CHAPTER XXV
Thenext morning RoBards was awake very betimes, driven from needed sleep by an onslaught of terrors. A thousand little fiends assailed him and bound him like Gulliver held fast with threads. RoBards would never take anxiety lying down, but rose and fought it. So now he broke the withes of remorse and prophetic frenzy and met the future with defiance.
He took up the morning paper to make sure that yesterday’s pageant had actually occurred. He glanced hastily through the pages first to see if his own history had transpired. He half expected to read some clamorous announcement of a mysterious body found in an old house in Westchester near Robbin’s Mills.
There was no mention of such a discovery, and he read of the immortal yesterday, “the most numerous and imposing procession ever seen in any American city.”
The town had apparently solved its chief problem. His own had just been posed. How long could he hope to escape discovery? Perhaps the news was already out. Perhaps the jaded revelers returning to Westchester had been met by Mrs. Lasher screaming like a fury. Perhaps the house had caught fire and the cellar walls had broken open with the heat and the collapse of the timbers, as he had seen big warehouses during the Great Fire broken open like crushed hickory nuts.
An unendurable need to make sure with his own eyes of the state of affairs goaded him to action. He ran upstairs to tell Patty some lie about the necessity for the trip. She was so heavenly asleep that he could not break the spell. The children were asleep, too.
So he told Cuff to tell them that he had been called back to the country.
He had the luck to meet a cab and the driver had a good horse that reached the City Hall Station of the New York and Harlem Railroad just in time to catch a train North.
As the carriages rolled through Center and Broome Streets and up the Bowery and on out through the mile-long cut and the quarter-mile tunnel through solid basalt, RoBards blessed the men that invented steam-engines, and the good souls who borrowed the money and paid the good toilers to lay these rails of stout wood with iron bands along the top. He blessed the men who ran that blessed locomotive. A demon of haste inspired them and they reached at times a rate well over twenty miles an hour. He covered the fourteen miles to Williamsbridge in no time at all compared to stage speed; and the fare was but a shilling! He had now only eighteen miles to make by the old-fashioned means.
He was a little cruel to the horse he hired and spared the poor hack neither uphill nor down. But then he was fiercelier lashed by his own torment.
At last his home swung into view—benign, serene, secure. No lightning, no fire, no storm had ripped open its walls. There was no excitement visible except in the fluttering of of a few birds—or were they belated leaves? The tulip tree stood up, awake, erect, the safe trustee of the home.
When he passed the Lasher place, he was afraid to go fast lest his guilt be implied in his haste. He let the galled jade jog. He even turned and looked the Lasher hovel straight in the face. As the guilty do, he stared it right in the eyes.
But Mrs. Lasher did not even turn to look at him. She was splitting wood and her bony fleshless arms seemed to give the ax three helves. Her head was simply an old sunbonnet. She was faceless, blind and deaf to everything but work—an old woodpecker of a woman hammering at a life that was hard and harsh. Yet it was not quite satisfying to have her so stupid. It was not pleasant to remember that Jud himself was notoriously worthless.
Strange, that to assassinate a Cæsar or a Henry of Navarre, to put a Socrates to the hemlock, was of a certaincruel nobility, but to annihilate an imbecile infamous! It was like stepping on a toad in the dark.
And this modern theory, that the insane and the criminal and the witless were poor sick people to be sorry for, was disturbing. Once the abnormal people had been accused of selling themselves to devils, renting their bodies to hellish tenants, earning an everlasting home in hell. But now it was the fashion to say that they were poor souls whom fate had given only broken or incomplete machines to work with, and that their punishment was a crime.
If it were true, then he had beaten to death a sick boy whose fearful deed had been the fumbling of a dolt. Even if it were untrue, he had sent a wicked youth to hell and Jud would now be frying and shrieking somewhere under RoBards’ feet.
RoBards fell into such abysmal brooding that he did not notice how the horse, a stranger to these roads, had turned into a lane and was no longer advancing but browsing on autumnal fare, nibbling with prehensile lip at an old rail. The horse himself was an imbecile of his kind.
For a long while RoBards struggled with black thoughts, each more dreadful than the other. He was like a man held at the bottom of the sea by a slimy devilfish, with searing poison and cold fire in the very touch of each writhing, enveloping arm.
He tore himself loose from all the arms at once with a wild resolve, like an outcry:
“I’ll not think about it any longer! I’ll go mad if I do!”
