CHAPTER II
Thiswas no such runaway match as that famous affair of a cousin of hers, who had stolen from a masked ball with a forbidden suitor, had crossed the Hudson, and ridden forty miles on horseback in the night to find a parson to marry them.
That bold foray against the respectabilities had revealed how easy it was for forbidden young Romeos to creep into the parlors of the city Capulets and steal thence their Juliets.
But that elopement had the excuse of thwarting parental tyranny. This was a flight from Sodom condemned.
When RoBards first pleaded with Patty to marry him and be gone from the accursed town, she had smiled drearily.
“You don’t want me to run away like Lot’s wife?”
“Yes! yes!”
“But she died looking back, and I’m afraid I’d meet her fate. I’d cry myself into another pillar of salt, and become only another milestone on the Post Road. Would you like me like that, Mister RoBards?”
She had somehow never learned to call him by his first name, before they were married. And by some stranger mystery of shyness, after they were married, she dared the “David” only on occasions of peculiar emotion. Even after she bore him children, she called him “Mister RoBards.”
She had laughed away his alarm, though her merriment was sickly. And then her uncle had gone with the other members of the Board of Health to inspect the quarantine station established at Staten Island against the infected foreigners, swarming overseas in sailing vessels like vast unclean buzzards; and in two weeks every member of that board was dead save one; and he was not her uncle.
This had ended her laughter in terror. She had denounced the authorities for the ignominy of her uncle’s fate. Wealthy as he had been, his body was carried out to the old Potter’s Field in Washington Square, and buried in that notorious spot hitherto devoted to the paupers, the criminals, and the overripe fruit of the gallows tree.
Then one day a nameless corpse was found in Park Place, before her very door; a cousin of hers that she loved was called to the inquest; and nine of the twenty on the coroner’s board were dead in a few days, and her cousin was one of them.
Patty was ready then to flee anywhere; but she could not persuade Harry Chalender to escape, and she vowed that she would not go without him. RoBards felt a cholera of jealousy burning his very vitals as he realized that his wife had seemed more afraid of leaving Harry Chalender than of the plague.
But Harry Chalender scorned to fly and RoBards would not leave town while Patty was there, even though she refused his love. He had just resigned himself to a life without her, and was hoping that the pestilence would end his suffering, when she came to him.
Only yesterday afternoon it was! And she came running along the street to his house—defying all the gossips in a greater fear!
He was living just below City Hall Park, on the east side of Broadway, in a once fashionable home that had become a fashionable boarding house. He happened to be standing at his window brooding when the sight of a woman running caught his eye. He was astounded to see that it was Patty Jessamine. Everybody was, for everybody knew her beauty. RoBards was down the stairs and at the front door just as she crossed Broadway, dodging among the tangled traffic.
She paused to lean against the pump that stood at the corner there, not heeding that her tiny shoes and the ribbons about her ankles were bedabbled with the mire, for she cowered from a staggering, groping wretch who seemed to turn black as he reeled, clutched at her wide skirts, and sprawledin the last gripe of cholera. She had to step across him to escape and RoBards ran to catch her as she swooned.
Her scream of dismay ended in a stuttering whisper:
“Marry me, Mr. RoBards! and take me away before I die.”
His exultance was so great at the undreamed-of benison that he felt a howl of wolfish triumph straightening his throat. So he had won her away from Harry Chalender! How? What did it matter? He cried,
“God knows how gladly!”
He stopped a passing hackney coach and took her home. She was afraid at first to get out of the cab, for she explained that her father was stricken with the cholera, and her brother had died in the house that afternoon.
He reassured her as best he could, and gave her servants orders to pack her things, and make her ready for such a wedding as he might improvise in a city whose ministers were worn out in body and soul with funeral ceremonies.
In mad haste he had somehow accomplished the countless details that made her his in the eyes of State and Church. It was not till long after that she had grown calm enough to repent her frenzy of fear, and the irreparable calamity of a marriage at such speed.
She had been reared to look forward to her wedding day as the high festival of her life, and had devoted numberless hours to visions of herself in her vast, creamy satin bridal robe from Whittingham’s, with a headdress like a veiled tower set upon a coiffure molded by Martell’s own deft fingers, a pair of Lane’s tightest satin boots, and gloves six buttons high. She had insisted that she should receive the newest novelty, a bridal bouquet, and that the wedding cake should be as big as a cathedral.
And now she was married and all, and never a sign of splendor, only an old veil and a wreath of artificial orange blossoms; only the ring that the groom had all but forgotten to bring.
Still, she was alive, and that was something; that was everything; that was far more than could be said of manya pretty friend of hers who had been blooming toward wifehood a week ago, and was now a blighted thing in a box from a coffin warehouse.
