Rupert Hughes

“ To shoot him down openly would be too noble a punishment—like shooting a spy. To garrote him, string him up squirming from a tree limb would be best. Major André had wept pleading to be shot, but they had hanged him—not far from Tuliptree Farm. And only recently people had dug up his grave and found the tiny roots of a tree all grown about his curly hair.
Chalender had sneaked into RoBards’ home and Patty had played the Benedict Arnold to surrender the citadel to the enemy. He deserved to be put out of the way like a poisoned dog, a sheep-killer, a lamb-worrier. ”

“ To David RoBards the house was home, and never so much home as now that he fled to it with his bride from New York, and from the cholera that had begun another of its grisly pilgrimages about the world. Leaving its religious home in India and traversing Asia and Europe, it had finally stridden overseas to Canada; drifted across the lakes to the new village of Chicago, and descended the Mississippi to devastate New Orleans. In the meanwhile it had crept down the Hudson to where New York’s two hundred thousand souls waited helpless and shuddering. ”

“ That’s all I ask. Just tell me where my rights begin, if ever. If ever! My baby! My little, little baby that has never seen me and never can see me! Why, they won’t even let me hold my own baby in my arms!”
RoBards stared at her in such pity that his heart seemed to beat up into his throat. Patty knelt and put out her hands to Immy in prayer for mercy, but Immy pushed them away, and threshed about like a broken jumping jack yanked by an invisible giant child.
She turned her head to him and pleaded: “Papa! you bring me my baby. You always get me what I want, papa. Get me my baby!” ”

“ With the loftiest motives he had been always the loser, and he could not understand things. Chalender was a flippant fencer with life; yet somehow he fought always on the winning side and the worthier side. His mortal offense had been condoned, outlawed, and the offended ones helped to conceal his guilt.
It was bitter for an earnest man like RoBards to go afoot after such a rake as Chalender. Why should he have killed and hidden Jud Lasher in a wall, and let Harry Chalender, who had been as evil, ride by in state showered with the cheers due a hero, a savior of New York? ”

“ Then they fell still in her lap and she sat as a worn-out farm-wife sits whose back is broken with overlong grubbing in the soil and with too heavy a load home.
For a long time he sorrowed over her, then he went stealthily across his library into the hall, and out to the porch where he looked at the night a moment. He discovered Immy as if by accident, and exclaimed, “Who’s that?”
“It’s only me, Papa, only me!”
“Only you? Why you’re all there is. You’re the most precious thing on earth.” ”

“ RoBards wondered if ever indeed there had been an honest man. He had meant to be one, but he had lapsed into the profound. And nothing so filled him with self-horror as his new and protecting genius in hypocrisy. What a Judas he was—to stand here and let the mother of the boy he had slain praise him, and pour out praise upon him! What a hypocrite this house itself must be! What liars those stolid walls that embraced and concealed the dead, and even in the face of the denouncing thunderbolt kept their composure, and did not reveal the cadaver in their deep bosom. ”

“ It was to this moody retreat that RoBards hurried now. He took one rail fence at a leap and landed running, like a hurdler. He stumbled and fell and was up again. Keith clambered after his father, crawled through the fence and over the rocks till he came where Immy lay bruised and stunned. Keith saw his father drop to his knees and lift the child, clench her to his breast, and shake his head over her, then raise his eyes to the sky and say something to God that the boy could not hear.
The boy had always been reproached for tears and had been told, “You’re a big man now and big men don’t cry.” ”

“ He was wounded worse than Chalender, and needed more care.
All that night it was as if Indians prowled about the house, savages that longed to drag forth the people within, to howl slanders and truths about them, to fasten them to stakes and dance a torture dance about them, cut off their eyelids and blind them with ruthless light. There were no Indians to fear now, save the stealthy reporters and the more merciless newspapers.
But the house baffled them; it was a strong stockade. They should not have its children yet a while. ”

“ She encountered Keith rigid on the sill and, glancing past, saw RoBards on the floor. She thought he had fallen asleep from exhaustion. In the bed Patty lay blissful.
Aletta whispered:
“Poor Mamma! She’s sleeping, isn’t she?”
Keith turned as if his neck were of marble and stared with a statue’s eyes. She ran past him and knelt by RoBards. He protected his eyes from the innocent trust in hers by drawing his eyelids over them.
Then he hoisted himself to his feet. Life came back to his every member in a searing current. ”