He heard his own voice clattering across the fields, woke, looked about, and felt lost before he realized that he was in one of his own meadows.
He turned and backed the gig, and reached the highway again. The farmer, Albeson, was waiting for him, laughing:
“I seen you leave that old fool of a horse go his own sweet way, so I knowed you was fig’erin’ out some old law-soot or other. I was wonderin’ haow long you’d set there. Wall, it was a gre’t day yes’day, wa’n’t it?”
RoBards could laugh with the farmer heartily, for itshowed how innocent his reverie looked to a witness; it showed that Albeson had not discovered anything amiss about the home.
He breathed elixir in the air and drove on to the house, finding it as always a mirror to his humor. It had been in turn an ancestral temple, a refuge from plague, a nuptial bower, a shelter for intrigue, a whited sepulcher. The tree had been a priest, a hypocrite, and now a faithful sentinel.
He was brought down again when Mrs. Albeson met him with a query: “How’s pore little Immy?”
She whispered, though there was no one else in the house.
“Mis’ Lasher has been takin’ on terrible along of her boy Jud lightin’ out for sea. Pity you let him live, for they do say a man what’s borned to be hung won’t never git drownded.”
This was an exquisite plight: to be blamed for sparing the life he had already taken. But he dared not give the noisy woman more of his confidence. Immy’s fate was enough in her power.
He dared not visit the cellar till the farmers had gone to bed, and then he went down into it as into a grave. It was morbidly cold and the lamp shivered in his hand.
He found everything as he had left it, and marveled at the neatness of his work. Yet it seemed not to be his work, but the work of somebody who had borrowed his frame and used his scholarship for cunning purposes.
He went back to the library. In this room his soul had found its world. But now it was an impossible place. The hearthstone there—Chalender had brought it—it was a headstone over a buried honor. He had often resolved to tear it out and break it to dust. But now it covered Jud Lasher, and served him as an anonymous memorial.
What was the quicklime doing down inside there? His heart stopped. Perhaps it would not work sealed away from the air. He ought to open the walls and see.
And this set him to trembling in utter confusion, for he recognized in his own bewilderment the unintelligent maudlin reasoning of the criminal.
Already he had revisited the scene; already debated an exhumation; already longed to talk to someone, to boast perhaps.
He was afraid to trust himself to the house, and, making an excuse of having come for some books and papers, set off again for the city.
When he got down from the cab in front of his home he found Keith in the bit of front yard. The boy was so absorbed in his task that he greeted his father absently, as if RoBards were the child and he the old one. He had dug a shallow channel from the hydrant to the iron railing, and was laying down pipes of tin and cardboard and any other rubbish he could find.
“I’m buildin’ an aqueduck from our house to London,” he explained. “London got burned down once and so the king has sent for me to get him some water right away, so’s the folks won’t get burned up again. They’re goin’ to give me a big immense parade and I’m goin’ to ride in a gold barouche like Uncle Harry did.”
RoBards managed a wry smile and went in. Patty met him with an ancient look of woe and motioned him into the drawing room. She spoke in a voice like ashes stirred with a cold wind.
“Immy told me,” she began and dropped into a chair sobbing. “She didn’t mean to, but she screamed again at nothing and let slip a word or two, and I got it out of her. She has cried herself sick with remorse at disobeying you. How could you let that monster live? How could you?”
“He’s dead,” RoBards sighed, and sank on an ottoman, crushed with weariness.
But Patty was startled to new life. She demanded the whole truth, and he told her in a dreary, matter-of-fact tone. He told her everything, including the secret of Jud’s resting place.
The story came from him with the anguish of dragging a sharp chicken bone from his throat. It cut and left a bleeding and an ache, but it was wonderful to be free of it.
Patty listened with awe, wide-eyed and panting. Therewas such need of being close together under the ruins of their life, that, since he could not find strength to lift his head or a hand, she leaned forward toward him till she fell on her knees to the floor and agonized across the space between them and, creeping close into his bosom, drew his arms about her, and wept and wept—with him.
Their only words were “oh!” and “oh!” eternally repeated, yet they felt that only now were their souls made one in a marriage of grief. They had no bodies; they were mere souls crushed under the broken temple of their hopes, bruised and wounded and pinioned together in their despair.
Yet there was a kind of pitiful happiness in groping and finding each other thus, and a bitter ecstasy in being able to love and be loved utterly at last.