CHAPTER XL
Whenhis term as judge ended, RoBards declined to try for re-election, and returned to the practice of law.
Once more the Croton River brought him clients—but also a civil war with his son Keith. This was a sore hurt to RoBards’ heart, for he and the boy had been mysteriously drawn together years before, and he had found such sympathy and such loyalty in Keith’s devotion, that he had counted upon him as a future partner in his legal career.
The water lust of New York was insatiable. As fast as new supplies were found they were outgrown. And the more or less anonymous and gloryless lovers of the city had always to keep a generation ahead of its growth.
The vice of water had led to the use of an average of seventy-eight gallons a day by each inhabitant. Every Saturday the reservoir at Forty-second Street was half drained. A new invention called the bathtub was coming into such favor especially of Saturdays that some legislatures made bathing without a doctor’s advice as illegal as drinking alcohol. The ever-reliable pulpit denounced such cleanliness as next to ungodliness: attention to the wicked body was indecent.
But already the need was urgent for a new reservoir. Another lake must be established within the city. The Croton Department had been authorized to acquire land. After much debate a thousand lots held by a hundred owners were doomed to be submerged. They lay in a sunken tract in the heart of a region set apart for the new park—to be called Central because it was miles to the north of all access. Nearly eight million dollars were voted for the purchase and improvement of this wilderness. The project came in handy during the panic of 1857, when the poor grew sopeevish and riotous that the city was forced to distribute bread and provide jobs. Twelve hundred hungry citizens and a hundred horses were set to work leveling the Park.
But first the city had to battle with the landholders and many of them engaged RoBards as their counsel. There were many houses on the bed of the new lake, gardens and squatters’ cabins.
Keith protested against his father’s activity, and tried to convert him to the great principles of the city’s higher rights.
The young man was frankly ashamed of his parent. It was like having a grandfather who had been a Tory in the Revolution, or a Hartford secessionist in 1812.
Keith had graduated from Columbia well toward the bottom of his class; but he had a gift for leadership among the least studious students. He preferred hydraulics to classics, and sneered at the law.
He was aided and abetted in his ambitions by Harry Chalender, who continued to exert a malign influence over the home, though he never came near it any more, and Immy never mentioned his name. If she saw him she met him outside, under the cover of other engagements. Then one day Keith came home swaggering:
“I’ve got a position as an engineer with the Croton Department. Uncle Harry got it for me; took me to a firm of engineers and made them take me in.”
That pet name “uncle” angered RoBards almost as much as the deed. But he could not expose such feelings to his son, or thwart the boy’s future.
The theatre of Keith’s labors was the long channel of the Croton River. At first he had to tote surveying instruments and scramble over rough ground. But the aqueduct was to him one of the majestic wonders of the world. Patty was glad to move out early to Tuliptree Farm to be near him, though Immy hated the place, and not without reason.
Repairs were incessantly required in the masonry imprisoning the Croton, and one afternoon Keith came home to Tuliptree Farm worn out, to tell of a strange breach:
“Near Sing Sing—in the section of the aqueduct that Uncle Harry built—we found that a willow tree had sent one of its roots into the crown of the arch. In six months it had bored a hole twenty feet right through the solid stone.”
RoBards started up in his chair at this. The thought had thrust into his mind: What if the great tulip tree growing out there had done the like to the foundations of the house?
He could imagine the numberless invisible roots groping in the dark, deep soil and fumbling along the foundation stone, pushing an inquisitive finger into every cranny and burrowing with the persistent curiosity of that tree which made a net of roots about the skull of Major John André.
The high Tulip lost at once its dignity of guardianship. It became a vast devil fish, a myriapod slimily prying and squirming, with the house in its clutches.
It might even now be ready to swell and heave and overturn the house. The scavenger might be even now wrapping its arms about Jud Lasher’s corpse—slowly, patiently haling it forth to the light of day and the eyes of men.
There seemed to be an unrelenting conspiracy in the world to bury everything that man would preserve and expose everything that man would conceal. In RoBards’ own conscience there was a something burrowing and squirming, as if commanding him to disgorge the secret interred in his brain.
The secret was like a growth creeping, growing and bulging toward the surface and multiplying its pain with every hour of concealment. He wondered how long he could withhold the proclamation of his crime. He caught himself at long intervals just about to announce to any bystander:
“I have committed my own little murder in my day. I am human, too. I am not innocent because of any incapacity for crime. My respectable reputation is due to my discretion, not to any flaccidity of character.”
Months would go by with no onset of this publishing instinct. Then it would sweep over him like a vertigo.
Hearing Keith tell of the tender root that broke through the aqueduct, he understood how even stone and mortarmust eventually yield to the intolerable nagging of a weak thing that never rested.
