This was no such runaway match as that famous affair of a cousin of
hers, who had stolen from a masked ball with a forbidden suitor, had
crossed the Hudson, and ridden forty miles on horseback in the night to
find a parson to marry them.
That bold foray against the respectabilities had revealed how easy it
was for forbidden young Romeos to creep into the parlors of the city
Capulets and steal thence their Juliets.
But that elopement had the excuse of thwarting parental tyranny. This
was a flight from Sodom condemned.
When RoBards first pleaded with Patty to marry him and be gone from the
accursed town, she had smiled drearily.
“You don’t want me to run away like Lot’s wife?”
“Yes! yes!”
“But she died looking back, and I’m afraid I’d meet her fate. I’d cry
myself into another pillar of salt, and become only another milestone
on the Post Road. Would you like me like that, Mister RoBards?”
She had somehow never learned to call him by his first name, before
they were married. And by some stranger mystery of shyness, after they
were married, she dared the “David” only on occasions of peculiar
emotion. Even after she bore him children, she called him “Mister
RoBards.”
She had laughed away his alarm, though her merriment was sickly. And
then her uncle had gone with the other members of the Board of Health
to inspect the quarantine station established at Staten Island against
the infected foreigners, swarming overseas in sailing vessels like vast
unclean buzzards; and in two weeks every member of that board was dead
save one; and he was not her uncle.
This had ended her laughter in terror. She had denounced the
authorities for the ignominy of her uncle’s fate. Wealthy as he had
been, his body was carried out to the old Potter’s Field in Washington
Square, and buried in that notorious spot hitherto devoted to the
paupers, the criminals, and the overripe fruit of the gallows tree.
Then one day a nameless corpse was found in Park Place, before her very
door; a cousin of hers that she loved was called to the inquest; and
nine of the twenty on the coroner’s board were dead in a few days, and
her cousin was one of them.
Patty was ready then to flee anywhere; but she could not persuade
Harry Chalender to escape, and she vowed that she would not go without
him. RoBards felt a cholera of jealousy burning his very vitals as
he realized that his wife had seemed more afraid of leaving Harry
Chalender than of the plague.
But Harry Chalender scorned to fly and RoBards would not leave town
while Patty was there, even though she refused his love. He had just
resigned himself to a life without her, and was hoping that the
pestilence would end his suffering, when she came to him.
Only yesterday afternoon it was! And she came running along the street
to his house—defying all the gossips in a greater fear!
He was living just below City Hall Park, on the east side of Broadway,
in a once fashionable home that had become a fashionable boarding
house. He happened to be standing at his window brooding when the sight
of a woman running caught his eye. He was astounded to see that it was
Patty Jessamine. Everybody was, for everybody knew her beauty. RoBards
was down the stairs and at the front door just as she crossed Broadway,
dodging among the tangled traffic.
She paused to lean against the pump that stood at the corner there,
not heeding that her tiny shoes and the ribbons about her ankles were
bedabbled with the mire, for she cowered from a staggering, groping
wretch who seemed to turn black as he reeled, clutched at her wide
skirts, and sprawled in the last gripe of cholera. She had to step
across him to escape and RoBards ran to catch her as she swooned.
Her scream of dismay ended in a stuttering whisper:
“Marry me, Mr. RoBards! and take me away before I die.”
His exultance was so great at the undreamed-of benison that he felt a
howl of wolfish triumph straightening his throat. So he had won her
away from Harry Chalender! How? What did it matter? He cried,
“God knows how gladly!”
He stopped a passing hackney coach and took her home. She was afraid
at first to get out of the cab, for she explained that her father was
stricken with the cholera, and her brother had died in the house that
afternoon.
He reassured her as best he could, and gave her servants orders to pack
her things, and make her ready for such a wedding as he might improvise
in a city whose ministers were worn out in body and soul with funeral
ceremonies.
In mad haste he had somehow accomplished the countless details that
made her his in the eyes of State and Church. It was not till long
after that she had grown calm enough to repent her frenzy of fear, and
the irreparable calamity of a marriage at such speed.
