CHAPTER XXXV
Therest of the family might sleep its fill on the morrow, but RoBards had to go to court. Getting himself out of bed was like tearing his own meat from his bones. He could hardly flog his body and mind to the task. If it had not been for the new shower bath the Croton River brought to his rescue, he could never have achieved it.
The house looked positively obscene in the morning light, with the wreckage of the festival, and no music or laughter to redeem it. Cuff and Teen were sullen with sleepiness and the prospect of extra toil. They emphasized the fact that the dining-room carpet was too sticky and messy for endurance. RoBards’ breakfast was served on the drawing-room table.
He went to court to try a case for a strange old female miser whose counsel he had been for many years. They called her the shrewdest business man in town and she laughed at the fact that she was not considered fit to vote, though the Revolutionary War had been fought because of the crime of “taxation without representation.”
“Now that they’ve thrown away the property qualifications, every Tom, Dick, and Harry can vote as often as he’s a mind to. But I can’t. Every thieving politician can load taxes on my property to get money to steal. But I have no say. My husband was a drunkard and a fool and a libertine, and I brought him all the property he ever had. He used it as an excuse for voting and I couldn’t even go to court in my own protection for the law says, ‘Husband and wife are one and the husband is the one.’
“The minute he died, I became a human being again, thank God. But I have to have a man for a lawyer and men to judge my cases. The lamb has to have a wolf for a lawyerand plead before a bench of wolves. But I will say, you’re as honest a wolf as ever I knew.”
If anything could have destroyed RoBards’ faith in exclusively white, male suffrage it would have been old Mrs. Roswell. But nothing could shake that tradition, and he accounted her an exception that proved the rule.
While he dealt with her professionally as if she were one of the shrewd old merchants of New York, he treated her personally with all the courtesy he displayed for more gentle females, and she was woman enough to love that.
Miser that she was, she made him take higher fees than he ordinarily charged, and they saved him again and again from despair in the face of the increasing expense of his home.
In her desperate eagerness to fight off retirement from the ranks of youth, Patty relied more and more on the dressmakers and hat-makers. She developed a passion for jewelry and she spent great sums at the Daguerrean galleries.
She would sit in frozen poses for six minutes at a time, trying to obtain a plate that would flatter her sufficiently. But her beauty was in her expression and especially in its fleetness, and the miracle of Daguerre was helpless. The mist that clothed Niagara in a veil of grace was not itself when winter made it ice. And Patty’s soul, so sweet and captivating as it flitted about her eyes and lips, became another soul when it must shackle itself and die.
Only a few colors were advantageous in the new process and those were the least happy in Patty’s rainbow. Yet she dressed and fixed her smiles and endured the agony of feeling a compelled laughter curdle into an inane smirk. And she would weep with hatred of her counterfeit presentment when it came home from Brady’s or Insley’s or Gurney’s.
Immy fared little better there for all her youth. And her costliness increased appallingly, for she must keep pace with the daughters of wealth. When she went shabby it reflected on her father’s love or his success, and Patty could stifle his fiercest protest by simply murmuring:
“Hasn’t the poor child suffered enough without having to be denied the common necessities of a well-bred girl?”
This stung RoBards into prodigies of extravagance, and Immy’s wildest recklessness took on the pathos of a frightened child fleeing from vultures of grief.
He could not even protest when he saw that she was taking up the disgusting vice of “dipping.” Snuff-taking had lost its vogue among the beaux, and only the elders preferred it to smoking tobacco.
But now the women and girls were going mad over it. In the pockets of their skirts they carried great horn snuff-boxes filled with the strongest Scottish weed. Stealing away from the sight of men, they would spread a handkerchief over their laps, open the boxes, and dipping the odious mixture on a little hickory mop, fill their pretty mouths with it and rub it on their teeth. They seemed to take some stimulus from the stuff, and the secrecy of it added a final tang.
All the men were arrayed against it, but their wrath gave it the further charm of defiant wickedness.
What was getting into the women? They would not obey anybody. Since Eve had mocked God and had desired only the one forbidden fruit, they seemed determined to enjoy only what was fatal.
And the books they read! RoBards came home one evening to find Immy in tears and Patty storming about her like a fury. When he intervened Patty said:
“Would you see what I caught this child devouring! Sitting with the gas blinding her and her eyes popping over this terrible story by somebody named Hawthorne. The title alone is enough to make a decent girl run from it.The Scarlet Letter.Do you know what the letter was and what it stood for?”
RoBards shook his head. He did not read light, popular fiction. The affidavits he handled were fiction enough for him.
Patty drew him into another room and whispered the plot of the story. RoBards gathered that it had to do with aPuritan minister who had a secret affair with the wife of an absent citizen, and with the child that resulted in the mother’s very proper appearance in the pillory.
“They ought to put the author there and sew a letter on his lapel.” Patty raged. “No wonder the people of Salem put him out of office and drove him out of town.”
There had been an article in theChurch Reviewabout the book. Patty fetched it and read a few lines to RoBards:
“Is the French era actually begun in our literature? We wonder what he would be at: whether he is making fun of all religion. Shelley himself never imagined a more dissolute conversation than that in which the polluted minister comforts himself with the thought that the revenge of the injured husband is worse than his own sin in instigating it.... The lady’s frailty is philosophized into a natural and easy result of the Scriptural law of marriage.”
That his daughter should read of such things sent a cold thrill into RoBards’ heart. He forgot that she had no innocence to destroy. Jud Lasher had wrecked that. Ernest Chirnside had rejected her for its lack. And he himself had watched her dance.
But the printed word had a peculiar damnation. He knew that wickedness was rife everywhere about him. He knew that Immy knew it, for the gossip was everywhere like the atmosphere. The newspapers blazoned it. The courthouses solemnized it.
Yet to print it in a story seemed infamous. And Patty added:
“I found her crying over it! Crying her heart out over that woman and her brat! What can we do to save that child?”
“Ah, what can we do,” RoBards groaned, “to save ourselves?”
There was something in his look that checked Patty’s ire, made her blench, shiver, and walk away. Perhaps she was thinking of—of what RoBards dared not remember.
That night RoBards was wakened from sleep by a bewildering dream of someone sobbing. He woke and heardsobs. They had invaded his slumber and coerced the dream.
He sat up and looked about. Patty undressed and freezing had glanced into the purloined romance; and it had fastened on her. She was weeping over Hester Prynne and her child Pearl, and Dimmesdale, the wretched partner in their expiation.
When RoBards drowsily asked what had made her cry, she sat on the edge of his bed and read to him. Whether it were the contagion of her grief or the skill of the author, he felt himself driven almost to tears. He flung a blanket about Patty’s quivering shoulders and clung to her, wondering at this mystery of the world: that lovers long dead in obscurity, and lovers who had never lived at all, should be made to walk so vividly through the landscapes of imagination that thousands of strangers should weep for them.
Or was it for their woes that one wept? Or for one’s own in the masquerade of other names and scenes?