CHAPTER XLVI
Therewas acrid humiliation for RoBards in his inability to take a soldier’s part in the field. He did what he could on the countless boards, but he longed to be young, to ride a snorting charger along a line of bayonets, or to shoulder a rifle and jog over the dusty roads to glory in the flaming red breeches and short jacket of a Zouave. The very children were little Zouaves now in tiny uniforms with tiny weapons. One could not walk the streets without breaking through these infantile armies.
RoBards had no military training and even the increasingly liberal standards of the recruiting boards would not let him through to add one more to the vast army that camp fever and dysentery sent to futile graves. Most of all, he dared not leave Patty alone with no man to comfort her.
Yet Harry Chalender, who was no younger than he and led the most irregular of lives, managed to do the handsome thing—as always. Since California, with no railroads to link it to the East, could hardly send many troops to the war, Chalender left the Golden State, sped around the Horn, and appeared in New York.
The first that RoBards knew of this was the flourish in the newspapers: “With characteristic gallantry and public spirit, Captain Harry Chalender has abandoned his interests in California and come all the way to his native heath to lay his untarnished sword on the altar of his country.”
RoBards hated himself for hating Chalender for being so honorable a man; but he could not oust from his heart the bitter thought that Chalender was rendering him one more insult.
Chalender had saved his life, dishonored his wife, married his daughter, surpassed him in every way as a captor of thehearts of women and men, as a breaker of the laws of God and man, and as a public servant and a patriot. And RoBards was bound and gagged and could not protest or denounce except in his own dark heart.
There was scant salve for his hurts in the low groan of wrath from Patty as she flung the paper to the floor:
“If he dares come to our house! if he dares!”
But Chalender with that almost infallible intuition of his for escaping bad quarters-of-an-hour, sent merely a gay little note:
“Dear Papa and Mamma-in-law:“It grieves me deeply to be unable to call and pay you both my filial devoirs, but I am to be shipped South at once for cannon-fodder.“Our dear Immy sent you all sorts of loving messages, which I beg you to imagine. She is well and beautiful and would be the belle of San Francisco if she were not so devoted a mother to the three perfect grandchildren, whom you have never seen.“‘When this cruel war is over,’ as the song goes, I shall hope to come tramp-tramp-tramping to your doorstep. Until then and always be assured, dear Patty and David (if I may be so familiar) that I amThe most devoted of“Sons-in-law.”
“Dear Papa and Mamma-in-law:
“It grieves me deeply to be unable to call and pay you both my filial devoirs, but I am to be shipped South at once for cannon-fodder.
“Our dear Immy sent you all sorts of loving messages, which I beg you to imagine. She is well and beautiful and would be the belle of San Francisco if she were not so devoted a mother to the three perfect grandchildren, whom you have never seen.
“‘When this cruel war is over,’ as the song goes, I shall hope to come tramp-tramp-tramping to your doorstep. Until then and always be assured, dear Patty and David (if I may be so familiar) that I am
The most devoted of“Sons-in-law.”
The next day’s paper told of his departure as the lieutenant colonel of a new regiment. Before the regiment reached the front, he was its colonel owing to the sudden demise of his superior. People died to get out of his way!
The next they knew he was shot in the throat as he led a magnificent and successful charge. He drew a dirty handkerchief through the red tunnel, remounted, and galloped to the head of his line and hurdled the Confederate breastworks as if he were fox-hunting again in Westchester. As soon as possible he was brevetted a brigadier and with uncanny speed a major general of Volunteers. His men adored him and while other generals rose and fell in a sickening reiteration of disasters, his own command always shone in victory or plucked a laurel from defeat.
His nickname was “Our Harry” or “Harry of Navarre,” but patriot as RoBards was, he could find no comfort in the triumphs that led the neighbors to exclaim:
“By gollies, it must make you proud to be the father-in-law of such a military genius! It’s a shame Old Abe don’t give him a chance like he gives those blundering butchers he picks out.”
Poor RoBards had to agree publicly that he was proud of New York’s pet, but Patty would not stoop to such hypocrisy. She would snap at Chalender’s partisans:
“Surely you can’t expect a good word for the wretch from his mother-in-law.”
To escape from the irony of these eulogies, Patty and David went up to Tuliptree, though it kept them longer from the newspapers, and the daily directories of killed, wounded, and missing which made almost their only reading.
