By and by the summer sifted from the trees and ebbed from the sky. The
honeymoon passed like a summer, in days and nights of hot beauty, in
thunder-salvos of battle, in passions of impatient rain.
For a while the autumn was a greater splendor, a transit from a green
earth starred with countless blossoms of scarlet, purple, azure, to a
vast realm of gold—red gold, yellow gold, green gold, but always and
everywhere gold. All Westchester was a treasure-temple of glory. Then
the grandeur dulled, the gold was gilt, was only patches of gilt, was
russet, was shoddy. The trees were bare. Sharp outlines of unsuspected
landscape came forth like hags whose robes have dropped from their
gaunt bones. The wind grew despondent. Savor went with color; hope was
memory; warmth, chill.
Something mournful in the air reminded RoBards of a poem that Mr.
Bryant, the editor of the _Post_, had written a few years before:
“The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere;
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.”
When he quoted this to Patty, her practical little soul was moved, as
always, to the personal:
“Your Mr. Bryant writes better than he fights, Mist’ RoBards. Only last
year, almost in front of our house, I saw him attack Mr. Stone, of
the _Commercial Advertiser_, with a horsewhip. Mr. Stone carried off
the whip. It was disgusting, but it brightened Broadway. Oh, dear,
does nothing exciting ever happen up here? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to
stroll down to the Battery to watch the sunset and cross the bridge to
Castle Garden, and hear the band play, and talk to all our friends? And
go to a dance, perhaps, or a theatre? The Kembles are there setting the
town on fire! And am I never to dance again? I was just learning to
waltz when the cholera came. I sha’n’t be able to dance at all unless
we go at once.”
It shocked RoBards to think that marriage had not changed the restless
girl to a staid matron. That she should want to waltz was peculiarly
harrowing, for this new and hideously ungraceful way of jigging and
twisting was denounced by all respectable people as a wanton frenzy,
heinously immoral, indecently amorous, and lacking in all the dignity
that marked the good old dances.
But he was in a mood to grant her anything she wished. She had a right
to her wishes now, for she was granting him his greatest wish; a son
and heir was mystically enfolded in her sweet flower-flesh, as hidden
now as the promise of the tulip tree in a bud that hardly broke the
line of a bough in the early spring, but later slowly unsheathed and
published the great leaf and the bright flower.
So he bade the servants pack her things and his, and they set out again
for New York.
Now the tide flowed back with them as it had ebbed with them. The
exiles were flocking once more to the city, and new settlers were
bringing their hopes to market. A tide of lawyers and merchants was
setting strong from New England, and packs of farmers who had harvested
only failure from the stingy lands, counted on somehow winnowing gold
on the city streets, where sharpers and humbugs of every kind would
take from them even that which they had not.
The drive to New York was amazingly more than a mere return along a
traveled path. Though they had gone out in a panic, they had been
enveloped in a paradise of leaves and flowers and lush weeds, as well
as in a bridal glamor. Now they went back under boughs as starkly
bare as the fences of rail or stone; only the weeds bore flowers, and
those were crude of fabric as of hue. And the hearts of the twain were
already autumnal. Their April, June, and August of love were gone and
November was their mantle. Patty’s orange blossoms were shed, and they
had been artificial, too.
Below White Plains the road was a-throng with cattle that frightened
Patty and the horses. When they were clear of these moving shoals,
they came into the Post Road where the stages went like elephants in a
panic. But Patty found them beautiful. She rejoiced in the increasing
crowds, and as the houses congregated about her, and the crowded
streets accepted her, she clapped her hands and cried:
“How good it is to be home!”
This sent a graveyard chill through RoBards’ heart, for it meant that
home to her was not in the solitude of his heart, but in the center of
the mob.
Home was to her more definitely the house in Park Place, her father’s
house to which he must take her till he found another lodging. Her
father and mother greeted her as a prodigal and him as a mere body
servant—which was what he felt himself to be.
