Fiends of suspicion laughed at the tenderness in RoBards’ heart as he
upheld his wife. The fiends called it “complacency.” Fiends of irony
mocked that complacency and told him that it was not lofty idealism
or even consideration for her that withheld his wrath, but only a
voluptuous unwillingness to surrender the possession of her pretty form.
But whatever his true motives, he was more helpless than Chalender,
where he found him prone on a couch in the library, biting on a
mouthful of tufted quilt and stuffing it down his throat to stifle his
howls of pain as the country doctor swabbed with a coarse towel the
dirty red channel in his back.
Chalender rolled his eyes up whitely at RoBards from the pit of hell,
and then his gaunt face turned into snowflake marble as his head fell
forward and he fainted.
All that night RoBards acted as nurse for him, and forgiveness
bled from him for any real or imagined injury he had received from
Chalender. Hating the man as he did and believing that Chalender had
seduced his wife’s interest and perhaps her very honor, he could not
but feel that the wretch was doing penance enough.
At midnight he had to walk out under the star-sprinkled roof of the
tuliptree to give his eyes repose from the sight of anguish. The night
brooded above, so beautiful, so benign that he wondered how God, the
indubitable God who stared down at his little world he had made, could
endure the hell he had created for the punishment of his creatures.
A few hours had drained RoBards’ heart of resentment against the one
rival in his one love, yet it was said and preached that God kept
in the center of this world an eternal vat of liquid fire where
numberless children of his parentage screamed everlastingly in vain
for so much as a drop of water on their foreheads. And all because six
thousand years before one man Adam had broken a contract imposed upon
him.
Lawyer and believer in laws, RoBards could not fathom such
ruthlessness, such rigor in a code of entailed sin. Humanity was
growing kindlier toward its prisoners. Thirty or forty years ago, the
French under the lead of Doctor Pinel had relapsed to the old Greek
theory that the insane were innocent invalids, and should be treated
kindly, not flogged and chained and reviled. This seemed to cast a
doubt upon the belief that the mad folk were inhabited by devils, but
the effects of gentleness were amazing. And recently this infection of
modern weakness and effeminacy had led to a theory of softer methods
toward criminals.
Good and pious men had protested against the cessation of capital
punishment for thieves, but theft had not been increased by mercy.
In the British Navy, the flogging of sailors had been discontinued
and there were sentimentalists who pleaded that American sailors also
should be protected from the horror of being stripped and lashed till
their bare backs bled. But this dangerous leniency had not yet been
tried.
Over at this Sing Sing prison, however, where Chalender was building
his section of the aqueduct, so called “prison reform” was under
trial, and no great harm had come of it as yet. Where three thousand
lashes with the cat-o’-six tails had been the monthly total, less than
three hundred were inflicted now. Women were reading the Bible to the
prisoners now and then. All the good old rigidities of discipline were
giving way.
The world was turning slowly and painfully from the ancient faith in
cruelty and in men made crueler by a most cruel God, and RoBards felt
his power to hate Chalender seeping out of his heart like sand stealing
from the upper chamber of an hourglass. He tried to hold it, because
it seemed indecent to endure the existence of one he suspected of so
much as an inclination toward his sacred wife. But it slipped away in
spite of him. When he needed his hate, it was gone.
Night after night he fell asleep in his chair at the bedside of
his panting enemy, who moaned when he slept, but when he was awake
smothered all sound and simply sweat and stared and gnawed at the quilt
like a trapped rat.
When RoBards woke he would often find Patty at his side, staring at
Chalender while big tears slipped from her cheek and fell, streaking
the air with a glistening thread of light. And she mopped with a little
handkerchief the clammy forehead of Chalender, on whose knotted brow
big drops of sweat glowed like tears from squeezed eyelids.
RoBards was too tired to resent. He would lift himself heavily from his
chair and go to his breakfast, and then to the gig that was to carry
him to New York. He would sleep for miles, but his horse knew the way.
He slept through hours of courtroom boredom, too, but at night in his
room at the Astor House he was wide awake.
Below him Broadway roared in the flare of its gas lamps, the busses
going to and fro like vast glowworms. But his thoughts were in
Westchester.