As RoBards stared down at her when he could risk a glance away from the rough road, she seemed to be almost waxen with death. Her cheeks were so pale, her breathing so gentle, that she might be drifting from him even now. The little distance between sleep and death gave her an especial dearness, and he hated himself for the meanness of remembering his question after the preacher had gone and the few friends had dispersed:
“How does it happen that you didn’t ask Harry Chalender to your wedding?”
He had asked it teasingly, in a spirit of mischievous bravado. But she had groaned:
“Harry? Harry is dying! Didn’t you know it? The old slave-woman at his house told our black man.”
This had cast ashes upon the fire of his rejoicing. But the flames leaped through them again. For he had won. She was his, and it would be impious to complain that his enemy had been stricken.
He felt a sudden dread of his bride. Could she be so heartless, so selfish—ah, well, women were weak things and men must be strong for them.
The good thing, the glorious thing, was that he had her his. She was Mrs. RoBards now, and she was asleep against his arm. The harsh ruts of the road jolting her tender body kept her bosom tremulous as a heap of white hyacinths fluttered by a soft breeze of summer.
With the rocking of the carriage her velvet cheek slid up and down on his shoulder. He was startled to note at length that his sleeve was pink and her inner cheek whiter than the other. So she powdered and painted! And he had never known it! He would have said that only the wantons that crowded the town or the shameless flirts were discontent to leave their skins as God made them. Yet his own bride—but—she was a wife now. She would be a mother in time. And she would have no temptations to vanity henceforth.
He studied her a little closelier, as if, in marrying her, he had indeed taken her from beneath the veil of romance into the keen sunlight of truth. The delicate forehead had never a wrinkle, even between the eyebrows of such delicate penmanship. If she had thought hard and fiercely on the problems of life and religion and natural philosophy, there would have been lines there. Well, one did not marry a woman for her wisdom. But what sorry tortures she endured to make herself a doll! She denied herself not only the glory of flight in the realms of thought, but even the privileges of motion.
She was the voluntary prisoner—as Fanny Kemble would say—of “tight stays, tight garters, tight sleeves, tight waistbands, tight armholes, and tight bodices.” She took no exercise, wore veils and handkerchiefs to ward off the glare, and preferred to sit in the dark till the sun was gone, lest it brown her pallor. Yet she went in little flat satin slippers through the snow, and bared her shoulders to icy winds that made a man huddle in his heaviest fear-naught.
But her foolishness somehow made her all the more fragile, all the more needful of gentle dealing. And he loved her pitiably.
She was still asleep when he made out from a hilltop the spires of the ancient courthouse, and the new academy in the half-shire village of White Plains. RoBards wanted to tell his wife that she need not be lonely out here, for she would be only a few miles from this lively community, already containing several hundred people, a boys’ school, and a newspaper. But he let her sleep, fearing that, after all, she might not be impressed. She slept past the great sight of this region, Washington’s old headquarters, only to wake a little later as the carriage was flung and whipped about in a road of particular barbarity.
“Where are we, Mist’ RoBards?” she cried, and gasped to learn how far they had driven. He watched her wild little glances with fascination. She seemed to flirt and coquet with the very landscape.
She glanced with amazement at the wildness around her,the maples and wild rhododendrons, and all the Westchester paradise of leaves and flowers crowding in the little-used highway, brushing the fetlocks of the horses, falling back like sickled wheat from the scythe of the wheels, and bending down from above to flail the carriage top with fragrant leaf-laden wands.
And now at last she spied his great tulip tree, and the Lilliputian house beneath it, and she was weary enough to welcome the welcome they vouchsafed.
The carriage rolled across a brief wooden bridge above a merry water.
“That’s old Bronck his river,” he told her. “And these hills were the stronghold that Washington fell back to after the British drove him out of the White Plains. Ignorant old General Howe had ordered his navy to sail up the Bronx, and when the ships could not even find the little creek, Howe feared to advance any further. He sneaked away to capture Fort Washington by treachery.
“Our tulip trees won the praise of Washington while the great man was here. Perhaps that very tree is the son of one of those that shed its blossoms on his tent. Tulip trees are hard to persuade; they won’t grow where you plant them. But this one came to live here of its own accord when my father built this house for my mother.
“Strange, isn’t it, my darling, that they should have come out here—in 1805, it was—to escape from another pestilence? It was the yellow fever then. It had been breaking out every few years before, but that year it was frightful, and my mother was a bride then just as you are now.
