CHAPTER XII
Fiendsof suspicion laughed at the tenderness in RoBards’ heart as he upheld his wife. The fiends called it “complacency.” Fiends of irony mocked that complacency and told him that it was not lofty idealism or even consideration for her that withheld his wrath, but only a voluptuous unwillingness to surrender the possession of her pretty form.
But whatever his true motives, he was more helpless than Chalender, where he found him prone on a couch in the library, biting on a mouthful of tufted quilt and stuffing it down his throat to stifle his howls of pain as the country doctor swabbed with a coarse towel the dirty red channel in his back.
Chalender rolled his eyes up whitely at RoBards from the pit of hell, and then his gaunt face turned into snowflake marble as his head fell forward and he fainted.
All that night RoBards acted as nurse for him, and forgiveness bled from him for any real or imagined injury he had received from Chalender. Hating the man as he did and believing that Chalender had seduced his wife’s interest and perhaps her very honor, he could not but feel that the wretch was doing penance enough.
At midnight he had to walk out under the star-sprinkled roof of the tuliptree to give his eyes repose from the sight of anguish. The night brooded above, so beautiful, so benign that he wondered how God, the indubitable God who stared down at his little world he had made, could endure the hell he had created for the punishment of his creatures.
A few hours had drained RoBards’ heart of resentment against the one rival in his one love, yet it was said and preached that God kept in the center of this world an eternalvat of liquid fire where numberless children of his parentage screamed everlastingly in vain for so much as a drop of water on their foreheads. And all because six thousand years before one man Adam had broken a contract imposed upon him.
Lawyer and believer in laws, RoBards could not fathom such ruthlessness, such rigor in a code of entailed sin. Humanity was growing kindlier toward its prisoners. Thirty or forty years ago, the French under the lead of Doctor Pinel had relapsed to the old Greek theory that the insane were innocent invalids, and should be treated kindly, not flogged and chained and reviled. This seemed to cast a doubt upon the belief that the mad folk were inhabited by devils, but the effects of gentleness were amazing. And recently this infection of modern weakness and effeminacy had led to a theory of softer methods toward criminals.
Good and pious men had protested against the cessation of capital punishment for thieves, but theft had not been increased by mercy. In the British Navy, the flogging of sailors had been discontinued and there were sentimentalists who pleaded that American sailors also should be protected from the horror of being stripped and lashed till their bare backs bled. But this dangerous leniency had not yet been tried.
Over at this Sing Sing prison, however, where Chalender was building his section of the aqueduct, so called “prison reform” was under trial, and no great harm had come of it as yet. Where three thousand lashes with the cat-o’-six tails had been the monthly total, less than three hundred were inflicted now. Women were reading the Bible to the prisoners now and then. All the good old rigidities of discipline were giving way.
The world was turning slowly and painfully from the ancient faith in cruelty and in men made crueler by a most cruel God, and RoBards felt his power to hate Chalender seeping out of his heart like sand stealing from the upper chamber of an hourglass. He tried to hold it, because itseemed indecent to endure the existence of one he suspected of so much as an inclination toward his sacred wife. But it slipped away in spite of him. When he needed his hate, it was gone.
Night after night he fell asleep in his chair at the bedside of his panting enemy, who moaned when he slept, but when he was awake smothered all sound and simply sweat and stared and gnawed at the quilt like a trapped rat.
When RoBards woke he would often find Patty at his side, staring at Chalender while big tears slipped from her cheek and fell, streaking the air with a glistening thread of light. And she mopped with a little handkerchief the clammy forehead of Chalender, on whose knotted brow big drops of sweat glowed like tears from squeezed eyelids.
RoBards was too tired to resent. He would lift himself heavily from his chair and go to his breakfast, and then to the gig that was to carry him to New York. He would sleep for miles, but his horse knew the way. He slept through hours of courtroom boredom, too, but at night in his room at the Astor House he was wide awake.
Below him Broadway roared in the flare of its gas lamps, the busses going to and fro like vast glowworms. But his thoughts were in Westchester.
