoBards would make the circuit of that little artificial sea
and, pausing to stare down into its glass, try to recall that once it
had been a ravine where squatters kept their squalid homes.

The insatiable city was drowning land everywhere with dammed-up water,
but the undammed people were flowing outward like water. In 1869
there was a drought and the four great reservoirs were all empty. No
water came in at all save from the Croton River. A new reservoir was
established at High Bridge to take care of the colony increasing in
Washington Heights. A reservoir was made at Boyd’s Corner to hold
nearly three hundred million gallons.

The next year the city laid its great hands upon a part of Westchester
County, and not content to reach out for water annexed the land as well.

Recalling when it had seemed a ridiculous boast that New York would one
day reach the Harlem River, RoBards already saw its boundary pushed
north to Yonkers and eastward along the banks of his Bronx.

He felt as if the city were some huge beast clumsily advancing toward
his home.

Its thirst was its excuse, and when the next shortage of water forced
the town to make a house-to-house inspection of plumbing to cut
down the waste, the engineers went out to hunt new ponds, while its
ambassadors marched on Albany and forced the state to cede it three
more lakes in the Croton watershed.

The property owners on their shores filled up the outlets and fought
the octopus in vain; and RoBards once more distinguished himself for
his brilliant rear-guard actions, ending always with defeat in the
courts.

At Middle Branch on the Croton, a reservoir of four thousand million
gallons failed to satisfy the town, and in 1880 began the two driest
years ever heard of. All the reservoirs were drained and even the
Croton wearied. The thirty million gallons a day it poured into the
city’s dusty gullet fell to ten million. The public fountains were
sealed, the hydrants turned off, the Mayor urged the citizens to
thrift, thrift, thrift.

Isaac Newton, the Chief Engineer, proposed a second aqueduct to drain
the Croton region, a great dam below the old, a tunnel, the longest in
the world, to the city and a great inverted siphon under the Harlem’s
oozy bed. And this was decreed; and in time accomplished under Engineer
Fteley.

But the promise of these two hundred and fifty million gallons a day
was not enough; and now the city turned its eyes to the Bronx River,
and RoBards felt that his doom was announced. The sacred stream had
kept its liberty in the face of greedy projects since it was first
named in 1798 as a victim of the all-swallowing town.

In place of the sixty thousand population then, there were twelve
hundred thousand people now, and buildings were lifted so high that
people were living six stories in air. They expected the city to pump
water to their faucets. It did, while the supply held.

Up the railroad came an army of engineers with Keith high among them to
stretch a dam at the very edge of Kensico, trapping the Bronx and its
cousin the Byram stream. With the engineers came the laborers, a horde
of Italians and all the muck and vermin that had marked the building of
the Croton dam.

The Kensico dam would impound only sixteen hundred and twenty million
gallons and there were sixteen hundred thousand people in New York
by the time it was finished. The two Rye ponds dammed and a Byram
reservoir completed and the Gun Hill reservoir at Williamsbridge raised
the total to three and a half billion gallons, but RoBards saw that
nothing could check the inevitable command to build a higher parapet
at Kensico and spread a tributary lake across his farm and his tulip
trees, his home, and his graves.

Meanwhile, as the townspeople inundated the country all about, the
greater tides of the republic overflowed all the continent. When Immy
had married Chalender, she had had to sail around the peak of South
America to San Francisco. But now the lands between were filled with
cities, and the farmers were pushing out to retrieve the deserts from
sterility.

Railroads were shuttling from ocean to ocean and it took hardly more
days now than months then for letters and people to go and come.

Letters from Immy had not been many nor expressed much joy in the
romance of the Pacific colonists. The return of Chalender to San
Francisco seemed rather to cause a recrudescence of unhappiness.

After Patty’s death a letter came, addressed to her, that RoBards
opened as her earthly proxy and read with tangled feelings:

 “My husband is what he always was, a flirt incorrigible, a rake for
 all his loss of teeth. He still kisses the old ladies’ hands and gives
 them a charitable thrill. And he kisses all the young girls’ lips that
 he can reach.