One day Patty came across a paragraph in one of the Westchester papers that called Lincoln a “tyrant,” and a “buffoon,” and the Abolitionists “cowards,” in terms hardly to be expected north of Mason and Dixon’s line. She read it to RoBards:
“Among the most recent victims of Abe Lincoln’s iniquitous war is Corporal Gideon Lasher of Kensico, who was murdered at Elmira while arresting a deserter. He had been previously wounded at Brandy Station during the advance from Rappahannock.”
Patty looked up from the paper and said:
“Gideon Lasher! Could he have been a brother of the Lasher who——”
RoBards did not start. He nodded idly. It all seemed so far off, so long ago as hardly to concern themselves at all. They had almost forgotten what the word Lasher meant to them.
And when on his way to the railroad station he met Mrs. Lasher he found her so old and worn-witted that she, too, had almost no nerves to feel sorrow with. She almost giggled:
“They tell me my boy Gideon’s dead. Yes, sir; he wentand got himself kilt, up yonder in Elmiry. Funny place to get kilt, way up north yonder! I can’t say as I’ve had much luck with my fambly. Jud—you remember him likely, sir?—he never came home from sea. Went a-whalin’, and ne’er a word or sign of him sence I don’t know when. My daughter Aletty—she’s in town up to some mischief, I s’pose. Well, it’s the way of the world, ain’t it? Them as has, gets; them as hasn’t, doosn’t.”
War or no war, RoBards found cases to try. There was a mysterious prosperity hard to account for in many businesses. Cases poured in on RoBards. Fees were high. However the tide of battle rolled in the South, the trades of life went on somehow, and petty quarrels over lands and wills and patent rights were fought out as earnestly as ever.
One evening as he set out for the Kensico train, he bought a paper, and found the name he had been looking for every day in the list.
He was benumbed by the blow and all the way home sat with his elbows on his knees and sagged like a bankrupt in the courts. He could hardly understand what it would mean if his namesake boy should no more be visible upon the earth. He hardly dared to grieve as a father must mourn for a lost son; for he thought of Patty and the necessity for carrying to her the news.
In his heart there was always a great wish that he might never come to her without bringing some gift of flowers, jewels, or at least good cheer. And he was always bringing her sorrow!
But that was marriage and it could not be escaped. He must try to be a little glad that evil tidings should be carried to her by one who loved her and would share her grief.
She was scraping lint for wounded soldiers when he came in as usual with the paper that he always brought home from his office. But there was a look about him, about the way he held the paper that shook her as if the house were a tocsin smitten with a sledge. Their colloquy was brief:
“Patty.”
“Has it come?”
“Yes, honey!”
“Keith?”
“No.”
“Junior!”
“Yes, sweet.”
“Wounded?”
“Worse.”
“Oh, not dead?”
“Missing.”
This was the bitterest word to hear, for it carried suspense and dreadful possibilities. Was he a captive to suffer the horrors of Southern prison camps where the jailers starved with the prisoners? Was he lying wounded and perishing slowly under some bush in the enemy’s lines, in the rain, at the mercy of ants, flies, wounds uncleansed? Was he shivering with mortal cold and no mother to draw a blanket over him? Was he among the unidentified slain? Had he run away in a disease of cowardice? Would he come home crippled? Insane?
Days and days dragged by before the papers answered their questions. Then it helped a little to know that, since their boy had died, he had died quickly, and had brought honor to the family in the manner of his taking-off.
In a series of bloody charges upon a line of high breastworks on a hilltop, three standard bearers had been shot down—each snatching the flag before it struck the earth. The dead were piled up with the writhing wounded and they were abandoned by the Union troops as they fell back and gave up the costly effort.
Under a flag of truce they pleaded for the privilege of burying their dead. Deep in the wall of Northern bodies, they found a boy with his blouse buttoned tight about him. A glimpse of bright color caught the eye of the burial party and his story told itself. Evidently Junior had been shot down with the flag he had tried to plant on the barrier. As he writhed and choked he had wrenched his bayonet free and sawed the colors from the staff, wrapped them around his body and buttoned his blouse over them to save themfrom falling into the hands of the enemy. Death found him with his thumb and finger frozen on the last button.
The hideousness of the boy’s last hour was somehow transformed to beauty by the thought of him swathed in the star-dotted blue and the red and white stripes. He had been thinking solemnly, frantically all his last moments of a flag.