The chief talk was of the cholera and its havoc. Three thousand and
five hundred dead made up its toll in the city, but the menace was
gone, and those who lived were doubly glad. The crowds in the streets
showed no gaps; there were no ruins visible. New houses were going up,
narrow streets being widened and the names changed.
It was only when the Sabbath called them to church, or some brilliant
performance took them to see Fanny Kemble and her father at the Park
Theatre, and they inquired for one friend or another, that they learned
dreadfully how many good friends had been hurried feet first to
Washington Square, whence they would never return.
Dinners were few, since nearly every family wore mourning for someone;
but gradually the gayety returned in full sweep. The dead were
forgotten, and the plans for preventing a return of the plague were
dismissed as a tiresome matter of old-fashioned unimportance. The pumps
and cisterns were no longer blamed for the slaughter of the innocents.
And now Patty must go into eclipse gradually. She grew more and more
peevish. When she complained that everybody worth while was moving
uptown, RoBards bought a house in St. John’s Park, just south of Canal
Street, and only a little distance from the Hudson River. The house
was new and modern, with a new cistern in the rear. Only a few steps
away was a pump supplied with water from the new city water works in
the salubrious region of Thirteenth Street and Broadway. There was a
key that admitted the family to the umbrageous park, behind whose high
fence there was seclusion.
There was something aristocratic and European, too, about the long iron
rail fence that framed the entire square, the same in front of every
house, and giving them all a formal uniform, a black court dress.
But even aristocracy palled. Patty found but a brief pleasure in the
privilege of walking there at twilight, and she dared not venture out
before dusk. It was chill then and she shivered as she sat on a bench
and breathed in the gloom that drooped from the naked branches like a
shroud. She did not want to be a mother yet, and she faced the ordeal
with dread, knowing how many mothers die, how few babies lived, for all
the pain of their long preparation.
The winter was cold and she complained of the dark of nights, though
her husband multiplied the spermaceti candles and the astral lamps
till her room was as dazzling as an altar. He filled the bins in the
hall closet with the best Liverpool coal and kept the grates roaring.
But she wailed of mornings when he had to break the ice in the water
pitcher for her and she huddled all day by the red-hot iron stove. She
made her servants keep it charged with blazing wood, until RoBards was
sure that the house would be set on fire.
When spring came again and released grass, birds, trees, souls,
flowers, the very air from the gyves of winter, she was so much more
a prisoner that she herself pleaded to be taken back to Tuliptree
Farm. If she could not meet people she did not want to see them pass
her windows, or hear them laugh as they went by in shadows of evening
time. On the farm she could wander about the yard unterrified and, with
increasing heaviness, devote herself to the flowerbeds. She fled at the
sight of any passerby and was altogether as hidden and craven as only a
properly bred American wife undergoing the shameful glory of motherhood
could be.
She was smitten at times with panics of fear. She knew that she would
perish and she called her husband to save her from dying so young;
yet when he got her in his arms to comfort her, she called him her
murderer. She accused him of dragging her into the hasty marriage, and
reminded him that if he had not inflicted his ring and his name and his
burden upon her she could have gone with her father and mother this
summer to Ballston Spa, where there was life and music, where the waltz
flourished in rivalry with the vivacious polka just imported.
But even in her most insane onsets she did not taunt him now with the
name of Harry Chalender. That was a comfort.
One day Chalender drove up to the house, but she would not see him.
Which gave RoBards singular pleasure. Chalender lingered, hoping no
doubt that she would relent. He sat out an hour, drinking too much
brandy, and cursing New York because it laughed at his insane talk of
going forty miles into the country to fetch a river into the city.
Chalender wanted to pick up the far-off Croton and carry it on a bridge
across the Spuyten Duyvil!
When he had left, Patty, who had overheard his every sentence, said:
“He must be going mad.” She was absent in thought a while, then
murmured as if from far off:
“I wonder if he is drinking himself to death on purpose, and why?”