He was further depressed by a hanging. At the new Tombs prison the
first execution had just taken place. The dead criminal had murdered
his wife, the pretty hot corn girl, whose cry, “Lily white corn! Buy my
lily white corn!” rang in RoBards’ ears. It seemed impossible that any
man should destroy so pretty a thing, a thing that he must have loved
much once. The thought of the pretty girl made him anxious for his own
pretty Patty. He was glad that he had not throttled her in one of his
onsets of mad justice. He longed to hurry home to hear her voice and be
sure of her.
But he could not go back for many days. And then a shift in the docket
suddenly released him and he set out at once. The long drive was an
ordeal, but there was a wonderful sense of perfectness in his heart
when his dusty horse at last turned into the road that gave his
home to his eyes. He was the pilgrim whose strength just lasts the
pilgrimage out. There was his Mecca, the Jerusalem of his heart’s
desire! His home, the place established by his father, the fireside
where his wife awaited him, the fane where his children were gathered.
It was the spirit of the time to let the poetic mood exult in high
apostrophic strains. He felt a longing to cry out something beginning
with “O thou——!” He could not find the word enormous enough for his
love, but the inarticulateness of his ecstasy shattered his soul with a
joyous awe.
Oh, that House where it waited on its hill, throned on its hill and
reigning there! Thou Tulip Tree! that standest there like a guardian
seneschal! or like the canopy above a throne! like something—he knew
not what, except that it was beautiful and noble and beyond all things
precious.
As the horse plodded up the steep road, RoBards’ heart climbed, too. He
was uplifted with a vague piety, such as he had felt when first he saw
the dome of the Statehouse at Albany and felt the glory of citizenship,
felt the majesty of his State. This home was the capitol of that people
which was his family. It bore the name he bore, as a franchise, a
title, a dignity, and therewith a mighty responsibility.
It was his duty, it must be his pride, to keep that name clean and
high; to keep that home a temple of unsullied honor. No enemy must tear
it down, no slander must soil its whiteness, no treachery must dishonor
it from within.
The sun, sinking behind it, threw out spokes of light as from the
red hub of a tremendous invisible wheel. The sun had the look of an
heraldic device.
The home was as quiet, too, as an armorial bearing. The children were
taking their afternoon nap, no doubt, in the nursery. No doubt the old
people were asleep in their upper room. His wife, where was she? He
would love to find her stretched out slumbering across her bed like a
long Easter lily laid along a pulpit.
He did not see even Cuff, the old negro, who was doubtless asleep in
the barn on a pile of harness. RoBards tied his horse to the hitching
post and moved with a lordly leisure to the porch. He had actually
forgotten that there was a stranger in his house. His heart had been
too perfectly attuned to admit a discord.
He paused on the top step and surveyed his domain. Along the contour
of the horizon—and his horizon was his own—a team of big white horses
moved, leaning against the collars that ruffed their necks. The plough
they dragged through the soil flashed back the sunset as its keen share
bounded from a sharp stone. After it plodded the farmer, the lines
about his loins, his whip sketching a long scrawl across the sky. He
was going to put in his winter wheat.
Along another hill an orchard was etched, the sky visible beneath the
branches that joined to form arches in a green colonade. Old fences
of rail and stone staggered up and down the slopes, each of them a
signature of some purchase his father had made, some parcel of land
bought from some dead farmer. Beneath RoBards’ eyes, was the little
garrison of tulip trees where his babies slept on earth. There was dew
on his lashes and an edged pebble in his throat as his lips knit in
a grimace of regret. Yet there was a holiness about his pain, and a
longing that nothing should disturb this Sabbath in his soul.
He turned to enter the open door, but he heard murmurs and a kind of
hissing whisper that surprised him. He moved toward his library, and
there, stretched out on the couch where he himself had sometimes rested
when worn out with his lawbooks, he saw Harry Chalender lying on his
right side. The quilt had fallen from one shoulder, since his left arm
was lifted to enfold the woman who sat curled on a hassock before him
and had just laid her lips upon his.
RoBards could not move, or speak. He seemed not even to think or feel.
He merely existed there. He was nothing but a witness, all witness.
After a long kiss and a long sigh of bitter-sweet bliss, Patty murmured:
“How wicked we are! how wicked!”
[Illustration: “HOW WICKED WE ARE! HOW WICKED!”]
Then she turned her beautiful head and stared across her shoulder
and saw RoBards. He could think of nothing but of how beautiful she was.
Chalender did not turn his head; but the amorous curve of his lips was
fixed in a mask of love—inane, and petrified.
Patty waited for RoBards to speak. But he did not know what to say, or
to think. And he could not move.