“They went back to New York because she grew lonely, but they came out again with the next fever summer. I was born here. Ten years ago I came out for a while. That was another yellow fever year. Even you remember that far back, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, Mist’ RoBards. That was when they moved the Post Office, the Customs House, the banks, the newspapers, the churches—even my father’s store, out to GreenwichVillage. But we went back in the late fall. When shall we go back now?”
“God knows!” he groaned. “I should be glad to stay here with you forever.”
“It’s lonely, though—a little, don’t you think, Mist’ RoBards?”
“Not with you. We’d best forget New York. It’s a doomed city now.”
“Oh, don’t say that!”
“Dr. Chirnside called this a visitation of God’s judgment. It’s not the first. Every few years the warning comes; the people run away and repent, and live in simple villages or on their farms; but when the plague has passed over they go back; they throw open their gaudy homes, wash off the mark of the angel of the Passover on the bloody lintels of their doors, and start up the carnival again. The men get drunk, the women tipple and flirt. They dance all night, gamble, carouse, divorce, live beyond their means, neglect the poor. Look at the churches on Sunday! Hardly a man there; all women, and not many of them. Not one in ten goes to church Sundays.”
She broke in on his tirade with a childish puzzler:
“What causes the plague, do you think, Mist’ RoBards?”
“Who can tell? It is God’s judgment, the pious men say. The doctors call it an exhalation, a vapor, a miasma; but those are only words to wrap ignorance in. God only knows what causes the plague.”
“Harry Chalender says—said——”
The word was the toll of a passing bell. The change of tense was like the taking of a life. It silenced her a dreadful while. Then she tried to banish the specter with an impersonal phrase:
“Some people say that cholera comes from bad water, and New York has no good water. I can hardly drink the bitter stuff from the pumps, and I can taste the old log pipes in the water that we buy from the Manhattan Company’s well. The rainwater from the roofs is worse. No wonder everybody drinks brandy, and there is so muchdrunkenness. Harry—many people want to go out into the country, all the way up to the Croton or the Bronx, and bring the pure streams down into the city, and do away with the pumps and cisterns.”
RoBards laughed. “That’s an old idea. They talked about it after the yellow fever of 1798. But they found it would cost a million dollars, and gave it up, and let that old villain of an Aaron Burr dig his Manhattan well in the heart of the town. Things are so much higher now that it would cost five millions; and it would take years to lay the miles of pipes. No, no, they’ll never make our wild little Bronx a New York citizen. How much better to come up here into the hills and drink its water where it is born.”
“Poor New York!” she sighed, and her head was turned so far about as she looked off to the South that her round chin rested on the round of her shoulder; the somber irises of her eyes were lost in the deep lashes, where there was a hint of a tear, and her throat was a straight line, taut as a whip-cord, from the tip of her tiny ear to the ivory slope of her breast.
Her beauty was marble in the repose of intense meditation upon the city abandoned to its fate. He drank it in devotedly before he laughed:
“Have you turned into Lot’s wife already, or have you the power to turn those big eyes toward the house? It’s pretty from here.”
She startled a little, like the frightened gazelle which was the model of ladylike conduct. Her head came round slowly, and she flicked the dew from her eyes with a quick flutter of the lids. Then the arc of her red lips changed from concave to convex as the sorrowful droop became a warm smile.
A dark thought flitted through his mind that at best she found her future prison less dismal than she had imagined it; and that her fatigue would have made her greet even a jail with relief.
She had sat so long on so rough a voyage that she could hardly rise.
“My limbs have gone to sleep,” she said, and blushed at such a bold allusion. She hardly knew her husband well enough yet for such carelessness.
But he felt a dart of sharp happiness at such an indelicacy. This was a wild adventure. A wilder was to follow, for, as he lifted her across the front wheel he was forced to observe not only her prunella slippers entire, but a flash of the white stocking above the ankle where the crossed thongs were knotted.
He was dizzied by the swoop of her beauty. She came to earth and his arms in the billow of her huge silken skirt, and her vast “elephant” sleeves, with a swirl of ribbons everywhere.
An incense came with the goddess stooping to the ground, and she leaned a moment along his body, the captive of his arms, and he thrust his face so deep into her hat that its brim knocked off his own tall beaver. He let it lie in the dust, though it was a deep-piled St. John of the latest bell.
He kissed her full and fair, and his arms found her as soft, as spicy, and as lithe in her voluminous taffeta as a long bough of tulip blossoms smothered in leaves. But the sharp points of his collar, protruding above his stock like a pair of spear-heads, hurt her cheek and threatened to blind her, and she squealed. He loved to hear her squeal.
