The next morning RoBards heard her voice again. It was loud and rough,
drowning the angry voice of her brother, Keith. She was saying:
“I was a fool to tell him! And I was a fool to tell you I told him!”
“I’ll beat him to death when I find him, that’s all I’ll do!” Keith
roared, with his new bass voice.
“If you ever touch him or mention my name to him—or his name to me,”
Immy stormed, “I’ll—I’ll kill—I’ll kill myself. Do you understand?”
“Aw, Immy, Immy!” Keith pleaded with wonderful pity in his voice. Then
she wept, long, piteously, in stabbing sobs that tore the heart of her
father.
He knew that she was in her brother’s arms, for he could hear his voice
deep with sympathy. But RoBards dared not make a third there. It was no
place for a father.
He went to his library and stood staring at the marble hearthstone.
Somewhere down there was what was left of Jud Lasher. He had not been
destroyed utterly, for he was still abroad like a fiend, wreaking cruel
harm.
Immy spoke and RoBards was startled, for he had not heard her come in:
“Papa.”
“Yes, my darling!”
“Do you think Jud Lasher will ever come back?”
“I know he won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, I just feel sure. He’d never dare come back.”
“If he did would I belong to him?”
“Would a lamb belong to a sheep-killing dog that mangled it?”
“That’s so. Thank you, Papa.” And she was gone.
A boy on a horse brought her a note that afternoon. She told no one its
contents and when Patty asked who sent it, Immy did not answer. RoBards
was sure it came from Ernest Chirnside, for the youth never appeared.
But RoBards felt no right to ask.
Somehow he felt that there was no place for him as a father in Immy’s
after-conduct. She returned to her wildness, like a deer that has
broken back to the woods and will not be coaxed in again.
How could he blame her? What solemn monition could he parrot to a soul
that had had such an experience with honesty, such a contact with
virtue?
Young Chirnside never came to the house. But he was the only youth in
the countryside, it seemed, that kept away. Patty tried to curb Immy’s
frantic hilarities, but she had such insolence for her pains that she
was stricken helpless.
Then Immy decided that the country was dull. The young men went back
to town, or to their various colleges. Keith went to Columbia College,
which was still in Park Place, though plans were afoot for moving it
out into the more salubrious rural district of Fiftieth Street and
Madison Avenue.
Keith met Chirnside on the campus, but he could not force a quarrel
without dragging Immy’s name into it. So he let slip the opportunity
for punishment, as his father had let slip the occasion for punishing
Chalender. Father and son were curiously alike in their passion for
secrets.
Keith had little interest in the classic studies that made up most of
the curriculum. He could not endure Latin and the only thing he found
tolerable in Cæsar was the description of the bridge that baffled the
other students with its difficulties.
He was an engineer by nature. He had never recovered from his ambition
to be an hydraulic savior of the city. And it looked as if the town
would soon need another redemption.
The citizens had treated the Croton as a toy at first. The hydrants
were free and the waste was ruinous. This blessing, like the heavenly
manna, became contemptible with familiarity. Children made a pastime
of sprinkling the yards and the streets. The habit of bathing grew
until many were soaking their hides every day. During the winter the
householders let the water run all day and all night through the open
faucets, to prevent the pipes from freezing. There were twelve thousand
people, too, who had water in their houses!
Already in 1846 the Commissioners had begun to talk of a costly new
reservoir as a necessity. For thirteen days that year the supply had to
be shut off while the aqueduct was inspected and leaks repaired. What
if another great fire had started?
In 1849 the Water Commissioners were dismissed and the Croton Aqueduct
Department entrusted with the priesthood of the river god and his
elongated temple.
So Keith looked forward to the time when he should be needed by New
York and by other cities. And he studied hard. But he played hard,
too. The students were a lawless set, and drunkenness and religious
infidelity were rival methods for distressing their teachers. Up at New
Haven the Yale boys in a certain class, feeling themselves wronged by
a certain professor, had disguised themselves as Indians and with long
knives whittled all the study benches into shavings while the terrified
instructor cowered on his throne and watched.
Vice of every sort seemed to be the chief study of such of the students
as were not aiming at the ministry. As one of the college graduates
wrote:
“Hot suppers, midnight carousals were too frequent with us and sowed
the seed of a vice that in a few years carried off a fearful proportion
of our members to an untimely grave.”
