CHAPTER XXVII
Themystery and terror of the sky-flung thunder were restored to their old power over RoBards’ soul by the news from Tuliptree Farm.
The lightning had suffered a distinct loss of social prestige when Ben Franklin coaxed it out of the clouds with a kite-string and crowded it into a pickle jar. Its immemorial religious standing had been practically destroyed. To complete its humiliation from the estate of divine missile, Professor Morse had recently set it to carrying messages, writing dots and dashes, and racing back and forth along a wire like a retriever.
But now again it took the form of God’s great index finger thrust from the heavens to point out the deed too safely buried in the walls of RoBards’ home.
He could have wished that Professor Morse’s lightning might have brought him instant news of the actual appearance of the shattered chimney. There was a wire all the way between New York and Philadelphia, but the far-writer had not been extended north as yet.
So RoBards must take the train. Fortunately the New York and Harlem Railroad had already reached White Plains, and he had only five miles more to ride on a horse of flesh and blood. His eyes scanned the horizon fiercely, and his heart beat with such a criminal’s anxiety that he would almost have welcomed the exposure of his crime—if crime it were.
The first thing that topped his horizon was the great tulip tree overtowering the house. Its lofty plume was untarnished. Some other tree, then, must have been blasted. Next, the roof-line rose to view. It looked strange with the chimney gone.
As the road curved in its approach, he saw where the brick were torn away, the clapboards singed with the streaked fire, and the foundation stones ripped open.
The farmer met him at the gate with cordial homage and a crude buffoonery more pleasant to his ear than the most elegant epigram, since it proved him still ignorant of what the walls contained.
“Thar lays your chimbley, Mr. RoBards,” he said, “jest as the Lord left her. I ain’t teched e’er a brick, and I told the wife not to heave none of ’em at me when she lost her temper—so to speak, seein’ as she don’t seem to have ever found it, haw haw haw!”
“He will have his joke!” Mrs. Albeson tittered.
“A sense of humor certainly helps you through the world,” said her husband as he took the horse in charge. Mrs. Albeson waddled after RoBards, and checked him to murmur:
“Haow’s pore little Immy?”
That eternal reminder hurt him sore. She startled him by adding, “Old Mis’ Lasher keeps hangin’ about. More trouble! One of her girls has ran away with a hired man from the city, and she’s more lost than the boy that’s went a-whalin’. Mis’ Lasher prob’ly seen you drive past and she’ll likely be along any minute naow.”
“Yes, yes; very well; all right,” said RoBards, impatient to be alone. And Mrs. Albeson went back to her kitchen, taking her snub patiently.
RoBards studied the course of the thunderbolt and was glad that he had not been present to see it smite and hear it. He would probably have died of fear. He shivered now with the bare imagination, and cravenly wondered if any thrill of it could have stirred Jud Lasher.
He was so absorbed in this fantasy that he jumped when Albeson spoke across his shoulder:
“Looks like to me, the mason would have to pull the whole thing daown, shore up the walls, dig out the foundation, and set her up all over again!”
“Nonsense!” said RoBards.
“All right! It’s your haouse. Mend it the way you want to.”
RoBards sent him to White Plains to fetch a mason, and remained to study the crevice that split the thick foundation as if Achilles had hurled his own unequaled javelin of Pelian ash into the tomb of another Patroclus. The fabric of the cellar wall was not opened all the way, but the wedge of the gap pointed right at the burial chamber.
As he wondered how soon some casual inspector would follow the lead of that arrow head and break open the wall, RoBards heard at his elbow that well-remembered querulous sniffle of Mrs. Lasher’s:
“H’are ye, Mist’ RoBards? Too bad what the lightnin’ done to your nice house, ain’t it? But the Lord has his reasons, I expect. Here he hits your home where there’s never been any wickedness and leaves mine alone, as if there had ever been anything else there.
“What I wanted to ask you was this, please; I was talkin’ to you about the boy Jud goin’ away to sea. Well, I ain’t heard a word from the pore child sence. Where d’you s’pose he could be now?—ridin’ out on a mast most like; or sinkin’ in a whaleboat that some whale has knocked to flinders with one swat of his tail. A friend of my husband’s was here recent, and he’d been on a whaler and he told me terrible things.
“Poor Jud! There ain’t never a night but I pray the Lord to look after him and be a mother to him, but I do’ know. Sometimes of nights I dream about him. I see him drownin’ and callin’ to me, ‘Maw! Maw! save me!’ I wake up all of a sweat and tremblin’ like mad, but his voice goes on callin’ me. Sometimes it follers me all day long. I can see him out in that terrible big ocean—just one pore boy in all that sea with nobody to call to but his mother. Oh, God, sir, it’s no fun.”
