CHAPTER LV
Therewas 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 thetulip 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 humanheart 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,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.
The house and farm of Tuliptree had been. They were no more.
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.
The girl, vexed by her gallant’s too easy discouragement, spoke stupidly:
“I love sunsets, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh!”
“The lake’s pretty, don’t you think?”
“Pretty big for its age. It’s just a new pond, you know, to add to New York’s collection. They’re looking for morewater 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!”
“Ye-ah, people used to live down there, they say.”
“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.
THE END.