 “But I can’t complain. I was shopworn when he took me from the shelf.
 I am so domestic that I can hardly believe my own eventless diary. I
 am plain and plump and my husband, such as he is, brings home so many
 stories that I don’t miss the novels much.

 “The neighbors run in with scandals, but I can usually say that Harry
 told me first. He is a beast but a lot of fun. For the children’s
 sake, I endure. I grow very homesick, though, and cry myself to sleep
 after my children have cried themselves to sleep. But oh, to have you
 tuck me in again, my pretty, my darling Mamma, and oh, to look into
 Papa’s sad, sweet eyes, and the unwavering love that seemed to grow
 the greater as I deserved it less and less!”

Finishing the letter RoBards was glad, for some reason, that Patty had
never seen it. She might have hated Chalender for being so fickle, but
RoBards had heard him cry out in his loneliness and he could never hate
him any more.

He could not have sent him to hell or kept him there if he had been
God, even the jealous God of Genesis. Yet if Chalender were not to go
to hell, who could be sent?

So feeble grew RoBards’ grudge that when he received a telegram all the
way from San Francisco that Harry Chalender had died, he felt lonely;
and tears ran down into his tremulous mouth. As always, Chalender had
been engaged on a work of public benefaction. He had thrown himself,
heart and soul, into the irrigation projects that were rescuing the
Golden State into a paradise of vines and fig-trees, almonds and
oranges and palms. Overwork and overexertion in the mountains broke
his old heart. It was quaintly appropriate that his ever-driven heart
should crack.

Like so many of the republic’s heroes, his public morals were as pure
as his private were sullied, and his funeral brought forth eulogium
all across the continent. The public said, “He was a patriot!” and
none knew how many women keened, “Harry was a darling, a darling, a
darling.”

The departure of Chalender took a prop from RoBards. He had outlived
the rival who had saved his life and embittered it, and had confessed
that RoBards had done him greater injury.

He, RoBards, was ready now to go, and merely waited. The only thing he
wished to see was Immy. She wrote that she would come to live with him
as soon as she could close up her husband’s mixed affairs and learn
whether she were rich or poor.

As an earnest of her coming she sent along a daughter, to go to an
Eastern finishing school. She had been named Patty, and the girl had
grown to such likeness that when she stood at last before RoBards he
almost fell to his knees to welcome a revenant ghost to his arms.

She stood mischievous, exquisite, ambrosially winsome, ready to laugh
or cry, threaten or take flight, according to whichever stratagem she
could best use to gain her whim.

She ran into her grandfather’s bosom and set his old heart to clamoring
like a firebell in the night. Her lips tasted like Patty’s lips. Her
flesh beneath his caress had the same peachy mellowness.

So there was a new Patty in the world! The world would never lack for
Patty Jessamines.

Nor for David RoBardses, either, it seemed; for every body said that
Keith’s son, Ward, was just like his grandfather. But only in looks,
for Ward was already an engineer in his father’s office and even more
zealous to build inland seas upon other people’s lands for the sake of
the infinite New York he loved.

Ward fought his grandfather, called him an old fogy, a poor Canute
who wanted to check the world’s greatest city; and in his very ardor
resembled RoBards more than either realized.

He resembled him, too, in his response to the fascination of this new
Patty. They were cousins, and in RoBards’ youth that had implied a
love-affair. But nowadays such alliances were looked upon as perilous
and scandalous.

So Ward gave Patty merely the glance of admiration a temperate man
casts upon a jeweler’s window and resumed his efforts to convert his
grandfather to the justice of making Westchester a mere cistern for New
York.

The young man knew nothing of the meaning of the land to RoBards; he
knew nothing of the secrets the house retained like a strong vault. He
had the imperial eye of youth, a hawk’s look to far horizons.

He found old David querulous and old David found him sacrilegious;
so they fought a civil war as uncivilly over the enslaving of the
Westchester waters as North and South over the enslaving of the black
nations stolen out of Africa.

Keith began to incline to his father’s side, for he shared with him
the love of the natal soil. Then Ward turned on Keith with equal
impatience, denouncing him as a “back number.”

