WITHIN THESE WALLS

WITHIN THESE WALLS
By
RUPERT HUGHES
Author of
“SOULS FOR SALE,” “CLIPPED WINGS”
“THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT”
“WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY”

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1 9 2 3

WITHIN THESE WALLS

Copyright, 1923
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U.S.A.

First Edition

ILLUSTRATIONS

WITHIN THESE WALLS

WITHIN THESE WALLS

CHAPTER I

He called that tulip tree “the bouquet of God,” because it was more like a Titan’s handful of flowers than a tree.

Yet it stood a hundred and fifty feet high, and the stem of it was so large that a man and a girl together could just touch hands about its bole by stretching their arms to full length in a double embrace, and leaning their cheeks against its bark, deep-fluted as a Corinthian column.

This afternoon it meant a torch of welcome on the peak of the last hill; and it was stirred into yellow flame by the breeze that stroked its multitudinous blossoms.

Beneath it, the house looked small, cuddling in the shadow, its roof all pied yellow and green with the fallen saffron petals of the orange-stained tulip cups, with the stripped sheaths of leaf and flower, and the broad, blunt, glossy leaves, and the pistils and stamens shredded and powdery.

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.

Invisible devils of pestilence were darting everywhere now, wringing the vitals of the city to an agony, and flinging rich and poor to the cobblestones in such foul and twisted anguishes that the scavengers recoiled, and the nearest of kin or of love shrank away with gorges rising and bowels melting, not with pity, but with fear. In Bellevue Hospital the dead lay on the floor so thickly strewn that the overworked physicians could hardly move about among them. And the nurses detailed from the prison took to drink and fought across the beds of the dying or slept off their liquor on a mattress of corpses.

New York was the prey of confusion. It was the prey of panic. The people were a-shiver like the leaves of the poplars that lined Broadway. The great street was paved all the way now to the farmsteads out at Twenty-third Street. The shops crowding in from Pearl Street had begun to pursue the homes.

Broadway was ceasing to be a lane of homes. But the cholera was faster and fiercer than commerce. It had turned Broadway into a channel of escape. It was all fugitive with citizens fleeing from this new Pompeii whose fires were from within, whose lava seethed in the loins of its people. Half the people—a hundred thousand fled.

The swine that had kept the roadway clean were frightened into the byways by the frightened men and women. The cattle droves that had gone lowing along Broadway in hundreds were thrust aside by the human herds; and their dusty wardens cursed the plague.

The street was full of funerals, lone paupers in carts, merchants with retinues of mourners on foot, moving slowly up to the burial ground for plague victims in Washington Square. Only men, of course, went to the funerals, but women joined the flight. The quick crowded the dead into the flushed gutters, and the hackney coaches, the heavy busses, the light wagons from Ford, the four-horse stages, the Tilburys, chairs, gigs, and phaetons were hurried north in a jumble of wagons and drays filled with baggage and household effects, as well as wives and children.

The city was moving once more out to Chelsea and other rural retreats. A hotel of pine boards had been run up in a Greenwich wheatfield in two days, and it held already five hundred exiles. But Greenwich was not far enough for RoBards and his precious bride. She had been too hardly won to be lightly risked.

He had bought the two bays and the Godwin carriage for the escape, and when he checked his horses under the tree before her home in Park Place, she was waiting on the step.

He had sent ahead his man, Cuff, and her woman, Teen—both of them manumitted only five years before by the New York emancipation law of 1827, both still and forever slaves at heart. They were to prepare his house in the country for the honeymoon. It was up in Westchester, beyond White Plains, near Robbin’s Mills. The stage could have carried the bride and groom, but it was booked for days ahead.

So now he helped her in and bestowed her packages. For all his fear, it was wonderful to feel the exquisite elbow of pretty Patty Jessamine in his palm, and to know that henceforth she was Mistress David RoBards.

