CHAPTER XXVIII
Theassembly was worthy of the suit and of the vast amount involved. It thrilled old Jessamine to be the man who dragged the metropolis itself to the bar of its own conscience, and demanded penance.
The court was large and stately. In addition to the three judges of the Supreme Court, and the Chancellor, the state senators were gathered in judgment under the presidence of the Lieutenant Governor.
The trial was as long as it was large. As attorney for the plaintiff, General Butler spoke for a day. Mr. Graham spent another day in defense of the city. RoBards had his day in court, but his spirit was quenched by the knowledge that he was heeded only as so much sand pouring through the throat of the hourglass. Webster, who sat and sweat and listened in silence, was the one thing waited for.
The news that he was at last to speak packed the courtroom with spectators. The day was suffocating. The humidity thrust needles into the flesh, and the voice of Webster was like the thunder that prowls along the hills on a torrid afternoon.
For five hours he spoke, and enchanted people who cared little what words made up his rhapsody. His presence was embodied majesty; his voice an apocalyptic trumpet; his gestures epic; his argument rolled along with the rhythm, the flood, the logic of an Iliad.
The audience would have given him any verdict he asked. Old Jessamine wept with certainty of his triumph. It was sublime to be the theme of such a rhapsody, and when the old man heard his rights proclaimed and his wrongs denounced by Stentor himself, he felt himself an injured god.
For five hours Webster—well, there was hardly a verbfor what he did. Patty said that Webster just “websted.” Her word was as good as any. Then the court adjourned for the day and the spectators went out to breathe the common air.
The exhausted orator was led into the Governor’s Room in the City Hall, where wine was brought him in quantity. He was soon refreshed enough to receive congratulations on his achievement. But he shook his head and groaned, “I was very uncomfortable. I felt as if I were addressing a packed jury.”
The moan from the sick lion threw a great fear into old Jessamine’s heart, and he listened with terror next day to the long argument of the counselor who spoke for the city to a much diminished audience.
Waiting for the court to reach a verdict was worse than the trial. And the verdict was doom—doom with damages. An almost unanimous decision condemned Jessamine to poverty and decreed that he had no claim against the city.
Patty ran to her father’s side and upheld him, while her mother knelt and wept at his other elbow. But he was inconsolable.
He had counted on triumphing through the streets where he had shuffled. He had spent magnificently the money he was going to get. They hurried him home in a closed carriage, but he could not endure the calls of old friends and enemies who came to express their sympathy. He collapsed like the tall chimney the lightning had struck at Tuliptree.
It was Patty of all people who begged RoBards to take him and her and her mother to the farm. Even she longed for obscurity, for she also had squandered royally that money that never arrived.
They left the children at home with Teen, and set out as on a long funeral ride, with their dreams in the hearse. The journey by train was too public and the railroad was a new-fangled, nerve-wrecking toy. It was dangerous, too—almost as dangerous as the steamboats that were blowing up, burning up, and sinking on all the seas and rivers, dragging their passengers to triple deaths. People were forgettinghow many people had been killed by horses. They seemed to think that death itself was a modern invention.
Old Jessamine had to endure a hired carriage with a shabby driver who talked and spat incessantly. When they reached at last the farm, the senile wretch was racked of body and soul and they put him to bed, a white-haired, whimpering infant.
The rest were so wearied of the effort to console him that they grew disgusted with grief. Patty had just so much sympathy in her heart. When that was used up, you came to the bitter lees of it. She began to scold her father and at length produced a bottle of laudanum that she kept to quiet the children with when they cried too long. She threatened her father with it now:
“You big baby! If you don’t stop that noise and go to sleep this very instant, I’ll give you enough of these sleeping drops to quiet you for a week.”
She remembered afterward the strange look he cast upon the phial and how his eyes followed it when she put it back in the cupboard’s little forest of drugs and lotions that had accumulated there for years.
Her father wept no more. He lay so quiet that she put her mother to bed alongside him. As she bent to kiss him good night, he put up his ancient arms and drew her head down and whispered, like a repentant child:
“I’m sorry, my sweet, to be so great a pest to everybody. Forgive me, honey! I wanted to cover you with jewels and satins and everything your pretty heart could wish, but—but—I’ve lived too long.”
“Now! now!” said Patty, kissing him again as she turned away to quell the sobs that sprang to her throat.
Her mother was already fast asleep in her nightcap and her well-earned wrinkles; her teeth on the bureau and her mouth cruelly ancient. Her father stared at Patty with the somber old eyes of a beaten hound. Life had whipped him.
Doleful enough, Patty lay down at the side of her husband,who was even more forlorn than usual. She groaned:
“Oh, dear, such an unhappy world as this is!”
Then she sank away to sleep. She dreamed at length of hands snatching at her, of Macbeth and his hags about the cauldron of trouble.
She woke to find her mother looking a very witch and plucking at her with one hand, while she clutched at her own throat with the other. She kept croaking something with her toothless gums. It was long before Patty could make it out:
“Come quick! Your papa has k-k-k—your papa has k-k-killed himshelf; killed himshelf!”
Patty flung away drowsiness as one whips off a coverlet, and leaped from her bed, seizing her husband’s arm and shrieking to him to follow.