She had been reared to look forward to her wedding day as the high
festival of her life, and had devoted numberless hours to visions of
herself in her vast, creamy satin bridal robe from Whittingham’s, with
a headdress like a veiled tower set upon a coiffure molded by Martell’s
own deft fingers, a pair of Lane’s tightest satin boots, and gloves
six buttons high. She had insisted that she should receive the newest
novelty, a bridal bouquet, and that the wedding cake should be as big
as a cathedral.
And now she was married and all, and never a sign of splendor, only an
old veil and a wreath of artificial orange blossoms; only the ring that
the groom had all but forgotten to bring.
Still, she was alive, and that was something; that was everything; that
was far more than could be said of many a pretty friend of hers who
had been blooming toward wifehood a week ago, and was now a blighted
thing in a box from a coffin warehouse.
As RoBards stared down at her when he could risk a glance away from
the rough road, she seemed to be almost waxen with death. Her cheeks
were so pale, her breathing so gentle, that she might be drifting from
him even now. The little distance between sleep and death gave her an
especial dearness, and he hated himself for the meanness of remembering
his question after the preacher had gone and the few friends had
dispersed:
“How does it happen that you didn’t ask Harry Chalender to your
wedding?”
He had asked it teasingly, in a spirit of mischievous bravado. But she
had groaned:
“Harry? Harry is dying! Didn’t you know it? The old slave-woman at his
house told our black man.”
This had cast ashes upon the fire of his rejoicing. But the flames
leaped through them again. For he had won. She was his, and it would be
impious to complain that his enemy had been stricken.
He felt a sudden dread of his bride. Could she be so heartless, so
selfish—ah, well, women were weak things and men must be strong for
them.
The good thing, the glorious thing, was that he had her his. She was
Mrs. RoBards now, and she was asleep against his arm. The harsh ruts of
the road jolting her tender body kept her bosom tremulous as a heap of
white hyacinths fluttered by a soft breeze of summer.
With the rocking of the carriage her velvet cheek slid up and down on
his shoulder. He was startled to note at length that his sleeve was
pink and her inner cheek whiter than the other. So she powdered and
painted! And he had never known it! He would have said that only the
wantons that crowded the town or the shameless flirts were discontent
to leave their skins as God made them. Yet his own bride—but—she was
a wife now. She would be a mother in time. And she would have no
temptations to vanity henceforth.
He studied her a little closelier, as if, in marrying her, he had
indeed taken her from beneath the veil of romance into the keen
sunlight of truth. The delicate forehead had never a wrinkle, even
between the eyebrows of such delicate penmanship. If she had thought
hard and fiercely on the problems of life and religion and natural
philosophy, there would have been lines there. Well, one did not marry
a woman for her wisdom. But what sorry tortures she endured to make
herself a doll! She denied herself not only the glory of flight in the
realms of thought, but even the privileges of motion.
She was the voluntary prisoner—as Fanny Kemble would say—of “tight
stays, tight garters, tight sleeves, tight waistbands, tight armholes,
and tight bodices.” She took no exercise, wore veils and handkerchiefs
to ward off the glare, and preferred to sit in the dark till the sun
was gone, lest it brown her pallor. Yet she went in little flat satin
slippers through the snow, and bared her shoulders to icy winds that
made a man huddle in his heaviest fear-naught.
But her foolishness somehow made her all the more fragile, all the more
needful of gentle dealing. And he loved her pitiably.
She was still asleep when he made out from a hilltop the spires of
the ancient courthouse, and the new academy in the half-shire village
of White Plains. RoBards wanted to tell his wife that she need not be
lonely out here, for she would be only a few miles from this lively
community, already containing several hundred people, a boys’ school,
and a newspaper. But he let her sleep, fearing that, after all, she
might not be impressed. She slept past the great sight of this region,
Washington’s old headquarters, only to wake a little later as the
carriage was flung and whipped about in a road of particular barbarity.
“Where are we, Mist’ RoBards?” she cried, and gasped to learn how far
they had driven. He watched her wild little glances with fascination.
She seemed to flirt and coquet with the very landscape.
She glanced with amazement at the wildness around her, the maples and
wild rhododendrons, and all the Westchester paradise of leaves and
flowers crowding in the little-used highway, brushing the fetlocks of
the horses, falling back like sickled wheat from the scythe of the
wheels, and bending down from above to flail the carriage top with
fragrant leaf-laden wands.