He wished that the crowd of young and old bucks who had besought her in marriage since she was fifteen, might have been drawn up in review along Broadway to see him carry her off. Most of all he wished that Harry Chalender might have witnessed his triumph, for he had dreaded Chalender so much among his rivals that he was still surprised at his success. He wondered a little that Chalender had made no resistance to his conquest.

He whirled the steeds, and turning his back on the Columbia College Building looming through the grove behind him, sent them galloping towards City Hall placid in its marble serenity just ahead, its flower beds and grasses protected from cattle and pigs by a new picket fence.

Patty squealed and clutched RoBards’ arm, as a decently cowardly young lady ought, when the carriage spun to the left, and RoBards snapped his whip to warn away a foolish girl who swept the crossing, and one of the pestiferous boys who thrust loco-foco matches under every nose.

He almost overran the pretty girl who sold hot corn, and a shriek ended her sweet sing-song, “Lily white corn! Buy my lily white corn!”

Progress was slow among the lumbering busses and stages. Besides, the horses must be dealt with sparingly. They had twenty-seven miles ahead of them before they should reach White Plains, and five or more beyond that. And the paved streets would end at the newly opened Madison Square.

There was much to terrify the eyes in their progress. Dear friends were seen among the funeral followers, and among the fugitives many who had mocked at the prophets of the plague. But Harry Chalender was not to be seen, though RoBards did not mention him, of course. The foreign critics were ridiculing the Yankee passion for questions, but even here bridegrooms did not ask their brides about their bitterest rivals.

The thin and wretched poplar trees along Broadway were drooping under the hot midsummer sun, and the grass was yellow in the yards; for water, the greatest need of New York, was more than usually sparse. It was so expensive that sailing vessels from Europe brought with them casks enough to take them back again.

The pumps at the corners were crowded with negroes and paupers carrying pails, and with gentlemen pausing to drink or to splash their hot faces. The cisterns were dry in the backyards, for no rain had blessed the roofs.

The bride smiled wanly at her husband as they passed Contoit’s Garden, for they had often gone together into its cool shadows. It was as near as they could come to a Watteau idyl in the circumspection of Manhattan proprieties, and he had leant upon the bare board and dabbed at a lemon ice (slyly drenched with surreptitious cognac by the negro waiter) while she dipped the famous Contoit ice cream from an earthenware dish with a black pewter spoon, and crumbled the poundcake with fingers that seemed too delicate for any more difficult office. In his infatuated gaze she wore the grace of Versailles as she carried her spoon curvily to lips like curled rose-petals under the multiple shade of a black scuttle hat adrip with veils and studded with a huge peony that brushed the low branches of the living ceiling. But that was for memory to cherish in a bright niche on the black wall of New York’s fate.

Even when they reached Niblo’s Gardens out at the edge of civilization, in the suburbs about Houston Street, the trees that hung their branches across the high board fence held out no promise of comfort within. The dust that Billy Niblo had come so far to escape was whipped into clouds by innumerable hooves, and fell back in the listless air to stifle the lungs and sting the eyes. Few couples ventured into the bowers where Mrs. Niblo purveyed ice cream to ladies, and port negus to their beaux.

On these woeful nights, in the flower-scented, flower-lanterned gardens, the gleaming lanterns of multi-colored glass flattered not many cheeks, brightened not many eyes. Even the Ravels, who were later to play here for three hundred nights, had just met with disaster; for though they ravished New York with the grace of their acrobatics, their writhing contortions, their dancing, and most of all by their amazing antics upon the new and bewildering invention of roller skates—even they could not bring the morose populace to the Park Theatre, and the cholera closed them out after two weeks of vain battle with the general despair.

There were sad memories for the RoBards twain on every hand. Herealong they had walked and wooed; at this house or that they had met for dinner or dance, and now the homes where carriages had been packed for balls, were hushed with dread, or shaken with the outcries of woe.

It seemed good to turn away from Broadway at Madison Square, and join the dust-misted Post Road, with its huge stages lurching perilously, and racking the bones of the tossed passengers bound for Harlem, New Rochelle, Rye, and all the towns beyond to Boston.

