CHAPTER XIII
IfChalender had only risen in self-defence or reached for a weapon or spoken a word, whether of bravado or cowardice, it would have been easy for RoBards to rush him. If his lip had merely quirked with that flippant smile of his at life, it would have been a rapture to throttle him.
But his lip was still pathetic with an arrested kiss, and in his eyes was the pain of desire. He did not know that RoBards was looking at him.
The animal instinct to destroy the man who had won his wife’s caress was checked by an instinct equally animal: the disability to attack the helpless and unresisting.
First wrath had thrust RoBards forward. But his feet grew leaden upon the floor, as a multitude of impulses and instincts flung out of his soul and crowded about his will, restraining it like a mob of peacemakers, a sheriff’s posse of deputies.
He had come from thoughts of piety before the meaning of his home, and his heart was devout. His eyes had just left off embracing with a mighty tenderness the graves of his two little children.
The bare imaginations of their mother’s infidelity and its punishment were like sacrilegious rioters abusing the calm church within him.
In his revolt, he could have called his eyes liars for presenting his wife to him in another man’s arms, and before he could see through the haze that clouded his vision, she was standing erect and staring at him with a dignity that defied either his suspicions or his revenge. He could have killed Patty for her own recklessness with her honor, which was his now. He understood in a wild flash of thought-lightning why the husband of “the pretty hot-corn girl” must have struck her dead.
Chalender had not moved, did not suspect. He was wounded; his fever was high. He might not live.
Perhaps he had been in a delirium. Perhaps Patty had been merely trying to quiet him. But she had been saying, “How wicked we are!” as if cheaply absolving herself of sin by confession.
Suppose RoBards charged her with disloyalty and she denied it. What proof had he? He was the only witness. He could not divorce her for merely kissing a wounded visitor.
Divorce! How loathsome! Nobody had yet forgotten old Aaron Burr’s brief marriage to old Betty Jumel or the recent noisome lawsuit that followed, in which Burr flattered her with four corespondents to her one for him.
As a lawyer RoBards had many divorce trials brought to him and he abominated them. He had never had a nightmare so vile as the thought that he might have to choose between clamorous divorce and smothered disgrace.
He wanted to die now rather than make the choice. To kill Chalender would seem almost a lesser horror. But that also meant exposure to the public. The burial of Chalender would but throw open his own home like a broken grave. It was only a detail that Chalender had saved his life the night of the fire when RoBards could not climb back to the wharf and no one else heard or heeded him.
To butcher a wounded man, guilty so ever; to strip a woman stark before the mob, evil so ever; to brand his children, to blotch his home with scandal—pure infamy! But, on the other hand, to spare a slimy reptile; to be the cheap victim of a woman’s duplicity; to leave his children to her foul ideals; to make his home a whited sepulcher—infamy again. He felt that the children must be first to be considered. But which way was their welfare to be sought?
Then the children themselves ran in upon his swooning mind, Imogene and Keith. He felt their tendril fingers wrap about his inert hands. He heard their piping cries of welcome. He fell back from the door and was so weak, so sick that they easily pulled him to his knees and clamberedon his back and beat him, commanding “Giddap!” and “Whoa, Dobbin!”
The very attitude was a degradation. He was actually crawling, a brute beast on all fours with his young on his back. When he flung them off Keith bumped his head and began to cry, Immy to howl and boo-hoo! And they ran to their mother protesting that their Papa was mean, and hurted them. They turned to Chalender for protection. And this was Chalender’s first warning that RoBards had come home—home! what a dirtied word it was now—“home!”
RoBards scrambled to his feet and dashed out of the intolerable place.
Only the old tulip tree had dignity now. With a Brahmanic majesty it waved its long-sleeved arms above him and warned him that he must not let life drive him mad. His decision one way or the other did not matter much. Nothing he did or left undone mattered much. The leaves would come and go and come anew. The farmer was still striding along after his plough in a silhouette cut out against a scarlet west.
Just one thing seemed important: the house pleaded with him not to dishonor it. It was older than he. It had cradled him. It had cradled his children. It wanted to cradle their children’s children. The lengthening shadow of the chimney had crept along the grass now till it lay like a soft coverlet on the beds of the little twain that had been lent him for a while. The very chimney had a soul of its own, and a good name. It seemed to implore him not to brand it as a place of evil resort.
His knees gave way and he dropped to the ground, rendered idiot by the contradiction of his impulses. He saw old negro Cuff staring at him. The farmer’s wife paused at the back door to wonder. At an upper window Patty’s Teen leaned out to fix on him the white stare of her black face.