And now at last she spied his great tulip tree, and the Lilliputian
house beneath it, and she was weary enough to welcome the welcome they
vouchsafed.
The carriage rolled across a brief wooden bridge above a merry water.
“That’s old Bronck his river,” he told her. “And these hills were the
stronghold that Washington fell back to after the British drove him out
of the White Plains. Ignorant old General Howe had ordered his navy to
sail up the Bronx, and when the ships could not even find the little
creek, Howe feared to advance any further. He sneaked away to capture
Fort Washington by treachery.
“Our tulip trees won the praise of Washington while the great man was
here. Perhaps that very tree is the son of one of those that shed its
blossoms on his tent. Tulip trees are hard to persuade; they won’t grow
where you plant them. But this one came to live here of its own accord
when my father built this house for my mother.
“Strange, isn’t it, my darling, that they should have come out here—in
1805, it was—to escape from another pestilence? It was the yellow fever
then. It had been breaking out every few years before, but that year it
was frightful, and my mother was a bride then just as you are now.
“They went back to New York because she grew lonely, but they came out
again with the next fever summer. I was born here. Ten years ago I came
out for a while. That was another yellow fever year. Even you remember
that far back, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, Mist’ RoBards. That was when they moved the Post Office, the
Customs House, the banks, the newspapers, the churches—even my father’s
store, out to Greenwich Village. But we went back in the late fall.
When shall we go back now?”
“God knows!” he groaned. “I should be glad to stay here with you
forever.”
“It’s lonely, though—a little, don’t you think, Mist’ RoBards?”
“Not with you. We’d best forget New York. It’s a doomed city now.”
“Oh, don’t say that!”
“Dr. Chirnside called this a visitation of God’s judgment. It’s not
the first. Every few years the warning comes; the people run away and
repent, and live in simple villages or on their farms; but when the
plague has passed over they go back; they throw open their gaudy homes,
wash off the mark of the angel of the Passover on the bloody lintels of
their doors, and start up the carnival again. The men get drunk, the
women tipple and flirt. They dance all night, gamble, carouse, divorce,
live beyond their means, neglect the poor. Look at the churches on
Sunday! Hardly a man there; all women, and not many of them. Not one in
ten goes to church Sundays.”
She broke in on his tirade with a childish puzzler:
“What causes the plague, do you think, Mist’ RoBards?”
“Who can tell? It is God’s judgment, the pious men say. The doctors
call it an exhalation, a vapor, a miasma; but those are only words to
wrap ignorance in. God only knows what causes the plague.”
“Harry Chalender says—said——”
The word was the toll of a passing bell. The change of tense was like
the taking of a life. It silenced her a dreadful while. Then she tried
to banish the specter with an impersonal phrase:
“Some people say that cholera comes from bad water, and New York has no
good water. I can hardly drink the bitter stuff from the pumps, and I
can taste the old log pipes in the water that we buy from the Manhattan
Company’s well. The rainwater from the roofs is worse. No wonder
everybody drinks brandy, and there is so much drunkenness. Harry—many
people want to go out into the country, all the way up to the Croton or
the Bronx, and bring the pure streams down into the city, and do away
with the pumps and cisterns.”
RoBards laughed. “That’s an old idea. They talked about it after the
yellow fever of 1798. But they found it would cost a million dollars,
and gave it up, and let that old villain of an Aaron Burr dig his
Manhattan well in the heart of the town. Things are so much higher now
that it would cost five millions; and it would take years to lay the
miles of pipes. No, no, they’ll never make our wild little Bronx a New
York citizen. How much better to come up here into the hills and drink
its water where it is born.”
“Poor New York!” she sighed, and her head was turned so far about as
she looked off to the South that her round chin rested on the round
of her shoulder; the somber irises of her eyes were lost in the deep
lashes, where there was a hint of a tear, and her throat was a straight
line, taut as a whip-cord, from the tip of her tiny ear to the ivory
slope of her breast.
