CHAPTER LI
Allthis while Keith had stood watching, as motionless as a statue, and with as little will.
He had opened the door just as his father bent and kissed his mother through her hair. He had understood what was being done, and saw that his intervention was too late. He could not save his mother as he had planned. He had to watch her hands blindly fighting for escape, and to abstain from help. He could not rescue his father from that ineffable guilt, or rob him of his divine prerogative.
He felt as if he had stumbled upon a parental nakedness and must be forever accursed; but he could move neither forward nor back, to prevent or retreat.
The first thing that recalled his power to move was the touch of Aletta, the widow of David Junior. After hours on a rack of sympathy, she had fallen asleep at last with the covers stuffed over her ears to shut out the wails of her husband’s mother, whom she had learned to call “Mamma.”
The silence had startled her awake, the strange unusual peace, the deep comfort of the absence of outcry. She had leaped from the bed and hurried barefoot to the room.
She encountered Keith rigid on the sill and, glancing past, saw RoBards on the floor. She thought he had fallen asleep from exhaustion. In the bed Patty lay blissful.
Aletta whispered:
“Poor Mamma! She’s sleeping, isn’t she?”
Keith turned as if his neck were of marble and stared with a statue’s eyes. She ran past him and knelt by RoBards. He protected his eyes from the innocent trust in hers by drawing his eyelids over them.
Then he hoisted himself to his feet. Life came back to his every member in a searing current. His mind turnedtraitor to itself, and he felt that he was the most hideous criminal that ever soiled the earth.
To make sure that he had not merely dreamed it all, he bent and touched the hand of Patty, set his finger where her pulse had once throbbed like a little heart, felt no stir there; kissed her lips and found them cold.
He turned to Aletta and said:
“Your mamma—your mamma—our darling is—is——”
Aletta screamed and ran to the bed and verified the message, then dashed from the room aghast, crying for help. Soon the house was awake, trembling with feet. Lamps were lighted, children whimpered questions sleepily.
Keith took his father’s hand and murmured before anyone else could come:
“I saw what you did.”
His father recoiled in horror, but Keith said:
“I came too late to save you by doing it myself.”
RoBards needed, above all things just then, someone to understand, to accept, to approve. He was like a man dying of thirst in a desert when he looks up and sees a friend standing by with water and food and strong arms.
He fell into his son’s embrace and clenched him tight, and was clenched tight. There was no need for RoBards to ask his boy to keep this secret. The child was a father and a husband and he understood. They fell back and wrung hands, and RoBards winced as he saw that the backs of his hands were bleeding from the marks of Patty’s fingernails.
Then the room filled with the hurried family drowsily regarding death: Keith’s wife with her child toddling, upheld by a clutch of her nightgown; Aletta and the tiny Jessamine, whom Patty had named; the old nurse whom RoBards had sent off to bed hours ago.
Everybody was ashamed of the thought that it was best for Patty to be no more, for it was too hideous a thing to say of a soul. It was a villainous thought even to think that Patty was better dead.
When the venerable Doctor Matson was fetched at last,RoBards was glad to have Aletta tell him how she came in and what she saw:
The Doctor looked unconvinced, puzzled, then convinced. RoBards feared that Matson would look at him with dismay. In the morning, before a stranger, his passionate deed did not look so tender, so devoted as in the night. But the Doctor avoided any challenge of RoBards’ gaze and contented himself with saying:
“She was a beautiful little lady.”
And that made RoBards remember how Patty had looked when she read in the paper the terrible word, “was”—a terrible word for beauty, youth, joy, but a beautiful one for pain, weeping, and being afraid.
Though new churches were being established in Kensico, with their ex-members asleep about them, RoBards wanted Patty near him and the children in the little yard where the tulip trees had grown high.
The funeral was held in the house, and there was a throng. The road was choked with carriages. It was Patty’s last party.
Even Mrs. Lasher hobbled over in a new black dress. Her daughter Aletta had seen to her comfort; and the pride she took in being related to the RoBardses was so great that her tears were almost boastful.
Since the famous son-in-law, Harry Chalender, Major-General of Volunteers, was still in the East, of course he was present at the obsequies. RoBards watched him with the eyes of a crippled wolf seeing his rival stalwart. The insolent dared even to ask if he might stay the night at the house, and RoBards could not turn him out.
