One day, while sinking an exploratory shaft, Chalender came upon a vein
of the snowflake marble that underlay that region. He bored a tunnel
through this frost that had become stone; and laid a royal pavement for
the rural Croton to march upon to town.
The first slab of marble that Chalender cut served him as a pretext for
a visit to Tuliptree Farm. He brought it across country in a wagon and
laid it down at Patty’s feet. He said he had been writing a poem all
the way over, but the jolting of the wagon had knocked the meter askew,
and the sight of RoBards had knocked the whole thing out of his sconce.
That was his way. He had hoped not to find RoBards at home. Finding
him there, he was impudent enough to conceal his dismay in its own
exaggeration. He pretended to be caught in a rendezvous and played the
scene with an imitation of the bombast of the popular young actor,
Edwin Forrest.
Patty laughed equally at Chalender’s burlesque of guilt and at her
husband’s efforts to pretend amusement. Then she insisted that the slab
be set down before the fireplace as a hearthstone, to replace the old
block of slate that had been quietly cracking and chipping for years.
This whim of hers offended her husband exquisitely, but she thwarted
him by a show of hysterics, and he dared not protest; for she was
once more in one of those states of mind and body where she must not
be crossed. She was like a rose-tree budding every year with a new
flower. Her third baby had died in the spring following the great fire.
Still Nature would not relent, and another was already aglow within
her protesting flesh. And in the fall of 1837, that baby followed its
brother to the grave. But that was to be expected.
Nobody counted on raising more than half the children the Lord
allotted. It was a woman’s duty to bear enough to have a few left to
mature. Since nobody had discovered a preventive of disease, it was
evidently Heaven’s pleasure to take back its loaned infants after
running them through a brief hell of whooping cough, chicken pox,
measles, fits, red gum, and scarlatina.
Patty was an unheroic mother. She fought the doctor’s and the nurse’s
orders to keep the babies bandaged tightly, and she was impatient with
the theory that it was a good thing for a baby to cry all the time, and
that it was well to have all the diseases and get them over with—or go
under with them.
Heaven was pleased that a wife should multiply her kind. What else was
she for? If Heaven subtracted, that was the pleasure of Heaven. The
orders were to bear much fruit. Families of sixteen or more children
were not unusual, and a dozen was hardly more than normal. Most of the
family would soon be found in the graveyard, but that had always been
so. The death rate among mothers was horrible, too; but they died in
the line of duty and their husbands remembered them tenderly—unless
their successors were over-jealous. And it was a man’s duty to keep on
taking wives so that the race should not perish—as it was a soldier’s
duty, as soon as one charger died under him, to capture another.
Patty grew almost blasphemous over the curse upon her sex. She resented
her seizure by one of the wandering souls, and the long exile it meant
from “the pursuit of happiness.” She called it “unconstitutional!” When
the day of travail came she screamed like a tormented child, and when
her hard-won puppet was taken from her she wept like a little girl
whose toy is wrested away.
Those weird deaths of souls hardly yet born were devastating to
RoBards. He frightened Patty so by the first hideous sob she heard from
him that he concealed his grief from her and sought only to console
her as if he had lost nothing. It cost him heavily to deny himself the
relief of outcry.
On one subject at least he and Patty did not disagree. She would not
have her lost babies taken to either of the graveyards at White Plains
and Armonk. She asked to have their hardly tenanted bodies kept on the
farm, and chose for them a nook where a covey of young tulip trees had
gathered like a little outpost of sentinels.
Always she vowed that she would have no more children: it hurt too
much to see them die. And RoBards, though he longed for a forest of
sons about him, felt a justice in her claim that she should have the
decision since she carried the burden. But she was so tempting and so
temptable that now and again passion blinded them again to peril, and
she was trapped anew. Sometimes, in his black agonies of mourning,
RoBards believed that these children were snatched from them because
they were conceived in tempests of rapture, and not in the mood of
prayer and consecration with which the preacher, Dr. Chirnside,
declared the parental altar should be approached.
But Patty mocked RoBards’s solemnity when he broached the subject,
and giggled at him as she peeked between her fingers and snickered,
“Shame on you!” She had two weapons that always put him to utter rout—a
naughty smile of pretended shock, and the quivering upper lip and
tremulous wet eyelids of being about to cry.
Often when her frivolous hilarities angered him and he made ready to
denounce her, the mere tightening of the silken threads of her eyebrows
and the puckering of her thimble chin admonished him that a shower of
tears was in her sky, and he forbore. He could not endure to give her
pain. His whole desire was to make her life one long, long blissfulness.
Yet he seemed disqualified for this. He could rarely achieve
entertainment. She did not find the luxury in his society that he found
in hers. He had her beauty to bask in and she had only his tiresome
earnestness or labored humor. Nowadays when he was kept in the city for
a week or two during the sessions of the courts, she would not go to
town with him. She pretended that it was the quiet contentment of the
farmstead that held her, but he was not convinced.
Patty’s father and mother still lived at Tuliptree Farm, and both were
so querulous that Patty could hardly endure them. Yet she would not
stay in town.
It was more than a coincidence that Harry Chalender was neighbors with
her now. He carried the city with him. He was New York enough for her.
The times being hard and fees hard to collect, RoBards closed up the
house in St. John’s Square. He could not rent it, but it was expensive
to keep up, and lonely; so he took a room at the gorgeous new Astor
House.
