CHAPTER III
Leavingthe mansion of such a night and entering a mere house, was less a going in than a going out. The night, vast as space, was yet closer than the flesh, more intimate than the marrow of the bones or the retina that sat behind the eyes and observed.
When he left the roomy dark at last he found Patty still asleep, or pretending to be. He could not quite feel sure of her. He never could. It was only of himself and of his idolatry that he was forever sure.
If she slept indeed it would be cruel to wake her. If she affected slumber, it was because she prayed to be spared his love. In either case he had not the courage to invade her retreat, or compel her withdrawn presence to return.
This sublimity of devotion was ridiculous. But he achieved it.
The morning found him still a bachelor. He was amazed at first to hear women’s voices in another room quarreling; it was Patty berating her stupid maid.
When he met her at the breakfast table she was serene again, and held up her cheek like a flower to be pressed against his lips. She had taken command of the household, imperious as a young queen, a-simmer with overbubbling pride like a little girl suddenly hoisted to the head of the table in her mother’s absence.
Womanlike, she found a strange comfort in the discovery that the china in the house was good, the linen of quality, and the silver dignified. She had erudition of a sort, in a field where he was blankly ignorant. She recognized at once that the gleaming coffee pot was from the elegant hand of Paul Revere himself.
“I didn’t know he was a silversmith,” said RoBards.
“What else was he famous for?” Patty said.
This dazed him as a pretty evidence of the profound difference between a male and a female mind. He started to tell her about what Paul Revere had done when she began to praise his mother’s taste in china. She laughed:
“You never saw the pieces of china I did, did you, Mist’ RoBards?”
“You did china? You never showed me any!”
“It was nothing to boast of. But when I was a little girl at Mrs. Okill’s school, I drew a pattern of a tea-set—a wreath of sweet peas and convolvulus surrounding my initial and a lamb holding a cross. My cousin Peter, who was going out to China as a supercargo, said he would take it with him and have it put on a tea-set. He made fun of my drawing and wrote on the design under the lamb: ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ And in about a year the set came round the Horn in one of my uncle’s ships. But the foolish, long-tailed apes in China had put on every cup and saucer the words, ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ I cried for days, and broke every piece to flinders.”
She could laugh with him now, and when she laughed he found a new excuse for a new adoration. He was not gifted in frivolity, and the old house seemed to store up her mirth for dark days when remembered laughter would make a more heartbreaking echo than the remembered drip of tears.
Breakfast left his soul famished for her love, but she would not be serious. She flitted and chirped like a bird that lures a hunter away from her nest.
She seemed to evade him, “to lock herself from his resort,” to be preparing retreats and defences. He was humiliated and shamefully ashamed to find that she was not yet his wife save by ceremony and appearance. He had sharply rebuked the old farmer for a crassly familiar joke or two upon a consummation devotedly to be wished, but he would have hung his head if the truth were known.
Then finally, suddenly, strangely, she was his, and in a manner of no sanctity at all, in a mood of eddying passion,like an evil intrigue. Many of the bachelors, and many of the married men, kept mistresses, but Patty was his wife. And yet he felt a bewildering sense of infidelity to somebody, something. Was it because she seemed afterwards to wear a look of guilt? Was she thinking that she was disloyal to that man Chalender, whose ghost perhaps by now had left his body and followed her up into this citadel?
If she seemed to feel guilty, she betrayed also an exhilaration in the crime, a bravado he had never imagined her capable of.
He was the one that suffered remorse, and he came to wonder if it were not after all man and not woman who had invented modesty and chastity, and who upheld them as ideals which women accepted rather in obedience than in conviction.
Evidently woman must be controlled and coerced for her own salvation.
There had been recently a flurry of a few insane zealots who had coined a new phrase, “Women’s Rights,” and had invented an obscene garment named after a shameless Mrs. Bloomer. In Boston a few benighted wearers of this atrocity had been properly mobbed off the streets. They were even less popular and less likely to succeed than the anti-slavery fanatics.
RoBards was glad that Patty was at the other extreme from such bigots. He would rather have her a butterfly than a beetle. He loved her for saying once:
“I want to be ruled, Mist’ RoBards, if you please!”
And by God he would rule her—and for God he would rule her, and save her, soul and body. If either failed it would be his fault.
Pride in her meekness, fear for her frailty, pity for her lack of intellect, and wonder at her graces, were intertwisted with moods of a groveling unworthiness of her, of upstaring rapture before her mystic wisdoms.
