CHAPTER XXVI
ThereafterPatty and RoBards felt a need of keeping close. They slept together after that, her throat across his left arm. She called it “my arm,” and when his travels to distant courts took him away from her, that arm of “hers” was lonely.
Like galls that torment old trees for a while but grow at last into their structures, the secrets that began as cancers became a part of the hard gnarled bark that people and trees acquire or perish. The RoBards home was being held together by misfortunes as much as affection. The longing for utterance that makes secrets dangerous was satisfied by common possession. Patty and her husband knew the worst of each other, and their children, and they made league against the world’s curiosity.
She was insatiably curious about the secrets of other homes while protecting her own, but this was hardly so much from malice as from a longing to feel that other people had as much to conceal as she.
The children had talked the thing over with their parents and the strain was taken from their minds. Immy less often slashed the silence with those shrieks of hers. She and Keith were busy growing up and playing in the toyshop of new experiences.
RoBards tried lawsuits with fair success, and his fees were liberal; he often secured fifty dollars for a case requiring no more than two or three days in court. His house rent was six hundred dollars a year, and his office rent and clerical expenses took another five hundred. This left enough to give Patty and the children all the necessary comforts, including two hired women, though most of these were ignorant, impudent, and brief of stay, even though theirwages had gradually trebled until some of them were demanding as high as two dollars a week.
While RoBards practiced the law, Patty visited the shops and the gossip marts, went to church, and indulged in modest extravagances of finance, scandal, and faith.
The baby grew and another came, and went; but Patty never became quite matronly. She took fierce care of her figure, lacing herself to the verge of suffocation and trying all the complexion waters advertised.
Patty was the very weather-vane of the fashion-winds. She was not one of the increasing class of women who boldly invaded the realms of literature and politics; her battlefield was amusement. She was one of those of whom a writer in the New YorkReviewsaid: “The quiet of domestic life has been lost in this stirring age; nothing will satisfy but action, notoriety, and distinction.”
Like all the other women, who could (or could not) afford it, Patty dressed in the brightest of colors and flaunted coquetry in her fabrics. Visitors from overseas commented on the embarrassments they had encountered from mistaking the most respectable American wives for courtesans because of their gaudy street dress, their excessive powder, their false hair, and their freedom from escort.
The chief cross in her life and her husband’s was the burden of her parents’ company. They were not interested in modern heresies and manners, found them disgusting. Patty was bored to frenzy by their tales of the good old times of their memory.
The old man grew increasingly impatient of the law’s delay. He had less and less time to spend on earth, and that two hundred thousand dollars the city owed him grew more and more important.
It seemed impossible, however, to speed the courts. One or two similar suits against the city on account of buildings similarly blown up to check the fire of 1835 were won by the city, and RoBards dreaded the outcome of his father-in-law’s claim. He dreaded the loss of the vast sum at stakeeven less than the effect of the loss on Mr. Jessamine’s sanity.
The fire had died out and its ravages were overbuilt for ten years before the case drew up to the head of the docket at last. As Mr. Jessamine grew more and more frantic, he felt less and less confident of his son-in-law’s ability to win the action. He insisted upon the hiring of additional counsel and cruelly wounded RoBards by his frank mistrust. But he could not make up his mind what lawyer to employ, and since he was out of funds, he must depend on his son-in-law to advance the fee for his own humiliation.
Patty herself was zealous for the splendor that two hundred thousand dollars would add to the establishment which she found all too plain in spite of her husband’s indulgence. And she shamed him woefully by her lack of confidence. She saw his hurt and added exquisiteness to it by constantly saying:
“Of course, I think my Mist’ RoBards is the finest lawyer in the world, but can the judges be relied on to appreciate you?”
Lying on his arm she would waken him from slumbers just begun by crooning:
“Two hundred thousand dollars! Think of it! Papa and Mamma are too old to spend it, so we should have the benefit. I’d buy you a yacht so that you could join the new club, and I’d buy myself—what wouldn’t I buy myself!”
“First catch your cash, my dear,” RoBards would mumble, and try in vain to drown himself in a pool of sleep that would not accept him, though Patty sank away to blissful depths of oblivion.
