Afraid to intervene in this idyl; ashamed of the un-American snobbery
that made him wince at the prospect of a Lasher for a daughter-in-law;
aghast at the thought of having to ruin Aletta’s life after secretly
taking her brother’s life; and humbled by the praise he had overheard
her give him, RoBards was in the doldrums of uncertainty.
He could not declare himself to the two lovesick children. He could not
challenge them to a debate on the rights of youth to romance. He slunk
from the field, glad only of being able to sneak away uncaught.
As he hurried down the hill home to lay the problem before Patty, the
nearer he drew to her, the more clearly he foresaw that she would be
less of a help in its solution than herself a new complication.
She had suffered bitterly from Immy’s marriage to Chalender. The son
growing up should have been a support; but Junior was bound to be an
increasing burden.
No, he must not tell Patty what he had learned. But he wanted to be
near her in his own misery, and when he could not find her downstairs
he went up to her room.
She was so profoundly a-brood over some evident despair that she did
not hear him push back the door, slightly ajar. He stood on the sill
and studied her with the utter regret and impotency of a lover who
cannot buy or fetch new beauty for the old beauty of his sweet, nor
stay the waning of her radiance.
As vainly as a girl muses upon her outgrown dolls; as vainly as Dido
wished her love to come again to Carthage—Patty was scanning the
fineries she had taken pride in up to the doomsday when her daughter
married her own former lover.
She sat back and away from the bureau at a timid distance from the
wonderful looking-glass RoBards had bought her not long ago as the
novelty of the day: an oval reflector with a jointed rod to fasten
above the large mirror, so that the back of one’s head was visible
without turning and twisting. They called it the _miroir face et
nuque_, and Patty had reveled in the ease it gave her in coiling the
great braids and rolls of her coiffure.
But RoBards felt that the new contrivance had taken away something
charming in the mechanism of her toilet. Hitherto he had loved to
watch her trying to bend her lithe frame spirally while her hands
and arms dipped and tapped like twin swans as she labored over the
last disposition of the least thread of her beautiful hair. He had
found exquisite grace in her nymphlike contortions when she held
her hand-glass in various places behind her head and tried to look
around her own ears or up over her own eyebrows. He had laughed at her
impossible efforts, but he had loved them.
The _miroir face et nuque_ had made the process more efficient and less
amusing. But now she was afraid to look at herself fore and aft, or at
all.
On the bureau was a bracelet she had rejoiced in when he brought it
home as the latest importation from France: a jointed, green gold
serpent to wrap round and round her wrist; it had a fierce diamond in
its crest and bloodshot rubies for eyes. Next to it lay a tiny watch
from Tiffany’s in a locket no bigger than a shilling; also another
fantastic contrivance, a little diamond-sprinkled gold pocket-pistol
with a watch in the butt, and, hidden beneath it, a vinaigrette against
fainting spells; not to mention a bouquet-holder that popped out when
you pulled the trigger.
Spilled along the bureau was a loop of pearls her mother had worn as a
bride; yellowed they were with years. And a necklace of tiny diamonds
he had squandered an unexpected fee upon after a quarrel. Often and
often he had watched them luminously mysterious as they made a little
brook around her throat and laughed silently above the panting of her
spent heart after a dance.
But she would not wear them now. They were the loot of her youth,
doomed to the museum of age. She sat cowering away from them, slumped
with intentional lack of grace in a chair, her fingers nagging at a
sandalwood and silken fan she had fluttered against her breast or
dangled from her wrist in the last German she danced—a very riotous
German that had made the town gasp.
Never had RoBards loved her so much as at this moment. Never had she
seemed so beautiful. But it was the beauty of a maple tree in autumnal
elegy. He could not praise her aloud for this pitiable splendor. Still
less could he tell her that one more of her babies was impatient to
marry.
Junior was Patty’s final toy. She spoiled him and wanted for him
everything he wanted. But she could not wish him another woman to love,
a young beauty to worship even to marriage.
So RoBards said nothing more than a long-drawn “Well!” as he moved
forward. He bent and kissed her and she smiled as she had done when she
was in a bed of pain.
Pain in her body or her heart hurt him fearfully. He hated the world
most when it gave her pangs to endure. He rebelled against heaven then,
and he could never reconcile himself to the thought of the Rod when
it smote her. The text “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth” always
enfuriated him as the invention of a cruel zealot, ascribing to his
invented Deity his own patience with other people’s pains.
To-day, RoBards longed most for some anæsthesia of the soul, some drug
for the spirit, some nepenthe to avert and annul the slow surgery of
age that excises the graces and leaves scars everywhere; he yearned for
some mystic laughing gas to give Patty to carry her through the news
that another woman, a young woman, had wrenched her boy’s heart away
from his mother.
Lacking such an ether, he had recourse to a tender deception, and urged
that he must be getting back to town; he would shortly be needed in
the law courts; he could not face the long evenings alone in New York
without his beautiful wife for company. She beamed a little at his
good intentions, and rose to be at her packing.
This was better than an onset of grief, but he noted that she did not
receive the word of a return to the city with her usual clamor of joy.
It was her appetite that had dulled, and not the feast, for New York
offered all its former riches multiplied. Already there were eight
hundred thousand people in the welter of the city. It was greater than
Rome had ever been. It had passed Berlin, which had lost a hundred
thousand in the rebellion of 1848—most of them freedom-loving souls who
had come to America. New York was now ahead of Naples, Venice—of many
a proud capital. John Pintard’s prophecy made at the beginning of the
century still held good: he had predicted that the city would grow at
such a rate that by the year 1900 it would have a population of five
millions.
He did not foresee the cataclysm that would sharply and suddenly cut
its growth down to a third of what it had been. That cataclysm was now
silently preparing, like the hushed strain that at its exact moment
explodes an earthquake.