From here on, the highway ran through farmland, broken now and then by dwellings, or by warder trees that sheltered mansions in the garden deeps; but the heat was ruthless and beat with oven-glow upon grain and grass praying in vain for relief.

Past the cattle marts of Bull’s Head Village, on up Murray’s Hill, and down through the village of Odellville, their horses trotted doggedly, threaded McGowan’s Pass, and climbed Breakneck Hill, the scene of so many fatal mishaps that Patty was in a panic. She clung to her husband’s arm with such anxiety that he could hardly manage his team. But to their surprise they got down alive into the plains of Harlem.

RoBards had counted on resting his bride and his horses at Harlem Village while they took dinner there at three. But Harlem was in even direr estate than New York, and a pallid negro, who brought water to the horses, stammered a warning against the accursed spot. Families had been annihilated by the cholera in a night. Under the big willow by the church a corpse had been found, and of the coroner’s jury of twelve, all were dead in a week save one. The firehouse at Harlem was a fearsome place, as RoBards could see; for it was a morgue where two overworked black men nailed together pine boxes, and nailed the dead into them in dozens. The rumor had spread that in their haste they were burying some of the villagers alive in the churchyard.

Patty implored her husband to drive on, and he lashed the horses to a run to outrace her fears. He would not have hurt animal or man, except for her; but for her he was strangely capable of anything, cruel or sublime.

Not long the gallopade lasted before the jades fell back into a dogged trot. They pushed on through Bronxdale, and rejoined the Boston Post Road at McTeague’s Caves. Soon a great flying stage of the new Concord type, with its huge body swung on great leather thoroughbraces, rolled by at better than the wonted six miles an hour. It passed RoBards’ weary horses, and hid them and its own seasick passengers in a smoke of dust.

Coaches like these had been established in New York only a few months before, to run on rails. RoBards had ridden on one of the first trips, the whole distance from Prince to Fourteenth Street. The rails made it easier for the passengers and the horses. Indeed, the legislature had incorporated a wonderful company that proposed to build a railway from the Harlem River to White Plains, and pull the coaches with steam engines, like those on the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, which had gone tearing through space at the incredible speed of twenty miles an hour. Some doctors said it would blind the passengers to see the landscape shoot past at such an ungodly speed. But this was the age of wonders.

If the Boston stages threw up such a blinding dust, what would the steam engines do?

It was good to turn off at the head of Black Dog Brook, and take the less frequented highway to White Plains, past Tuckahoe, and through the scenes that Mr. Cooper had described in his novel, The Spy. RoBards had read it as a boy one Saturday night, and it had kept him awake until he heard the Sunday church bells toll, and heard the chains rattle as they were drawn across Broadway to keep the ribald infidels from disturbing the orderly by driving horses on Sunday.

Mr. Cooper was in Europe now, quarreling with some and being praised by others. He had been highly spoken of by a French critic named Balzac, who was also writing novels, if RoBards were not mistaken. Yet nearly everybody said that America had no literature!

In the midst of RoBards’ disquisition on such themes, Patty wailed:

“I’m hungry!”

It was the female bird chirping to her mate, and RoBards felt both proud and pitiful. Fortunately he could descry, not far ahead, a row of dormer windows breaking the roof of a long low house that he recognized as Varian’s Tavern at Scarsdale. A pock-marked milestone set there in 1773 mournfully announced that they were already XXI miles from New York.

A great barn yawned for the tired horses, and they quickened their gait as they sniffed its plentiful fodder.

Being a bridegroom, RoBards had worn his second-best suit, made for him only a little while before by Tryon and Derby, and it had reduced him to the fashionable immobility in which a gentleman of the mode almost rivaled a lady.

His black frock was so tight across the chest, so short of waist, and so constricted of armhole, that he could hardly breathe, or drive the horses. The pantaloons (if one must mention them) were so snug to his skin, and the straps beneath his boots drew them so taut, that his nether limbs were all pins and needles, and when he stepped down from the carriage, he could hardly endure the exquisite distress.

