CHAPTER XLII
Thenewspapers made a pretty story of the Chalender-RoBards marital alliance. For once, they overlooked a horror and gave space to romance. The retreat in Westchester had saved the family once more.
The editors praised Captain Chalender as “our popular and public-spirited citizen, a soldier and a leader in civic affairs, whose large interests compel his immediate return to the Golden Gate, whither he takes as his bride, Miss Imogene RoBards, one of the belles of the season.” They even had a word for ex-Judge David RoBards, “the well-known jurist,” and continued, “The bride’s mother in her day was one of the beauties of her generation and a toast of the town in the gallant old times that are now no more.”
RoBards brought the paper home to the farm from town to show Patty. He thought only of the comfort she should take from the glossing over of the wretched misalliance. But Patty was numb to the fear of publication.
As soon as she spoke he wondered that he had lacked the common intelligence to spare her the cruelest of wounds. She read the brief notice and sighed:
“‘The bride’s mother—in her day—was!’”
She dropped the paper and smiled miserably: “They’ve got me in the obituary column already.”
She seemed to die then.
He understood, and falling on his knees by the rocking chair, caught her as she drooped forward across his shoulder. She had read her death-warrant. Her head rolled as heavily as if the ax had already fallen on the so kissable nape of her gracile neck.
What could RoBards say? He could and did protest that she was more beautiful than ever, that eternal youth washers, that she was his greatest pride, that she had all his love, all his love.
But he protested too much. He could not stay the scythe of Time. He thought of old, old phrases, ancient confessions of the dread meekness of humanity before the ineluctable dragon, the glutton of charm and fleetness and vivacity—Tempus edax rerum—tarda vetustas—the swift fugacity of everything, youth that flows out of the veins as sand from a shattered hourglass.
He clung to Patty, but less and less as one who might rescue her from drowning, more as one who would prove his love by drowning with her.
He could give her no courage in a battle already irretrievably lost. Rather, he took panic from her and began to understand that, while he had no beauty to lose, he had already caught up with his future, and was beginning to leave it behind, as a man who walks toward the west all day overtakes his diminishing shadow and then leaves it lengthening aft.
Youth had gone out of the house, too, now that Immy had taken with her not only her trunks and her bright gowns and her jingling trinkets, but her laughter, as well, her mischief, her audacities, her headlong genius for peril.
But they rarely spoke of her, for her name meant not only Chalender, but all the dangers of the sea, the infamous storms of the antarctic waters, the long climb up the infinitely distant Pacific Ocean to the equator and far, far beyond; and then all the fabulous hazards of the San Francisco frontier. Between that new city and New York lay the oceanic continent. Railroads and wagon-trains were pushing through the vast wastes where the buffaloes swept in tides and the Indians lurked, but letters were forever in coming, and Immy’s parents could know nothing of her fate for half a year; if, indeed, they ever heard of her again.
There were the other children. Keith had turned twenty, a young Viking indifferent to girls except as clowns to amuse him—which gave Patty almost her only comfort in the world.
But David the younger, whom they called Junior, wascoming along to the last of his teens, and he was as full of romance as an Orlando. He did not stick poems on trees, but he carved linked initials in the bark of the tulip trees and quickly gouged them out before his father could discover what they were.
When RoBards reminded him that he was endangering the life of some of the slenderer trees, he groaned, “All right, Dad; I’ll quit,” and walked away as cheerful as Job.
His father and mother eyed him from a distance anxiously, and exchanged glances of alarm over his sagging head at table, but they could not imagine what siren had bewitched him; and he would not answer their questions. They made light remarks about love, forgetting how important it had been to them in their equal age, and how important it was to them now.
But Junior rebuked them with eyes as old as those of Prometheus chained to a cliff and torn by a vulture’s hooked beak.
The unsolved puzzle of David’s infatuation began to harass his parents and frighten them, for he was wasting away to a melancholia.
They tried to keep track of him, to see which one of which neighbor’s daughters he was frequenting. But he always managed to elude them. He would lie coiled in a chair somewhere reading Walter Scott or Dickens or Byron, or the morbid Poe, until they gave over watching him. When they looked for him he had vanished.
