Thereafter Patty and RoBards felt a need of keeping close. They slept
together after that, her throat across his left arm. She called it “my
arm,” and when his travels to distant courts took him away from her,
that arm of “hers” was lonely.
Like galls that torment old trees for a while but grow at last into
their structures, the secrets that began as cancers became a part
of the hard gnarled bark that people and trees acquire or perish.
The RoBards home was being held together by misfortunes as much as
affection. The longing for utterance that makes secrets dangerous was
satisfied by common possession. Patty and her husband knew the worst
of each other, and their children, and they made league against the
world’s curiosity.
She was insatiably curious about the secrets of other homes while
protecting her own, but this was hardly so much from malice as from a
longing to feel that other people had as much to conceal as she.
The children had talked the thing over with their parents and the
strain was taken from their minds. Immy less often slashed the silence
with those shrieks of hers. She and Keith were busy growing up and
playing in the toyshop of new experiences.
RoBards tried lawsuits with fair success, and his fees were liberal; he
often secured fifty dollars for a case requiring no more than two or
three days in court. His house rent was six hundred dollars a year, and
his office rent and clerical expenses took another five hundred. This
left enough to give Patty and the children all the necessary comforts,
including two hired women, though most of these were ignorant,
impudent, and brief of stay, even though their wages had gradually
trebled until some of them were demanding as high as two dollars a week.
While RoBards practiced the law, Patty visited the shops and the gossip
marts, went to church, and indulged in modest extravagances of finance,
scandal, and faith.
The baby grew and another came, and went; but Patty never became quite
matronly. She took fierce care of her figure, lacing herself to the
verge of suffocation and trying all the complexion waters advertised.
Patty was the very weather-vane of the fashion-winds. She was not one
of the increasing class of women who boldly invaded the realms of
literature and politics; her battlefield was amusement. She was one of
those of whom a writer in the New York _Review_ said: “The quiet of
domestic life has been lost in this stirring age; nothing will satisfy
but action, notoriety, and distinction.”
Like all the other women, who could (or could not) afford it, Patty
dressed in the brightest of colors and flaunted coquetry in her
fabrics. Visitors from overseas commented on the embarrassments they
had encountered from mistaking the most respectable American wives for
courtesans because of their gaudy street dress, their excessive powder,
their false hair, and their freedom from escort.
The chief cross in her life and her husband’s was the burden of her
parents’ company. They were not interested in modern heresies and
manners, found them disgusting. Patty was bored to frenzy by their
tales of the good old times of their memory.
The old man grew increasingly impatient of the law’s delay. He had less
and less time to spend on earth, and that two hundred thousand dollars
the city owed him grew more and more important.
It seemed impossible, however, to speed the courts. One or two similar
suits against the city on account of buildings similarly blown up to
check the fire of 1835 were won by the city, and RoBards dreaded the
outcome of his father-in-law’s claim. He dreaded the loss of the vast
sum at stake even less than the effect of the loss on Mr. Jessamine’s
sanity.
The fire had died out and its ravages were overbuilt for ten years
before the case drew up to the head of the docket at last. As Mr.
Jessamine grew more and more frantic, he felt less and less confident
of his son-in-law’s ability to win the action. He insisted upon the
hiring of additional counsel and cruelly wounded RoBards by his frank
mistrust. But he could not make up his mind what lawyer to employ, and
since he was out of funds, he must depend on his son-in-law to advance
the fee for his own humiliation.
Patty herself was zealous for the splendor that two hundred thousand
dollars would add to the establishment which she found all too plain in
spite of her husband’s indulgence. And she shamed him woefully by her
lack of confidence. She saw his hurt and added exquisiteness to it by
constantly saying:
“Of course, I think my Mist’ RoBards is the finest lawyer in the world,
but can the judges be relied on to appreciate you?”
Lying on his arm she would waken him from slumbers just begun by
crooning:
“Two hundred thousand dollars! Think of it! Papa and Mamma are too old
to spend it, so we should have the benefit. I’d buy you a yacht so that
you could join the new club, and I’d buy myself—what wouldn’t I buy
myself!”
“First catch your cash, my dear,” RoBards would mumble, and try in vain
to drown himself in a pool of sleep that would not accept him, though
Patty sank away to blissful depths of oblivion.