It would have been a mercy of a sort to end her nightmares with a word of assurance that her son would never die of drowning. But RoBards had his own children to consider. It seemed to him that a man must sometimes liefor posterity’s sake. This legacy of truth he had no right to entail upon his children. He must take his deed and all its consequences to hell with him.
So there they stood, the murderer and the mother, staring at the very tomb of the boy; she thinking him at sea and he wondering whether or no he were dancing in infernal flames. Perhaps those cries his mother heard were not from the width of the Pacific but from the depths.
“But what I was gittin’ at,” Mrs. Lasher went on, “was my daughter Molly—a pirty thing as ever was, but wild! She couldn’t see no future up here. Nobody wanted to marry her or be honest with her. And so one night she never come home at all. Where is she now? She’s in a deeper sea, I guess, than her brother. A man was sayin’ there’s eighteen thousand bad women in New York now—if you’ll excuse me mentionin’ it. Something tells me she’s one of ’em, but I never could find her if I went to look. I get lost so easy. She wouldn’t come back here if I did. Why should she? But why should all my children go wrong? I was wonderin’ if you could look for her or send somebody or do somethin’. I don’t know anybody. But you know the town and you’re a good honest man if ever they was one.”
“If ever they was one!” RoBards wondered if ever indeed there had been an honest man. He had meant to be one, but he had lapsed into the profound. And nothing so filled him with self-horror as his new and protecting genius in hypocrisy. What a Judas he was—to stand here and let the mother of the boy he had slain praise him, and pour out praise upon him! What a hypocrite this house itself must be! What liars those stolid walls that embraced and concealed the dead, and even in the face of the denouncing thunderbolt kept their composure, and did not reveal the cadaver in their deep bosom.
He promised to search for Molly, and the mother went away comforted, to pray for her girl and to pray for the boy, and to pray for her kind friend Mr. RoBards. And God took her prayers! had taken them and nevergiven her a sign that the boy she asked all-seeing Heaven to guard a thousand leagues distant was lying immured at her feet! If Heaven could lie so blandly by keeping silence, no wonder men could perjure themselves by standing mute.
By and by Albeson returned with Failes, the bricklayer.
Little as he knew of the ancient art of masonry, RoBards was determined that no member of that guild should bring a lawyer to the law.
Failes wanted to tear the whole foundation away and start all over. Every art and trade has its religion, and this mason’s was a stubborn belief in doing a job thorough. But he yielded at last to RoBards’ insistence, and charged an extra price for the surrender, and a further sum for beginning at once.
As an excuse for his haste RoBards alleged the necessity of his presence in town. When Failes said that he didn’t need any legal advice about layin’ brick and patchin’ stone, RoBards made other pretexts for delay. He dared not leave the house until the broken tomb was sealed again.
Days went racking by while the mason’s leisurely procedure, his incessant meditation upon nothing at all, his readiness to stop and chatter, drove RoBards almost out of his wits.
But at last the chimney stood erect again, dappled with new brick and crisscrossed with white mortar unweathered.
Then and then only, RoBards went back to New York, to tell more lies to Mr. Jessamine, who wondered at his neglect of the necessary conferences with Daniel Webster and Benjamin F. Butler, whom some called General because he had been Attorney General under Jackson and Van Buren, and some called Professor because he was the chief instructor at the City University.
RoBards outlined the situation as he saw it and they accepted his reasoning without demur. They would also accept a heavy fee without demur.
The case was called in the in the City Hall building on a day of stifling heat. There was something disheartening in the very air, and RoBards gave uphope. The counsel for the city objected to the reargument of the case on the ground that the legal principles involved had already been decided in the city’s favor in the similar Fire Case of Tabeleeet al.vs.the Mayoret al.
Old Jessamine knew nothing of legal principles and RoBards could hardly keep him from popping up and blustering what he whispered to Webster:
“Legal principles! legal bosh! I’ve been poor for ten years now and the city has grown fat and rich, and it has no right to send one of its most honorable merchants down to a pauper’s grave for no fault of his own. Make ’em give me my two hundred thousand dollars or they’ll murder me with their ‘legal principles.’”
Mr. Webster nodded his great head and agreed that Mr. Jessamine was right, but the law must take its course.
General Butler pleaded with the judges in their own language, and they consented to hear the case, though it was plain that they wanted only to hear Mr. Webster. They wanted to hear that trombone voice peal forth its superhuman music. The words would mean no more than the libretto of the Italian works sung at Palmo’s Opera House.