They decided to take him back to the city, in spite of the heat of the late September and the charm of the golden countryside. The announcement staggered the boy. It dazed them to see one so young so capable of despair—as if any age were immune to anguish; as if a little pitcher could not overflow as well as a large.
One afternoon he got away from the house with a fox’s craftiness. RoBards missed him immediately and, seizing his hat, set out in pursuit, knowing that Junior had but little start of him.
He hurried to the gate and looked up and down the road.In neither direction was anyone visible. What other way could the boy have gone? The view before him was wide and clear; the hill fell away in such broad billows that the eye commanded more of the scene than a man could have covered, running.
The only region left to explore was above and back of the house. RoBards had avoided that realm for years. Up there was the Tarn of Mystery, where he had almost killed Jud Lasher; up there were the thickets where he had hunted him down and ended him.
There was no pleasure in invading that accursed demesne of black memories, but his frenzy for an answer to the riddle of his son outweighed his reluctance.
He turned and marched grimly up the slope. It seemed to have steepened since he ran up it so fleetly years ago. His breath was shorter—excitement it was, no doubt, that made his heart beat faster and more heavily.
Time had wrought upon everything up here. Bushes were clumps of shrubbery; saplings were trees; trees were columns upholding the sky. The very boulders seemed to have enlarged with age. The dead logs must have grown higher and fatter. At the top he had to pause and sink to the ground till his heart slowed up. Sitting here he could see afar. The autumnal winds had torn away foliage like curtains pulled down, discovering a wide expanse of the surging Westchester scene.
The last time he was up here there was hardly another home to be descried except his own roof and the distant hut of the Lashers. Now there were gables and chimneys and gateways everywhere. A few of the houses were mansions, snowy colonial residences with high white pillars reminiscent of Greek temples.
The Lasher rookery alone was not new. It was older, more ramshackle than ever, though he had noted as he passed the growth of the little brats to big brats.
The girl Molly who had run off to the city and gone to the bad, had faded into oblivion after a few noisy struggles, like one drowning in the sea.
RoBards had visited the Five Points occasionally, but he had seen nothing of Molly. Perhaps it had grown too respectable for her, since the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Church had ventured into the human sewer and reformed the first few sots, then called in Reverend Mr. Luckey, the former chaplain of Sing Sing. Under this explorer of the underworld they had established themselves in a room in the Old Brewery itself. Then they had bought the foul den, cleared out its three hundred human maggots, and torn the whole thing down, erecting in its place a clean new building devoted to reformation of the prematurely damned.
And now a Children’s Aid Society was established there, teaching honest industry and proffering opportunity for decency to the thousands of boys and girls who had hitherto slept on cellar steps, or in barrels or in dens of vice and earned what little food they got by picking pockets, garroting drunkards, burglary, beggary, rag and bone hunting, peddling matches, apples, flowers, newspapers, or their own dirty bodies.
Girls could now be something better than crossing-sweepers or twelve-year-old harlots and dance-hall lice.
RoBards had often been called to the Five Points to meetings of this and other societies. There was horror enough there yet, but it was not unmitigated. There was a manhole open above the sewer and those who wanted to were aided to climb out into the air.
He had often looked for Molly Lasher among the girls going out to decent tasks or returning from them. He had watched for her among the throngs still plying the most venerable of trades. But her pretty, vicious smile was no longer to be seen. Perhaps she had been murdered, or sent to a prison; perhaps she had gone round the Horn to California, perhaps she had gone West overland. She might be running a saloon somewhere west, or conducting a salon as the pretentious wife of a bonanza king.
Another Lasher girl had grown up to replace her in the hut, and perhaps later to trace her footsteps on the streets ofNew York. RoBards had seen her now and then as he drove past to the station.
Usually she leaned across the gate and dreamed wide-eyed of something that made her wistful. Either she was paler than the other Lasher young, or washed oftener, for there was a cleanliness about her skin and in the clothes she was pushing through.
Thinking of her now, he was surprised to find that he remembered a gradual change in her as she lolled across the gate. She had grown higher, the arms that fell listlessly had lengthened and rounded; and so had her once hollow chest, and her eyes and her mouth.