When he put up his arms for Patty, he heard the ominous hiss of a slipping seam in a sleeve. His poor bride was asleep all over, and could hardly rise from her seat or direct her fall across the wheel into his arms.

They staggered tipsily to the tavern doorway, where RoBards checked her at the sill to point out the saber-scars still gashing the woodwork. The British had made them when they were plundering and pursuing the rebels along this very road nearly sixty years before.

In the tavern lounged a crowd of loud and smelly Westerners who had goaded their herds all the way from Ohio, and were waiting here to haggle with the cattle-dealers from New York. But the cattle-dealers had their own hides to think of.

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.

In a secluded nook Patty forgot to be exquisite, and ate with the sincerity of hunger, and made fatigue an excuse for sipping a noggin from the brandy bottle that was a necessary part of all tableware. Then she prinked a little, and left at Varian’s what dust she had absorbed on the road hitherto. And so they drove on.

The pad-pad of the horses’ feet, the hot air, the winding miles of uphill and down, brought her great eyelids over the dear eyes wearied with terror, and she slept at last against her husband’s shoulder. He had wanted to discourse to her of the historic places they passed; for this ground was classic with Washington’s retreats to victory; these fields and creeks had been clotted with the blood of patriots. But history had never interested her, though it was RoBards’ passion—next to her.

He felt strangely like a father carrying a daughter home from school, though he was not more than eight years her senior. But she was such a child! though already entering seventeen. He gazed down at her admiringly, and her head had fallen back until she seemed to gaze up at him, though her eyes were closed and he knew she slept.

In her poke bonnet her face was like a fragment of bisque at the bottom of a basket. The brows and the arched eyelids, the tiny path along the bridge of her nose, the curled nostrils, the incredible grace and petulant pathos of her lips, severed a little as she panted, and the whorl of her chin, were of too studied a perfection, he thought, to have grown merely by any congress of blood and flesh.

He could hardly endure not to bend and kiss her, but that would have brought her eyes open and he could not study her as now, when she lay before him like some rare object of vertu, some priceless thing in tinted Carrara that he had bought overseas and was hurrying to his private gallery, its one gem, and never to be shared with the public gaze.

It seemed that only now he had a first moment of leisure to review the surprise of her capture. She was his wife almost before he dreamed that he had any hope of winning her at all. It would have been ungallant but quaintly truthful to say that she had carried him off on this odd elopement, in which the fleeing couple were man and wife, whom no one pursued.

CHAPTER II

This was no such runaway match as that famous affair of a cousin of hers, who had stolen from a masked ball with a forbidden suitor, had crossed the Hudson, and ridden forty miles on horseback in the night to find a parson to marry them.

That bold foray against the respectabilities had revealed how easy it was for forbidden young Romeos to creep into the parlors of the city Capulets and steal thence their Juliets.

But that elopement had the excuse of thwarting parental tyranny. This was a flight from Sodom condemned.

When RoBards first pleaded with Patty to marry him and be gone from the accursed town, she had smiled drearily.

“You don’t want me to run away like Lot’s wife?”

“Yes! yes!”

“But she died looking back, and I’m afraid I’d meet her fate. I’d cry myself into another pillar of salt, and become only another milestone on the Post Road. Would you like me like that, Mister RoBards?”

She had somehow never learned to call him by his first name, before they were married. And by some stranger mystery of shyness, after they were married, she dared the “David” only on occasions of peculiar emotion. Even after she bore him children, she called him “Mister RoBards.”

She had laughed away his alarm, though her merriment was sickly. And then her uncle had gone with the other members of the Board of Health to inspect the quarantine station established at Staten Island against the infected foreigners, swarming overseas in sailing vessels like vast unclean buzzards; and in two weeks every member of that board was dead save one; and he was not her uncle.