Patty was not so jealous of this mystic rival as she might have been if he had been found with some girl’s picture in his hand. For the first time, indeed, the flag became holy to her. In her heart, her son’s blood sanctified it, rather than it him.
Her sorrow was hushed in awe for a long while and her eyes were uplifted in exaltation that was almost exultant. Then a wall of tears blinded them and she saw the glory no more, only the pity of her shattered boy unmothered in his death-agony.
She clutched her breasts with both hands, clawed them as if they suffered with her for the lips they had given suck to, the lips that they and she would never feel again.
She put on the deepest mourning, drew thick veils about her, and moved like a moving cenotaph draped in black. She became one of the increasing procession of mothers who had given their sons to the nation. They had pride, but they paid for it.
She watched other mothers’ sons hurrying forth under the battle standards slanting ahead and the flags writhing backward, and it did not comfort other women to see her; for she was a witness of the charnel their children entered.
The call for three months’ volunteers had been amended to a larger demand for two years’ enlistments, and then to a larger still for three years. The failure of the North to uphold the Union bred a growing distrust of its ability to succeed, a doubt of its right to succeed, a hatred for its leaders.
And always there was the terror that the next list would carry the name of the other son she had lent to the nation with no security for his return. She had Keith’s wife forcompanion, and they multiplied each other’s fears. Patty had the excuse of knowing what havoc there was in war. Frances had the excuse of her condition. She was carrying a child for some future war to take away from her.
When Keith’s baby was born, Keith was in the travail of a battle and the baby was several weeks old before the news reached him that the wife he had not seen for nearly a year had given him a son that he might never see.
Patty made the usual grandmother, fighting vainly for ideas that her daughter-in-law waived as old-fashioned, just as Patty had driven her mother frantic with her once new-fangled notions.
She felt as young as she had ever felt and it bewildered her to be treated as of an ancient generation. She resented the reverence due her years a little more bitterly than the contempt.
“I won’t be revered!” she stormed. “Call me a fool or a numskull; fight me, but don’t you dare treat me with deference as if I were an old ninny!”
RoBards understood her mood, for he felt once more the young husband as he leaned over his grandson’s cradle and bandied foolish baby words with an infant that retorted in yowls and kicks or with gurglings as inarticulate as a brook’s, and as irresistible.
One day at his office where he sat behind a redoubt of lawbooks, he glanced up to smile at a photograph of his grandchild, and caught the troubled look of a young man who was reading law in his office.
“Well?” he said.
“Begging your pardon, sir, there’s a young woman outside wants to see you. Says her name is—her name is—is——”
RoBards snapped at him:
“Speak up, man. What’s the terrible name?”
“Mrs. David RoBards, Junior.”
This word “Junior” wrenched an old wound open and RoBards whipped off his glasses shot with instant tears. He snarled less in anger than in anguish:
“What are you saying? My poor boy had no wife.”
“So I told her, sir. But she insists he did, and—and—well, hadn’t you better see her? I can’t seem to get rid of her.”
RoBards rose with difficulty and stalked forth. Leaning against the rail in the outer office was a shabby mother with a babe at her frugal breast. RoBards spread his elbows wide to brace himself in the door while he fumbled for his distance glasses.
They brought to his eyes with abrupt sharpness the wistful face of Aletta Lasher, as he had seen her perched on the rock in the Tarn of Mystery that day, when she bemoaned her helpless love for his son.
She came to him now, slowly, sidlingly, the babe held backward a little as if to keep it from any attack he might make. To verify his wild guesses, he said:
“My clerk must have misunderstood your name. May I ask it?”
“I am Mrs. David RoBards—Junior. This is our little girl.”
“But Junior—my boy Junior—is——”
“I am his widow, sir.”
“But, my dear child, you—he——”
“We were married secretly the day before he marched with his regiment. He was afraid to tell you. I was afraid to come to you, sir, even when I heard of his beautiful death. You had sorrow enough, sir; and so had I. I shouldn’t be troubling you now, but I don’t seem to get strong enough to go back to work, and the baby—the baby—she doesn’t belong to me only. You might not forgive me if I let her die.”
The baby laughed at such a silly word, flung up two pink fists and two doll’s feet in knit socks, and said something in a language that has never been written but has never been misunderstood. The purport of its meaning brought RoBards rushing to the presence. He looked down past the sad eyes of Aletta into the sparkling little eyes of all mischief. The finger he touched the tiny hand with wasmoistly, warmly clasped by fingers hardly more than grape tendrils.
