CHAPTER XIV
Thatnight RoBards slept apart from his wife—in the spare room. He owed that much to his wrongs and she dared not try to wheedle him into the dangerous neighborhood of her beauty.
But first they heard the children’s prayers together. It was bitter to hear their sleepy voices asking forgiveness for their tiny sins and murmuring, “God bless Mamma and Papa and Mister Chalender! Amen!” Then the wet little good-night kisses scalded the cheeks of the divided parents who leaned across the cradles as across coffins and waited till sleep carried their babes away to the huge nursery of night. Then they parted without a word, without the challenge of a look.
He slept, too. All night he slept, better than ever. His strength had been shattered in a moment as if a bolt of lightning had riven him. He was a dead man until the morning brought resurrection and the problems of the daylight.
The first thing he heard was a loud shout:
“Jump her, boys! jump her! No water! There’s no water! We’ve got to get some gunpowder! Up she goes! Down she comes!”
It was Harry Chalender in a delirium fighting the Great Fire again. His frenzy gave him the horrible sanctity of the insane.
The doctor came over after breakfast. He shook his head. The wound was dangerous: the pick-blade had made an ugly gouge and gangrene might set in. There was pus in the wound. There was fever, of course, high, racking fever that fried his flesh till the very skin seemed to crackle.
RoBards had not expected to go back to town for several days. He had needed the cool remoteness of his farm.But now the solitude was like that uttermost calm into which the angels fell and made it Pandemonium. Now the place was crowded with invisible devils gibbering at him, shaking their horned heads over him in hilarious contempt, tempting him to everything desperate.
He made an excuse to Patty that he had to return to the city. He spoke to her with the coldest formality. She made no effort to detain him, but this was plainly not from indifference, for she answered like a condemned prisoner in the dock.
“All right, Mist’ RoBards. I understand.”
It broke his heart to see her meek. All the fire of pride was gone out of her. She was a whipped cur thing, and he could not put out his hand to caress her.
Something in him, a god or a fiend, tried to persuade him that she was not to blame, that she had been the prey of currents stronger than herself. But whether the god or the fiend whispered him this, the other of the two spirits denied it as a contemptible folly.
According to the law, women, as soon as they married, lost all rights to their souls, wills, properties, and destinies: yet if men were to forgive their wives for infidelities no home would be safe. This new-fangled mawkishness toward the wicked must have a limit somewhere.
He had to go into his library for a lawbook that he had brought with him on an earlier visit to his home—“visit” seemed the nice, exact word, for he was only a visitor now. Harry Chalender was the master of the house.
RoBards expected to find the usurper in a delirium. But Chalender was out of the cloud for the moment. With a singularly fresh and boyish cheer, he sang out:
“Hello, David! How’s my old crony? Don’t let me keep you out of your shop. Go ahead and work and don’t mind me. I’m pretty sick, I suppose, or I’d take myself out of your way. Forgive me, won’t you?”
He asked forgiveness for a possible inconvenience, but kept in his black heart the supposed secret of his treachery! Yet something compelled RoBards to laugh and say that hewas to make himself at home and feel right welcome. The dishonest glance he cast toward Chalender was met with a look of smiling honesty that reminded David of some lines he had heard the English actor Kean deliver at the theatre:
“My tables—meet it is I set it down,That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”
“My tables—meet it is I set it down,That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”
“My tables—meet it is I set it down,That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”
“My tables—meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”
Yet he smiled himself, and felt that many a villain was more the hero than he. He hurried out of the room, fleeing from the helpless sick man who smiled and had no conscience to trouble him.
He found that his horse had gone lame and could not take him all the way to New York. He drove the limping nag only so far as White Plains, and sent Cuff back with him. He waited in front of Purdy’s Store until the Red Bird coach was ready to start. He saw Dr. Chirnside waiting for the same stage, and he dreaded the ordeal of the old preacher’s garrulity. But there was no escape. The parson had come up to look over the churches in the Bedford Circuit and he was pretty sure to indulge in one of his long tirades against the evils of the times—especially the appalling atheism of the country, an inheritance from the Revolutionary sentiments. The colleges were full of it—of atheism, drunkenness, gambling—but Dr. Chirnside seemed to dread atheism far less than he dreaded the other sects of his own faith. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians were gaining a foothold in the countryside and he almost choked when he referred to the Catholics.
All the way down to New York Dr. Chirnside’s tongue kept pace with the galloping horses. He began with the stage itself. He remembered when even carriages were almost unknown in the rural districts. Gentlemen rode horses and carried their necessaries in valises swung from the saddle; ladies rode on pillions. Then light wagons came in, and carioles next, gigs, chaises, and chairs. And now stages with their luxury and their speed of nearly ten miles an hour!
As if that were not enough, a steam railroad was to ruin the peace of the country. Had Mr. RoBards ridden behindone of the engines that now drew the railway cars from the City Hall all the way to Harlem? No? He had been fortunate in his abstemiousness.
“The speed of these trains is only another instance of our mad passion for hurry. After a time people will return to their sanity, and the stage coaches will drive the fire-breathing monsters back to the oblivion they came from.
“Another evil of the railroad is that it will bring more and more of the wicked city element into the country. The aqueduct has practically ruined an entire region. Have you seen the hollow Chinese wall they are building for the Croton water? Ah, yes! Indeed! Most impressive, but if man’s work destroys God’s beautiful country where will be the profit?