This had ended her laughter in terror. She had denounced the authorities for the ignominy of her uncle’s fate. Wealthy as he had been, his body was carried out to the old Potter’s Field in Washington Square, and buried in that notorious spot hitherto devoted to the paupers, the criminals, and the overripe fruit of the gallows tree.

Then one day a nameless corpse was found in Park Place, before her very door; a cousin of hers that she loved was called to the inquest; and nine of the twenty on the coroner’s board were dead in a few days, and her cousin was one of them.

Patty was ready then to flee anywhere; but she could not persuade Harry Chalender to escape, and she vowed that she would not go without him. RoBards felt a cholera of jealousy burning his very vitals as he realized that his wife had seemed more afraid of leaving Harry Chalender than of the plague.

But Harry Chalender scorned to fly and RoBards would not leave town while Patty was there, even though she refused his love. He had just resigned himself to a life without her, and was hoping that the pestilence would end his suffering, when she came to him.

Only yesterday afternoon it was! And she came running along the street to his house—defying all the gossips in a greater fear!

He was living just below City Hall Park, on the east side of Broadway, in a once fashionable home that had become a fashionable boarding house. He happened to be standing at his window brooding when the sight of a woman running caught his eye. He was astounded to see that it was Patty Jessamine. Everybody was, for everybody knew her beauty. RoBards was down the stairs and at the front door just as she crossed Broadway, dodging among the tangled traffic.

She paused to lean against the pump that stood at the corner there, not heeding that her tiny shoes and the ribbons about her ankles were bedabbled with the mire, for she cowered from a staggering, groping wretch who seemed to turn black as he reeled, clutched at her wide skirts, and sprawled in the last gripe of cholera. She had to step across him to escape and RoBards ran to catch her as she swooned.

Her scream of dismay ended in a stuttering whisper:

“Marry me, Mr. RoBards! and take me away before I die.”

His exultance was so great at the undreamed-of benison that he felt a howl of wolfish triumph straightening his throat. So he had won her away from Harry Chalender! How? What did it matter? He cried,

“God knows how gladly!”

He stopped a passing hackney coach and took her home. She was afraid at first to get out of the cab, for she explained that her father was stricken with the cholera, and her brother had died in the house that afternoon.

He reassured her as best he could, and gave her servants orders to pack her things, and make her ready for such a wedding as he might improvise in a city whose ministers were worn out in body and soul with funeral ceremonies.

In mad haste he had somehow accomplished the countless details that made her his in the eyes of State and Church. It was not till long after that she had grown calm enough to repent her frenzy of fear, and the irreparable calamity of a marriage at such speed.

She had been reared to look forward to her wedding day as the high festival of her life, and had devoted numberless hours to visions of herself in her vast, creamy satin bridal robe from Whittingham’s, with a headdress like a veiled tower set upon a coiffure molded by Martell’s own deft fingers, a pair of Lane’s tightest satin boots, and gloves six buttons high. She had insisted that she should receive the newest novelty, a bridal bouquet, and that the wedding cake should be as big as a cathedral.

And now she was married and all, and never a sign of splendor, only an old veil and a wreath of artificial orange blossoms; only the ring that the groom had all but forgotten to bring.

Still, she was alive, and that was something; that was everything; that was far more than could be said of many a pretty friend of hers who had been blooming toward wifehood a week ago, and was now a blighted thing in a box from a coffin warehouse.

As RoBards stared down at her when he could risk a glance away from the rough road, she seemed to be almost waxen with death. Her cheeks were so pale, her breathing so gentle, that she might be drifting from him even now. The little distance between sleep and death gave her an especial dearness, and he hated himself for the meanness of remembering his question after the preacher had gone and the few friends had dispersed:

“How does it happen that you didn’t ask Harry Chalender to your wedding?”

He had asked it teasingly, in a spirit of mischievous bravado. But she had groaned:

“Harry? Harry is dying! Didn’t you know it? The old slave-woman at his house told our black man.”

