WITHIN THESE WALLS
WITHIN THESE WALLS
WITHIN THESE WALLSCHAPTER I
WITHIN THESE WALLS
Hecalled 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 twistedanguishes 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 fivehundred 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 curvilyto 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 shelteredmansions 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 riddenon one of the first trips, the whole distance from Prince to Fourteenth Street. The rails made it easier for the passengers and the horses. Indeed, the legislature had incorporated a wonderful company that proposed to build a railway from the Harlem River to White Plains, and pull the coaches with steam engines, like those on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, which had gone tearing through space at the incredible speed of twenty miles an hour. Some doctors said it would blind the passengers to see the landscape shoot past at such an ungodly speed. But this was the age of wonders.
If the Boston stages threw up such a blinding dust, what would the steam engines do?
It was good to turn off at the head of Black Dog Brook, and take the less frequented highway to White Plains, past Tuckahoe, and through the scenes that Mr. Cooper had described in his novel,The Spy. RoBards had read it as a boy one Saturday night, and it had kept him awake until he heard the Sunday church bells toll, and heard the chains rattle as they were drawn across Broadway to keep the ribald infidels from disturbing the orderly by driving horses on Sunday.
Mr. Cooper was in Europe now, quarreling with some and being praised by others. He had been highly spoken of by a French critic named Balzac, who was also writing novels, if RoBards were not mistaken. Yet nearly everybody said that America had no literature!
In the midst of RoBards’ disquisition on such themes, Patty wailed:
“I’m hungry!”
It was the female bird chirping to her mate, and RoBards felt both proud and pitiful. Fortunately he could descry, not far ahead, a row of dormer windows breaking the roof of a long low house that he recognized as Varian’s Tavern at Scarsdale. A pock-marked milestone set there in 1773 mournfully announced that they were already XXI miles from New York.
A great barn yawned for the tired horses, and they quickened their gait as they sniffed its plentiful fodder.
Being a bridegroom, RoBards had worn his second-best suit, made for him only a little while before by Tryon and Derby, and it had reduced him to the fashionable immobility in which a gentleman of the mode almost rivaled a lady.
His black frock was so tight across the chest, so short of waist, and so constricted of armhole, that he could hardly breathe, or drive the horses. The pantaloons (if one must mention them) were so snug to his skin, and the straps beneath his boots drew them so taut, that his nether limbs were all pins and needles, and when he stepped down from the carriage, he could hardly endure the exquisite distress.
When he put up his arms for Patty, he heard the ominous hiss of a slipping seam in a sleeve. His poor bride was asleep all over, and could hardly rise from her seat or direct her fall across the wheel into his arms.
They staggered tipsily to the tavern doorway, where RoBards checked her at the sill to point out the saber-scars still gashing the woodwork. The British had made them when they were plundering and pursuing the rebels along this very road nearly sixty years before.
In the tavern lounged a crowd of loud and smelly Westerners who had goaded their herds all the way from Ohio, and were waiting here to haggle with the cattle-dealers from New York. But the cattle-dealers had their own hides to think of.
In the fields about the tavern hundreds of horned pedestrians were content to graze at ease, while the cholera made New York a human slaughter-house. They had walked a long way to die, and they were in no haste.
The inn’s good host, Colonel Varian, veteran of the War of 1812, gave the city travelers a welcome all the heartier for the contrast between Patty Jessamine and the disgusted and disgusting drovers, who bellowed their orders for his ale as if they had caught their voices, as well as their fragrance, from their cattle.
In a secluded nook Patty forgot to be exquisite, and atewith 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 winningher 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.