This brought about another alliance between Keith and his father, and
they solemnly pledged themselves to save Tuliptree from New York.




CHAPTER LIII


When the new lake of Kensico was linked to the Williamsbridge
reservoir, Keith and Ward visited the farm.

They spoke of tremendous future projects; for the problem of fetching
New York water was one that promised no respite.

They went back to the city, leaving RoBards there to install a new
“superintendent,” the fifth since Albeson had trudged into his grave
after his fat old wife.

Then the autumnal gales began to squander the golden leaves of
Westchester,—the spendthrift heirs that strip all estates and bring
back poverty in its everlasting rhythm.

One night a wind came down in a tidal wave of air, a wind made up of an
army of winds.

RoBards stood out on his porch to watch the battle of his trees, each
engaged with some fierce unseen wrestler that tore off every rag of
leaf and twisted every limb, but could not win a fall. He laughed with
pride to see his tulip trees defending his graves. They neither yielded
nor fled; and they did not die.

The air resounded like a pounded drum with the blasts of wind. The yard
was a cauldron of boiling leaves and a smoke of dust. Mrs. Laight, the
new farmer’s wife, begged the old gentleman to come inside the house,
but he motioned her away, and she watched him through a window; saw him
chuckle and wave his hands to his brave trees.

He trusted even to the old giant whose roots he had sawed off when they
pushed into the cellar walls. But he had trusted too long.

A vast breaker of air rode over the Tarn of Mystery and splashed its
pool with a dozen toppled veterans, oaks, sycamores, and cedars; then
the whole weight of its rush rolled down the hill upon the house
and, plucking off shingles like leaves, wrenching shutters loose and
scattering a chimney into flying bricks, fell upon the ancient tulip
tree on its outer side and brought it down like a fallen lighthouse.

It smashed the roof it had shaded so many years and sliced off the
graceful old cornices.

Mrs. Laight screamed with terror, then with horror; for she saw RoBards
go to his knees under a deluge of splintered timbers. Then the bole of
the tulip tree rolled down upon him as the temple column on Samson; and
he was lost to the sight of her affrighted eyes.




CHAPTER LIV


While the young farmer and the two hired men labored in the rain
that came as a deluge upon the gale’s heels, Mrs. Laight saddled and
bridled a horse and forced it through the world of storm and across the
barriers of blown-down trees into Kensico Village for Doctor Brockholst.

By the time he arrived the broken body of RoBards was stretched upon
the couch in the library. The master’s bedroom had been cracked open by
the fallen tulip tree and the rain was thundering through it.

The doctor, seeing the state of his patient and all his red wounds and
hearing the groans he could not stifle, first checked the outlets of
his blood, then made ready to give him ease of pain.

Old RoBards was as eager for the anæsthetic as a starved infant for its
mother’s milk, but he suddenly bethought him of his need of all his
wits, and he gasped:

“If—if you make me sleep, I may—may nev-never wake up, eh?”

Doctor Brockholst tried to evade a direct answer, but RoBards panted:

“I won’t risk it—risk it. I’ve sent—I’ve sent Laight to tele-telegraph
my son to come up from—from town. There’s things I must say to
him—before—before——”

He was more afraid of unconsciousness than of pain, and he would not
gamble with a palliation of his anguishes. He chattered to the doctor:

“Just stay here and let me talk. It helps to keep me from making an old
fool of myself. And don’t let me die till Keith comes. Don’t let me die
till—oh, oh!—Oh, God! oh, God!”

He gnawed his lips and twisted his face in all the fierce grimaces of
a desperate athlete trying to pry himself from a hammerlock.

He groaningly computed the hours it would take Keith to reach the farm
if he got the message and came at once and caught a train. But those
hours passed and Keith was not yet visible to Mrs. Laight watching from
the porch in her wind-whipped skirts and her fluttering shawl.

The old man moaned, watching the inexorably deliberate clock with white
eyes;

“The storm has torn down the telegraph poles, I suppose; or wrecked a
bridge or two. But somehow, somebody will get the word to my boy and
he’ll fight his way here. I know Keith!”