Her beauty was marble in the repose of intense meditation upon the city
abandoned to its fate. He drank it in devotedly before he laughed:
“Have you turned into Lot’s wife already, or have you the power to turn
those big eyes toward the house? It’s pretty from here.”
She startled a little, like the frightened gazelle which was the model
of ladylike conduct. Her head came round slowly, and she flicked the
dew from her eyes with a quick flutter of the lids. Then the arc of her
red lips changed from concave to convex as the sorrowful droop became a
warm smile.
A dark thought flitted through his mind that at best she found her
future prison less dismal than she had imagined it; and that her
fatigue would have made her greet even a jail with relief.
She had sat so long on so rough a voyage that she could hardly rise.
“My limbs have gone to sleep,” she said, and blushed at such a bold
allusion. She hardly knew her husband well enough yet for such
carelessness.
But he felt a dart of sharp happiness at such an indelicacy. This was
a wild adventure. A wilder was to follow, for, as he lifted her across
the front wheel he was forced to observe not only her prunella slippers
entire, but a flash of the white stocking above the ankle where the
crossed thongs were knotted.
He was dizzied by the swoop of her beauty. She came to earth and his
arms in the billow of her huge silken skirt, and her vast “elephant”
sleeves, with a swirl of ribbons everywhere.
An incense came with the goddess stooping to the ground, and she
leaned a moment along his body, the captive of his arms, and he thrust
his face so deep into her hat that its brim knocked off his own tall
beaver. He let it lie in the dust, though it was a deep-piled St. John
of the latest bell.
He kissed her full and fair, and his arms found her as soft, as spicy,
and as lithe in her voluminous taffeta as a long bough of tulip
blossoms smothered in leaves. But the sharp points of his collar,
protruding above his stock like a pair of spear-heads, hurt her cheek
and threatened to blind her, and she squealed. He loved to hear her
squeal.
A rude guffaw of unmannerly laughter brought him back to daylight and
indignation, as he heard old farmer Albeson roar:
“Wall, wall! I never seen two bodies with one head till now. Why, it’s
Master Dave! and his female bride!”
The farmer’s wife cackled at the wit of her spouse, and Patty giggled
with well-bred reserve. She treated the old rustics with the manner she
held toward the blacks who had been her father’s slaves when she was
younger. But though the Albesons were quick to remind any presumptuous
prigs that they were as good as royalty in the great and only republic,
they found Patty’s tyranny as pretty as a baby’s.
They led the way into the house. David’s black man Cuff took the horses
to the stable, and Patty’s brown woman Teen carried the luggage up the
steps and up the stairs to the long, lone room under the eaves, that
grazed the four high tops of bedposts carved as if the mahogany had
been twisted or braided.
The first duty was to wash off the dust of the travel. When Patty
lifted the scuttle hat from the clutter of her curls before the mirror,
she screamed with dismay:
“I’m blacker than Teen!”
RoBards himself poured water into the bowl and boasted of its clarity.
“Not much like the soup you get from your city cisterns, eh?”
“It’s cold, though,” she murmured.
She put him out of the room while she changed her dress to a simple,
loose house-robe. She slipped out of the steel cuirass of her stays,
and the soft sleeves drooped from her shoulders along her arms. There
was a girl’s body bewitchingly hinted inside the twinkling wrinkles.
After the return to simple, clinging things of the brief French
republic and the early Empire, the fashions had been departing more and
more from any respect for God’s image beneath. When Patty came down the
steps in something that was rather drapery than a group of balloons,
RoBards was amazed to find how human she was after all, how Grecian,
somehow; how much quainter, littler, dearer.
She apologized for her immodesty, but gave weariness as her excuse.
“I should have fainted in my room—if you had been there,” she said,
with an audacity he had never dreamed her capable of. “But where’s the
profit of a swoon if you fall into the arms of another woman—and a
black one at that?”
“You don’t have to faint to get into my arms,” he riposted as he
crushed her close.
“I’ll faint if you don’t let me out of them, Mist’ RoBards,” she gasped.
Then they went in to tea. She made hardly a pretence of eating. Even if
she had not been trained to fast at table like a lady, she would have
been too jaded with the travel.
Afterward he walked with her on the narrow piazza in the rising moon,
and he felt so wonderfully enriched by her possession, so intimately at
home with her, that he asked her if he might smoke.