Often when he came to the farm from the hot town he would note a
strange elusiveness in Patty, the guilt of a mouse caught nibbling a
cake. Or, else, she would be a little too glad to see him. The most
suspicious trait was her occasional unusual solicitude for him: her
anxiety to be sure just when he would return.
Sometimes when he rode into the yard Cuff would say, “You jest missed
Mista Chalenda.” He felt that he read a veiled disappointment in the
ivory eyeballs as they rolled away from his scrutiny. But how could he
ask an ex-slave such questions as rose to his tortured mind? How could
he resent a servant’s unspoken criticism, without exposing the whole
problem of his wife’s integrity?
He would say to Patty carelessly:
“Anybody been here?”
But what could he say when she answered:
“Only that stupid Harry Chalender, with his eternal talk of culverts
and protection walls and drunken teamsters, and the prospects of a
strike.”
He had long ago learned that beneath her yawn was a readiness to fight.
He was usually worn out with the worry and fag of the law courts where
even the judges sat in shirt-sleeves and spat tobacco between their
cocked-up feet. He came home for peace; but to Patty, a hot argument
brought refreshment from a day of languor or of boredom from her dull
parents, or of light coquetry with a flattering gallant.
She always whipped her husband out. She would whimper and make him a
brute, or she would rail and storm till he implored her for quiet, to
cheat the hungry ears of the servants or to appease the two terrified
children who hung about his knees; or to escape the sullen glare of
Patty’s father and mother.
He felt that, instead of browbeating or being browbeaten by a delicate
woman, he ought to go over to Sing Sing and horsewhip Harry Chalender.
But that also had its inconveniences, and he had no stomach for adding
his own name to the list of knockabouts that accompanied the building
of the aqueduct.
For, all along the right of way, as the landholders had prophesied,
there was drunken brawling. A river of alcohol paralleled the dry bed
for the Croton. Farmers turned their homes into grog shops. Village
tavern-owners and city saloon-keepers set up shanties under the dusty
trees, whether the easily corrupted magistrates gave them licenses or
not.
Together with drink came every other form of dissipation. Gamblers and
cheap tricksters abounded, and those burly harpies strangely miscalled
“light women” came out of their overcrowded lairs in town until the
innocent countryside was one sordid bacchanal.
Whipped up with liquor and the mad eloquence it inspired, the laboring
men began to talk of their rights and wrongs and, above all, of their
right to organize. In England the first efforts of the lower classes to
combine against the upper, and form a new Jacquerie had been dealt with
sharply, but without permanent success.
The laws of the United States were strict enough, but loose talk of
democracy was undermining them, and the toilers were gaining a sense of
unity. They called themselves “Workies” with an affectionate self-pity,
and early in 1838 they achieved a turn-out (or, as they called it
recently, “a strike”) for higher wages.
This mutiny had a short life, for the hard times and the vast mobs of
unemployed made it easy for the contractors to replace the strikers,
and the magistrates were severe. The contractors caused a panic by
agreeing never on any terms to re-employ the ringleaders, and there
were soon no ringleaders. The others made haste to beg for mercy and to
resume their picks and shovels with gratitude.
One day Patty, to escape from the gloom of her parents, ordered Cuff to
hitch up the carry-all and drive her over to see the construction camp.
As she sat gossiping with Harry Chalender, who pointed out the rising
walls of masonry, a quarrel arose between two laborers in a ditch.
They bandied words like Hamlet and Laertes in the tomb of Ophelia, and
then as if the first and second gravediggers had fallen afoul, they
raised their picks and began a dreadful fencing match that set Patty to
shrieking and swooning.
Chalender was capable as any other carpet knight of prodigies of valor
so long as a lady’s eyes were upon him. He left Patty’s carriage wheel
and ran shouting commands to desist. When the battlers paid him no
heed, he was foolhardy enough to leap down between them. One pick dealt
him a glancing blow on the skull, while the other struck deep into the
sinews across his shoulder blades.
Cuff told RoBards afterward that Miss Patty, instead of fainting at the
sight of Chalender’s blood, sprang to the ground across the wheel and
ran to him like a fury, slashing at the laborers with her fingernails.
The workmen were aghast enough at the white victim they had unwittingly
laid low, and they lifted him from the ditch. Patty dropped to the
heap of fresh soil and took his bleeding form into her arms, tore away
his shirt and with desperate immodesty made bandages of her own white
pantaloons and stenched the gouts of red.
Then she ordered that Chalender be picked up and placed in her own
carry-all. And she brought him home with her.
When RoBards came up from New York, Cuff told him the story before he
reached the house. On the doorsill Patty confronted him with white
defiance. She waited for him to speak.
She dared him to speak. What could he say?
She had saved the life of a wounded man. She had brought home a dying
friend. The Good Samaritan had done no more and no less.
RoBards could have wished the victim had been anyone else in the world,
but he could hardly have wished his wife unequal to such a crisis.
She stood waiting for him, grim, wan, her nostrils wide and taut, her
lips thin and tight, her eyes ransacking his very soul.
And so he said:
“You are wonderful!”
And then she broke down across the arm he thrust out to catch her; and
she wept upon his heart, caressing his cheek with stroking hands, while
she sobbed:
“I love you. You are so sweet. Poor Harry, I thought they had killed
him! He was so stupid! But you are so sweet!”
And never was word bitterer in a man’s ears than that reiterated
“sweet.”