If Chalender had only risen in self-defence or reached for a weapon
or spoken a word, whether of bravado or cowardice, it would have been
easy for RoBards to rush him. If his lip had merely quirked with that
flippant smile of his at life, it would have been a rapture to throttle
him.
But his lip was still pathetic with an arrested kiss, and in his eyes
was the pain of desire. He did not know that RoBards was looking at him.
The animal instinct to destroy the man who had won his wife’s caress
was checked by an instinct equally animal: the disability to attack the
helpless and unresisting.
First wrath had thrust RoBards forward. But his feet grew leaden
upon the floor, as a multitude of impulses and instincts flung out
of his soul and crowded about his will, restraining it like a mob of
peacemakers, a sheriff’s posse of deputies.
He had come from thoughts of piety before the meaning of his home,
and his heart was devout. His eyes had just left off embracing with a
mighty tenderness the graves of his two little children.
The bare imaginations of their mother’s infidelity and its punishment
were like sacrilegious rioters abusing the calm church within him.
In his revolt, he could have called his eyes liars for presenting his
wife to him in another man’s arms, and before he could see through the
haze that clouded his vision, she was standing erect and staring at him
with a dignity that defied either his suspicions or his revenge. He
could have killed Patty for her own recklessness with her honor, which
was his now. He understood in a wild flash of thought-lightning why the
husband of “the pretty hot-corn girl” must have struck her dead.
Chalender had not moved, did not suspect. He was wounded; his fever was
high. He might not live.
Perhaps he had been in a delirium. Perhaps Patty had been merely trying
to quiet him. But she had been saying, “How wicked we are!” as if
cheaply absolving herself of sin by confession.
Suppose RoBards charged her with disloyalty and she denied it. What
proof had he? He was the only witness. He could not divorce her for
merely kissing a wounded visitor.
Divorce! How loathsome! Nobody had yet forgotten old Aaron Burr’s
brief marriage to old Betty Jumel or the recent noisome lawsuit that
followed, in which Burr flattered her with four corespondents to her
one for him.
As a lawyer RoBards had many divorce trials brought to him and he
abominated them. He had never had a nightmare so vile as the thought
that he might have to choose between clamorous divorce and smothered
disgrace.
He wanted to die now rather than make the choice. To kill Chalender
would seem almost a lesser horror. But that also meant exposure to the
public. The burial of Chalender would but throw open his own home like
a broken grave. It was only a detail that Chalender had saved his life
the night of the fire when RoBards could not climb back to the wharf
and no one else heard or heeded him.
To butcher a wounded man, guilty so ever; to strip a woman stark before
the mob, evil so ever; to brand his children, to blotch his home with
scandal—pure infamy! But, on the other hand, to spare a slimy reptile;
to be the cheap victim of a woman’s duplicity; to leave his children to
her foul ideals; to make his home a whited sepulcher—infamy again. He
felt that the children must be first to be considered. But which way
was their welfare to be sought?
Then the children themselves ran in upon his swooning mind, Imogene
and Keith. He felt their tendril fingers wrap about his inert hands.
He heard their piping cries of welcome. He fell back from the door
and was so weak, so sick that they easily pulled him to his knees and
clambered on his back and beat him, commanding “Giddap!” and “Whoa,
Dobbin!”
The very attitude was a degradation. He was actually crawling, a brute
beast on all fours with his young on his back. When he flung them off
Keith bumped his head and began to cry, Immy to howl and boo-hoo! And
they ran to their mother protesting that their Papa was mean, and
hurted them. They turned to Chalender for protection. And this was
Chalender’s first warning that RoBards had come home—home! what a
dirtied word it was now—“home!”
RoBards scrambled to his feet and dashed out of the intolerable place.
Only the old tulip tree had dignity now. With a Brahmanic majesty it
waved its long-sleeved arms above him and warned him that he must not
let life drive him mad. His decision one way or the other did not
matter much. Nothing he did or left undone mattered much. The leaves
would come and go and come anew. The farmer was still striding along
after his plough in a silhouette cut out against a scarlet west.
Just one thing seemed important: the house pleaded with him not to
dishonor it. It was older than he. It had cradled him. It had cradled
his children. It wanted to cradle their children’s children. The
lengthening shadow of the chimney had crept along the grass now till it
lay like a soft coverlet on the beds of the little twain that had been
lent him for a while. The very chimney had a soul of its own, and a
good name. It seemed to implore him not to brand it as a place of evil
resort.
His knees gave way and he dropped to the ground, rendered idiot by the
contradiction of his impulses. He saw old negro Cuff staring at him.
The farmer’s wife paused at the back door to wonder. At an upper window
Patty’s Teen leaned out to fix on him the white stare of her black face.