This had cast ashes upon the fire of his rejoicing. But the flames leaped through them again. For he had won. She was his, and it would be impious to complain that his enemy had been stricken.

He felt a sudden dread of his bride. Could she be so heartless, so selfish—ah, well, women were weak things and men must be strong for them.

The good thing, the glorious thing, was that he had her his. She was Mrs. RoBards now, and she was asleep against his arm. The harsh ruts of the road jolting her tender body kept her bosom tremulous as a heap of white hyacinths fluttered by a soft breeze of summer.

With the rocking of the carriage her velvet cheek slid up and down on his shoulder. He was startled to note at length that his sleeve was pink and her inner cheek whiter than the other. So she powdered and painted! And he had never known it! He would have said that only the wantons that crowded the town or the shameless flirts were discontent to leave their skins as God made them. Yet his own bride—but—she was a wife now. She would be a mother in time. And she would have no temptations to vanity henceforth.

He studied her a little closelier, as if, in marrying her, he had indeed taken her from beneath the veil of romance into the keen sunlight of truth. The delicate forehead had never a wrinkle, even between the eyebrows of such delicate penmanship. If she had thought hard and fiercely on the problems of life and religion and natural philosophy, there would have been lines there. Well, one did not marry a woman for her wisdom. But what sorry tortures she endured to make herself a doll! She denied herself not only the glory of flight in the realms of thought, but even the privileges of motion.

She was the voluntary prisoner—as Fanny Kemble would say—of “tight stays, tight garters, tight sleeves, tight waistbands, tight armholes, and tight bodices.” 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 wanted to tell his wife that she need not be lonely out here, for she would be only a few miles from this lively community, already containing several hundred people, a boys’ school, and a newspaper. But he let her sleep, fearing that, after all, she might not be impressed. She slept past the great sight of this region, Washington’s old headquarters, only to wake a little later as the carriage was flung and whipped about in a road of particular barbarity.

“Where are we, Mist’ RoBards?” she cried, and gasped to learn how far they had driven. He watched her wild little glances with fascination. She seemed to flirt and coquet with the very landscape.

She glanced with amazement at the wildness around her, the maples and wild rhododendrons, and all the Westchester paradise of leaves and flowers crowding in the little-used highway, brushing the fetlocks of the horses, falling back like sickled wheat from the scythe of the wheels, and bending down from above to flail the carriage top with fragrant leaf-laden wands.

And now at last she spied his great tulip tree, and the Lilliputian house beneath it, and she was weary enough to welcome the welcome they vouchsafed.

The carriage rolled across a brief wooden bridge above a merry water.

“That’s old Bronck his river,” he told her. “And these hills were the stronghold that Washington fell back to after the British drove him out of the White Plains. Ignorant old General Howe had ordered his navy to sail up the Bronx, and when the ships could not even find the little creek, Howe feared to advance any further. He sneaked away to capture Fort Washington by treachery.

“Our tulip trees won the praise of Washington while the great man was here. Perhaps that very tree is the son of one of those that shed its blossoms on his tent. Tulip trees are hard to persuade; they won’t grow where you plant them. But this one came to live here of its own accord when my father built this house for my mother.

“Strange, isn’t it, my darling, that they should have come out here—in 1805, it was—to escape from another pestilence? It was the yellow fever then. It had been breaking out every few years before, but that year it was frightful, and my mother was a bride then just as you are now.

“They went back to New York because she grew lonely, but they came out again with the next fever summer. I was born here. Ten years ago I came out for a while. That was another yellow fever year. Even you remember that far back, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, Mist’ RoBards. That was when they moved the Post Office, the Customs House, the banks, the newspapers, the churches—even my father’s store, out to Greenwich Village. But we went back in the late fall. When shall we go back now?”

“God knows!” he groaned. “I should be glad to stay here with you forever.”

“It’s lonely, though—a little, don’t you think, Mist’ RoBards?”

“Not with you. We’d best forget New York. It’s a doomed city now.”

“Oh, don’t say that!”