“ One might as well accept these insane notions of women’s rights to their own souls. And with the souls would go the bodies, of course. And then the home, the family, society, the nation were lost. He could not imagine the chaos that would ensue. His own heart was a seething chaos in little.
And then all the men were eclipsed by the entrance of Daniel Webster—no less a giant than Daniel Webster. As a citizen RoBards felt an awe for him; as a lawyer, a reverence.
Patty gasped with pride at meeting the man. ”

“ To butcher a wounded man, guilty so ever; to strip a woman stark before the mob, evil so ever; to brand his children, to blotch his home with scandal—pure infamy! But, on the other hand, to spare a slimy reptile; to be the cheap victim of a woman’s duplicity; to leave his children to her foul ideals; to make his home a whited sepulcher—infamy again. He felt that the children must be first to be considered. But which way was their welfare to be sought?
Then the children themselves ran in upon his swooning mind, Imogene and Keith. ”

“ In the fields about the tavern hundreds of horned pedestrians were content to graze at ease, while the cholera made New York a human slaughter-house. They had walked a long way to die, and they were in no haste.
The inn’s good host, Colonel Varian, veteran of the War of 1812, gave the city travelers a welcome all the heartier for the contrast between Patty Jessamine and the disgusted and disgusting drovers, who bellowed their orders for his ale as if they had caught their voices, as well as their fragrance, from their cattle. ”

“ The drive to New York was amazingly more than a mere return along a traveled path. Though they had gone out in a panic, they had been enveloped in a paradise of leaves and flowers and lush weeds, as well as in a bridal glamor. [Pg 38] Now they went back under boughs as starkly bare as the fences of rail or stone; only the weeds bore flowers, and those were crude of fabric as of hue. And the hearts of the twain were already autumnal. Their April, June, and August of love were gone and November was their mantle. Patty’s orange blossoms were shed, and they had been artificial, too. ”

“ David, David!”
It was a long while before he could make out any other word and then he caught faintly:
“They shan’t stay here! They can go to Europe or California or hell. But they shan’t stay here! they shan’t, they shan’t!”
He could not persuade her to speak to them. When Immy came in radiant and shaken with laughter, Patty laughed like a woman long insane, worn down with some old ribald mania; but she would not speak, though Immy wept and begged:
“Mamma, kiss me. Please, Mamma! If I did wrong, it’s too late to make a fuss. Don’t spoil my first little chance of happiness, Mamma! ”

“ After all, RoBards thought, justifying his seeming anarchy: who is truly guilty of anything? Who would shoot or poison another except under the maddening torment of some spiritual plague?
And if one must say, as the pious pleaded, that Heaven was all-wise and all-merciful and all-loving even though it sent cancer and cholera and mania and jealousy to prey upon helpless humans, why should one abhor a human being who followed that high example and destroyed with ruthlessness? ”

“ Forty-five miles away on a steamboat from Albany returning New Yorkers hung over the rail and wondered if Judgment Day had indeed been sounded for the metropolis of the new world.
Deeply as he had abhorred the town, RoBards felt his heart ache for it now. Pity turned to love, and it seemed abominable that the work and the treasure and the destinies of so many poor people should be annulled in this pure wantonness of destruction.
Odd, that a man should love or hate a city or a nation, or feel sorry for a jumble of buildings or a stretch of land, a shore, or a hill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A swallow for its wildness, a humming bird for its teasing, a kitten for its scampers—a woman for her unlikeness to a man’s ideals—we love them for what they will not give us!
Only a little while could RoBards revel in his lavendered memories, for St. John’s Park was taken over by a railroad company as the site for a big freight station. All of the inhabitants were evicted like paupers from a tenement. The quondam retreat of gentility in search of peace was now a bedlam of noisy commerce, of thudding cars and squeaking brakes. ”

“ She took no exercise, wore veils and handkerchiefs to ward off the glare, and preferred to sit in the dark till the sun was gone, lest it brown her pallor. Yet she went in little flat satin slippers through the snow, and bared her shoulders to icy winds that made a man huddle in his heaviest fear-naught.
But her foolishness somehow made her all the more fragile, all the more needful of gentle dealing. And he loved her pitiably.
She was still asleep when he made out from a hilltop the spires of the ancient courthouse, and the new academy in the half-shire village of White Plains. ”