The doctor pleaded with him to accept the aid of a sedative and even
made a show of force, but the old man grew so frantic with resistance
that he gave over.

And after a time when Mrs. Laight had given up watching for Keith,
there came upon his agonized mien a look almost of comfort. He smiled
and murmured:

“Now I know a little of what Patty suffered. I thought I knew before;
but nobody can imagine pain—or remember it. It’s a hideous thing—to
hurt. But I ought to be able to stand it for a night when that little
girl bore far worse—far worse for years.”

All the long evening, all the long night he babbled her name, and if
at intervals he sobbed and the tears slid down his much-channeled
features, it was for memory of the bitterness of her woe, and his
belated understanding of it.

He would not take any quieting drug or let the needle be set against
his skin, but he called for stimulants to lash his crippled heart to
its task, putting the doctor on his honor not to cheat him.

The physician fell asleep at midnight and woke shuddering in the chill
of dawn, ashamed to think that every moment of his hours of oblivion
had been a torment to his client.

Soon after the dawn, Keith came, whipping a horse through the road,
soggy with the nightlong rain. He ran across the ruined porch into the
wreck of the house and his father answered his searching call with a
note of triumph:

“That’s my boy! I knew he’d come! I knew!”

Doctor Brockholst, who had never seen Keith, somehow expected a youth
to dash into the room. He was surprised to find that the lad was a
grizzled giant of fifty. But Colonel RoBards ran to the couchside and
dropped to his knees, with a childish, “Daddy!”

The shock of the contact brought a shriek from the old man’s jolted
bones but he wrung a laugh from it. Then he asked the doctor to leave
him alone with his son.

Making sure that they were not spied upon, he whispered in a pellmell
of hurry:

“I had to see you, Keithie, to get one more promise from you before I
go. The city, that infernal New York, will be demanding our farm for
the bottom of one of its lakes before long. But don’t let ’em have it!
Fight ’em to the last ditch! And whatever you do, don’t let ’em open
the cellar walls.

“There may be nothing there to see by now, but you remember about
Jud Lasher. He’s there still and after all these years I can’t bear
the thought of anybody finding out what we kept inviolate so long,
especially after I’m gone and can’t fight back.

“Promise me you won’t let ’em tear down the house and the walls. I’ve
seen ’em clear away so many old homes and stone fences and roads—for
other lakes. I can’t abide the thought of them prying into our walls.

“And I want to lie by your mother’s side out there in the yard. You’ll
put me there. And once I’m there, they’ll never dare disturb me! You
can put up a sign like Shakespeare’s: ‘Good friend, for Jesu’s sake,
forbear——’ or something like that. Promise.”

“I promise!” said Keith.

And his father, failing away beneath his eyes like Hamlet’s father’s
spirit, spoke already from underground.

“Swear!”

“I swear!”

“Swear!”

“I swear it, father!”

There was a faint moan, almost of luxury, the luxury of one who sinks
out of all pain and all anxiety into that perfect sleep which Socrates
pronounced the richest pleasure even of the Persian kings.

Keith thought he saw his father smile; thought he read upon his lips
the playful pet name he had seen and heard there, when as a child he
saw his father praising his mother tenderly:

“Patty? Pattikins? pretty, pretty Pattikins?”

Then the lips ceased to beat together, and parted in the final yawn
that ends the boredom of this life.




CHAPTER LV


There was something incomplete and irreparable for Immy in the fact
that she reached New York too late to see her father before he joined
her mother in oblivion.

The new New York was beyond her comprehension. She was appalled by the
aged look of all her old friends whom she remembered as young friends.
She and her mirror had kept such steady company that she could not see
the slow changes in her own features. She saw them all at once in the
looking-glass of her old companions.

They made her unhappy and she went up to Tuliptree Farm to live, saying
that it was more wholesome for her children. Keith’s wife died and
his children grew away from him and he felt tired, old, of an evening
mood. So he also settled down at Tuliptree Farm, taking care that the
restorations after the storm should renew the old lines of the house
without disturbing its cellar walls.

