The assembly was worthy of the suit and of the vast amount involved. It
thrilled old Jessamine to be the man who dragged the metropolis itself
to the bar of its own conscience, and demanded penance.
The court was large and stately. In addition to the three judges of the
Supreme Court, and the Chancellor, the state senators were gathered in
judgment under the presidence of the Lieutenant Governor.
The trial was as long as it was large. As attorney for the plaintiff,
General Butler spoke for a day. Mr. Graham spent another day in defense
of the city. RoBards had his day in court, but his spirit was quenched
by the knowledge that he was heeded only as so much sand pouring
through the throat of the hourglass. Webster, who sat and sweat and
listened in silence, was the one thing waited for.
The news that he was at last to speak packed the courtroom with
spectators. The day was suffocating. The humidity thrust needles into
the flesh, and the voice of Webster was like the thunder that prowls
along the hills on a torrid afternoon.
For five hours he spoke, and enchanted people who cared little what
words made up his rhapsody. His presence was embodied majesty; his
voice an apocalyptic trumpet; his gestures epic; his argument rolled
along with the rhythm, the flood, the logic of an Iliad.
The audience would have given him any verdict he asked. Old Jessamine
wept with certainty of his triumph. It was sublime to be the theme of
such a rhapsody, and when the old man heard his rights proclaimed and
his wrongs denounced by Stentor himself, he felt himself an injured god.
For five hours Webster—well, there was hardly a verb for what he did.
Patty said that Webster just “websted.” Her word was as good as any.
Then the court adjourned for the day and the spectators went out to
breathe the common air.
The exhausted orator was led into the Governor’s Room in the City Hall,
where wine was brought him in quantity. He was soon refreshed enough to
receive congratulations on his achievement. But he shook his head and
groaned, “I was very uncomfortable. I felt as if I were addressing a
packed jury.”
The moan from the sick lion threw a great fear into old Jessamine’s
heart, and he listened with terror next day to the long argument of the
counselor who spoke for the city to a much diminished audience.
Waiting for the court to reach a verdict was worse than the trial. And
the verdict was doom—doom with damages. An almost unanimous decision
condemned Jessamine to poverty and decreed that he had no claim against
the city.
Patty ran to her father’s side and upheld him, while her mother knelt
and wept at his other elbow. But he was inconsolable.
He had counted on triumphing through the streets where he had shuffled.
He had spent magnificently the money he was going to get. They hurried
him home in a closed carriage, but he could not endure the calls of old
friends and enemies who came to express their sympathy. He collapsed
like the tall chimney the lightning had struck at Tuliptree.
It was Patty of all people who begged RoBards to take him and her and
her mother to the farm. Even she longed for obscurity, for she also had
squandered royally that money that never arrived.
They left the children at home with Teen, and set out as on a long
funeral ride, with their dreams in the hearse. The journey by train
was too public and the railroad was a new-fangled, nerve-wrecking
toy. It was dangerous, too—almost as dangerous as the steamboats that
were blowing up, burning up, and sinking on all the seas and rivers,
dragging their passengers to triple deaths. People were forgetting how
many people had been killed by horses. They seemed to think that death
itself was a modern invention.
Old Jessamine had to endure a hired carriage with a shabby driver who
talked and spat incessantly. When they reached at last the farm, the
senile wretch was racked of body and soul and they put him to bed, a
white-haired, whimpering infant.
The rest were so wearied of the effort to console him that they grew
disgusted with grief. Patty had just so much sympathy in her heart.
When that was used up, you came to the bitter lees of it. She began
to scold her father and at length produced a bottle of laudanum that
she kept to quiet the children with when they cried too long. She
threatened her father with it now:
“You big baby! If you don’t stop that noise and go to sleep this very
instant, I’ll give you enough of these sleeping drops to quiet you for
a week.”
She remembered afterward the strange look he cast upon the phial and
how his eyes followed it when she put it back in the cupboard’s little
forest of drugs and lotions that had accumulated there for years.
Her father wept no more. He lay so quiet that she put her mother to
bed alongside him. As she bent to kiss him good night, he put up his
ancient arms and drew her head down and whispered, like a repentant
child:
“I’m sorry, my sweet, to be so great a pest to everybody. Forgive me,
honey! I wanted to cover you with jewels and satins and everything your
pretty heart could wish, but—but—I’ve lived too long.”
“Now! now!” said Patty, kissing him again as she turned away to quell
the sobs that sprang to her throat.
Her mother was already fast asleep in her nightcap and her well-earned
wrinkles; her teeth on the bureau and her mouth cruelly ancient. Her
father stared at Patty with the somber old eyes of a beaten hound. Life
had whipped him.
Doleful enough, Patty lay down at the side of her husband, who was
even more forlorn than usual. She groaned:
“Oh, dear, such an unhappy world as this is!”
Then she sank away to sleep. She dreamed at length of hands snatching
at her, of Macbeth and his hags about the cauldron of trouble.
She woke to find her mother looking a very witch and plucking at her
with one hand, while she clutched at her own throat with the other. She
kept croaking something with her toothless gums. It was long before
Patty could make it out:
“Come quick! Your papa has k-k-k—your papa has k-k-killed himshelf;
killed himshelf!”
Patty flung away drowsiness as one whips off a coverlet, and leaped
from her bed, seizing her husband’s arm and shrieking to him to follow.