He was further depressed by a hanging. At the new Tombs prison the first execution had just taken place. The dead criminal had murdered his wife, the pretty hot corn girl, whose cry, “Lily white corn! Buy my lily white corn!” rang in RoBards’ ears. It seemed impossible that any man should destroy so pretty a thing, a thing that he must have loved much once. The thought of the pretty girl made him anxious for his own pretty Patty. He was glad that he had not throttled her in one of his onsets of mad justice. He longed to hurry home to hear her voice and be sure of her.
But he could not go back for many days. And then a shift in the docket suddenly released him and he set out at once. The long drive was an ordeal, but there was a wonderful sense of perfectness in his heart when his dustyhorse at last turned into the road that gave his home to his eyes. He was the pilgrim whose strength just lasts the pilgrimage out. There was his Mecca, the Jerusalem of his heart’s desire! His home, the place established by his father, the fireside where his wife awaited him, the fane where his children were gathered.
It was the spirit of the time to let the poetic mood exult in high apostrophic strains. He felt a longing to cry out something beginning with “O thou——!” He could not find the word enormous enough for his love, but the inarticulateness of his ecstasy shattered his soul with a joyous awe.
Oh, that House where it waited on its hill, throned on its hill and reigning there! Thou Tulip Tree! that standest there like a guardian seneschal! or like the canopy above a throne! like something—he knew not what, except that it was beautiful and noble and beyond all things precious.
As the horse plodded up the steep road, RoBards’ heart climbed, too. He was uplifted with a vague piety, such as he had felt when first he saw the dome of the Statehouse at Albany and felt the glory of citizenship, felt the majesty of his State. This home was the capitol of that people which was his family. It bore the name he bore, as a franchise, a title, a dignity, and therewith a mighty responsibility.
It was his duty, it must be his pride, to keep that name clean and high; to keep that home a temple of unsullied honor. No enemy must tear it down, no slander must soil its whiteness, no treachery must dishonor it from within.
The sun, sinking behind it, threw out spokes of light as from the red hub of a tremendous invisible wheel. The sun had the look of an heraldic device.
The home was as quiet, too, as an armorial bearing. The children were taking their afternoon nap, no doubt, in the nursery. No doubt the old people were asleep in their upper room. His wife, where was she? He would love to find her stretched out slumbering across her bed like a long Easter lily laid along a pulpit.
He did not see even Cuff, the old negro, who was doubtlessasleep in the barn on a pile of harness. RoBards tied his horse to the hitching post and moved with a lordly leisure to the porch. He had actually forgotten that there was a stranger in his house. His heart had been too perfectly attuned to admit a discord.
He paused on the top step and surveyed his domain. Along the contour of the horizon—and his horizon was his own—a team of big white horses moved, leaning against the collars that ruffed their necks. The plough they dragged through the soil flashed back the sunset as its keen share bounded from a sharp stone. After it plodded the farmer, the lines about his loins, his whip sketching a long scrawl across the sky. He was going to put in his winter wheat.
Along another hill an orchard was etched, the sky visible beneath the branches that joined to form arches in a green colonade. Old fences of rail and stone staggered up and down the slopes, each of them a signature of some purchase his father had made, some parcel of land bought from some dead farmer. Beneath RoBards’ eyes, was the little garrison of tulip trees where his babies slept on earth. There was dew on his lashes and an edged pebble in his throat as his lips knit in a grimace of regret. Yet there was a holiness about his pain, and a longing that nothing should disturb this Sabbath in his soul.
He turned to enter the open door, but he heard murmurs and a kind of hissing whisper that surprised him. He moved toward his library, and there, stretched out on the couch where he himself had sometimes rested when worn out with his lawbooks, he saw Harry Chalender lying on his right side. The quilt had fallen from one shoulder, since his left arm was lifted to enfold the woman who sat curled on a hassock before him and had just laid her lips upon his.
RoBards could not move, or speak. He seemed not even to think or feel. He merely existed there. He was nothing but a witness, all witness. After a long kiss and a long sigh of bitter-sweet bliss, Patty murmured:
“How wicked we are! how wicked!”
“HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!”
“HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!”
“HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!”
Then she turned her beautiful head and stared across hershoulder and saw RoBards. He could think of nothing but of how beautiful she was.
Chalender did not turn his head; but the amorous curve of his lips was fixed in a mask of love—inane, and petrified.
Patty waited for RoBards to speak. But he did not know what to say, or to think. And he could not move.