Within These Walls

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[Pg 2] 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[Pg 3] 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[Pg 5] 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[Pg 6] 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[Pg 7] 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!

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[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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.

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.

“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[Pg 13] in the last gripe of cholera. She had to step across him to escape and RoBards ran to catch her as she swooned.

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,

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[Pg 14] 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:

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,[Pg 16] 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.

“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[Pg 17] 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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[Pg 18] 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.

“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[Pg 20] 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:

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.

“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[Pg 21] 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.

She kissed him on the cheek and drifted away before[Pg 22] 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[Pg 23] 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.

[Pg 24]

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.

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.

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:

“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,[Pg 26] 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.

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:

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[Pg 27] 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.”

“By who, what?” she screamed, staring up at him as if[Pg 28] 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.

“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.”

“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[Pg 29] 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.”

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:

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

“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[Pg 31] 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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[Pg 32] to give the ladies the vote—or anything else the darlings desire.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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. 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[Pg 34] 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.”

“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[Pg 35] 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:

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!

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:

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[Pg 37] 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.[Pg 38] 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:

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[Pg 39] 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[Pg 40] 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:

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[Pg 42] 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[Pg 43] 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[Pg 45] 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[Pg 46] 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[Pg 47] 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[Pg 48] 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.

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.

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[Pg 50] 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.

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[Pg 52] 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[Pg 53] 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.

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[Pg 55] 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[Pg 56] 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!”

[Pg 57]

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.[Pg 58] 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.

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

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[Pg 59] 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.

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[Pg 60] 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.

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

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

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

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[Pg 61] officer beckoned one of his soldiers and, pointing to Mr. Jessamine, spoke:

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

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[Pg 62] 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:

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

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.

[Pg 63]

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.[Pg 64] 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.

“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[Pg 65] 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.

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

“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.

“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:

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

“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.

“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[Pg 68] 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.

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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 72] 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.

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[Pg 74] 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[Pg 75] 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.

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,[Pg 80] 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[Pg 81] 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[Pg 82] 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?

“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[Pg 83] 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[Pg 85] Patty confronted him with white defiance. She waited for him to speak.

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 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!”

[Pg 86]

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[Pg 87] 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[Pg 88] 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[Pg 89] 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[Pg 90] 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:

Then she turned her beautiful head and stared across her [Pg 91]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.

[Pg 92]

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[Pg 94] 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!”

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[Pg 95] 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[Pg 96] 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:

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[Pg 97] 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.

[Pg 98]

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.

“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.[Pg 99] 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.

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[Pg 100] 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:

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[Pg 101] 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,[Pg 102] 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.

[Pg 105]

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[Pg 107] 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.

[Pg 110]

CHAPTER XVI

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

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[Pg 112] 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.

[Pg 113]

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[Pg 114] 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[Pg 116] 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[Pg 117] 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.

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.

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 [Pg 119]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[Pg 120] 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.

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[Pg 123] 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[Pg 124] 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,[Pg 125] 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.

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?”

“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[Pg 126] 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:

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[Pg 127] 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[Pg 128] 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.

He rode past the home of the Lashers. It was always[Pg 129] 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.

“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.

RoBards gave his horse a swift long slash with the whip and the carry-all went into the yard on two wheels. He[Pg 130] 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.

[Pg 131]

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:

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[Pg 133] 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:

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.[Pg 134] 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?”

“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:

“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?”

“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:

“Hush! hush, sweetness! Don’t tell—don’t tell! Promise papa you’ll never tell anybody about this—not anybody on earth.”

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:

“Never speak to anybody about Jud Lasher—never say his name—never think of it.”

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:

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:

And RoBards was glad to surrender to this big woman[Pg 137] 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 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.

[Pg 138]

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[Pg 139] 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.

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:

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.”

“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!”

“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——”

“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.”

Her wildly beseeching eyes fell before the sad sternness of his. She nodded meekly:

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[Pg 144] 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,[Pg 146] 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.

“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 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[Pg 147] solemnly pledged them never to mention the name of Jud Lasher, or the efforts he had made to steal Immy.

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.

[Pg 148]

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[Pg 149] 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[Pg 150] 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.[Pg 151] 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[Pg 152] 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.

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.

“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?”

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 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.

“About me being in the cellar and seeing you taking stones out of the wall.”

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,[Pg 154] no quicklime. The cellar floor was clean—cleaner than usual.

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.

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.

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:

“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[Pg 155] 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?”

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[Pg 156] policemen would come and take me away and hang me before all the people.”

[Pg 157]

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.

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[Pg 158] 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[Pg 160] 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?

[Pg 161]

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[Pg 162] 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[Pg 163] 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.”

“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.

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.

[Pg 165]

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[Pg 167] 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[Pg 168] 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.”

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[Pg 169] 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[Pg 170] 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:

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[Pg 171] 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,

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[Pg 172] 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?

[Pg 173]

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.

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[Pg 175] 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:

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[Pg 176] 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?”

“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[Pg 178] 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.

[Pg 179]

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[Pg 180] 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[Pg 181] 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?”

“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[Pg 182] 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[Pg 183] 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:

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[Pg 184] 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.

“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[Pg 185] 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.[Pg 186] Yet crime has mightily increased. How do you explain that?”

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[Pg 187] 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[Pg 189] 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[Pg 190] 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.

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:

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.”

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.”

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?

[Pg 192]

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!”

“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:

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!”

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[Pg 195] 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[Pg 196] 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.

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[Pg 197] 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.

[Pg 198]

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[Pg 199] 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[Pg 200] 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,[Pg 201] who was even more forlorn than usual. She groaned:

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.

[Pg 202]

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?”

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.”

“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[Pg 205] 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.

[Pg 206]

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.