He had had a large part in the engineering of the large six-mile
siphon that ran four hundred and twenty feet under the oozy bed of the
Harlem. He watched the water from the new Croton aqueduct roll into
Lake Manahatta in Central Park, and felt that the Croton field was now
drained.

All eyes turned further north, but the remaining cis-Hudsonian streams
belonged to the State of Connecticut whose sovereign rights were not at
the mercy of Albany.

The Catskill Mountains were the nearest source in the trans-Hudsonian
territory, and the Ramapo Company bought up all the rights. A tempest
of scandal broke out and Governor Roosevelt and Mayors Low and
McClellan quashed the company and set on foot the project of the
Ashokan reservoir, rivaling the magnitude of the canal cut through the
Isthmus of Panama.

A strip of land two hundred feet wide and ninety-two miles long must
be secured by condemnation and purchase, from Esopus Creek to New York
across thousands of farms, and a siphon must be driven a thousand feet
under the Hudson River between Storm King and Breakneck.

The work involved the submersion or removal of sixty-four miles of
highways, and eleven miles of railroad, nine villages and thirty-two
cemeteries of nearly three thousand graves, some of them more than two
centuries old.

And Tuliptree Farm with its graves was only one of this multitude.
Keith and Immy fought the city in vain. Nothing they could do could
halt the invading army of fifteen hundred workmen that established
itself at Valhalla and began to dam the Bronx above White Plains.

The dam was of cyclopean concrete, eighteen hundred feet across, and it
was made to hold thirty-eight billion gallons of water. Which was only
a fifty-day supply for New York.

The new lake with its forty miles of shore line would obliterate no
villages and few burial places. But one of these few was the RoBards’
plot and Keith trembled to think that when the house came down and the
cellar walls were removed piecemeal, the bones of Jud Lasher would be
disclosed.

He dared not speak even to Immy of the secret in the walls. He could
only stand aside and mourn the felling of the great tree-steeples.

He and Immy watched the wrecking crew demolishing the house, throwing
the chimneys down, tearing off the roof and opening the attic to the
sun. Then the ceiling went and the floors of the bedrooms where their
bare feet had toddled.

At last the house was gone, all but the main floor, and from that
stairways went up to nowhere.

After the wrecking crew had left off work for the day, Keith and Immy
wandered one evening through the place where the house once was, and
poked about the débris on the library floor. They noted the hearthstone
of white marble.

They had seen to the removal of the graves before the tulip trees came
down. The family had been transported to the increasing city of the
dead at Kensico, but they were still debating what monument to rear.
One little coffin was found there which Keith could not account for.

That was Immy’s secret and she kept it, though it ached in her old
heart, remembering the wild romance of her youth. A blush slipped
through her wrinkles and the shame was almost pleasant at this distance.

Now that she and Keith stared at the white marble hearthstone, they
were both inspired by a single thought.

“Let’s use that for a headstone in the family lot in Kensico!” Immy
said and Keith agreed.

They were proud of the felicity of their inspiration and hiring
laborers, stole the slab that very night and carried it over to the
graveyard, and saw to its establishing.

And they never knew the final irony of its presence there above the
parallel bodies of David and Patty RoBards. It linked Harry Chalender’s
destiny forever with theirs. But they never made a protest. It
was the Parthian shot of fate, the perfection of the contemptible
contemptuousness with which life regards its victims.

Unwitting of this dismal joke upon his father and remembering only the
secret of which he was trustee, Keith loitered about to see the cellar
walls demolished and the dead Jud Lasher brought to light. He kept
wondering what to say when the crisis was reached. He could not find a
lie to utter.

But from somewhere the edict came that the cellar walls should not be
taken away; and the workmen abandoned them.

And now the house was gone as if it had been burned in some night of
fire. But it had served its time. It had lived the short life of wooden
homes. Stone houses may outlast sonnets and coins and chronicles, but
houses of wood and of flesh perish soon. They have lived as stone never
lived. Through the wood the white blood of sap once coursed and trees,
like hearts, suffer too well for time to endure. They must go back to
the dust whence new trees and new hearts are made.