“The Continental Sabbath will soon destroy the rural peace as it has already destroyed New York’s good name. The chains are no longer drawn across Broadway before the church services and any Tom, Dick, or Harry may now drive his rattletrap past the sacred edifice on his way to some pagan holiday.
“In the good old days even taking a walk on Sunday was recognized as a disrespect to the Lord. Nowadays men go driving! And not always without fair companions of the most frivolous sort. In my day a gentleman, passing his most intimate friend on the way to church, would greet him with a cold and formal nod. Nowadays people smile and laugh on Sunday as if it were merely a day like another! Where will it end? I tremble to think of it.
“I have just witnessed an example of the extent to which the new lawlessness is carrying us. Fortunately I was able to deal with it sternly.”
He told how some of the aqueduct laborers had spent their Sunday off, not in pious meditation and fasting, but in sauntering about the country. Their paganism had gone so far that when they came upon a patch of wild whortleberries growing by the roadside, they brazenly began to pick and eat them and gather others to take to their camp.
“Driving home from the service I chanced to see them,and I determined to put a stop at once to this violation of the laws of God and man. I ordered the county sheriff to arrest the culprits. They were fined a shilling each for the sacrilege.
“Unfortunately, this was not the end of it. The depths of human depravity were disclosed in the behavior of these gross men. Only last Sabbath, instead of going to church, they hung about the village. Most unluckily, the sheriff’s daughter carelessly went into the garden and picked a few currants for the midday dinner. Whereupon the laborers called on her father and demanded that he arrest his own daughter. He had to do it, too, and pay her fine of a shilling. It will be a lesson to the wicked girl, but it rather undoes the good I was able to impress on the laborers.”
Dr. Chirnside was aghast at such levity, such contempt for sacred things, but RoBards took no comfort in the thought that, since man’s quenchless thirst for horrors could be slaked with such trivial atrocities, his own tragedy was only one example more.
He felt an almost irresistible impulse to seize the clergyman by the sleeve and cry:
“What would you say if I told you of what has been going on in my own home? My wife is a member of your congregation; she has been brought up with every warning against immodesty of thought or action, and yet—and yet——”
He could not frame the story even in thought. He could not tell it. Yet if he did not tell, the secret would gnaw his heart away like a rat caged within.
Dr. Chirnside could hardly have found appropriate gloom for this disaster since he was already in such despair over the habits of the modern women, that he had no superlatives left for their dishonor.
As the stage swung down into the city, lurching through mudholes that occasionally compelled it to take to the sidewalk and scatter the pedestrians like chickens, he pointed out a girl strolling along with a greyhound on the leash of a blue silk ribbon.
“See how our girls walk abroad unattended,” he gasped. “That young female has at least a dog to protect her, but it is appalling how careless parents are. No wonder our foreign critics are aghast at the license we allow our ladies. They go about without a father or a husband to guard them from the insolence of bystanders. It is the custom, too, to permit couples who have been formally betrothed to be alone together without any guardian. In most of the homes sofas have been imported for them to sit upon. No wonder that New England people say that their old custom of bundling was less immodest. The very word sofa implies an Oriental luxury.
“The dress of our women, too, is absolutely disgusting. When I was young there was an outcry against a new fashion of shortening the skirts in the rear so that the heels were visible. People frankly cried ‘Shame!’ at the sight of them. Nowadays ankles are openly exposed. Look at that pretty creature stepping across the gutter. She is actually lifting her petticoats out of the mud. No wonder those men all crane their necks to ogle! And her satin shoes are hardly more than cobwebs!
“Their immodesty does not stop at the ankles. The bare bosom is seen! Really! I blush to mention what young females of excellent family do not blush to reveal.
“It is perilous to health, too. You see our ladies gadding about in the bitterest weather with their necks uncovered, while gentlemen shiver under their great coats with five or six capes and heavy stocks and mufflers besides.
“But the men are hardly more modest. This new fashion of—dare I refer to it?—of buttoning the pantaloons down the front instead of on the sides! It is astounding. One or two sermons have already been preached against it and I think I shall refer to it myself next Sabbath. Pardon me!”
There was a respite while he took out his pocketbook and made a note of this urgent matter. RoBards remembered his own memorandum that a man may smile and be a rake as well. He could hardly keep from plucking at the parson’s sleeve and confessing:
“When you are in your pulpit, cry out also that one of the town’s pets, the popular Harry Chalender, has ruined the good name of my wife and our children and stained the old RoBards mansion with the wreckage of the Seventh Thou-shalt-not!”
But Dr. Chirnside was putting up his pencil and putting forth his lean, cold hand for a farewell clasp. The stage was nearing City Hall Park and he must get out his fare and get down at his parsonage.
And a little further below was the Astor House, which RoBards must call home henceforth.
Dr. Chirnside had referred for his “thirteenthly” to the barbaric luxury of the new hotel, and to the evil influence of such hostelries on home-life. It had a bathtub on every floor! What Oriental luxury would come next? In many of the more religious states bathing was a misdemeanor, but in New York every crime flourished—and every slothfulness. The modern woman, unlike her mother, was too shiftless to care for her own household or even to oversee her servants: she preferred to live in a hotel and have more time and convenience for her idle mischiefs.
But RoBards mused dismally that his home had gone to wrack and ruin first, and that the hotel was his only refuge.