The newspapers made a pretty story of the Chalender-RoBards marital
alliance. For once, they overlooked a horror and gave space to romance.
The retreat in Westchester had saved the family once more.
The editors praised Captain Chalender as “our popular and
public-spirited citizen, a soldier and a leader in civic affairs,
whose large interests compel his immediate return to the Golden Gate,
whither he takes as his bride, Miss Imogene RoBards, one of the belles
of the season.” They even had a word for ex-Judge David RoBards, “the
well-known jurist,” and continued, “The bride’s mother in her day was
one of the beauties of her generation and a toast of the town in the
gallant old times that are now no more.”
RoBards brought the paper home to the farm from town to show Patty. He
thought only of the comfort she should take from the glossing over of
the wretched misalliance. But Patty was numb to the fear of publication.
As soon as she spoke he wondered that he had lacked the common
intelligence to spare her the cruelest of wounds. She read the brief
notice and sighed:
“‘The bride’s mother—in her day—was!’”
She dropped the paper and smiled miserably: “They’ve got me in the
obituary column already.”
She seemed to die then.
He understood, and falling on his knees by the rocking chair, caught
her as she drooped forward across his shoulder. She had read her
death-warrant. Her head rolled as heavily as if the ax had already
fallen on the so kissable nape of her gracile neck.
What could RoBards say? He could and did protest that she was more
beautiful than ever, that eternal youth was hers, that she was his
greatest pride, that she had all his love, all his love.
But he protested too much. He could not stay the scythe of Time. He
thought of old, old phrases, ancient confessions of the dread meekness
of humanity before the ineluctable dragon, the glutton of charm and
fleetness and vivacity—_Tempus edax rerum_—_tarda vetustas_—the swift
fugacity of everything, youth that flows out of the veins as sand from
a shattered hourglass.
He clung to Patty, but less and less as one who might rescue her from
drowning, more as one who would prove his love by drowning with her.
He could give her no courage in a battle already irretrievably lost.
Rather, he took panic from her and began to understand that, while he
had no beauty to lose, he had already caught up with his future, and
was beginning to leave it behind, as a man who walks toward the west
all day overtakes his diminishing shadow and then leaves it lengthening
aft.
Youth had gone out of the house, too, now that Immy had taken with her
not only her trunks and her bright gowns and her jingling trinkets,
but her laughter, as well, her mischief, her audacities, her headlong
genius for peril.
But they rarely spoke of her, for her name meant not only Chalender,
but all the dangers of the sea, the infamous storms of the antarctic
waters, the long climb up the infinitely distant Pacific Ocean to the
equator and far, far beyond; and then all the fabulous hazards of the
San Francisco frontier. Between that new city and New York lay the
oceanic continent. Railroads and wagon-trains were pushing through the
vast wastes where the buffaloes swept in tides and the Indians lurked,
but letters were forever in coming, and Immy’s parents could know
nothing of her fate for half a year; if, indeed, they ever heard of her
again.
There were the other children. Keith had turned twenty, a young Viking
indifferent to girls except as clowns to amuse him—which gave Patty
almost her only comfort in the world.
But David the younger, whom they called Junior, was coming along to
the last of his teens, and he was as full of romance as an Orlando. He
did not stick poems on trees, but he carved linked initials in the bark
of the tulip trees and quickly gouged them out before his father could
discover what they were.
When RoBards reminded him that he was endangering the life of some
of the slenderer trees, he groaned, “All right, Dad; I’ll quit,” and
walked away as cheerful as Job.
His father and mother eyed him from a distance anxiously, and exchanged
glances of alarm over his sagging head at table, but they could not
imagine what siren had bewitched him; and he would not answer their
questions. They made light remarks about love, forgetting how important
it had been to them in their equal age, and how important it was to
them now.
But Junior rebuked them with eyes as old as those of Prometheus chained
to a cliff and torn by a vulture’s hooked beak.
The unsolved puzzle of David’s infatuation began to harass his parents
and frighten them, for he was wasting away to a melancholia.
They tried to keep track of him, to see which one of which neighbor’s
daughters he was frequenting. But he always managed to elude them. He
would lie coiled in a chair somewhere reading Walter Scott or Dickens
or Byron, or the morbid Poe, until they gave over watching him. When
they looked for him he had vanished.