One hot July New York daybreak had just begun to annoy his unrested eyes when the fire bells broke out. He had promised himself and Patty long ago to resign from his company, but a sense of civic duty had kept him in the ranks.
Patty slept so well among her visions of wealth that shedid not heed when he withdrew his arm from under her head, nor hear him getting into his uniform.
Remembering the icy December night of the disaster of 1835, he rejoiced in the absence of wind and the plentitude of the Croton water. Neptune would soon prevail over his enemy element, as in the banners of the parade.
The Fire Kings, who had been frost-nipped on that other night, were dripping with sweat this morning when they drew near the origin of the fire in a New Street warehouse. This contained a great mass of stored saltpeter, and it exploded just as the Fire Kings coupled up their hose. The world rocked about them. Buildings went over as if an earthquake had rattled the island. The glass of a thousand windows rang and snapped and the air rained blocks of granite, timbers and chimneys.
Two of the Fire Kings were struck dead at RoBards’ side, and he was bruised and knocked down. The whole fire army was put to rout and the flames bounding in all directions were soon devouring a hundred and fifty buildings at once, most of them new structures that had risen in the ashes of 1835.
Once more the fear of doom fell upon the city, but after three hundred and sixty-five of the city’s most important buildings were piled in embers, the Croton came to the rescue.
Once more the heart of the city’s commerce was eaten out. Again the insurance companies went bankrupt in the hour they had assumed to provide against. Once more financial dismay shook the stout frame of the town.
Yet carpenters and masons were at work before the ruins ceased to smoke, though they had to wear gloves to protect them from brick and stone too hot to be touched with naked hands.
When RoBards came home after the fire, Patty was still blessedly asleep. She woke with a little cry of petulance when his helmet fell from his bruised hand as he lifted it from his bleeding forehead and dropped sickly into a chair. But when she saw how hurt he was, she was at his side in aninstant, hurrying like a slipperless Oceanid to comfort him. The battered hero’s wounds were made worth while when they brought the delicate ministrations of the barefoot nymph in the flying white gown, so thin that it seemed to blush wherever it touched the flesh beneath. Patty looked all the bonnier for the panic that left her nightcap askew upon the array of curl papers bordering her anxious brow.
And the fire had another benefit. It brought to old Jessamine the first grin of genuine contentment RoBards had seen on his twisted lips since 1835. For the old wretch chuckled to realize that many a wealthy merchant whose carriage dust he had had to take afoot for ten years was now brought down to his own miserable level.
If only he could drag his two hundred thousand out of the city, he that had been poor among the rich, would be rich among the poor. That would be repayment with usury.
He could hardly endure to await the day when he should regain his glory, and he smothered Patty when she brought home the inspiration that promised to hasten his triumph.
She brought it home from a party, from a dinner so fashionable that it was not begun until seven o’clock. In only a few years the correct hour had been shoved further and further down the day from three o’clock in the afternoon until deep into the evening. At the same time the fashionable residence district had pushed out into the country until it was necessary for the RoBards’ hired carriage to travel for this occasion out Hudson Street for two miles to Ninth Avenue and nearly a mile more to Twenty-eighth Street. And Patty laughed into his ear:
“It’s nice to be bound for the North Pole on so hot a night.”
She was blissful as a new queen in her peculiarly lustrous dress of peach-blossom silk.
RoBards marveled at the perverse heroism with which she and other women endured these martyrdoms to vanity. He had ridiculed Patty’s devotion to tight stays for years, with the usual effect of male counsel on female conduct. She was not likely to yield to a husband’s satires, since hersex had mocked at similar opinion since the beginning of the world. Preachers had denounced corsets in vain; the word was not considered decent, but a man may say anything across a pulpit. Physicians had uttered warnings in private and public. They had traced all the evils of modern infirmity to corsets; but their patients groaned and persevered. Anatomists described the distorted livers and lungs of ladies they found inpost-mortems—in vain.
King Joseph II. had forbidden stays in orphan schools and convents and had put them on female convicts, in the hope of diminishing their prestige, but the women went their sweet way with secret laughter.
