CHAPTER XV
Thesumptuousness of the Astor House only emphasized RoBards’ exile. From his window he would look down upon the seething throngs along Broadway, the tall beavers of the men and the poke bonnets of the women bobbing along as on a stream.
He would seek escape from solitude overlooking the multitude by retreating to the inner court and the fountain flaunting its crystal plumes in the turfed garden. But there was that quadrangle of many-windowed walls about him, and he felt Argus eyes upon him everywhere. Behind every curtain somebody seemed to be watching him. The expense of the luxurious hotel was heavy—a dollar a day it cost him, but he could not face boarding-house inquisitiveness.
In his office he would sit and brood across his pine table with its green baize cover, and stare at the pine boxes that held his books and the files of his cases tied with red tape. He would dip his quill into the inkstand of gray stone and make careless scratches on the paper before him. When he looked at them afterward they made him wonder if he were going mad. These crazy designs would serve as evidence for his commitment to any asylum.
On the margins of his briefs he would wake to find that he had been making crude contours of Patty’s scoop hat, her big eyes, or the nape of her neck. He would blot her out in a fury of rage, and attack his work.
The case of Jessamine vs. the City of New York was still hanging fire. Many of the claims of people who were forced to sell their lands for the aqueduct were still unsettled though their farms were covered with stone and trenched with ditches.
Yet now RoBards felt that the city had its justice. He had fought for the country and the country had betrayed him. Vile wickedness had found shelter and prosperity in the gentlest seclusions.
It was a mockery that he should be the counsel for old Jessamine. What did he owe the dotard except hatred for bringing into the world so pretty a perjurer? The father had made Tuliptree Farm almost untenable by his whimpering stupidity and the daughter had driven him into exile by her ruthless frivolity.
From his law office and his hotel RoBards would flee to a club. He had joined the fashionable Union Club just formed, but the members always asked him about his wife, and he had to speak of her with affection and respect.
The affection was still in his heart, but the respect—he marveled at his ability to adore one whom he despised, to hang his whole life on the broken reed of a little woman’s wavering fancy.
He frequented the theatre but he found discomfort there, since almost all the stories dealt with tragic or comic flirtations. He liked to go to the Bowery Theatre, but it was always burning down. Mary Taylor, “Our Mary” as they called her, puzzled him because she had a reputation for private morality and yet she was a convincing actress of spicy rôles. Patty was not an actress at all—she was positively imbecile in the drawing-room plays she had taken part in; yet her private life proved that her home was but a stage to her. Behind the private life of people there was so often another private life. And he had never been admitted until now to the green room of his own domestic theatre. Patty was a convincing actress of Innocence.
Moods of retaliation were frequent. There were opportunities enough. It amazed him now that he was alone in the city to see how many chances were offered him to make some other husband a fool. Young girls of fifteen or sixteen, who had not yet been married, or were only betrothed, dazed him by the black wisdom in their eyes. They scamperedand made pretenses of terror before him like kittens or puppies begging him to pursue them.
Others were to be had of a more public character. It was estimated that there were ten thousand downright wicked women in the town. The streets at night were so crowded with them that innocent young girls, poor seamstresses or polite damsels whom some emergency forced to be abroad, were not only ogled and bespoken, but sometimes seized and kissed by the loiterers.
The haunts of evil were well known, some of them foul dens, but others mansions. Yet the very sense that Patty had absolved him of obligation to her; that she herself had severed their contract, annulled the temptation. What excitement could he find it taking sneakingly what nobody could prevent his taking openly?
Besides, as a lawyer he knew that the traps of blackmail lay all about the town—springes to catch woodcocks. The heads of many families were paying perennial taxes on such indiscretions. He knew of one banker who had been mulcted of thirty thousand dollars just because he chanced to be in the house where Helen Jewett was murdered. The trial of the young clerk charged with the crime was enormously exploited by the noisy newspapers.
That clerk was ruined for life, and he might well have wished that he had been employed by Mr. Tappan, the abolitionist silk merchant who compelled each of his clerks to sign a pledge never to visit a theatre or make acquaintance with actor, actress, or other person of evil life, never to be out of his boarding house after ten o’clock at night, never to miss the two prayer meetings a week, or the two Sunday services, or fail to report of a Monday morning the church, the preacher, and the text of the day before.
A final check upon any recklessness in RoBards’ lonely humors was the feeling that if he also sinned he would be robbed of his precious indignation against Patty. He was no prig, no prude. He had lived. But just now the one food of his soul was the sense of being cruelly wronged. It was gall, but it sustained him somehow.
In the eyes of the law a husband’s infidelity was almost negligible, but RoBards felt that if he were to break his vows he would acquit Patty of blame for being false to hers. There were families in town, according to gossip-mongers and the gossip papers, where husband and wife were mutually and commonly disloyal. But he could think of nothing more hideous than such households.
He was Saint Anthony in a lonely cavern, but only one devil tried his soul and that was the bewitching spirit of his pretty wife. Patty drifted through his dreams like a wind-driven moth. She poised and flitted and opened her arms like a moth’s wings. And it seemed impossible that he should long resist her.
One morning he read in theHerald(whose editor Mr. Bennett had recently had a knockdown fight with General Webb of theCourier) a statement that Mr. Henry Chalender had recovered from his wound and was once more active in the completion of his section of the aqueduct. TheHeraldadded that this news would give relief and pleasure to the numberless admirers of the popular idol.
This paragraph filled RoBards with mixed emotions. During his long indecision, his Hamlet-like soliloquies and postponements, nature had healed the wound in Chalender’s flesh, and, though he would not admit it, had nearly healed the wound in RoBards’ soul.
There was a relief of tension at least. The world was going on. Chalender was well and busy—perhaps he was renewing his amour with Patty. Perhaps, deserted and lonely, she would yield again. That would be a double damnation. Anyone might sin and recover, but to slip back again was to be lost forever.
Yet who was to uphold her in the hour of weakness? Who was to drive the wolf away from the ewe?
Insidiously the temptations RoBards had denounced as complacency, servility, wanton desire took on now the aspect of duty. It was his duty to go home and take up wedlock again, to save the little silly beauty he had married from becoming a monster of iniquity.
Now that his house was freed of the intruder, homesickness came over him like a fever. He yearned for the hills of Westchester, those earthen breakers foaming with trees, and carrying on their crests houses like ships anchored on waves that never moved.
His long sojourn in New York began to attract open comment, particularly as the heat was so vicious that it looked curious for anyone to remain who could get out. There was nobody in town now but nobodies.
What excuse had he to linger? He had to rise and go back. He had not slain Chalender. This abstention in itself had amounted to an acquittal. If he were not going to punish Chalender, why should he punish himself? If his aim were to escape gossip, why encourage it?
He went home. Patty was in the yard playing a game with the children. They seemed to have grown amazingly since he left. They ran to him screaming welcome. It was bliss to feel their warm hands clutching him.
He could see that Patty was afraid to move either toward him or away. She had never written to him, but he had felt that this was meekness rather than neglect. She waited now struggling between a cry of joy and a fit of tears.
He pretended that it was for the children’s sake that he called out:
“Hello, Patty!”
“Hello, David!” she murmured. Suddenly her eyes were gleaming with tears.