The next morning RoBards was awake very betimes, driven from needed
sleep by an onslaught of terrors. A thousand little fiends assailed him
and bound him like Gulliver held fast with threads. RoBards would never
take anxiety lying down, but rose and fought it. So now he broke the
withes of remorse and prophetic frenzy and met the future with defiance.
He took up the morning paper to make sure that yesterday’s pageant had
actually occurred. He glanced hastily through the pages first to see if
his own history had transpired. He half expected to read some clamorous
announcement of a mysterious body found in an old house in Westchester
near Robbin’s Mills.
There was no mention of such a discovery, and he read of the immortal
yesterday, “the most numerous and imposing procession ever seen in any
American city.”
The town had apparently solved its chief problem. His own had just been
posed. How long could he hope to escape discovery? Perhaps the news was
already out. Perhaps the jaded revelers returning to Westchester had
been met by Mrs. Lasher screaming like a fury. Perhaps the house had
caught fire and the cellar walls had broken open with the heat and the
collapse of the timbers, as he had seen big warehouses during the Great
Fire broken open like crushed hickory nuts.
An unendurable need to make sure with his own eyes of the state of
affairs goaded him to action. He ran upstairs to tell Patty some lie
about the necessity for the trip. She was so heavenly asleep that he
could not break the spell. The children were asleep, too.
So he told Cuff to tell them that he had been called back to the
country.
He had the luck to meet a cab and the driver had a good horse that
reached the City Hall Station of the New York and Harlem Railroad just
in time to catch a train North.
As the carriages rolled through Center and Broome Streets and up the
Bowery and on out through the mile-long cut and the quarter-mile
tunnel through solid basalt, RoBards blessed the men that invented
steam-engines, and the good souls who borrowed the money and paid the
good toilers to lay these rails of stout wood with iron bands along the
top. He blessed the men who ran that blessed locomotive. A demon of
haste inspired them and they reached at times a rate well over twenty
miles an hour. He covered the fourteen miles to Williamsbridge in no
time at all compared to stage speed; and the fare was but a shilling!
He had now only eighteen miles to make by the old-fashioned means.
He was a little cruel to the horse he hired and spared the poor hack
neither uphill nor down. But then he was fiercelier lashed by his own
torment.
At last his home swung into view—benign, serene, secure. No lightning,
no fire, no storm had ripped open its walls. There was no excitement
visible except in the fluttering of of a few birds—or were they belated
leaves? The tulip tree stood up, awake, erect, the safe trustee of the
home.
When he passed the Lasher place, he was afraid to go fast lest his
guilt be implied in his haste. He let the galled jade jog. He even
turned and looked the Lasher hovel straight in the face. As the guilty
do, he stared it right in the eyes.
But Mrs. Lasher did not even turn to look at him. She was splitting
wood and her bony fleshless arms seemed to give the ax three helves.
Her head was simply an old sunbonnet. She was faceless, blind and deaf
to everything but work—an old woodpecker of a woman hammering at a
life that was hard and harsh. Yet it was not quite satisfying to have
her so stupid. It was not pleasant to remember that Jud himself was
notoriously worthless.
Strange, that to assassinate a Cæsar or a Henry of Navarre, to put
a Socrates to the hemlock, was of a certain cruel nobility, but to
annihilate an imbecile infamous! It was like stepping on a toad in the
dark.
And this modern theory, that the insane and the criminal and the
witless were poor sick people to be sorry for, was disturbing. Once
the abnormal people had been accused of selling themselves to devils,
renting their bodies to hellish tenants, earning an everlasting home in
hell. But now it was the fashion to say that they were poor souls whom
fate had given only broken or incomplete machines to work with, and
that their punishment was a crime.
If it were true, then he had beaten to death a sick boy whose fearful
deed had been the fumbling of a dolt. Even if it were untrue, he had
sent a wicked youth to hell and Jud would now be frying and shrieking
somewhere under RoBards’ feet.
RoBards fell into such abysmal brooding that he did not notice how
the horse, a stranger to these roads, had turned into a lane and was
no longer advancing but browsing on autumnal fare, nibbling with
prehensile lip at an old rail. The horse himself was an imbecile of his
kind.
For a long while RoBards struggled with black thoughts, each more
dreadful than the other. He was like a man held at the bottom of the
sea by a slimy devilfish, with searing poison and cold fire in the very
touch of each writhing, enveloping arm.
He tore himself loose from all the arms at once with a wild resolve,
like an outcry:
“I’ll not think about it any longer! I’ll go mad if I do!”