When RoBards quoted the parsons against the corsets, Patty answered:
“If God didn’t want women to wear corsets, why did he fill the seas with whales and fill the whales with whalebone? What else is it good for?”
Heaven was an appellate court that RoBards did not practice in, and he dropped the case.
To-night he had watched Patty devoting half an hour of anguish to the throttling of her waist. She slept in “night stays” now to make the daytime constriction easier, but the new peach blossom silk had demanded too much—or too little.
After three efforts to pull the strings to the necessary tightness, she had sunk into a chair, bathed in sweat, pleading for help. And RoBards was so sorry for her that he actually put his strength to the infamous task of lacing his own wife into an impossible cone. But she thanked him for the torture and pirouetted before her mirror in rapture.
And now in the carriage, though she could hardly sit up straight, she was so happy that RoBards, delighting in anything that could delight her, leaned near to press his lips against her cheek.
She was the mother of a long family, yet she was still a girl, and a girl by virtue—or by vice—of avoiding the penalties of growing up. Her extravagances, her flippancies, her very determination to evade the burdens of grief andresponsibility, her refusal to be in earnest about anything but beauty, were, after all, the only means of keeping beauty.
At such moments, he felt that she and her sort alone were wise; and that those who bent to the yoke of life were not the wise and noble creatures they thought themselves, but only stolid, sexless, stupid oxen. She still had wings because she used them always, was always fugitive.
At this bright dinner there were many eminent women among the eminent men in the drawing room. There were two mayors, Mr. Havemeyer, newly elected, and Mr. Harper, of the Native American Party, who had failed of re-election but had won the city’s gratitude by discarding the old night watchman system of “Leatherheads” for a police force of eight hundred men in uniform—and none too many in view of the prevalence of all manner of crime.
Commodore Stevens of the new yacht club was there; also Mr. A. T. Stewart, who was building a great store in Broadway, and sealing its doom as a street of homes.
A picturesque guest was Mrs. Anne Cora Mowatt, who had written a successful play called “Fashion,” though she had never been behind the scenes, and who had followed it up by becoming an actress and playing “The Lady of Lyons” after one rehearsal. And she had triumphed! This was a new way for a woman to repair her broken fortunes.
Across from her and somewhat terrified by the situation was the Rev. Dr. Chirnside, who abhorred the playhouse and never failed to view with alarm the fact that New York already had eight theatres and that they were rebuilt as fast as they burned down—which was pretty fast. Against these there were only a hundred and sixty churches, including nine African, six Catholic churches and four synagogues.
RoBards’ heart lurched as always when he saw Harry Chalender in the drawing room. He heard him saying:
“They tell me that the number of theatres in town has not increased in years, though the churches have tripled in number.Yet crime has mightily increased. How do you explain that?”
“You are flippant, sir!” said Dr. Chirnside.
When Patty made her entrance, swimming in like a mermaid waist-deep in a peach-blossom billow, all the babble stopped. All the eyes rolled her way. Her husband following her, slim, black, and solemn, felt a mere lackey, and yet was proud to lag at heel of such a vision.
His pride sickened and his heart lurched when he saw Harry Chalender push forward and lift her hand to his lips. RoBards had once seen those lips on his wife’s mouth, and he felt now that he ought in common decency to crush them both to death.
But, of course, he did not even frown when he shook Chalender’s hand. After all, Chalender had saved his life once—that black night in the fire of 1835, and he felt a twisted obligation.
Another twisted emotion was his delight when he saw Chalender crowded away from Patty by other men. He felt that a man ought either to cage his wife in a cell or give up all respectable ideas of monopoly or monogamy. One might as well accept these insane notions of women’s rights to their own souls. And with the souls would go the bodies, of course. And then the home, the family, society, the nation were lost. He could not imagine the chaos that would ensue. His own heart was a seething chaos in little.
And then all the men were eclipsed by the entrance of Daniel Webster—no less a giant than Daniel Webster. As a citizen RoBards felt an awe for him; as a lawyer, a reverence.
Patty gasped with pride at meeting the man. She bowed so low that she almost sat on the floor. And Webster, looking down on her, bent till his vast skull was almost on a level with Patty’s little china-doll head.