“Come in,” said RoBards. “Let me carry the baby.”
He motioned Aletta to the chair where never so strange a client had sat, and questioned her across the elusive armload that pulled his neckscarf awry and beat him about the face as with young tulip leaves.
Aletta had brought along her certificate of marriage to prove her honesty and she told a story of hardships that added the final confirmation, and filled RoBards with respect for her. His new-found daughter had been as brave as his new-lost son.
But he dared not commit himself. He took the half-starved girl in his carriage—he kept a carriage now—to St. John’s Park to consult his partner in this grandchild.
He left Aletta in the parlor and went up the stairs with the baby. Sometimes when he had a woman for a client he found it best to put her on the witness stand and let her plead her own case to the jury. So he took the baby along now.
When he entered Patty’s room she was sitting rocking by the window gazing into nowhere. Her hands held a picture of Junior, and as RoBards paused he could see the few slow tears of weary grief drip and strike.
He could find no first word. It was the baby’s sudden gurgle that startled Patty. She turned, stared, rose, came to him, smiling helplessly at the wriggling giggler. Up went two handlets to buffet her cheeks as she bent to stare. She took the creature from her husband’s arms, lifting it till its cheek was silken against her own. For a little while she basked in contentment unvexed by curiosity, before she asked:
“And whose baby is this?”
“Yours,” said RoBards.
“My baby? What do you mean? Who was it came in with you?”
“Your daughter and mine—a new one we didn’t know wehad. Honey, this is the little daughter of our blessed boy Junior.”
While RoBards was resolving her daze into an understanding of the situation, the child was pleading away her resentment, her suspicion. Before she knew the truth she was eager to have it true. She needed just that sort of toy to play with to save her from going mad with age and uselessness.
The hungry baby beat at her dry bosom in vain, but shook her heart with its need.
She felt too weak to trust herself to the stairway and asked RoBards to bring Aletta up. She waited in that great terror in which a mother meets a strange daughter-in-law. But when the girl came into the room, so meek, so pale, so expectant of one more flogging from life, Patty, who would have met defiance with defiance, set forth a hand of welcome and drawing the girl close, kissed her.
There were many embarrassing things to say on either side, but before the parley could begin, the baby intervened with the primeval cry for milk. There was no talking in such uproar and Aletta, noting that RoBards was too stupid to retreat, turned her back on him and, laying the child across her left arm, soon had its anger changed to the first primeval sound of approval.
After a while of pride at the vigorous notes of smacking and gulping, Patty murmured:
“What’s its name?”
“She has no name but Baby,” Aletta sighed. “I have been so alone, with nobody to advise me that I—I didn’t know what to call her.”
Patty hardly hesitated before she said with a hypocritical modesty:
“I don’t think much of ‘Patty’ for a name but Mist’ RoBards used to like it.”
Aletta gasped: “Oh, would you let my baby have your name?”
“Your baby is too beautiful for a name I’ve worn out. But how would you like to call her by the name that wasmy last name when I was a girl like you? ‘Jessamine’ is right pretty, don’t you think?”
“Jessamine RoBards!” Aletta sighed in a luxury, and added with a quaint bookishness. “It’s another term for Jasmine. I had a little jasmine plant at home. Oh, but it was sweet, and fragrant! My poor mother always said it was her favorite perfume. She used almost to smile when it was in bloom.”
This mention of her mother, their neighbor once so despised, since so dreaded, gave Patty and David a moment’s pause. But only a moment’s, for the little pink link that united the Lasher with the RoBards stock, as if accepting the name she had waited for so long, began to crow and wave her arms in all the satisfaction of being replete with the warm white wine of a young mother’s breast.
And the grandparents embraced each other and their new daughter as they meditated on the supine quadruped that filled their lonely house with unsyllabled laughter.
When later Mrs. Keith RoBards came round to call with her richly bedizened and bediapered son, Patty had such important news to tell her, that Keith Junior’s nose would have been put out of joint if it had been long enough to have a joint.
In gratifying contrast with Frances’ autocratic motherhood, Aletta was so ignorant, or tactfully pretended to be, and so used to being bullied, so glad of any kindness, that Patty took entire command of the fresh jasmine-flower and was less a grandmother than a miraculously youthful mother—for a while, for a respite—while before the world renewed the assaults it never ceases long to make upon the happiness of every one of its prisoners.