Her purity seemed to be replenished after the storms of love, as the blue sky came back innocent and untarnished after a black cloud and lightning. Quick tempests rose andpassed, and a fleet angelic quality brought her down to earth on and in a rainbow from heaven.
He found himself studying her as a botanist studies a flower. In their loneliness they dwelt as on a desert island.
But she could ride a little and he had good saddle horses, and she found many occasions for excursions to White Plains. They rode often together up to the Northcastle post office, where the stage flung off the New York papers and the letters. She had a brave beauty as she rode, her long skirt like a spinnaker at the horse’s flank, her veil flying from her hat, her silhouette one with the horse’s back, where her arched thigh rose above it and clasped the saddle horn.
The news from the city was blacker every day, and she was more and more content with her exile, until a letter came to tell her that Harry Chalender had not died after all, but had somehow won his duel with the Asiatic death. The same post brought her word that her father had also passed the crisis. She made a great noise of delight in the recovery of her father. But she said nothing more of Harry Chalender.
And so his name rang aloud in the back of RoBards’ mind. He was hard to please: if she had exclaimed upon Chalender’s escape he would have winced. Yet her silence was unendurable.
In a ferocious quarrel that began in nothing at all, and was, on his part, only the outcry of a love too exacting, because it was too hungry, she flung at him:
“I needn’t have married you, Mist’ RoBards! You made me. You kept at me.”
“Hush, sweetheart!” he pleaded, “you don’t want the servants to hear.”
“What do I care for servants? If I hadn’t been such a fool as to listen to you, I might have married Harry Chalender.”
“Hush!” he stormed, “or, by——”
“By who, what?” she screamed, staring up at him as ifin desire as in need of a beating. When he could not smite such beauty, she cried at him:
“This house! This terrible tomb! My father would have called it this damned house. Well, it’s nothing but a madhouse to me, one of those places where they lock people up so that they may go insane really.”
He choked. It was bad enough for a lady to swear, for his wife of all ladies to swear, but there was a sacrilege in her curse upon this home.
This anathema and this bridal rebellion must be kept secret. Walls had ears but no lips to speak. Servants, however, had both long ears and large mouths; and negroes were blabbers.
And so for the sake of quiet, he crushed back his own wrath and his sense of her wickedness, and fell on his knees before her, imploring pardon as an idolater might prostrate himself before a shrine whence he received only divine outrage and injustice. And she was appeased by his surrender! And lifted him up in her arms amorously!
He resented her caresses more than her cruelty, but he preferred them because they were private and murmurous. He had an inherited passion for secrecy.
One day he learned that she had ordered her horse saddled without consulting him, or inviting him to ride with her. He sent the nag back to the stables, and when she came out habited, she was furious.
“You can’t ride alone about these woods,” he said.
“Why not? Who’s to harm me?”
“What if the horse bolted and flung you against a rock, or fell on you or dragged you? Besides, there are many bad characters hereabouts. Only a mile down the road is a family called Lasher.”
“Those poor wretches in that tumbledown hut? Who’s afraid of them?”
“They’re descendants of the Cowboys and Skinners who used to murder and torture people here during the Revolution. We’re in the old Neutral Ground, where those hyenas used to prey on patriots and Tories alike. They burnedhomes, hung old ministers up by the neck to make them tell where their money was, mistreated women—did everything horrible. Major André was captured by some of them just a few miles from here. Those Lashers are sons of one of the worst of the Skinners, and I wouldn’t trust you among them.”
When she insisted, he said, “You shall not go!”
Three days later he read in hisHeraldthat Mr. Harry Chalender was so far recovered from the cholera that he had gone to recuperate at his farm near the village of Sing Sing, not far from the country seat of Mr. Irving, the well-known writer.
Sing Sing was only a few miles away. RoBards handed the paper to his wife, with an accusing finger pointing to the notice. She met his eye with a bland gaze, and said:
“I knew it. That is where I wanted to ride. But you wouldn’t let me.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to go along with you?”
“You don’t like Harry.”
This logic dazed him.
“Because I don’t like him, you are to visit him secretly?”
“But his mother and sisters are there, Mist’ RoBards! Am I to forsake my every friend?”
“Friend!” he groaned.
And that made her laugh. She flung her arms about him and said:
“The only time you’re funny is when you’re mad, Mist’ RoBards. I love you jealous.”