He heard his own voice clattering across the fields, woke, looked
about, and felt lost before he realized that he was in one of his own
meadows.
He turned and backed the gig, and reached the highway again. The
farmer, Albeson, was waiting for him, laughing:
“I seen you leave that old fool of a horse go his own sweet way, so
I knowed you was fig’erin’ out some old law-soot or other. I was
wonderin’ haow long you’d set there. Wall, it was a gre’t day yes’day,
wa’n’t it?”
RoBards could laugh with the farmer heartily, for it showed how
innocent his reverie looked to a witness; it showed that Albeson had
not discovered anything amiss about the home.
He breathed elixir in the air and drove on to the house, finding it as
always a mirror to his humor. It had been in turn an ancestral temple,
a refuge from plague, a nuptial bower, a shelter for intrigue, a whited
sepulcher. The tree had been a priest, a hypocrite, and now a faithful
sentinel.
He was brought down again when Mrs. Albeson met him with a query:
“How’s pore little Immy?”
She whispered, though there was no one else in the house.
“Mis’ Lasher has been takin’ on terrible along of her boy Jud lightin’
out for sea. Pity you let him live, for they do say a man what’s borned
to be hung won’t never git drownded.”
This was an exquisite plight: to be blamed for sparing the life he
had already taken. But he dared not give the noisy woman more of his
confidence. Immy’s fate was enough in her power.
He dared not visit the cellar till the farmers had gone to bed, and
then he went down into it as into a grave. It was morbidly cold and the
lamp shivered in his hand.
He found everything as he had left it, and marveled at the neatness of
his work. Yet it seemed not to be his work, but the work of somebody
who had borrowed his frame and used his scholarship for cunning
purposes.
He went back to the library. In this room his soul had found its world.
But now it was an impossible place. The hearthstone there—Chalender
had brought it—it was a headstone over a buried honor. He had often
resolved to tear it out and break it to dust. But now it covered Jud
Lasher, and served him as an anonymous memorial.
What was the quicklime doing down inside there? His heart stopped.
Perhaps it would not work sealed away from the air. He ought to open
the walls and see.
And this set him to trembling in utter confusion, for he recognized
in his own bewilderment the unintelligent maudlin reasoning of the
criminal.
Already he had revisited the scene; already debated an exhumation;
already longed to talk to someone, to boast perhaps.
He was afraid to trust himself to the house, and, making an excuse of
having come for some books and papers, set off again for the city.
When he got down from the cab in front of his home he found Keith in
the bit of front yard. The boy was so absorbed in his task that he
greeted his father absently, as if RoBards were the child and he the
old one. He had dug a shallow channel from the hydrant to the iron
railing, and was laying down pipes of tin and cardboard and any other
rubbish he could find.
“I’m buildin’ an aqueduck from our house to London,” he explained.
“London got burned down once and so the king has sent for me to get
him some water right away, so’s the folks won’t get burned up again.
They’re goin’ to give me a big immense parade and I’m goin’ to ride in
a gold barouche like Uncle Harry did.”
RoBards managed a wry smile and went in. Patty met him with an ancient
look of woe and motioned him into the drawing room. She spoke in a
voice like ashes stirred with a cold wind.
“Immy told me,” she began and dropped into a chair sobbing. “She didn’t
mean to, but she screamed again at nothing and let slip a word or two,
and I got it out of her. She has cried herself sick with remorse at
disobeying you. How could you let that monster live? How could you?”
“He’s dead,” RoBards sighed, and sank on an ottoman, crushed with
weariness.
But Patty was startled to new life. She demanded the whole truth, and
he told her in a dreary, matter-of-fact tone. He told her everything,
including the secret of Jud’s resting place.
The story came from him with the anguish of dragging a sharp chicken
bone from his throat. It cut and left a bleeding and an ache, but it
was wonderful to be free of it.
Patty listened with awe, wide-eyed and panting. There was such need
of being close together under the ruins of their life, that, since he
could not find strength to lift his head or a hand, she leaned forward
toward him till she fell on her knees to the floor and agonized across
the space between them and, creeping close into his bosom, drew his
arms about her, and wept and wept—with him.
Their only words were “oh!” and “oh!” eternally repeated, yet they felt
that only now were their souls made one in a marriage of grief. They
had no bodies; they were mere souls crushed under the broken temple of
their hopes, bruised and wounded and pinioned together in their despair.
Yet there was a kind of pitiful happiness in groping and finding each
other thus, and a bitter ecstasy in being able to love and be loved
utterly at last.