The sumptuousness of the Astor House only emphasized RoBards’ exile.
From his window he would look down upon the seething throngs along
Broadway, the tall beavers of the men and the poke bonnets of the women
bobbing along as on a stream.
He would seek escape from solitude overlooking the multitude by
retreating to the inner court and the fountain flaunting its
crystal plumes in the turfed garden. But there was that quadrangle
of many-windowed walls about him, and he felt Argus eyes upon him
everywhere. Behind every curtain somebody seemed to be watching him.
The expense of the luxurious hotel was heavy—a dollar a day it cost
him, but he could not face boarding-house inquisitiveness.
In his office he would sit and brood across his pine table with its
green baize cover, and stare at the pine boxes that held his books and
the files of his cases tied with red tape. He would dip his quill into
the inkstand of gray stone and make careless scratches on the paper
before him. When he looked at them afterward they made him wonder if
he were going mad. These crazy designs would serve as evidence for his
commitment to any asylum.
On the margins of his briefs he would wake to find that he had been
making crude contours of Patty’s scoop hat, her big eyes, or the nape
of her neck. He would blot her out in a fury of rage, and attack his
work.
The case of Jessamine vs. the City of New York was still hanging fire.
Many of the claims of people who were forced to sell their lands for
the aqueduct were still unsettled though their farms were covered with
stone and trenched with ditches.
Yet now RoBards felt that the city had its justice. He had fought for
the country and the country had betrayed him. Vile wickedness had found
shelter and prosperity in the gentlest seclusions.
It was a mockery that he should be the counsel for old Jessamine. What
did he owe the dotard except hatred for bringing into the world so
pretty a perjurer? The father had made Tuliptree Farm almost untenable
by his whimpering stupidity and the daughter had driven him into exile
by her ruthless frivolity.
From his law office and his hotel RoBards would flee to a club. He had
joined the fashionable Union Club just formed, but the members always
asked him about his wife, and he had to speak of her with affection and
respect.
The affection was still in his heart, but the respect—he marveled at
his ability to adore one whom he despised, to hang his whole life on
the broken reed of a little woman’s wavering fancy.
He frequented the theatre but he found discomfort there, since almost
all the stories dealt with tragic or comic flirtations. He liked to go
to the Bowery Theatre, but it was always burning down. Mary Taylor,
“Our Mary” as they called her, puzzled him because she had a reputation
for private morality and yet she was a convincing actress of spicy
rôles. Patty was not an actress at all—she was positively imbecile in
the drawing-room plays she had taken part in; yet her private life
proved that her home was but a stage to her. Behind the private life of
people there was so often another private life. And he had never been
admitted until now to the green room of his own domestic theatre. Patty
was a convincing actress of Innocence.
Moods of retaliation were frequent. There were opportunities enough. It
amazed him now that he was alone in the city to see how many chances
were offered him to make some other husband a fool. Young girls
of fifteen or sixteen, who had not yet been married, or were only
betrothed, dazed him by the black wisdom in their eyes. They scampered
and made pretenses of terror before him like kittens or puppies begging
him to pursue them.
Others were to be had of a more public character. It was estimated that
there were ten thousand downright wicked women in the town. The streets
at night were so crowded with them that innocent young girls, poor
seamstresses or polite damsels whom some emergency forced to be abroad,
were not only ogled and bespoken, but sometimes seized and kissed by
the loiterers.
The haunts of evil were well known, some of them foul dens, but others
mansions. Yet the very sense that Patty had absolved him of obligation
to her; that she herself had severed their contract, annulled the
temptation. What excitement could he find it taking sneakingly what
nobody could prevent his taking openly?
Besides, as a lawyer he knew that the traps of blackmail lay all about
the town—springes to catch woodcocks. The heads of many families were
paying perennial taxes on such indiscretions. He knew of one banker who
had been mulcted of thirty thousand dollars just because he chanced to
be in the house where Helen Jewett was murdered. The trial of the young
clerk charged with the crime was enormously exploited by the noisy
newspapers.
That clerk was ruined for life, and he might well have wished that he
had been employed by Mr. Tappan, the abolitionist silk merchant who
compelled each of his clerks to sign a pledge never to visit a theatre
or make acquaintance with actor, actress, or other person of evil life,
never to be out of his boarding house after ten o’clock at night, never
to miss the two prayer meetings a week, or the two Sunday services, or
fail to report of a Monday morning the church, the preacher, and the
text of the day before.
A final check upon any recklessness in RoBards’ lonely humors was the
feeling that if he also sinned he would be robbed of his precious
indignation against Patty. He was no prig, no prude. He had lived.
But just now the one food of his soul was the sense of being cruelly
wronged. It was gall, but it sustained him somehow.
In the eyes of the law a husband’s infidelity was almost negligible,
but RoBards felt that if he were to break his vows he would acquit
Patty of blame for being false to hers. There were families in town,
according to gossip-mongers and the gossip papers, where husband and
wife were mutually and commonly disloyal. But he could think of nothing
more hideous than such households.
He was Saint Anthony in a lonely cavern, but only one devil tried
his soul and that was the bewitching spirit of his pretty wife.
Patty drifted through his dreams like a wind-driven moth. She poised
and flitted and opened her arms like a moth’s wings. And it seemed
impossible that he should long resist her.
One morning he read in the _Herald_ (whose editor Mr. Bennett had
recently had a knockdown fight with General Webb of the _Courier_) a
statement that Mr. Henry Chalender had recovered from his wound and was
once more active in the completion of his section of the aqueduct. The
_Herald_ added that this news would give relief and pleasure to the
numberless admirers of the popular idol.
This paragraph filled RoBards with mixed emotions. During his long
indecision, his Hamlet-like soliloquies and postponements, nature had
healed the wound in Chalender’s flesh, and, though he would not admit
it, had nearly healed the wound in RoBards’ soul.
There was a relief of tension at least. The world was going on.
Chalender was well and busy—perhaps he was renewing his amour with
Patty. Perhaps, deserted and lonely, she would yield again. That would
be a double damnation. Anyone might sin and recover, but to slip back
again was to be lost forever.
Yet who was to uphold her in the hour of weakness? Who was to drive the
wolf away from the ewe?
Insidiously the temptations RoBards had denounced as complacency,
servility, wanton desire took on now the aspect of duty. It was his
duty to go home and take up wedlock again, to save the little silly
beauty he had married from becoming a monster of iniquity.
Now that his house was freed of the intruder, homesickness came over
him like a fever. He yearned for the hills of Westchester, those
earthen breakers foaming with trees, and carrying on their crests
houses like ships anchored on waves that never moved.
His long sojourn in New York began to attract open comment,
particularly as the heat was so vicious that it looked curious for
anyone to remain who could get out. There was nobody in town now but
nobodies.
What excuse had he to linger? He had to rise and go back. He had
not slain Chalender. This abstention in itself had amounted to an
acquittal. If he were not going to punish Chalender, why should he
punish himself? If his aim were to escape gossip, why encourage it?
He went home. Patty was in the yard playing a game with the children.
They seemed to have grown amazingly since he left. They ran to him
screaming welcome. It was bliss to feel their warm hands clutching him.
He could see that Patty was afraid to move either toward him or away.
She had never written to him, but he had felt that this was meekness
rather than neglect. She waited now struggling between a cry of joy and
a fit of tears.
He pretended that it was for the children’s sake that he called out:
“Hello, Patty!”
“Hello, David!” she murmured. Suddenly her eyes were gleaming with
tears.