It was time for the old house to vanish. Like a human heart it had
held within its walls sorrow and honor, passion and crime. It was time
for it to cease to beat, cease to be.

It went out with an honorable name. It went into oblivion with no
history, and the old word of Tacitus about nations was true of houses,
too. Happy is the house that has no history. But all houses, and all
nations, have histories—if one only knew.

Keith was almost sorry that the cellar walls were left. He had braced
himself against the shock of revelation and when it did not come,
he suffered a collapse of strength. But he could not share this
disappointment with anyone. It must remain forever a RoBards secret to
die with him.

When at last the dam was piled across the valley, and the little
brooks encountered it, they backed up and filled their own beds to
overflowing. They swelled till they covered the levels where the
bridges had been. Stealthily they erased the roads that dipped into
them now and ran under water till they climbed out again on the
opposite slope. The brooks united into a pond and the pond widened and
lengthened. It began to climb the hills and wind about the promontories.

It aspired toward the highway cut out of the rock along the top of the
hills, and toward the lengthy tall-piered concrete bridge with the
ornaments of green bronze.

Keith and Immy watched the gradual drowning of the farm and took
their last walks about it, hand in hand, until long arms of water cut
off their approach even to the Tarn of Mystery, which was now a bald
hillock, an island height, a tiny Ararat.

Up and up the water climbed and came at last to the cellar walls,
lipping them inquiringly. They had the isolated dignity of ruins on the
Nile. They stood up in a little sea of waters and if anyone were to rip
the strongbox of their secret open now, he must take a boat to reach it.

One evening Keith and Immy went out to bid the home a last good-by.
They rode along the highway in a motor car and left it with its driver
while they clambered down to sit upon the hillside and pay the final
rites of observation.

Over their heads the automobiles went by in a stream, flashing back
the sunset that turned the sheet of waters into blood.

As the sunset grew wan and colorless, the motor lamps came out like
stars and the searchlights fenced as with swords. It grew chill, but
the old brother and sister sat fascinated by the disappearance of all
their memories under the climbing waters.

They were old and yet they felt themselves children, for they stared
across the misty years between to the clear opposite heights of youth.
Their hands unbidden moved to each other and clasped fingers. They were
the last of their generation, though other generations out of their
loins were gathering their own secrets of sins and griefs to keep from
their own posterities.

At length by imperceptible deepenings the cellar walls were all
engulfed. The lake was an unbroken mirror to the placid sky.

The house and farm of Tuliptree had been. They were no more.

       *       *       *       *       *

But still the ancient children lingered, numb with cold and loneliness
and yet at peace, wonderfully at peace.

Above their heads a motor had stopped in the thick hush of the
gloaming. Two lovers, thinking themselves alone in their world, were
whispering and scuffling in amorous play. There was a girl’s voice that
gasped, “Don’t!” and a man’s voice that grumbled, “All right for you!”

Evidently the world would never lack for lovers. Lovers were still
coquetting and sulking and making a war of opportunity.

The girl, vexed by her gallant’s too easy discouragement, spoke
stupidly:

“I love sunsets, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh!”

“The lake’s pretty, don’t you think?”

“Pretty big for its age. It’s just a new pond, you know, to add to New
York’s collection. They’re looking for more water every day. I was
reading that they’re planning to tap the Adirondacks next, as soon as
the Catskills are used up.

“They’re turning a river around up there now. It was flowing west and
they’re going to dig under a mountain through an eighteen mile tunnel
and steal the river, and make it run east and south to New York.”

This titanic work did not interest the girl at all. She tried to fetch
the youth around to human themes:

“Somebody was telling me there used to be farms and homes down under
where the water is now. You can hardly believe it!”

“Ye-ah, people used to live down there, they say.”

“I wonder what they were like. Nice old-fashioned souls, I suppose,
good and simple and innocent, and not wicked in our modern ways.”

“I suppose not. But they didn’t get much out of life, I guess. They
couldn’t have known what love was. They couldn’t have seen anybody down
there as pretty as you are.”