Then someone came stepping toward him as timidly as a rabbit in dew-chilled grass. Someone sank down by himwith a puff of floating silk and a drift of perfume across his nostrils. And then his wife spoke in the coldest calmest voice he had ever heard from her, as if his discovery of her had discovered her to herself and had aged her in a moment.
“Mist’ RoBards!” she pleaded, “Mist’ RoBards if it will save you any trouble, I’ll kill myself. I’ll fling myself down the well, or let you kill me if you would like that better. Some day you were bound to catch us together, Harry and me. I’m almost glad you did at last. I’ve been bad enough to destroy my own soul, but don’t let me break your heart or ruin your life. I’m not worth your grieving for, Mist’ RoBards. I’ve been as wicked as I could be and for a long while, and now you’ve found me out—and I’m glad. Even if you kill me, I’m glad.”
But he was not glad. Suspicion had burned and hurt, but knowledge was a knife through the heart; it was mortal. It killed something in him. One soul of his many souls was slain. His other souls were in a panic about its deathbed, as Patty went on, her voice queerly beautiful for all the hideous things it told:
“Harry doesn’t know that you saw him—us. Nobody does. He isn’t in his right mind. He is weak and sick and I made myself pretty just to make him quit laughing at me. And if he dies, it will be my fault.
“And that would be funny—for such a worthless little fool as me to cause so much trouble for two men, two such fine men. He is fine, in spite of all his wickedness, and he’s doing a great work that must go on. Let me go away and disappear somewhere. I’ll drown myself in your river, if I can find a place deep enough. And Harry need never know why. I don’t want him to know that you saw us. I couldn’t stand that. It’s of you I’m thinking. I don’t want him to know that you know about this terrible thing. It isn’t so bad, if he doesn’t know you know. For then you’d have to kill him, I suppose.
“But please don’t kill him, for then they’ll try you and send you to prison or hang you and choke you to death beforeall the people. Oh, don’t let that happen, David. You couldn’t be so cruel to me as to let them kill you and hurt you and bury you in the Potter’s Field on my account—don’t do that to me, Davie. I’ve loved you. In my way, I’ve loved you. I’m not good enough for you, but—if any harm should come to you, I’d die. Don’t look like that, Mist’ RoBards! Oh, don’t look so helpless and heartbroken and so unhappy. Don’t torture me to death that way!”
And then it was he that sobbed and not she. He could feel her clutching at him and lifting him from the grass reeking with his tears. She drew his head into her soft arms and into her lap and set her lips against his cheek, but dared not kiss him, though her tears beat on his clenched eyelids like the first big drops of a long rain.
One little mercy was vouchsafed him and that was the sinking of the sun behind the hill; the blessed twilight came with its infinite suavity and the impalpable veils it draws across the harsh edges of things and thoughts.
He saw the tide of the evening wind where it eddied along the grass and overflowed his hands and his face. He heard the farmer go up the dusty lane that muffled the tread of the tired horses, but not the little clink-clink of the harness rings. He supposed that the farmer was staring and wondering at him as he himself stared inside his own eyelids at the world within him, and wondered at that.
It grew cold. His wife’s hands chilled as they clenched his. He could feel her shiver. He could just hear her whisper through her chattering teeth:
“Please come in, Mist’ RoBards.”
He put away her arms and got to his feet. Then his dignity took on the look of mere sulkiness. When he saw Patty unable to rise, and huddled in a dismal heap, he bent and lifted her to her feet. She seemed unable to stand or walk; so his arm of its own volition or habit went round her to hold her up.
And at that she threw her arms about him and buried her face in his breast and sobbed. He looked through blurredeyes at the ambiguous sky where stars were thrilling in the rosy afterglow. In the dark house someone was lighting lamps. The lamps and the stars were tenderly beautiful, but they came only when all else was black.
From the hall door a rug of warm yellow ran across the porch and down the steps into the path. The children began to call, “Mamma! Papa! where are you?”
The house yearned toward him with its deep bosom. Something with the arms of a spirit reached out from it and drew him in.
It was wrong to yield, but he had an utter need of peace for a while. He was wounded worse than Chalender, and needed more care.
All that night it was as if Indians prowled about the house, savages that longed to drag forth the people within, to howl slanders and truths about them, to fasten them to stakes and dance a torture dance about them, cut off their eyelids and blind them with ruthless light. There were no Indians to fear now, save the stealthy reporters and the more merciless newspapers.
But the house baffled them; it was a strong stockade. They should not have its children yet a while. It had won another day in its long battle against the invading strangers.