Her humility was such a pretty tribute to his genius that his confusion was perfect. His mastiff jaws wagged with the shock of her grace. His huge eyes saddened in a distress of homage. For once he could find no words. Therewas only a groan of contentment in that columnar throat, equally famous for its thirst and for the eloquence of the angelic voice that stormed the senate chamber and shook the judicial benches, yet purled like a brook at a female ear.
Patty almost swooned when she learned that she was to go out on Webster’s arm.
When the black servants folded back the doors, a table like a lake of mahogany waited them, gleaming with a flotilla of heavily laden silver, platters, tureens, baskets, and bowls in a triple line.
Patty and the leonine Daniel followed the lady of the mansion, and when she was formally handed to her throne, the clatter began. The servants fairly rained food upon the guests, soup and fish and ham and turkey, venison and mutton, corn and all the vegetables available, sweets of every savor, cheeses and fruits, claret and champagne and a dulcet Madeira brought down from the attic where it had spent its years swinging from the heat of the sun-baked roof to the chill of the long winters.
RoBards noted that many of his old schoolmates, still boys in his eye, were far older than Patty had allowed him to be. And their wives were as shapeless as the haunches of meat whose slices they attacked without grace. Patty made a religion of little manners and charming affectations. She took off her gloves with caressing upward strokes and folded them under her napkin. She sipped her soup with a birdlike mincing that was beyond cavil.
And when Mr. Webster, with old-fashioned courtesy, challenged her to champagne, she accepted the challenge, selecting the wine he named, held her glass to be filled, and while the bubbles tumbled and foamed to the brim and broke over it in a tiny spray, she looked into the monstrous eyes of the modern Demosthenes, and with the silent eloquence of her smile, nullified the ponderous phrases he would have rolled upon her.
He found his voice later, but RoBards could hear Patty’s voice now and then, tinkling like raindrops between thunders. And finally he heard her murmur in little gasps:
“Oh, Mr. Senator!—if only you—you!—would take my father’s case—against this wicked, wicked city—then—justice would be done—at last—for once at least.”
A faintness, less of jealousy than despair, made RoBards put down his Madeira glass so sharply that a blotch of the wine darkened the linen of the cloth. He set the glass above the stain lest the hostess see him and want to murder him. And this blunder completed his misery.
But Patty stared up into Webster’s eyes as if she had never seen a man before.
By this time Mr. Webster was well toward the befuddlement for which he was noted, and his reply was more fervent than elegant:
“My dear, ’f you want my assisshance in your father’s—your father’s lawsuit, I shall consider it a prilivege, a glorious pril—op’tunity to pay homage to one of mos’ beau’iful wom’n, one of mos’ charming—Madam, I shallenge you to champ—champagne.”
Patty went through the rites again, but put her hand across the glass when the servant would have refilled it. She finished her dessert, and deftly resumed her gloves before the hostess threw down her napkin and rose to lead the ladies to the dressing room. Patty, for all her accepted challenges, was one of the few women who made the door without a waver.
Her husband followed her with his eyes and longed to go with her and unpack his heart of the grudge it held. In his very presence she had asked another lawyer to supply the ability she denied him. But he had to stay and watch with disgust the long tippling and prattling and male gossip.
A few of the men told stories of excellent spice, but some were as loathsome to his mood as one of the worm-eaten walnuts that he bit into before he realized its estate. He had no stomach for Harry Chalender’s gabble, and found nothing but impudence and bad taste in the problem Chalender posed to poor old Dr. Chirnside. Harry said that he had made a ghastly mistake. In talking to a well-bred young female who had snubbed him for insulting her by offering tohelp her on with her shawl, he had somehow let slip the obscene word, “corsets.” The young lady pretended not to have understood, but blenched in silence.
An old lady who overheard him, however, told him that she was old enough to advise him to apologize for the slip. He promised rashly, but was at his wit’s end for the procedure.
“I appeal to you, Dr. Chirnside,” he said, “for spiritual help. How shall I apologize to that young gazelle for using the word ‘corsets’ in her presence—without once more using the word ‘corsets’ in her presence?”