* * * * *
One hot July New York daybreak had just begun to annoy his unrested
eyes when the fire bells broke out. He had promised himself and Patty
long ago to resign from his company, but a sense of civic duty had kept
him in the ranks.
Patty slept so well among her visions of wealth that she did not heed
when he withdrew his arm from under her head, nor hear him getting into
his uniform.
Remembering the icy December night of the disaster of 1835, he rejoiced
in the absence of wind and the plentitude of the Croton water. Neptune
would soon prevail over his enemy element, as in the banners of the
parade.
The Fire Kings, who had been frost-nipped on that other night, were
dripping with sweat this morning when they drew near the origin of
the fire in a New Street warehouse. This contained a great mass of
stored saltpeter, and it exploded just as the Fire Kings coupled up
their hose. The world rocked about them. Buildings went over as if an
earthquake had rattled the island. The glass of a thousand windows rang
and snapped and the air rained blocks of granite, timbers and chimneys.
Two of the Fire Kings were struck dead at RoBards’ side, and he was
bruised and knocked down. The whole fire army was put to rout and the
flames bounding in all directions were soon devouring a hundred and
fifty buildings at once, most of them new structures that had risen in
the ashes of 1835.
Once more the fear of doom fell upon the city, but after three hundred
and sixty-five of the city’s most important buildings were piled in
embers, the Croton came to the rescue.
Once more the heart of the city’s commerce was eaten out. Again the
insurance companies went bankrupt in the hour they had assumed to
provide against. Once more financial dismay shook the stout frame of
the town.
Yet carpenters and masons were at work before the ruins ceased to
smoke, though they had to wear gloves to protect them from brick and
stone too hot to be touched with naked hands.
When RoBards came home after the fire, Patty was still blessedly
asleep. She woke with a little cry of petulance when his helmet fell
from his bruised hand as he lifted it from his bleeding forehead and
dropped sickly into a chair. But when she saw how hurt he was, she was
at his side in an instant, hurrying like a slipperless Oceanid to
comfort him. The battered hero’s wounds were made worth while when they
brought the delicate ministrations of the barefoot nymph in the flying
white gown, so thin that it seemed to blush wherever it touched the
flesh beneath. Patty looked all the bonnier for the panic that left her
nightcap askew upon the array of curl papers bordering her anxious brow.
And the fire had another benefit. It brought to old Jessamine the
first grin of genuine contentment RoBards had seen on his twisted lips
since 1835. For the old wretch chuckled to realize that many a wealthy
merchant whose carriage dust he had had to take afoot for ten years was
now brought down to his own miserable level.
If only he could drag his two hundred thousand out of the city, he that
had been poor among the rich, would be rich among the poor. That would
be repayment with usury.
He could hardly endure to await the day when he should regain his
glory, and he smothered Patty when she brought home the inspiration
that promised to hasten his triumph.
She brought it home from a party, from a dinner so fashionable that it
was not begun until seven o’clock. In only a few years the correct hour
had been shoved further and further down the day from three o’clock
in the afternoon until deep into the evening. At the same time the
fashionable residence district had pushed out into the country until
it was necessary for the RoBards’ hired carriage to travel for this
occasion out Hudson Street for two miles to Ninth Avenue and nearly a
mile more to Twenty-eighth Street. And Patty laughed into his ear:
“It’s nice to be bound for the North Pole on so hot a night.”
She was blissful as a new queen in her peculiarly lustrous dress of
peach-blossom silk.
RoBards marveled at the perverse heroism with which she and other women
endured these martyrdoms to vanity. He had ridiculed Patty’s devotion
to tight stays for years, with the usual effect of male counsel on
female conduct. She was not likely to yield to a husband’s satires,
since her sex had mocked at similar opinion since the beginning of
the world. Preachers had denounced corsets in vain; the word was
not considered decent, but a man may say anything across a pulpit.
Physicians had uttered warnings in private and public. They had traced
all the evils of modern infirmity to corsets; but their patients
groaned and persevered. Anatomists described the distorted livers and
lungs of ladies they found in _post-mortems_—in vain.
