The old house gathered her in and comforted her for a while. But
chiefly it comforted her because it let her cry out without fear of
notice from passers-by in the street or the neighbors in St. John’s
Park.
And there she abode until the war was over, and the troops came home,
saddened in their triumph by the final sacrifice of poor Mr. Lincoln.
When the regiment whose colonel was Keith flowed up Broadway, Patty was
not there to run out and kiss his hand, as she would have done if she
could have seen him on his horse with his epaulets twinkling on his
shoulders, and his sword clinking against his thigh.
His father watched him from a window and then hurried up side streets
to meet and embrace him when he was free of his soldiers. RoBards had
to wait, of course, until Keith had hugged his wife and tossed aloft
the child he saw now for the first time. Then the author of all this
grandeur came meekly forward and felt small and old and foolish in the
great arms of this famous officer.
“Where’s mother!” Keith cried.
“Up at the farm.”
“Why couldn’t she have come down to meet me?”
“She’s not very well of late.”
Keith’s pique turned to alarm. He knew his mother and he knew that
nothing light could have kept her from this hour. But Frances turned
his thoughts aside with hasty chatter, and dragged him home.
The next day he obtained leave from the formalities of the muster-out
and was ready for a journey to Kensico. His father, who had to be in
town for his business’ sake and to gain new strength for Patty’s needs,
went with him.
On the way up Keith said:
“What’s all this mystery about mother?”
“She’s pretty sick, my boy. You’ll find her changed a good deal. You’ll
pretend not to notice, of course. She’s proud, you know.”
Then the grisled colonel, who had grown patient with so much that was
terrible, looked at his father as he had looked sometimes when he woke
from bad dreams, screaming “Mamma! Papa!”
He turned his frightened eyes away from what he saw in his father’s
eyes.
Quietly, since it was an old, old story to him, RoBards told him the
truth, and Keith wrung his hands to keep from startling the passengers
in the crowded car with the mad gestures of protest he would else have
flung out.
He wanted to charge the clouds and battle in his mother’s behalf.
But when he entered her room he was as brave and calm as at a dress
parade. He smiled and caressed and spoke flatteries that cut his throat
and burned his lips.
He hurried back to disband his regiment, then brought Frances and his
son up to Tuliptree with him, and established himself in the nearest
room to his mother’s. He tucked her in and babied her as she had babied
him when she was younger than he was now.
Patty’s famous hair was her only remaining pride, the inheritance
from the Patty Jessamine who had combed and brushed and coiled it and
wrapped it in strange designs about her little head.
She was always fondling it as if it were a fairy turban, a scarf of
strange silk. Even in her bitterest paroxysms she would not tear at her
hair.
The nurse would braid it and draw two long cables down her shoulders
and praise it, and Patty would not brag a little, saying:
“It is nice, isn’t it?”
The fate that took away every other comfort and beauty and every last
luxury spared her tresses.
They had not even turned white except for certain little streaks—a fine
line of silver here and there that glistened like the threads of the
dome-spider’s gossamer shining in the morning dew when the sunbeams
just rake the lawn.
She would lay her hair against her cheeks and against her lips and she
would hold it up to RoBards to kiss, and laugh a wild little laugh.
He loved it as she did, and thought it miraculous that so many strands
of such weave should be spun from that head of hers to drip about her
beauty.
Then she would forget it in another call to martyrdom. Her bravery
astounded her husband and her brave son. It was the courage of the
ancient heretic women who had smiled amid the flames of the slow green
fagots that zealots chose for their peculiar wretchedness.
Sometimes she would seem to be whispering something to herself and
RoBards would bend down to catch the words. Usually she was crooning
that song:
“We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-y-ons loo-oo-ooms.
To deck our girls for ga-a-ay delights.”
The war was over, the looms were astream with silks again, but not for
Patty Jessamine RoBards.
One night when he had fallen asleep from sheer fag, drained like an
emptied reservoir, RoBards was wakened by her seizure upon his arm. It
terrified him from some dream of a lawsuit. He was a moment or two in
realizing that it was Patty who had seized him. The lamp had gone out,
the dawn was stealing in. She was babbling:
“I can’t stand it any more. Not another day! Oh, God, not another day!
Don’t ask me that, dear God!”
He tried to take her out of herself on to his own galled shoulders.
He seized her hands and put his face in front of her glazed eyes and
cried to her to talk to him and let him help her through this one more
Gethsemane.
Her desperate eyes stared past him for a while. Then their blurred
gaze slowly focussed upon him. She nodded in recognition and talked to
him, not to God:
“I’d ask you to give me a knife or a pistol or something to kill myself
with, but I’m afraid. Dr. Chirnside said once that self-murder was a
sin, a cowardly sin, and that hell waited for the craven one. Hell
would be even worse than this, I suppose, and it would never end—never.
Isn’t it funny that God could build hell and keep it burning from
eternity to eternity? Why if you were God, and there were only me in
hell, you’d weep so many tears they would put out the fires, wouldn’t
you? And you’d lift me up in your arms and comfort my poor scorched
body. For you love me. But oh, if only somebody would love me enough
to kill me. No, I don’t mean that. You would, if I asked you. You’d go
to hell for me forever. I know you, Mist’ RoBards—Davie. You would,
wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t let you, though. No! If hell must be gone through I’d
rather be the one. To be there in hell and think of you in heaven
feeling sorry for me would help a little.
“But if only some of these burglars that kill strange people would
shoot me by accident! If only an earthquake should come or a fire
should break out, so that I could be killed honestly! If only—if
only—oh, I can’t stand another day, Davie! I just can’t. That’s all
there is about it. I can’t.”
Then she forgot her thoughts, her theology, her hopes in the utter
absorption of her soul in her body’s torment. She was very busy with
being crucified.
RoBards suddenly realized that an opportunity was offered him to cure
this unpitied sufferer. A choice that had long been before him was only
now disclosed to his clouded soul. He wondered at his long delay in
recognizing how simple a remedy there was for the disease called life.
He did not know that his son Keith had risen from his bed, and stolen
from his room to pace the hall outside his mother’s door. He did not
know that Keith had been eavesdropping upon this sacred communion of
theirs.
Keith was a soldier. He had been killing his fellow-Americans in great
numbers for their own sakes and their country’s. He had been sending
his own beloved men into traps of death and had acquired a godlike
repose in the presence of multitudinous agonies.
He, too, when he heard Patty’s appeal for release, wondered why he had
been so dull and so slow, so unmerciful through brutish stupidity.
He had not hesitated in the field to cry “Charge!” and lead the long
line like a breaker pursuing a fleet rider up a beach, a breaker
crested with bright bayonets. This duty before him was not so easy to
meet. Yet it seemed a more certain duty than his lately finished task
of slaying Southern men.
If he did not kill his mother, his father must. He could save them both
by one brief gesture. Yet he shrank from it, fought within himself a
war of loves and duties. Then he heard his mother’s wailing again and
he set his teeth together fiercely, laid his hand upon the knob, turned
it softly, and softly thrust the door ajar.