They decided to take him back to the city, in spite of the heat of
the late September and the charm of the golden countryside. The
announcement staggered the boy. It dazed them to see one so young so
capable of despair—as if any age were immune to anguish; as if a little
pitcher could not overflow as well as a large.
One afternoon he got away from the house with a fox’s craftiness.
RoBards missed him immediately and, seizing his hat, set out in
pursuit, knowing that Junior had but little start of him.
He hurried to the gate and looked up and down the road. In neither
direction was anyone visible. What other way could the boy have gone?
The view before him was wide and clear; the hill fell away in such
broad billows that the eye commanded more of the scene than a man could
have covered, running.
The only region left to explore was above and back of the house.
RoBards had avoided that realm for years. Up there was the Tarn of
Mystery, where he had almost killed Jud Lasher; up there were the
thickets where he had hunted him down and ended him.
There was no pleasure in invading that accursed demesne of black
memories, but his frenzy for an answer to the riddle of his son
outweighed his reluctance.
He turned and marched grimly up the slope. It seemed to have
steepened since he ran up it so fleetly years ago. His breath was
shorter—excitement it was, no doubt, that made his heart beat faster
and more heavily.
Time had wrought upon everything up here. Bushes were clumps of
shrubbery; saplings were trees; trees were columns upholding the sky.
The very boulders seemed to have enlarged with age. The dead logs must
have grown higher and fatter. At the top he had to pause and sink to
the ground till his heart slowed up. Sitting here he could see afar.
The autumnal winds had torn away foliage like curtains pulled down,
discovering a wide expanse of the surging Westchester scene.
The last time he was up here there was hardly another home to be
descried except his own roof and the distant hut of the Lashers. Now
there were gables and chimneys and gateways everywhere. A few of the
houses were mansions, snowy colonial residences with high white pillars
reminiscent of Greek temples.
The Lasher rookery alone was not new. It was older, more ramshackle
than ever, though he had noted as he passed the growth of the little
brats to big brats.
The girl Molly who had run off to the city and gone to the bad, had
faded into oblivion after a few noisy struggles, like one drowning in
the sea.
RoBards had visited the Five Points occasionally, but he had seen
nothing of Molly. Perhaps it had grown too respectable for her, since
the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Church had
ventured into the human sewer and reformed the first few sots, then
called in Reverend Mr. Luckey, the former chaplain of Sing Sing. Under
this explorer of the underworld they had established themselves in a
room in the Old Brewery itself. Then they had bought the foul den,
cleared out its three hundred human maggots, and torn the whole thing
down, erecting in its place a clean new building devoted to reformation
of the prematurely damned.
And now a Children’s Aid Society was established there, teaching honest
industry and proffering opportunity for decency to the thousands of
boys and girls who had hitherto slept on cellar steps, or in barrels
or in dens of vice and earned what little food they got by picking
pockets, garroting drunkards, burglary, beggary, rag and bone hunting,
peddling matches, apples, flowers, newspapers, or their own dirty
bodies.
Girls could now be something better than crossing-sweepers or
twelve-year-old harlots and dance-hall lice.
RoBards had often been called to the Five Points to meetings of this
and other societies. There was horror enough there yet, but it was not
unmitigated. There was a manhole open above the sewer and those who
wanted to were aided to climb out into the air.
He had often looked for Molly Lasher among the girls going out to
decent tasks or returning from them. He had watched for her among the
throngs still plying the most venerable of trades. But her pretty,
vicious smile was no longer to be seen. Perhaps she had been murdered,
or sent to a prison; perhaps she had gone round the Horn to California,
perhaps she had gone West overland. She might be running a saloon
somewhere west, or conducting a salon as the pretentious wife of a
bonanza king.
Another Lasher girl had grown up to replace her in the hut, and perhaps
later to trace her footsteps on the streets of New York. RoBards had
seen her now and then as he drove past to the station.
Usually she leaned across the gate and dreamed wide-eyed of something
that made her wistful. Either she was paler than the other Lasher
young, or washed oftener, for there was a cleanliness about her skin
and in the clothes she was pushing through.
Thinking of her now, he was surprised to find that he remembered a
gradual change in her as she lolled across the gate. She had grown
higher, the arms that fell listlessly had lengthened and rounded; and
so had her once hollow chest, and her eyes and her mouth.