A rude guffaw of unmannerly laughter brought him back to daylight and indignation, as he heard old farmer Albeson roar:
“Wall, wall! I never seen two bodies with one head till now. Why, it’s Master Dave! and his female bride!”
The farmer’s wife cackled at the wit of her spouse, and Patty giggled with well-bred reserve. She treated the old rustics with the manner she held toward the blacks who had been her father’s slaves when she was younger. But though the Albesons were quick to remind any presumptuous prigs that they were as good as royalty in the great and only republic, they found Patty’s tyranny as pretty as a baby’s.
They led the way into the house. David’s black man Cuff took the horses to the stable, and Patty’s brown womanTeen carried the luggage up the steps and up the stairs to the long, lone room under the eaves, that grazed the four high tops of bedposts carved as if the mahogany had been twisted or braided.
The first duty was to wash off the dust of the travel. When Patty lifted the scuttle hat from the clutter of her curls before the mirror, she screamed with dismay:
“I’m blacker than Teen!”
RoBards himself poured water into the bowl and boasted of its clarity.
“Not much like the soup you get from your city cisterns, eh?”
“It’s cold, though,” she murmured.
She put him out of the room while she changed her dress to a simple, loose house-robe. She slipped out of the steel cuirass of her stays, and the soft sleeves drooped from her shoulders along her arms. There was a girl’s body bewitchingly hinted inside the twinkling wrinkles.
After the return to simple, clinging things of the brief French republic and the early Empire, the fashions had been departing more and more from any respect for God’s image beneath. When Patty came down the steps in something that was rather drapery than a group of balloons, RoBards was amazed to find how human she was after all, how Grecian, somehow; how much quainter, littler, dearer.
She apologized for her immodesty, but gave weariness as her excuse.
“I should have fainted in my room—if you had been there,” she said, with an audacity he had never dreamed her capable of. “But where’s the profit of a swoon if you fall into the arms of another woman—and a black one at that?”
“You don’t have to faint to get into my arms,” he riposted as he crushed her close.
“I’ll faint if you don’t let me out of them, Mist’ RoBards,” she gasped.
Then they went in to tea. She made hardly a pretence of eating. Even if she had not been trained to fast at tablelike a lady, she would have been too jaded with the travel.
Afterward he walked with her on the narrow piazza in the rising moon, and he felt so wonderfully enriched by her possession, so intimately at home with her, that he asked her if he might smoke.
“I beg you to, Mist’ RoBards,” she said; “I love the flavor of Havana.”
He took from the portmanteau-like lining of his hat one of the cigars he carried there with his red silk handkerchief, his black gloves, and any other small baggage that might otherwise bulge his pockets. As he lighted it with one of the new spiral sulphur matches, he remembered that Harry Chalender had smoked much and expensively.
Harry Chalender even smoked cigars on the street and in office hours, though no gentleman was supposed to do that, and it would have ruined a less secure young man financially and socially. Some of the banks would not lend money to a man eccentric enough to smoke on the street or to wear a mustache. But Harry had dared even to grow and wear a mustache down Broadway. It was to pay a bet on an election, but it shocked the more conservative.
His only effeminacy was his abstention from chewing tobacco and from snuff. Patty often praised him for not spitting tobacco juice about over her skirts and carpets, as so many of the gentlemen did. She had one dress quite ruined on Broadway by a humorist’s ejaculation of such liquor.
Because of Chalender, RoBards flung down his cigar and glared at it where it lay in the grass, as smouldering as his sullen jealousy, and glared back like an eye, watchful and resentful.
Only a little while he was privileged to stroll his porch with his arm about Patty Jessamine’s unfortressed waist, for she tried to smuggle away a yawn under the cover of a delicious sigh, and then protested that she could not keep her eyelids open.
“No wonder!” he answered, “they’re so big!”
She kissed him on the cheek and drifted away beforehe 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, dullwalls, and his plain, dull self; wondering, no doubt, what substitute he could provide for the dances and picnics and romances that crowded the days and nights in the city.
He bent to kiss a cheek like warm and pliant porcelain, and to draw the quilt across a shoulder escaped from its sleeve, and all aglow, as if light itself slumbered there.
He tiptoed from the room and down the stairs and into the August night. He stepped into a cataract of moonbeams streaming down upon the breathing grass and the somnolent trees, the old walls and fences, and the waft flowers in the unkempt garden.
A wind walked to and fro among them like a prisoner in trailing robes, a wind that seemed to be trying to say something, and could not, because its tongue had been plucked out. But it kept trying inarticulately to mumble a warning—against what?—the hazards of life and love perhaps, and the inevitable calamities that follow success.
He had succeeded in winning Patty Jessamine. But what else had he incurred?