There was grave anxiety for the morals of the whole nation. The city
was growing too fast. By 1850 it had passed the half-million mark! The
churches were not numerous enough to hold a quarter of the population,
yet most of them were sparsely attended.
The American home was collapsing. Dr. Chirnside preached on the exalted
cost of living, and stated that church weddings were on the decrease.
The hotel was ruining the family. Rents were so exorbitant, servants so
scarce and incompetent, that people were giving up the domesticity of
the good old days.
Business detained the husband downtown, and he took his midday dinner
at Sweeny’s or Delmonico’s, where he could have poultry or sirloin
steak for a shilling and sixpence. And his wife and daughters,
unwilling to eat alone, went to Weller’s or Taylor’s and had a
fricandeau, an ice, or a meringue. Ladies’ saloons were numerous and
magnificent and wives could buy ready-made meals there; so they forgot
how to cook. The care of children no longer concerned them. Women were
losing all the retiring charm that had hitherto given them their divine
power over men.
The clergy bewailed the approaching collapse of a nation that had
forgotten God—or had never remembered him. There was a movement afoot
to amend the Constitution with an acknowledgment of the Deity and “take
the stain of atheism from that all-important document.”
These were the Sunday thoughts.
In contrast were the Fourth of July thoughts, when the country sang its
own hallelujahs and, like another deity, contentedly meditated its own
perfections. On these occasions every American man was better than any
foreigner, and American women were all saints.
And there were the Election Day moods, when the country split up into
parties for a few weeks, and played tennis with mutual charges of
corruption, thievery, treason. Then there was Christmas, when everybody
loved everybody; and New Year’s Day, when everybody called on everybody
and got a little drunk on good wishes and the toasts that went with
them.
David RoBards had his personal seasons; his feast days and fast days
in his own soul. Everybody treated him with respect as a man of
unblemished life in a home of unsullied reputation.
Then Patty met him with a doleful word:
“We’ve got to give an At Home right away. Don’t stand staring! We’ve
gone out dozens of times and accepted no end of hospitality. We simply
must pay our debts.”
“I’d like to,” said RoBards. “You and Immy have run up so many bills at
so many shops that I am almost afraid to walk the streets or open my
mail.”
This always enfuriated Patty and it angered her now:
“Since you owe so much you can owe a little more. But we owe something
to Immy. We must give a ball, and it must be a crack.”
“An orgy, you mean, if it’s to be like some of the others we’ve gone
to. Is that the most honest way to present a daughter to the world?”
“You’re getting old, Mist’ RoBards!” Patty snapped. “Orgies was the
name poor old Papa used to call the dances you and I went to in our
day.”
The upshot of it was that Patty won. The choicest personages in town
received an Alhambra-watered envelope containing a notice that Mr. and
Mrs. RoBards would be at home in St. John’s Park that evening week.
Patty sent cards also to a number of young men whom RoBards considered
far beneath his notice; but they were asked everywhere because
they could and would dance the tight polka, the redowa, the waltz,
the German; they could and would play backgammon and graces, write
acrostics, sit in tableaux, get up serenades, riding parties, sleighing
parties—anything to keep females from perishing of boredom. They all
dressed correctly and alike, parted their hair straight down the back,
posed as lost souls and murmured spicy hints of the terrific damnations
they had known in Paris. Some of them lived in twenty-shilling-a-week
boarding houses and curled each other’s hair.
But they could and would dance instead of standing about like wooden
Indians. Some critics said that the dancing in the American homes was
faster and more furious than anything abroad, except at the masked
balls in Paris where the girls were grisettes.
Some of the beaux won an added prestige by their cynicism. They
spoke with contempt of the sex they squired. In fact, everybody said
that the new generation lacked the reverence for women that had been
shown in the better days. Some blamed the rapidly increasing wealth
of the country with its resultant laxity of morals; some blamed the
sensational novelists for their exposures of feminine frailties.
Mr. Thackeray, an English lecturer and novelist, whose “Vanity Fair”
had been a ruthless picture of British wickedness in high circles, came
in for no little rebuke.
In an article on the subject RoBards found him blamed for the attitude
of “unfledged college boys who respect nothing in the shape of woman,
and exult in his authority to throw overboard the slight remains of the
traditionary reverence which inconveniently bridles their passions, and
restrains their egotisms.”
It was into such an atmosphere that the young girl Immy and the lad
Keith must emerge from childhood. In such a dangerous world they must
live their life. RoBards shuddered at the menace.