A few weeks later when he and Patty came back from a tour of their fields with the farmer, they saw a cariole (a “carry-all,” as she called it) hitched to the post in front of the gate. On the porch they found Chalender, pale, lean, weak, but still smiling.
The cry that escaped Patty’s lips was so poignant with welcome that RoBards’ heart went rocking in his breast.
If Chalender had been in his usual health, RoBards might have killed him. It was, oddly, wickeder to kill an ill man than a well one.
He wanted to challenge the fellow to a duel, but dueling was against the laws of the nation, and latterly against the more powerful laws of fashion. Besides, what excuse could he give for a challenge?
And the scandal of it! The newspapers were diabolically scandalous nowadays; foreign travelers said they had never imagined anything so outrageous as the American newspapers.
When RoBards saw Patty drop down in front of Chalender and hold his hand, he had an impulse to shoot the dog dead. But he could not stain Tuliptree Farm with blood.
While he waited for the stableman to take the horses, he could see that Chalender’s manner with Patty was intimate, emotional, intense. He was probably bewailing his loss of her. RoBards felt that the innocent old house was depraved by such insolence, but in order to deny his wife the luxury of another festival of his jealousy, when he came up on the porch he greeted Chalender as cordially as he could, and complimented him on his appearance—which was altogether too hale to please RoBards.
Harry Chalender usually suited his talk to his company, and the gallant became at once the man of affairs.
“That’s the Bronx down there, isn’t it, Dave? We ought to have it in New York now. It would put an end to this cholera. That’s one reason why I’m up here in this solitude. New York is dying of thirst; we’ve got to have water; we’ve put it off too long. But nobody can decide what to do. The conservative crowd says the well water that was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us. But our fathers died in great agony, and we’re doing the same. The New York water is good enough for cholera and yellow fever. It’s a fine thing, too, for Greenwich Village, and other far-off points that the whole town runs away to every few summers. But New York has got to get good water and plenty of it—or move out of New York.
“Funny, isn’t it, how people hate to be saved? I was reading that when Pontius Pilate brought water into Jerusalem, the Jews rose in a mob and demanded somebody’slife—as they did on a certain other famous occasion. And no doubt it will be devilish hard—pardon me, Patty!—to persuade the New York mob to take water—and pay for it.
“You could divide the town into two parties, the Drys and the Wets. And we Wets are at war among ourselves. One party wants to get a supply from the Passaic River; some favor our Croton; some lean toward your Bronx.”
RoBards answered with dubious irony:
“I’d thank them to lean the other way. If New York lays hands on our classic stream, I’ll rise in a mob myself.”
Chalender offered an argument he probably supposed to be irresistible:
“You could sell out your holdings at a vast profit, and get very rich without a stroke of work. I’m casting about for a few quiet investments. If I only knew which way the cat would jump, I could do very handsomely by myself.”
RoBards answered coldly:
“Different people have different standards of honesty.”
Patty gasped at the directness of this stab, but Chalender laughed:
“And some people call that honesty which is really only an indifference to opportunity. Most of these starving farmers up here would shout with joy if I offered them twenty-five dollars an acre. If I sold it later for a hundred, they would howl that I had cheated them. But think how much more gracefully I should spend it.”
RoBards nodded. “As for grace, you could have no rivals.”
Chalender did not wince; he did not even shrug. He went on:
“But the thing will have to be decided by an election.”
“You can always buy votes. One of the inalienable rights of our citizens is the right to sell their birthrights.”
“Yes, but it takes such a pile of money to buy enough birthrights. Nobody can vote without owning real estate, and property gives people expensive notions. That’s why I am in favor of universal suffrage. I should be willing evento give the ladies the vote—or anything else the darlings desire.”
RoBards was hot enough to sneer:
“In a ladies’ election you would bribe them all with a smile.”
“Thanks!” said Chalender, destroying the insult by accepting it as a compliment. “But let me have a look at your Bronx, won’t you? As an engineer it fascinates me. It is the real reason for my visit to-day.”
This thin duplicity made even Patty blush. RoBards bowed:
“Our sacred Bandusian font is always open for inspection, but it’s really not for sale.”
“Not even to save New York from depopulation?”
“That would be a questionable service to the world,” RoBards grumbled. “The town is overgrown already past the island’s power to support. Two hundred thousand is more than enough. Let the people get out of the pest-hole into the country and till the farms.”
