That night RoBards slept apart from his wife—in the spare room. He owed
that much to his wrongs and she dared not try to wheedle him into the
dangerous neighborhood of her beauty.
But first they heard the children’s prayers together. It was bitter to
hear their sleepy voices asking forgiveness for their tiny sins and
murmuring, “God bless Mamma and Papa and Mister Chalender! Amen!” Then
the wet little good-night kisses scalded the cheeks of the divided
parents who leaned across the cradles as across coffins and waited till
sleep carried their babes away to the huge nursery of night. Then they
parted without a word, without the challenge of a look.
He slept, too. All night he slept, better than ever. His strength had
been shattered in a moment as if a bolt of lightning had riven him. He
was a dead man until the morning brought resurrection and the problems
of the daylight.
The first thing he heard was a loud shout:
“Jump her, boys! jump her! No water! There’s no water! We’ve got to get
some gunpowder! Up she goes! Down she comes!”
It was Harry Chalender in a delirium fighting the Great Fire again. His
frenzy gave him the horrible sanctity of the insane.
The doctor came over after breakfast. He shook his head. The wound was
dangerous: the pick-blade had made an ugly gouge and gangrene might
set in. There was pus in the wound. There was fever, of course, high,
racking fever that fried his flesh till the very skin seemed to crackle.
RoBards had not expected to go back to town for several days. He had
needed the cool remoteness of his farm. But now the solitude was like
that uttermost calm into which the angels fell and made it Pandemonium.
Now the place was crowded with invisible devils gibbering at him,
shaking their horned heads over him in hilarious contempt, tempting him
to everything desperate.
He made an excuse to Patty that he had to return to the city. He spoke
to her with the coldest formality. She made no effort to detain him,
but this was plainly not from indifference, for she answered like a
condemned prisoner in the dock.
“All right, Mist’ RoBards. I understand.”
It broke his heart to see her meek. All the fire of pride was gone out
of her. She was a whipped cur thing, and he could not put out his hand
to caress her.
Something in him, a god or a fiend, tried to persuade him that she was
not to blame, that she had been the prey of currents stronger than
herself. But whether the god or the fiend whispered him this, the other
of the two spirits denied it as a contemptible folly.
According to the law, women, as soon as they married, lost all rights
to their souls, wills, properties, and destinies: yet if men were
to forgive their wives for infidelities no home would be safe. This
new-fangled mawkishness toward the wicked must have a limit somewhere.
He had to go into his library for a lawbook that he had brought with
him on an earlier visit to his home—“visit” seemed the nice, exact
word, for he was only a visitor now. Harry Chalender was the master of
the house.
RoBards expected to find the usurper in a delirium. But Chalender was
out of the cloud for the moment. With a singularly fresh and boyish
cheer, he sang out:
“Hello, David! How’s my old crony? Don’t let me keep you out of your
shop. Go ahead and work and don’t mind me. I’m pretty sick, I suppose,
or I’d take myself out of your way. Forgive me, won’t you?”
He asked forgiveness for a possible inconvenience, but kept in his
black heart the supposed secret of his treachery! Yet something
compelled RoBards to laugh and say that he was to make himself at home
and feel right welcome. The dishonest glance he cast toward Chalender
was met with a look of smiling honesty that reminded David of some
lines he had heard the English actor Kean deliver at the theatre:
“My tables—meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”
Yet he smiled himself, and felt that many a villain was more the hero
than he. He hurried out of the room, fleeing from the helpless sick man
who smiled and had no conscience to trouble him.
He found that his horse had gone lame and could not take him all the
way to New York. He drove the limping nag only so far as White Plains,
and sent Cuff back with him. He waited in front of Purdy’s Store until
the Red Bird coach was ready to start. He saw Dr. Chirnside waiting
for the same stage, and he dreaded the ordeal of the old preacher’s
garrulity. But there was no escape. The parson had come up to look over
the churches in the Bedford Circuit and he was pretty sure to indulge
in one of his long tirades against the evils of the times—especially
the appalling atheism of the country, an inheritance from the
Revolutionary sentiments. The colleges were full of it—of atheism,
drunkenness, gambling—but Dr. Chirnside seemed to dread atheism far
less than he dreaded the other sects of his own faith. Methodists,
Baptists, Presbyterians were gaining a foothold in the countryside and
he almost choked when he referred to the Catholics.
All the way down to New York Dr. Chirnside’s tongue kept pace with the
galloping horses. He began with the stage itself. He remembered when
even carriages were almost unknown in the rural districts. Gentlemen
rode horses and carried their necessaries in valises swung from the
saddle; ladies rode on pillions. Then light wagons came in, and
carioles next, gigs, chaises, and chairs. And now stages with their
luxury and their speed of nearly ten miles an hour!
As if that were not enough, a steam railroad was to ruin the peace of
the country. Had Mr. RoBards ridden behind one of the engines that now
drew the railway cars from the City Hall all the way to Harlem? No? He
had been fortunate in his abstemiousness.
“The speed of these trains is only another instance of our mad passion
for hurry. After a time people will return to their sanity, and the
stage coaches will drive the fire-breathing monsters back to the
oblivion they came from.
“Another evil of the railroad is that it will bring more and more of
the wicked city element into the country. The aqueduct has practically
ruined an entire region. Have you seen the hollow Chinese wall they are
building for the Croton water? Ah, yes! Indeed! Most impressive, but if
man’s work destroys God’s beautiful country where will be the profit?