“Don’t! Somebody might see you. It’s getting so dark you must drive me
home. If Mamma knew I had been out here alone with you——!”

Still there was stealth in the world—joy to be stolen and turned into
guilt, secrets to be cherished.

Keith helped Immy to her feet and they struggled toward the road out of
the night up into the night.

In the sky to the south the sleepless torches of far-off New York were
pallidly suspected. The waters below were black to their depths, save
where the stars slept or twinkled as a ripple shook their reflection,
or a fish, exploring its new sky, broke through into another world.


THE END.




_Harper Fiction_


  THE VEHEMENT FLAME      BY MARGARET DELAND

Can a man marry a woman twenty years his senior—and be happy and remain
true to the wife of his choice? This—and the Biblical quotation from
the Song of Solomon: “Love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the
grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire which hath a most vehement
flame”—is the basis of Mrs. Deland’s latest novel. This book by its
sheer bigness of theme, will rank above even _The Iron Woman_ and _The
Awakening of Helena Ritchie_.


  THE VERTICAL CITY      BY FANNIE HURST

New York! The Vertical City! Fannie Hurst has daringly inquired into
the lives of people who live dangerously in this greatest of all
monolithic cities, and pictured them for us in six whirlwind sketches.
You will never again think of this author’s shorter work as merely
short stories, for they are more than that—they are vivid impressions
of life.


  CONFLICT      BY CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

Mystery, love, and strong personalities are brought together in this
latest Kelland story. It tells how a girl made weak and effete by
the society of the city regained her womanhood when she was thrown
among those who still believe in the power of their fists—how a rich,
hypocritical, old lumberman and guardian of his wealthy society-loving
niece tried to save her soul by breaking her spirit.


  THE PATHLESS TRAIL      BY ARTHUR O. FRIEL

Arthur O. Friel comes forward with a story of the wildest kind of
adventure in the only place in America where there are still cannibals.
It is the strange story of a man who thought he had killed another and
to escape punishment by death fled to Peru. Adventures more exciting
than Tarzan’s in a land more weird and wonderful.


HARPER & BROTHERS

  FRANKLIN SQUARE      NEW YORK




_Humor and Drama_

_By Distinguished Authors_


  THE MAN FROM HOME      BY BOOTH TARKINGTON AND HARRY LEON WILSON

The scene takes place in Italy, and the American humor shows up
brilliantly against the foreign background. _Illustrated._


  MONNA VANNA      BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

One of the Belgian poet’s most powerful dramas. The scenes are laid at
Pisa, Italy, at the end of the fifteenth century. _Portrait._


  L’AIGLON      BY EDMOND ROSTAND

This, the only English edition published of the story of the great
Napoleon’s unfortunate son, was translated by Louis N. Parker. It is
illustrated with pictures of Miss Maude Adams in the character of the
Duke of Reichstadt. _Illustrated._


  PARTING FRIENDS      BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

A farcical scene on an outgoing steamer, when two sweethearts can find
neither time nor place for tender farewells. Readers who like brilliant
conversation, unrestrained fun, and amusing character portrayal will
find in these farces a rich treat. _Illustrated._


  THE MOUSE-TRAP      BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

This volume contains in compact form four of Howells’s most popular
farces, which have been both read and acted with complete enjoyment and
success. The farces in this volume are: The Garroters, Five-o’Clock
Tea, The Mouse-Trap, A Likely Story. _Illustrated._


HARPER & BROTHERS

  FRANKLIN SQUARE       NEW YORK




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 16 Changed: the maples and wild rhodendendrons
             to: the maples and wild rhododendrons

  pg 41 Changed: he had taken a whole tumberful
             to: he had taken a whole tumblerful

  pg 96 Changed: bury you in the Potter’s Feld
             to: bury you in the Potter’s Field

  pg 121 Changed: a strange pilgrimake through the
              to: a strange pilgrimage through the

  pg 164 Changed: The boy had evidenty inherited
              to: The boy had evidently inherited

  pg 285 Changed: somewhow in all these years
              to: somehow in all these years