“I beg you to, Mist’ RoBards,” she said; “I love the flavor of Havana.”
He took from the portmanteau-like lining of his hat one of the cigars
he carried there with his red silk handkerchief, his black gloves, and
any other small baggage that might otherwise bulge his pockets. As he
lighted it with one of the new spiral sulphur matches, he remembered
that Harry Chalender had smoked much and expensively.
Harry Chalender even smoked cigars on the street and in office hours,
though no gentleman was supposed to do that, and it would have ruined a
less secure young man financially and socially. Some of the banks would
not lend money to a man eccentric enough to smoke on the street or to
wear a mustache. But Harry had dared even to grow and wear a mustache
down Broadway. It was to pay a bet on an election, but it shocked the
more conservative.
His only effeminacy was his abstention from chewing tobacco and from
snuff. Patty often praised him for not spitting tobacco juice about
over her skirts and carpets, as so many of the gentlemen did. She had
one dress quite ruined on Broadway by a humorist’s ejaculation of such
liquor.
Because of Chalender, RoBards flung down his cigar and glared at it
where it lay in the grass, as smouldering as his sullen jealousy, and
glared back like an eye, watchful and resentful.
Only a little while he was privileged to stroll his porch with his arm
about Patty Jessamine’s unfortressed waist, for she tried to smuggle
away a yawn under the cover of a delicious sigh, and then protested
that she could not keep her eyelids open.
“No wonder!” he answered, “they’re so big!”
She kissed him on the cheek and drifted away before he could
retaliate. He walked up and down alone a while, breathing the incense
of her possession in the quiet air, still faintly flavored with the
perfume she employed.
Then he went in and up the dark stairs to find her. She lay asleep
along the bed as if she had been flung there. She was lying across
the border of the candle’s yellow feud with the blue moonlight; they
divided her form between dim gold and faint azure. She had fallen
aslumber where she fell, and he stole close to wonder over her and to
study her unblushing beauty.
Her face was out of the reach of the candle’s flickering gleam, and the
moon bewitched it with a mist of sapphire. Through the open window a
soft breeze loitered, fingering her curls, lifting them from her snowy
neck and letting them fall. And from the tulip tree a long, low branch,
studded with empty sconces of living brass, beat upon the pane with
muffled strokes.
“Beautiful! beautiful!” he whispered—not to her, nor to himself, but to
a something that seemed to watch with him. He longed to be worthy of
such beauty, and wondered if she—the she inside that little bosom—were
worthy of such treasures, such perils, as her face and her fascinations.
His heart ached with a yearning to shelter her from the evil of the
world, the plagues that would rend that lacy fabric, the fiends that
would soil its cleanliness. Such a petulant, froward, reckless little
imp it was that dwelt inside the alabaster shrine! Such loyalty she had
for the gaudy city and its frivolities! Such terror of the pestilence,
yet such terror of the great, sweet loneliness of this beloved solitude!
Else, why had she stared back along the road with a sorrow, with a
regret that seemed to trail almost like a ribbon reaching all the way
to town? Would she ever be divorced from the interests that he could
neither understand nor admire?
Well, she was his for a while—for now—and more his own while she
slept than while she was awake, for when she was awake her eyes kept
studying the plain, dull walls, and his plain, dull self; wondering,
no doubt, what substitute he could provide for the dances and picnics
and romances that crowded the days and nights in the city.
He bent to kiss a cheek like warm and pliant porcelain, and to draw the
quilt across a shoulder escaped from its sleeve, and all aglow, as if
light itself slumbered there.
He tiptoed from the room and down the stairs and into the August
night. He stepped into a cataract of moonbeams streaming down upon the
breathing grass and the somnolent trees, the old walls and fences, and
the waft flowers in the unkempt garden.
A wind walked to and fro among them like a prisoner in trailing
robes, a wind that seemed to be trying to say something, and could
not, because its tongue had been plucked out. But it kept trying
inarticulately to mumble a warning—against what?—the hazards of life
and love perhaps, and the inevitable calamities that follow success.
He had succeeded in winning Patty Jessamine. But what else had he
incurred?