The last time he saw her her hair was combed. There might have been a
ribbon around it somewhere. He had an idea that her name was Aletta.
Her mother had mentioned some such name to him once when she had
checked him to whine:
“No word of my boy Jud yet. After all these years wouldn’t he ’a’ wrote
me a line, wouldn’t he ’a’ got home somehow in all these years, don’t
you think—if he was still alive?”
He did not like to consider old Mrs. Lasher and he rose to continue his
search for his own son, also lost in a sea of mystery, gone a-whaling
after some strange love.
RoBards avoided the Tarn of Mystery, so gayly named and so justified in
the event. But he saw no sign of Junior elsewhere, so he drew near the
loathsome spot, circling about it and coming closer reluctantly.
The old rail fence was almost rotted away, but he did not need to climb
across it, for there was a path that led to an opening where two of the
upper rails had been laid on the ground.
The great boulders were as before but less mysterious, if one could
believe a recent theory that they had been dropped there by a universal
glacier that had once covered all this part of the world with an ocean
of ice, whose slowly ebbing tide would flow back again perhaps and
cover all of man’s ambitious monuments.
He squeezed through a strait Cyclopean gateway of rock, and the little
green pond lay before him, still thick with submerged grasses, still
oversprinkled with curled autumn leaves.
He gazed at the spot where he had beaten Jud Lasher and used him as
a flail. He quivered with a nausea for that whole chapter in his
life, and was glad that his swinging glance discovered no other human
presence.
But as he was about to back through the narrow crevice between the
stones, he heard a voice floating above his head in the air, a girl’s
voice, as liquid and as sweetly murmurous as the voice should have been
of the nymph that should have haunted this viridescent pool.
It was very mournful and it said:
“All night I was reading the book you lent me. _The Lady of the Lake!_
Such a long beautiful story, and so sad! What a sad thing love is,
and how old! So many of us poor lovers have loved in vain—haven’t we,
honey? They’ll tell us that we’re too young to love, but oh, darling,
darling, I feel so old, so old! And how can I ever stand the years
that must go by before we can be together? You’ve got to finish your
college and make your way. I’d rather die than hinder you from being
the great man you’re going to be. And I can’t help you. I’m so poor and
friendless and ignorant.
“But when I think, when I think of the years, the years, the years, I
want to lie down in that water there and fold my hands and drown. For
even when you are rich and famous—what would your father and mother say
if you told them that you wanted to marry me? Your father is rich and
famous and everybody respects him. I’m just one of the Lashers.”
The boy had the RoBards talent for silence and he had listened as
quietly as his hidden father. Even now he only mumbled:
“I’ll marry you or nobody, Aletta. This is a free country!”
An eerie laugh broke from the girl’s throat as she cried:
“A free country! How could there be a free country anywhere? Least of
all here?”
RoBards was grimly glad that she had sanity enough to understand this
truth at least and the wildness of his boy’s infatuation. To marry the
impossible sister of the unspeakable wretch that his own father had put
to death—that would be impossible; if anything were.
He risked discovery and leaned out to have a look at this weird
creature whose voice had woven such unholy power about his son.
She was perched aloft on a little peak of rock a few yards away. The
boy lay along the slope of it, clinging to her right hand. There was
reverence in his manner. She was sacred to him and he to her in the
religion of young love. Her left hand held the book she had spoken
of. It rested like a harp on the wave of her thigh. Her feet were
bare, though the air was cold; they were shapely feet. She was shapely
everywhere, and there was a primeval grace, a loveliness about her
every outline. Womanhood was disclosing its growth and its spell,
straining at the scant and shabby dress and enveloping her in beauty
like a drapery of mist.
She might have been indeed the nymph of this pool, luring a faun to his
death in a fatal element. But to RoBards the life-fearing little pauper
had the terrifying power of a Lorelei throned on a storm-beaten cliff
and chanting his hapless son to shipwreck.
He wondered if the Lashers were not making ready to wreak upon his boy
a roundabout revenge for what he had done to theirs.
He was mortally afraid of this ragged girl. And there was nothing to
tell him of the tremendous forces that were gathering to overwhelm this
calamity with a greater.