“The Continental Sabbath will soon destroy the rural peace as it has
already destroyed New York’s good name. The chains are no longer drawn
across Broadway before the church services and any Tom, Dick, or Harry
may now drive his rattletrap past the sacred edifice on his way to some
pagan holiday.
“In the good old days even taking a walk on Sunday was recognized as a
disrespect to the Lord. Nowadays men go driving! And not always without
fair companions of the most frivolous sort. In my day a gentleman,
passing his most intimate friend on the way to church, would greet him
with a cold and formal nod. Nowadays people smile and laugh on Sunday
as if it were merely a day like another! Where will it end? I tremble
to think of it.
“I have just witnessed an example of the extent to which the new
lawlessness is carrying us. Fortunately I was able to deal with it
sternly.”
He told how some of the aqueduct laborers had spent their Sunday off,
not in pious meditation and fasting, but in sauntering about the
country. Their paganism had gone so far that when they came upon a
patch of wild whortleberries growing by the roadside, they brazenly
began to pick and eat them and gather others to take to their camp.
“Driving home from the service I chanced to see them, and I determined
to put a stop at once to this violation of the laws of God and man. I
ordered the county sheriff to arrest the culprits. They were fined a
shilling each for the sacrilege.
“Unfortunately, this was not the end of it. The depths of human
depravity were disclosed in the behavior of these gross men. Only last
Sabbath, instead of going to church, they hung about the village. Most
unluckily, the sheriff’s daughter carelessly went into the garden and
picked a few currants for the midday dinner. Whereupon the laborers
called on her father and demanded that he arrest his own daughter. He
had to do it, too, and pay her fine of a shilling. It will be a lesson
to the wicked girl, but it rather undoes the good I was able to impress
on the laborers.”
Dr. Chirnside was aghast at such levity, such contempt for sacred
things, but RoBards took no comfort in the thought that, since man’s
quenchless thirst for horrors could be slaked with such trivial
atrocities, his own tragedy was only one example more.
He felt an almost irresistible impulse to seize the clergyman by the
sleeve and cry:
“What would you say if I told you of what has been going on in my own
home? My wife is a member of your congregation; she has been brought up
with every warning against immodesty of thought or action, and yet—and
yet——”
He could not frame the story even in thought. He could not tell it. Yet
if he did not tell, the secret would gnaw his heart away like a rat
caged within.
Dr. Chirnside could hardly have found appropriate gloom for this
disaster since he was already in such despair over the habits of the
modern women, that he had no superlatives left for their dishonor.
As the stage swung down into the city, lurching through mudholes that
occasionally compelled it to take to the sidewalk and scatter the
pedestrians like chickens, he pointed out a girl strolling along with a
greyhound on the leash of a blue silk ribbon.
“See how our girls walk abroad unattended,” he gasped. “That young
female has at least a dog to protect her, but it is appalling how
careless parents are. No wonder our foreign critics are aghast at
the license we allow our ladies. They go about without a father or
a husband to guard them from the insolence of bystanders. It is the
custom, too, to permit couples who have been formally betrothed to be
alone together without any guardian. In most of the homes sofas have
been imported for them to sit upon. No wonder that New England people
say that their old custom of bundling was less immodest. The very word
sofa implies an Oriental luxury.
“The dress of our women, too, is absolutely disgusting. When I was
young there was an outcry against a new fashion of shortening the
skirts in the rear so that the heels were visible. People frankly cried
‘Shame!’ at the sight of them. Nowadays ankles are openly exposed. Look
at that pretty creature stepping across the gutter. She is actually
lifting her petticoats out of the mud. No wonder those men all crane
their necks to ogle! And her satin shoes are hardly more than cobwebs!
“Their immodesty does not stop at the ankles. The bare bosom is seen!
Really! I blush to mention what young females of excellent family do
not blush to reveal.
“It is perilous to health, too. You see our ladies gadding about in the
bitterest weather with their necks uncovered, while gentlemen shiver
under their great coats with five or six capes and heavy stocks and
mufflers besides.
“But the men are hardly more modest. This new fashion of—dare I refer
to it?—of buttoning the pantaloons down the front instead of on the
sides! It is astounding. One or two sermons have already been preached
against it and I think I shall refer to it myself next Sabbath. Pardon
me!”
There was a respite while he took out his pocketbook and made a note of
this urgent matter. RoBards remembered his own memorandum that a man
may smile and be a rake as well. He could hardly keep from plucking at
the parson’s sleeve and confessing:
“When you are in your pulpit, cry out also that one of the town’s pets,
the popular Harry Chalender, has ruined the good name of my wife and
our children and stained the old RoBards mansion with the wreckage of
the Seventh Thou-shalt-not!”
But Dr. Chirnside was putting up his pencil and putting forth his lean,
cold hand for a farewell clasp. The stage was nearing City Hall Park
and he must get out his fare and get down at his parsonage.
And a little further below was the Astor House, which RoBards must call
home henceforth.
Dr. Chirnside had referred for his “thirteenthly” to the barbaric
luxury of the new hotel, and to the evil influence of such hostelries
on home-life. It had a bathtub on every floor! What Oriental luxury
would come next? In many of the more religious states bathing was
a misdemeanor, but in New York every crime flourished—and every
slothfulness. The modern woman, unlike her mother, was too shiftless
to care for her own household or even to oversee her servants: she
preferred to live in a hotel and have more time and convenience for her
idle mischiefs.
But RoBards mused dismally that his home had gone to wrack and ruin
first, and that the hotel was his only refuge.