The last time he saw her her hair was combed. There might have been a ribbon around it somewhere. He had an idea that her name was Aletta.
Her mother had mentioned some such name to him once when she had checked him to whine:
“No word of my boy Jud yet. After all these years wouldn’t he ’a’ wrote me a line, wouldn’t he ’a’ got home somehow in all these years, don’t you think—if he was still alive?”
He did not like to consider old Mrs. Lasher and he rose to continue his search for his own son, also lost in a sea of mystery, gone a-whaling after some strange love.
RoBards avoided the Tarn of Mystery, so gayly named and so justified in the event. But he saw no sign of Junior elsewhere, so he drew near the loathsome spot, circling about it and coming closer reluctantly.
The old rail fence was almost rotted away, but he did not need to climb across it, for there was a path that led to an opening where two of the upper rails had been laid on the ground.
The great boulders were as before but less mysterious, if one could believe a recent theory that they had been dropped there by a universal glacier that had once covered all this part of the world with an ocean of ice, whose slowly ebbing tide would flow back again perhaps and cover all of man’s ambitious monuments.
He squeezed through a strait Cyclopean gateway of rock, and the little green pond lay before him, still thick with submerged grasses, still oversprinkled with curled autumn leaves.
He gazed at the spot where he had beaten Jud Lasher and used him as a flail. He quivered with a nausea for that whole chapter in his life, and was glad that his swinging glance discovered no other human presence.
But as he was about to back through the narrow crevice between the stones, he heard a voice floating above his head in the air, a girl’s voice, as liquid and as sweetly murmurous as the voice should have been of the nymph that should have haunted this viridescent pool.
It was very mournful and it said:
“All night I was reading the book you lent me.The Lady of the Lake!Such a long beautiful story, and so sad! What a sad thing love is, and how old! So many of us poor lovers have loved in vain—haven’t we, honey? They’ll tell us that we’re too young to love, but oh, darling, darling, I feel so old, so old! And how can I ever stand the years that must go by before we can be together? You’ve got to finish your college and make your way. I’d rather die than hinder you from being the great man you’re going to be. And I can’t help you. I’m so poor and friendless and ignorant.
“But when I think, when I think of the years, the years, the years, I want to lie down in that water there and fold my hands and drown. For even when you are rich and famous—what would your father and mother say if you told them that you wanted to marry me? Your father is rich and famous and everybody respects him. I’m just one of the Lashers.”
The boy had the RoBards talent for silence and he had listened as quietly as his hidden father. Even now he only mumbled:
“I’ll marry you or nobody, Aletta. This is a free country!”
An eerie laugh broke from the girl’s throat as she cried:
“A free country! How could there be a free country anywhere? Least of all here?”
RoBards was grimly glad that she had sanity enough to understand this truth at least and the wildness of his boy’s infatuation. To marry the impossible sister of the unspeakable wretch that his own father had put to death—that would be impossible; if anything were.
He risked discovery and leaned out to have a look at this weird creature whose voice had woven such unholy power about his son.
She was perched aloft on a little peak of rock a few yards away. The boy lay along the slope of it, clinging to her right hand. There was reverence in his manner. She was sacred to him and he to her in the religion of young love. Her left hand held the book she had spoken of. It rested like a harp on the wave of her thigh. Her feet were bare, though the air was cold; they were shapely feet. She was shapely everywhere, and there was a primeval grace, a loveliness about her every outline. Womanhood was disclosing its growth and its spell, straining at the scant and shabby dress and enveloping her in beauty like a drapery of mist.
She might have been indeed the nymph of this pool, luring a faun to his death in a fatal element. But to RoBards the life-fearing little pauper had the terrifying power of a Lorelei throned on a storm-beaten cliff and chanting his hapless son to shipwreck.
He wondered if the Lashers were not making ready to wreak upon his boy a roundabout revenge for what he had done to theirs.
He was mortally afraid of this ragged girl. And there was nothing to tell him of the tremendous forces that were gathering to overwhelm this calamity with a greater.