He rose and with a laborious pretense of dawdling sauntered to the door, out and around the house to where the tulip tree stood. As if idly, he leaned against the trunk and studied the sprawl of the roots. Some of them were thicker than a young tree. They writhed and contorted the ground. Standing still like pythons petrified, they yet seemed to move with a speed the more dreadful for its persistence. Glaciers were not more leisurely, nor more resistless.
The roots dived into the earth, some of them bent upon reaching the foundation walls. They had but one instinct, the hunt for water, and nothing could check them but death.
Down the outside stairway of the cellar went RoBards and stumbling in the dark found the wall nearest the tree and passed his hands along it like a blind man.
His anxious fingers encountered tendrils pleached against the rough masonry. He made a light and found that the tulip tree was already within the walls. The roots were like worms covered with mould. On the cellar floor was a dust of old mortar, and bits of it slowly shoved out from between the chinks. Some of the dislodged mortar was no older than the night when he had lifted out stones and buried Jud Lasher somewhere inside there and smeared fresh mortar in the crevices.
Terrified by the peril of this secret inquiry of the far-delving roots, he went back to the outer air.
Either he must be surrendered to exposure or the tree must be executed. The life of such a tree if let alone was far beyond the human span. The strength of it was uncanny.
He stood a while, as motionless as the roots, charmed by their snaky spell. Then an idea came to his rescue. He called to Albeson, who was puttering about the yard in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’s with his collar off for comfort.
“See those roots,” said RoBards. “They’re going to tip the house over if we don’t kill them. Get your saw and ax and we’ll cut them off now.”
“No special hurry as I can see,” said Albeson.
“We’ll get it over with to-day.”
“In spite of its bein’ the Sabbath?” Albeson protested, making religion an excuse for laziness.
“The better the day the better the deed.”
Albeson condensed the Declaration of Independence into a grumbling dissent, then fetched the tools. All afternoon they worked, chopping, digging, sawing, until they had severed all the Briarean arms on the side next the house.
“Looks like we’ve killed the old tree,” Albeson groaned. “It’ll naturally bleed to death.”
“Better lose the tree than the house,” RoBards retorted.
“Wall, they’re both your’n to do with as you’re a mind to,” said Albeson, absolving himself of guilt and folly, as he went his way. RoBards paused at the front steps to look back at his gigantic quondam friend. It had been treasonably making ready to betray him. He did not love it any more. The house itself was changing from a sanctuary to a penitentiary. He could set it on fire easily, but the heat would only crack the foundation walls apart. He could not burn those stones.
He had justly sentenced the tree to a partial execution. If it perished, it had earned its fate.
It was beautiful, though. It stood lofty and shapely, the broad leaves shimmering in an afternoon zephyr. It had a frank and joyous life and he wondered if it would suffer much pain from the mayhem he had committed on it.
He had visited a slow death of torture upon the patriarch. Would it know that it was dying? Would it ache and struggle against its fate? He was as sorry for it now as a man is for an overpowered enemy; he was sorry he had been so harsh with it.
He thought of Immy as she had been when he revenged her upon Jud Lasher. What, after all, had been the profit of that murder? He had tried to shelter Immy from harm as if she were a sacred ark, death to touch. And now she was the reckless companion of Harry Chalender in hisrevels. He had guarded her ignorance as a kind of virginity, and now there was nothing that she did not know.
He had taken a life with his own hands, to spare her so much as one chance meeting with someone who might remind her of her lucklessness. And now she flouted him to his face and was so bored with his society that she devoted herself to a man whose name he could not hear without rancor.
Well, if she would only be patient a while longer, her father would find the means and the time to give her more attention. He would travel with her to far-off lands, where she would be so fascinated with new sights and new suitors that she would forget Chalender and find some young and noble lover worthy of the Immy that she should have been.
The next day as he stood on the porch, he was startled to hear her voice crying his name:
“Papa, papa!”
He paused, thinking it imagination, but he saw her coming to him in a swift-rolling carriage. At her side was Chalender with exultance in his smile.
The carriage whirled in at the open gate, and the moment the driver stopped it short, Chalender leaped out, helped Immy to alight, and ran with her to the steps.
And there the twain knelt in a laughing parody of homage, and Chalender—Chalender his arch enemy, his chief annoyance upon the earth—dared to mimic Immy’s word and exclaim:
“Papa!”
As RoBards’ eyes rolled in wonder, he caught sight of Patty at a window staring unseen. She vanished almost at once, as if she had fallen.
Before RoBards could frame a question, Immy was up and at him in a whirlwind. She had her arms about his neck and was crying:
“Papa dearest, Harry and I have just come across the border from Connecticut. We went over there and the funniest old justice of the peace you ever saw married us.And we’ve come home galloping to ask your blessing. And I’ve come to pack some of my things.”
The habit of indulgence answered for RoBards before his slow wrath could muster its forces. He stammered idiotically:
“Married! Well, what do you think of that? Well, well! This is a surprise but—well—bless you, anyway.”
And his hands went up over them priestly.