King Joseph II. had forbidden stays in orphan schools and convents
and had put them on female convicts, in the hope of diminishing their
prestige, but the women went their sweet way with secret laughter.
When RoBards quoted the parsons against the corsets, Patty answered:
“If God didn’t want women to wear corsets, why did he fill the seas
with whales and fill the whales with whalebone? What else is it good
for?”
Heaven was an appellate court that RoBards did not practice in, and he
dropped the case.
To-night he had watched Patty devoting half an hour of anguish to
the throttling of her waist. She slept in “night stays” now to make
the daytime constriction easier, but the new peach blossom silk had
demanded too much—or too little.
After three efforts to pull the strings to the necessary tightness, she
had sunk into a chair, bathed in sweat, pleading for help. And RoBards
was so sorry for her that he actually put his strength to the infamous
task of lacing his own wife into an impossible cone. But she thanked
him for the torture and pirouetted before her mirror in rapture.
And now in the carriage, though she could hardly sit up straight, she
was so happy that RoBards, delighting in anything that could delight
her, leaned near to press his lips against her cheek.
She was the mother of a long family, yet she was still a girl, and a
girl by virtue—or by vice—of avoiding the penalties of growing up. Her
extravagances, her flippancies, her very determination to evade the
burdens of grief and responsibility, her refusal to be in earnest
about anything but beauty, were, after all, the only means of keeping
beauty.
At such moments, he felt that she and her sort alone were wise; and
that those who bent to the yoke of life were not the wise and noble
creatures they thought themselves, but only stolid, sexless, stupid
oxen. She still had wings because she used them always, was always
fugitive.
At this bright dinner there were many eminent women among the eminent
men in the drawing room. There were two mayors, Mr. Havemeyer, newly
elected, and Mr. Harper, of the Native American Party, who had failed
of re-election but had won the city’s gratitude by discarding the old
night watchman system of “Leatherheads” for a police force of eight
hundred men in uniform—and none too many in view of the prevalence of
all manner of crime.
Commodore Stevens of the new yacht club was there; also Mr. A. T.
Stewart, who was building a great store in Broadway, and sealing its
doom as a street of homes.
A picturesque guest was Mrs. Anne Cora Mowatt, who had written a
successful play called “Fashion,” though she had never been behind the
scenes, and who had followed it up by becoming an actress and playing
“The Lady of Lyons” after one rehearsal. And she had triumphed! This
was a new way for a woman to repair her broken fortunes.
Across from her and somewhat terrified by the situation was the Rev.
Dr. Chirnside, who abhorred the playhouse and never failed to view with
alarm the fact that New York already had eight theatres and that they
were rebuilt as fast as they burned down—which was pretty fast. Against
these there were only a hundred and sixty churches, including nine
African, six Catholic churches and four synagogues.
RoBards’ heart lurched as always when he saw Harry Chalender in the
drawing room. He heard him saying:
“They tell me that the number of theatres in town has not increased
in years, though the churches have tripled in number. Yet crime has
mightily increased. How do you explain that?”
“You are flippant, sir!” said Dr. Chirnside.
When Patty made her entrance, swimming in like a mermaid waist-deep in
a peach-blossom billow, all the babble stopped. All the eyes rolled her
way. Her husband following her, slim, black, and solemn, felt a mere
lackey, and yet was proud to lag at heel of such a vision.
His pride sickened and his heart lurched when he saw Harry Chalender
push forward and lift her hand to his lips. RoBards had once seen those
lips on his wife’s mouth, and he felt now that he ought in common
decency to crush them both to death.
But, of course, he did not even frown when he shook Chalender’s hand.
After all, Chalender had saved his life once—that black night in the
fire of 1835, and he felt a twisted obligation.
Another twisted emotion was his delight when he saw Chalender crowded
away from Patty by other men. He felt that a man ought either to cage
his wife in a cell or give up all respectable ideas of monopoly or
monogamy. One might as well accept these insane notions of women’s
rights to their own souls. And with the souls would go the bodies, of
course. And then the home, the family, society, the nation were lost.
He could not imagine the chaos that would ensue. His own heart was a
seething chaos in little.
And then all the men were eclipsed by the entrance of Daniel Webster—no
less a giant than Daniel Webster. As a citizen RoBards felt an awe for
him; as a lawyer, a reverence.