“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[Pg 209] 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,[Pg 210] 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[Pg 211] 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[Pg 212] 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.

“Oh, I’m on the cross.” He knew that she was “pattering the flash” for being in thievery; but he answered solemnly:

“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[Pg 213] 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[Pg 214] 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.

[Pg 215]

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.[Pg 216] 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[Pg 217] 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[Pg 218] 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.[Pg 219] 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[Pg 221] 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[Pg 222] God might have foredoomed from past eternity to future eternity. He would talk of election and the conviction of sin and of salvation.

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——”

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[Pg 223] 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.

[Pg 224]

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.

“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[Pg 225] higher right than anybody, Ernest—that is, if you still—unless you—oh, tell me!—speak!—say something!”

“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.”

“I believe if I could find that villain I could almost kill him. My soul is full of murder. God forgive me!”

Poor Immy suffered the desolation of a girl who finds her hero common clay; her saint a prig. But with apology she said:

“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:

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?”

“Only you? Why you’re all there is. You’re the most precious thing on earth.”

“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.

[Pg 227]

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’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.

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,[Pg 229] 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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.[Pg 232] 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.

[Pg 233]

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.

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[Pg 235] 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.

“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.”

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.

But the dance went on. Some old prudes were shocked,[Pg 236] but the rest said, “A party is a party, and accidents will happen.”

“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.

[Pg 238]

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[Pg 239] 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[Pg 241] 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.

“I found her crying over it! Crying her heart out over that woman and her brat! What can we do to save that child?”

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[Pg 242] 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?

[Pg 243]

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[Pg 244] 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[Pg 245] 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.

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.

“I don’t know for how long, but we must lose no time in getting Immy out of town.”

[Pg 246]

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:

“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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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[Pg 251] 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:

“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——”

“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[Pg 253] 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.

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[Pg 254] 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[Pg 256] 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.

[Pg 257]

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:

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——”

If Patty had looked away with shame he would have felt that she felt guilty of a cruel negligence, but she stared[Pg 258] 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.

“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.

“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[Pg 259] 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.[Pg 262] 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[Pg 263] 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.

[Pg 264]

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[Pg 265] 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[Pg 266] 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[Pg 267] 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[Pg 268] 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!”

“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.

“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:

“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!”

“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.”

[Pg 270]

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[Pg 271] 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[Pg 273] 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.”

“In spite of its bein’ the Sabbath?” Albeson protested, making religion an excuse for laziness.

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.”

“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[Pg 275] 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:

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:

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.[Pg 276] 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.”

[Pg 277]

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:

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.[Pg 279] 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:

“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?”

[Pg 280]

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:

She dropped the paper and smiled miserably: “They’ve got me in the obituary column already.”

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[Pg 281] 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[Pg 282] 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.[Pg 283] 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[Pg 285] 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.

“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:

“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.

[Pg 288]

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[Pg 291] 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.

[Pg 292]

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:

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.

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.

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[Pg 294] 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,[Pg 295] 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[Pg 296] 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[Pg 297] 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[Pg 298] 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:

[Pg 299]

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[Pg 300] 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[Pg 301] 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[Pg 302] 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[Pg 303] 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[Pg 304] 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:

He bent his head and drenched her cheeks with his tears,[Pg 305] 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[Pg 306] 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:

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:

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:

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[Pg 308] 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.”

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:

Below was a youth in uniform clinging to the iron fence, waveringly. RoBards said:

“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:

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[Pg 309] herself like an orderly sergeant a moment, saluted, and said: “Now!”

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:

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.

[Pg 310]

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[Pg 311] 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:

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.”

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[Pg 313] 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:

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[Pg 315] 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[Pg 316] 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.

“Begging your pardon, sir, there’s a young woman outside wants to see you. Says her name is—her name is—is——”

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:

“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:

“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[Pg 318] moistly, warmly clasped by fingers hardly more than grape tendrils.

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:

“Your daughter and mine—a new one we didn’t know we[Pg 319] 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:

“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.”

“I don’t think much of ‘Patty’ for a name but Mist’ RoBards used to like it.”

“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[Pg 320] 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.

[Pg 321]

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[Pg 322] 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[Pg 323] 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.

“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:

[Pg 324]

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[Pg 325] 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!”

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[Pg 326] 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.

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:

“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?

“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.

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.

“Oh, my pretty body, my poor little, pretty, pretty body, how sorry I am for you!”

“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.

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[Pg 329] still that winsome face in the scuttle hat, that pink rose in the basket, jostling against his shoulder while she slept.

[Pg 330]

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.

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.

“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!”

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.

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:

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:

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[Pg 333] 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?”

“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.

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.

His brain ran along an array of weapons; knife, poison, pistol, throttling fingers. He read the list as if a hand held[Pg 336] 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!”

“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,

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[Pg 337] 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.

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.

[Pg 338]

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.

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[Pg 339] 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.

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.

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,[Pg 340] 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:

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!—

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[Pg 342] 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——”

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!

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[Pg 343] for the first time perhaps; and each wondered at the other’s sorrow.

“Thank you, David. I think I shall sleep now. Good night, old man; and God help us all.”

[Pg 344]

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[Pg 345] 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[Pg 346] 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[Pg 347] 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.

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[Pg 351] 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.

[Pg 352]

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[Pg 353] 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.

[Pg 354]

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:

“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[Pg 355] 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 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[Pg 356] ruined porch into the wreck of the house and his father answered his searching call with a note of triumph:

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.

“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.”

And his father, failing away beneath his eyes like Hamlet’s father’s spirit, spoke already from underground.

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:

Then the lips ceased to beat together, and parted in the final yawn that ends the boredom of this life.

[Pg 358]

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[Pg 360] 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[Pg 361] 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,[Pg 362] 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.

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.

“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[Pg 363] 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!”

“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.

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