“ RoBards had brought Patty hither on their first visit to Tuliptree Farm as bride and groom fugitive from the cholera plague. She had cried out in delight at the spookiness of the place and he had called it the Tarn of Mystery. He was not quite sure what a tarn might be but the word had a somber color that he liked. And Patty had shuddered deliciously, rounding her eyes and her lips with a murmurous “ooh!” like a girl hearing a ghost story late at night. ”

“ You oughtn’t to be hurt to learn that another man loved your love. But if it makes you mad to hear me say it, maybe you could kill me. Then my blood would run out on this marble that I brought to her when she was young and pretty. Oh, but she was pretty, a pretty thing, a sweet thing. What a damned, ugly world, to let a pretty thing like Patty Jessamine suffer and die!
“Oh, Davie, Davie, what a darling she was, in what a dirty world!” ”

“ RoBards had once seen those lips on his wife’s mouth, and he felt now that he ought in common decency to crush them both to death.
But, of course, he did not even frown when he shook Chalender’s hand. After all, Chalender had saved his life once—that black night in the fire of 1835, and he felt a twisted obligation.
Another twisted emotion was his delight when he saw Chalender crowded away from Patty by other men. He felt that a man ought either to cage his wife in a cell or give up all respectable ideas of monopoly or monogamy. ”

“ The Croton work was a triumph of a city of 280,000 inhabitants, who wrought a task, said Jervis, “on a scale greatly beyond their actual or any near future wants, but which, designed to endure for ages, would bear record to those ages, however distant, of a race of men who were content to incur present burdens for the benefit of a posterity they could not know. Magnificent as may be the works of conquerors and kings, they have not equaled in forecast of design, and beneficence of result, the noble aqueduct, constructed at their own cost, by the freemen of the single city of New York.” ”

“ The runners of the sleigh mumbled and left long grooves in the white.
The rain of flakes upon the eyelids had the effect of a spell; it was like this new thing everybody was talking about, “hypnotism,” a mere disguise for the worn-out fraud of mesmerism.
Surging along in a state betwixt sleep and waking, RoBards’ mind fell into a sing-song of babble.
Every man has in him at least one poem and RoBards, like most of his profession, had a love of exalted words. He lacked the magniloquence of Webster (whose recent death had swathed most of New York’s buildings in black) ”

“ Chalender sneered, and RoBards sneered again:
“Oh, I’ve killed one or two in my day.”
Chalender apparently did not hear this mad brag, for he was bragging on his own account:
“You couldn’t kill me; nor could ten men like you. Thousands have tried to kill me. For four years the Rebels kept shooting at me and whacking at me with their sabers, jabbing with their bayonets and searching for me with grape and canister, but I didn’t die. It seems I shall never die. Maybe that’s because I’ve never quite lived. I loved Patty and you got her. ”

“ As a part of the night’s irony the firemen were blistered by both fire and frost. While cold gales bit their necks and backs, and the wet streets congealed their feet to mere hobbles, the blast from the flames blistered their cheeks.
Everywhere the pavements squirmed with black snakes of hose, limp and empty; for the hydrants were frozen, the cisterns sucked dry. In the face of such fire, little new fires had to be started around the hydrants to thaw them out, but when the water came it turned to ice in the hose as the chilled engines refused to work. ”

“ Chalender and his crowd might accuse the farmers of pettiness because they would not surrender their fields to the thirsty myriads of the city. But RoBards felt that this was only a new campaign in the eternal combat between town and country. He felt that if certain kinds of mankind had their way, every stream would be chained to a wheel, every field would contain a tenement or a shop. A snuff factory and a linen bleachery had all too long disgraced the lower stretches of the Bronx.
New York was pushing its beautiful wheatfields further and further north. ”

“ By one of Nature’s mysterious dispensations, this girl with the soul of a flirt and a gadabout had the bodily fertility of a great mother. To her frank and hysterical disgust heaven sent her a second proof of its bounty, which she received with an ingratitude that dazed her husband—and frightened him, lest its influence be visited on the next hostage to fortune. If the child should inherit the moods of its mother it would come into the world like another Gloster, with hair and teeth and a genius for wrath. ”

“ She knew that she would perish and she called her husband to save her from dying so young; yet when he got her in his arms to comfort her, she called him her murderer. She accused him of dragging her into the hasty marriage, and reminded him that if he had not inflicted his ring and his name and his burden upon her she could have gone with her father and mother this summer to Ballston Spa, where there was life and music, where the waltz flourished in rivalry with the vivacious polka just imported.
But even in her most insane onsets she did not taunt him now with the name of Harry Chalender. ”