Patty gasped with pride at meeting the man. She bowed so low that she
almost sat on the floor. And Webster, looking down on her, bent till
his vast skull was almost on a level with Patty’s little china-doll
head.
Her humility was such a pretty tribute to his genius that his confusion
was perfect. His mastiff jaws wagged with the shock of her grace. His
huge eyes saddened in a distress of homage. For once he could find no
words. There was only a groan of contentment in that columnar throat,
equally famous for its thirst and for the eloquence of the angelic
voice that stormed the senate chamber and shook the judicial benches,
yet purled like a brook at a female ear.
Patty almost swooned when she learned that she was to go out on
Webster’s arm.
When the black servants folded back the doors, a table like a lake of
mahogany waited them, gleaming with a flotilla of heavily laden silver,
platters, tureens, baskets, and bowls in a triple line.
Patty and the leonine Daniel followed the lady of the mansion, and
when she was formally handed to her throne, the clatter began. The
servants fairly rained food upon the guests, soup and fish and ham and
turkey, venison and mutton, corn and all the vegetables available,
sweets of every savor, cheeses and fruits, claret and champagne and a
dulcet Madeira brought down from the attic where it had spent its years
swinging from the heat of the sun-baked roof to the chill of the long
winters.
RoBards noted that many of his old schoolmates, still boys in his
eye, were far older than Patty had allowed him to be. And their wives
were as shapeless as the haunches of meat whose slices they attacked
without grace. Patty made a religion of little manners and charming
affectations. She took off her gloves with caressing upward strokes
and folded them under her napkin. She sipped her soup with a birdlike
mincing that was beyond cavil.
And when Mr. Webster, with old-fashioned courtesy, challenged her to
champagne, she accepted the challenge, selecting the wine he named,
held her glass to be filled, and while the bubbles tumbled and foamed
to the brim and broke over it in a tiny spray, she looked into the
monstrous eyes of the modern Demosthenes, and with the silent eloquence
of her smile, nullified the ponderous phrases he would have rolled upon
her.
He found his voice later, but RoBards could hear Patty’s voice now and
then, tinkling like raindrops between thunders. And finally he heard
her murmur in little gasps:
“Oh, Mr. Senator!—if only you—you!—would take my father’s case—against
this wicked, wicked city—then—justice would be done—at last—for once at
least.”
A faintness, less of jealousy than despair, made RoBards put down his
Madeira glass so sharply that a blotch of the wine darkened the linen
of the cloth. He set the glass above the stain lest the hostess see him
and want to murder him. And this blunder completed his misery.
But Patty stared up into Webster’s eyes as if she had never seen a man
before.
By this time Mr. Webster was well toward the befuddlement for which he
was noted, and his reply was more fervent than elegant:
“My dear, ’f you want my assisshance in your father’s—your father’s
lawsuit, I shall consider it a prilivege, a glorious pril—op’tunity to
pay homage to one of mos’ beau’iful wom’n, one of mos’ charming—Madam,
I shallenge you to champ—champagne.”
Patty went through the rites again, but put her hand across the glass
when the servant would have refilled it. She finished her dessert, and
deftly resumed her gloves before the hostess threw down her napkin
and rose to lead the ladies to the dressing room. Patty, for all her
accepted challenges, was one of the few women who made the door without
a waver.
Her husband followed her with his eyes and longed to go with her and
unpack his heart of the grudge it held. In his very presence she had
asked another lawyer to supply the ability she denied him. But he had
to stay and watch with disgust the long tippling and prattling and male
gossip.
A few of the men told stories of excellent spice, but some were as
loathsome to his mood as one of the worm-eaten walnuts that he bit into
before he realized its estate. He had no stomach for Harry Chalender’s
gabble, and found nothing but impudence and bad taste in the problem
Chalender posed to poor old Dr. Chirnside. Harry said that he had made
a ghastly mistake. In talking to a well-bred young female who had
snubbed him for insulting her by offering to help her on with her
shawl, he had somehow let slip the obscene word, “corsets.” The young
lady pretended not to have understood, but blenched in silence.