“You are merciless to us poor cits. No, my dear RoBards, what New York wants she will take. She is the city of destiny. Some day the whole island will be one swarm up to the Harlem, and it will have a gigantic thirst. Doesn’t the Bible say something about the blessedness of him who gives a cup of water to the least of these? Think what blessings will fall on the head of him who brings gallons of water to every man Jack in the greatest of American cities! Quench New York’s thirst and you will check the plagues and the fevers that hold her back from supremacy.”
“Her supremacy will do the world no good. It will only make her a little more vicious; give crime and every evil a more comfortable home.”
“Is there no wickedness up here in Arcadia?”
“None compared to the foulness of the Five Points.”
“Isn’t that because there is almost nobody up here to be wicked—or to be wicked with?”
“Whatever the reason, we are not complaining of the dearth.”
“That’s fine! It’s a delight to find somebody content with something. But show me your Bronx, and I may do you a service. You won’t object if I find fault with the stream, because then I shall have ammunition to fight with against your real enemies, who want to dam the brook at Williams’s Bridge and pipe it into town. You and I should be the best of friends; for I want the people to look to the Croton for their help. It will enable New York to wash its face oftener, and drink something soberer than brandy. And it will enrich me through the sale of the miserable lands that have grown nothing for me but taxes and mortgage interest.”
But RoBards was not content, and he was a whit churlish as he led Chalender along the high ridges, and let him remark the silver highway the river laid among the winding hills of Northcastle, down into the balsam-snowed levels of the White Plains.
Little as RoBards approved his tenacious guest, he approved himself less. He felt a fool for letting Chalender pink him so with his clumsy sarcasms, but he could not find wit for retort or take refuge in a lofty tolerance.
He suffered a boorish confusion when Chalender said at last, as they returned to the house and the cocktails that Patty had waiting for them on the porch:
“I agree with you, David. The Bronx is not our river. I can honestly oppose its choice. But it’s a pretty country you have here. I love the sea and the Sound and the big Hudson, but there is a peculiar grace about these inland hills of Westchester. I shall hope to see much of them in the coming years.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. I shall bid for a contract to build a section of the Croton waterway. That may mean that I shall spend several years in your neighborhood. My office will be the heights along the Hudson. That is only a few miles away and a pleasant gallop. You won’t mind if I drop in upon you now and then when I am lonely?”
Though Chalender ignored Patty’s existence in makingthis plea, RoBards felt that it was meant for her. But what could he say except a stupidly formal:
“It will be an honor to receive one of the captains of so great an enterprise.”
“Thanks! And I can count upon always finding you here?”
Now RoBards amazed himself when he answered:
“I fear not. We came up only to escape the cholera. When that is over, we shall return to New York. I have my law practice to remember.”
He could feel, like hot irons in his cheek, the sharp eyes of Patty. He knew what she was thinking. He had said that he wanted to dwell here forever. And now he was pretending that he was only a brief visitor.
Instead of gasping with the shock of her husband’s perversion, she snickered a little. It was as if he heard a sleighbell tinkle in the distance. But someone else was in that sleigh with his sweetheart.
He could not understand Patty. He seemed to please her most by his most unworthy actions. He wondered if she had scented the jealousy that had prompted his words, and had taken it once more as an unwitting tribute to her.
He thought he detected a triumphant smile on Chalender’s face, and he longed to erase it with the flat of his hand. Instead, he found himself standing up to bow in answer to Chalender’s bow, like a jointed zany.
The inscrutable Patty, when Chalender had driven out of sight of the little lace handkerchief she waved at him, turned to her husband with sudden anger in her face. He braced himself for a rebuke, but again she confused him by saying:
“The impudence of Harry Chalender! Daring to crowd in on our honeymoon! It was splendid how you made him understand that we RoBardses don’t welcome him here.”
“Did I? Don’t we?” stammered RoBards, so pitifully rejoiced to find her loyal to him and to their sacred union that he gathered her in his arms, and almost sobbed, “Oh, my dear! my sweet! my darling!”
Though she was as soft and flexile as a shaft of weepingwillow, somehow she was like a stout spar upholding him in the deep waters of fear, and he felt most ludicrously happy when she talked nursery talk to him and cooed:
“Poor, little David baby wants its Patty to love it, doesn’t it?”
He could not answer in her language, but he felt a divinity in it, and was miserably drenched in ecstasy. And she had used his first name!