Dr. Chirnside took refuge in offended dignity, stated that a word unfit for the female ear was equally unfit for the ear of a gentleman. He choked on a last gulp of port, and moved to the drawing room with more rectitude in his head than his legs.
Chalender was rebuked by a solemn gentleman who regretted the increasing indelicacy of manners. If women’s innocence were not protected where would human society look for safety?
“My wife had a most shocking experience recently,” he said. “We sent our daughter to Mrs. Willard’s school at Troy and what do you suppose they taught that poor child, sir? I should not have believed it if my wife had not told me. She could never have believed it if she had not seen it with her own eyes.
“A woman teacher, a most unwomanly teacher, drew on a blackboard, sir, pictures of the internal organs of women, the heart, the arteries, and the veins! Yes, sir, by God, sir, she did! My wife and several mothers who chanced to be visiting the classroom rose in their indignation and left the room. They were too shocked to command their daughters to violate the discipline of the school. But I shall withdraw my daughter from such precincts, I assure you. Is nothing to be sacred? Is everything to be spoken of openly in these atheistic times? I ask you, sir, I ask you!”
Chalender winked at RoBards while the old gentleman’stears of wrath salted his port. Chalender wailed, “But nobody tells me how to apologize for saying corsets.” He was incorrigible.
RoBards felt that his own predicament was as silly as Chalender’s, yet it was of equal torment. How could he rid himself of Mr. Webster? How could he endure his ponderous association?
The giant grew less and less awesome as he absorbed more and more liquor. RoBards began to hope that all memory of his pledge to Patty might be lost in the enormous ache which that enormous head would feel the next morning.
It was not.
On the next morning, Patty received a note from the Astor House where Mr. Webster lived when in New York. She took it to her father with a cry of pride:
“See, papa, what I’ve brought you, Mr. Webster’s head on a platter.”
All that RoBards could say in self-defense was a rather petty sarcasm: “I hope that Mr. Webster doesn’t do for you what he did not long ago: he drank so much that he tried the wrong side of the case.”
Patty snapped back at him: “Yes, but before he sat down, someone told him of his mistake, and he went right on and answered all his own arguments—and won for his client: as he will for Papa.”
“I hope so,” RoBards groaned, wondering if he really hoped so.
Old Jessamine was so sure now of his two hundred thousand dollars that he decided to spend more of it in making doubly sure. He would engage the next best lawyer in America, Benjamin F. Butler.
“With Webster and Butler as my counsel,” he roared, “I’ll make even this old city pay its honest debts.”
RoBards’ head drooped as he noted that his own name was not even mentioned, though he had fought the case for ten years at his own expense and must instruct the two Titans in all its details.
He felt a little meaner than ever when Patty noted his shameful distress and said:
“Don’t forget, papa, that you have also the distinguished assistance of the eminent Mr. David RoBards.”
“Umm—ah—yes! Yes, yes, of course, of course!”
But lesser alarms were lost in greater. And when RoBards went to the post office he found there a letter from his farmer:
Mr. D. RoBards esqe.Las nite in the big storm here youre chimbley was strok by litening and the seller wall all broke wat shall I do about it or will you get a mason from the sitty with respects as ever youre obed. servt.J. AlbesonP S. Too cows was also strok by litening and a toolup tree.J. A.
Mr. D. RoBards esqe.
Las nite in the big storm here youre chimbley was strok by litening and the seller wall all broke wat shall I do about it or will you get a mason from the sitty with respects as ever youre obed. servt.
J. Albeson
P S. Too cows was also strok by litening and a toolup tree.
J. A.
The letter was itself a lightning stroke in RoBards’ peace. Time and security had almost walled up Jud Lasher’s memory in oblivion. And now he seemed to see the body disclosed by a thunderbolt from heaven splitting apart the stones to show it grinning and malevolent.
After the first shock he realized that the body could not have been revealed or Albeson would have mentioned it. This gave him one deep breath of relief.
Then fear took the reins and made his heart gallop anew; for how could he expect a mason to repair the walls without tearing deep into the foundation of the chimney?