But the thought of Chalender added gall to his grief. He was standing by his window late that night, looking out at the tulip trees under whose enlarging branches his family was slowly assembling, when there came a knock at the door. He turned. It was Chalender—coming right in. He wore that wheedling look of his as he said:
“I can’t sleep either, Davie. By God, I am afraid to be alone. Do you mind if I sit with you awhile?”
He did not wait for permission, but sank down on the old couch. It creaked and almost gave way under him.
“Don’t sit there!” RoBards shouted, as if he feared an accident, but really because he could not endure the memory of the time he had seen Chalender there with Patty kneeling by him. It leaped back at him, rejuvenating his forgotten wrath. Again he wanted to hurl himself at Chalender’s throat. And again he did not.
Chalender, perhaps remembering too, shivered, rose, and went to the fireplace, thrusting his hands out, and washing them in the warm air as he mumbled:
“Many’s the cold night I’ve stood by the camp fire and tried to get my hands warm. That’s the only sign of my age, Davie: it’s hard to keep my hands warm. They’re half frozen all the time.”
He did not note that RoBards made no comment. He was thinking of that circle in Dante’s Inferno where the damned lie imbedded in ice. But Chalender glanced down at the hearthstone and asked:
“Isn’t that the marble I brought over from Sing Sing when I was an engineer on the aqueduct? Why, I believe it is! There was a poem I started to write. I have always been a poet at heart, Davie, plucking the lyre with hands all thumbs, trying to make life rhyme and run to meter. But I had no gift of words.
“I spent half a night and fifteen miles trying to write a poem to go with that slab. It ran something like—like—ah, I have it!—
“Marble, marble, I could never mould youTo the beauteous image of my love,So keep the blissful secret that I told youTell it only to—
“Marble, marble, I could never mould youTo the beauteous image of my love,So keep the blissful secret that I told youTell it only to—
“Marble, marble, I could never mould youTo the beauteous image of my love,So keep the blissful secret that I told youTell it only to—
“Marble, marble, I could never mould you
To the beauteous image of my love,
So keep the blissful secret that I told you
Tell it only to—
“And there I stuck and couldn’t get on to save me.”
He bent his arm along the mantel and laid his forehead on it as he said with an unusual absence of flippancy:
“I loved her, Davie. You stole her from me when I was dying. You ran away with her to this place. When I calledfor her and they told me she had married you, my heart died. I got well. My body got well. But my soul was always sick. I laughed and pretended, flirted and reveled, but I never loved anybody else—only Patty—always only Patty.
“And she—when she was afraid of life or death, she ran to you; but when she wasn’t afraid of life——”
As he struck his chest and opened his mouth to proceed, RoBards yelled:
“You say it and I’ll kill you!”
“You—kill anybody?” Chalender sneered, and RoBards sneered again:
“Oh, I’ve killed one or two in my day.”
Chalender apparently did not hear this mad brag, for he was bragging on his own account:
“You couldn’t kill me; nor could ten men like you. Thousands have tried to kill me. For four years the Rebels kept shooting at me and whacking at me with their sabers, jabbing with their bayonets and searching for me with grape and canister, but I didn’t die. It seems I shall never die. Maybe that’s because I’ve never quite lived. I loved Patty and you got her. You oughtn’t to be hurt to learn that another man loved your love. But if it makes you mad to hear me say it, maybe you could kill me. Then my blood would run out on this marble that I brought to her when she was young and pretty. Oh, but she was pretty, a pretty thing, a sweet thing. What a damned, ugly world, to let a pretty thing like Patty Jessamine suffer and die!
“Oh, Davie, Davie, what a darling she was, in what a dirty world!”
He put out his hand hungrily in the air and something—as if it were Patty’s ghost smiling irresistibly—persuaded RoBards’ hand forward to take Chalender’s and wring it with sympathy.
So two souls, two enemies on earth, meeting in hell, might gaze into each other’s eyes and find such agony there that they would lock hands in mutual pity.
RoBards and Chalender looked straight at one anotherfor the first time perhaps; and each wondered at the other’s sorrow.
By and by Chalender sighed and murmured:
“Thank you, David. I think I shall sleep now. Good night, old man; and God help us all.”