Then someone came stepping toward him as timidly as a rabbit in
dew-chilled grass. Someone sank down by him with a puff of floating
silk and a drift of perfume across his nostrils. And then his wife
spoke in the coldest calmest voice he had ever heard from her, as if
his discovery of her had discovered her to herself and had aged her in
a moment.
“Mist’ RoBards!” she pleaded, “Mist’ RoBards if it will save you any
trouble, I’ll kill myself. I’ll fling myself down the well, or let you
kill me if you would like that better. Some day you were bound to catch
us together, Harry and me. I’m almost glad you did at last. I’ve been
bad enough to destroy my own soul, but don’t let me break your heart or
ruin your life. I’m not worth your grieving for, Mist’ RoBards. I’ve
been as wicked as I could be and for a long while, and now you’ve found
me out—and I’m glad. Even if you kill me, I’m glad.”
But he was not glad. Suspicion had burned and hurt, but knowledge was a
knife through the heart; it was mortal. It killed something in him. One
soul of his many souls was slain. His other souls were in a panic about
its deathbed, as Patty went on, her voice queerly beautiful for all the
hideous things it told:
“Harry doesn’t know that you saw him—us. Nobody does. He isn’t in his
right mind. He is weak and sick and I made myself pretty just to make
him quit laughing at me. And if he dies, it will be my fault.
“And that would be funny—for such a worthless little fool as me to
cause so much trouble for two men, two such fine men. He is fine, in
spite of all his wickedness, and he’s doing a great work that must go
on. Let me go away and disappear somewhere. I’ll drown myself in your
river, if I can find a place deep enough. And Harry need never know
why. I don’t want him to know that you saw us. I couldn’t stand that.
It’s of you I’m thinking. I don’t want him to know that you know about
this terrible thing. It isn’t so bad, if he doesn’t know you know. For
then you’d have to kill him, I suppose.
“But please don’t kill him, for then they’ll try you and send you to
prison or hang you and choke you to death before all the people. Oh,
don’t let that happen, David. You couldn’t be so cruel to me as to let
them kill you and hurt you and bury you in the Potter’s Field on my
account—don’t do that to me, Davie. I’ve loved you. In my way, I’ve
loved you. I’m not good enough for you, but—if any harm should come to
you, I’d die. Don’t look like that, Mist’ RoBards! Oh, don’t look so
helpless and heartbroken and so unhappy. Don’t torture me to death that
way!”
And then it was he that sobbed and not she. He could feel her clutching
at him and lifting him from the grass reeking with his tears. She
drew his head into her soft arms and into her lap and set her lips
against his cheek, but dared not kiss him, though her tears beat on his
clenched eyelids like the first big drops of a long rain.
One little mercy was vouchsafed him and that was the sinking of the sun
behind the hill; the blessed twilight came with its infinite suavity
and the impalpable veils it draws across the harsh edges of things and
thoughts.
He saw the tide of the evening wind where it eddied along the grass
and overflowed his hands and his face. He heard the farmer go up the
dusty lane that muffled the tread of the tired horses, but not the
little clink-clink of the harness rings. He supposed that the farmer
was staring and wondering at him as he himself stared inside his own
eyelids at the world within him, and wondered at that.
It grew cold. His wife’s hands chilled as they clenched his. He could
feel her shiver. He could just hear her whisper through her chattering
teeth:
“Please come in, Mist’ RoBards.”
He put away her arms and got to his feet. Then his dignity took on the
look of mere sulkiness. When he saw Patty unable to rise, and huddled
in a dismal heap, he bent and lifted her to her feet. She seemed unable
to stand or walk; so his arm of its own volition or habit went round
her to hold her up.
And at that she threw her arms about him and buried her face in his
breast and sobbed. He looked through blurred eyes at the ambiguous sky
where stars were thrilling in the rosy afterglow. In the dark house
someone was lighting lamps. The lamps and the stars were tenderly
beautiful, but they came only when all else was black.
From the hall door a rug of warm yellow ran across the porch and down
the steps into the path. The children began to call, “Mamma! Papa!
where are you?”
The house yearned toward him with its deep bosom. Something with the
arms of a spirit reached out from it and drew him in.
It was wrong to yield, but he had an utter need of peace for a while.
He was wounded worse than Chalender, and needed more care.
All that night it was as if Indians prowled about the house, savages
that longed to drag forth the people within, to howl slanders and
truths about them, to fasten them to stakes and dance a torture dance
about them, cut off their eyelids and blind them with ruthless light.
There were no Indians to fear now, save the stealthy reporters and the
more merciless newspapers.
But the house baffled them; it was a strong stockade. They should not
have its children yet a while. It had won another day in its long
battle against the invading strangers.