An old lady who overheard him, however, told him that she was old
enough to advise him to apologize for the slip. He promised rashly, but
was at his wit’s end for the procedure.
“I appeal to you, Dr. Chirnside,” he said, “for spiritual help. How
shall I apologize to that young gazelle for using the word ‘corsets’
in her presence—without once more using the word ‘corsets’ in her
presence?”
Dr. Chirnside took refuge in offended dignity, stated that a word unfit
for the female ear was equally unfit for the ear of a gentleman. He
choked on a last gulp of port, and moved to the drawing room with more
rectitude in his head than his legs.
Chalender was rebuked by a solemn gentleman who regretted the
increasing indelicacy of manners. If women’s innocence were not
protected where would human society look for safety?
“My wife had a most shocking experience recently,” he said. “We sent
our daughter to Mrs. Willard’s school at Troy and what do you suppose
they taught that poor child, sir? I should not have believed it if my
wife had not told me. She could never have believed it if she had not
seen it with her own eyes.
“A woman teacher, a most unwomanly teacher, drew on a blackboard, sir,
pictures of the internal organs of women, the heart, the arteries, and
the veins! Yes, sir, by God, sir, she did! My wife and several mothers
who chanced to be visiting the classroom rose in their indignation
and left the room. They were too shocked to command their daughters
to violate the discipline of the school. But I shall withdraw my
daughter from such precincts, I assure you. Is nothing to be sacred? Is
everything to be spoken of openly in these atheistic times? I ask you,
sir, I ask you!”
Chalender winked at RoBards while the old gentleman’s tears of
wrath salted his port. Chalender wailed, “But nobody tells me how to
apologize for saying corsets.” He was incorrigible.
RoBards felt that his own predicament was as silly as Chalender’s, yet
it was of equal torment. How could he rid himself of Mr. Webster? How
could he endure his ponderous association?
The giant grew less and less awesome as he absorbed more and more
liquor. RoBards began to hope that all memory of his pledge to Patty
might be lost in the enormous ache which that enormous head would feel
the next morning.
It was not.
On the next morning, Patty received a note from the Astor House where
Mr. Webster lived when in New York. She took it to her father with a
cry of pride:
“See, papa, what I’ve brought you, Mr. Webster’s head on a platter.”
All that RoBards could say in self-defense was a rather petty sarcasm:
“I hope that Mr. Webster doesn’t do for you what he did not long ago:
he drank so much that he tried the wrong side of the case.”
Patty snapped back at him: “Yes, but before he sat down, someone told
him of his mistake, and he went right on and answered all his own
arguments—and won for his client: as he will for Papa.”
“I hope so,” RoBards groaned, wondering if he really hoped so.
Old Jessamine was so sure now of his two hundred thousand dollars that
he decided to spend more of it in making doubly sure. He would engage
the next best lawyer in America, Benjamin F. Butler.
“With Webster and Butler as my counsel,” he roared, “I’ll make even
this old city pay its honest debts.”
RoBards’ head drooped as he noted that his own name was not even
mentioned, though he had fought the case for ten years at his own
expense and must instruct the two Titans in all its details.
He felt a little meaner than ever when Patty noted his shameful
distress and said:
“Don’t forget, papa, that you have also the distinguished assistance of
the eminent Mr. David RoBards.”
“Umm—ah—yes! Yes, yes, of course, of course!”
But lesser alarms were lost in greater. And when RoBards went to the
post office he found there a letter from his farmer:
Mr. D. RoBards esqe.
Las nite in the big storm here youre chimbley was strok by litening
and the seller wall all broke wat shall I do about it or will you get
a mason from the sitty with respects as ever youre obed. servt.
J. ALBESON
P S. Too cows was also strok by litening and a toolup tree.
J. A.
The letter was itself a lightning stroke in RoBards’ peace. Time and
security had almost walled up Jud Lasher’s memory in oblivion. And
now he seemed to see the body disclosed by a thunderbolt from heaven
splitting apart the stones to show it grinning and malevolent.
After the first shock he realized that the body could not have been
revealed or Albeson would have mentioned it. This gave him one deep
breath of relief.
Then fear took the reins and made his heart gallop anew; for how could
he expect a mason to repair the walls without tearing deep into the
foundation of the chimney?