“Dr. Chirnside called this a visitation of God’s judgment. It’s not the first. Every few years the warning comes; the people run away and repent, and live in simple villages or on their farms; but when the plague has passed over they go back; they throw open their gaudy homes, wash off the mark of the angel of the Passover on the bloody lintels of their doors, and start up the carnival again. The men get drunk, the women tipple and flirt. They dance all night, gamble, carouse, divorce, live beyond their means, neglect the poor. Look at the churches on Sunday! Hardly a man there; all women, and not many of them. Not one in ten goes to church Sundays.”

She broke in on his tirade with a childish puzzler:

“What causes the plague, do you think, Mist’ RoBards?”

“Who can tell? It is God’s judgment, the pious men say. The doctors call it an exhalation, a vapor, a miasma; but those are only words to wrap ignorance in. God only knows what causes the plague.”

“Harry Chalender says—said——”

The word was the toll of a passing bell. The change of tense was like the taking of a life. It silenced her a dreadful while. Then she tried to banish the specter with an impersonal phrase:

“Some people say that cholera comes from bad water, and New York has no good water. I can hardly drink the bitter stuff from the pumps, and I can taste the old log pipes in the water that we buy from the Manhattan Company’s well. The rainwater from the roofs is worse. No wonder everybody drinks brandy, and there is so much drunkenness. Harry—many people want to go out into the country, all the way up to the Croton or the Bronx, and bring the pure streams down into the city, and do away with the pumps and cisterns.”

RoBards laughed. “That’s an old idea. They talked about it after the yellow fever of 1798. But they found it would cost a million dollars, and gave it up, and let that old villain of an Aaron Burr dig his Manhattan well in the heart of the town. Things are so much higher now that it would cost five millions; and it would take years to lay the miles of pipes. No, no, they’ll never make our wild little Bronx a New York citizen. How much better to come up here into the hills and drink its water where it is born.”

“Poor New York!” she sighed, and her head was turned so far about as she looked off to the South that her round chin rested on the round of her shoulder; the somber irises of her eyes were lost in the deep lashes, where there was a hint of a tear, and her throat was a straight line, taut as a whip-cord, from the tip of her tiny ear to the ivory slope of her breast.

Her beauty was marble in the repose of intense meditation upon the city abandoned to its fate. He drank it in devotedly before he laughed:

“Have you turned into Lot’s wife already, or have you the power to turn those big eyes toward the house? It’s pretty from here.”

She startled a little, like the frightened gazelle which was the model of ladylike conduct. Her head came round slowly, and she flicked the dew from her eyes with a quick flutter of the lids. Then the arc of her red lips changed from concave to convex as the sorrowful droop became a warm smile.

A dark thought flitted through his mind that at best she found her future prison less dismal than she had imagined it; and that her fatigue would have made her greet even a jail with relief.

She had sat so long on so rough a voyage that she could hardly rise.

“My limbs have gone to sleep,” she said, and blushed at such a bold allusion. She hardly knew her husband well enough yet for such carelessness.

But he felt a dart of sharp happiness at such an indelicacy. This was a wild adventure. A wilder was to follow, for, as he lifted her across the front wheel he was forced to observe not only her prunella slippers entire, but a flash of the white stocking above the ankle where the crossed thongs were knotted.

He was dizzied by the swoop of her beauty. She came to earth and his arms in the billow of her huge silken skirt, and her vast “elephant” sleeves, with a swirl of ribbons everywhere.

An incense came with the goddess stooping to the ground, and she leaned a moment along his body, the captive of his arms, and he thrust his face so deep into her hat that its brim knocked off his own tall beaver. He let it lie in the dust, though it was a deep-piled St. John of the latest bell.

He kissed her full and fair, and his arms found her as soft, as spicy, and as lithe in her voluminous taffeta as a long bough of tulip blossoms smothered in leaves. But the sharp points of his collar, protruding above his stock like a pair of spear-heads, hurt her cheek and threatened to blind her, and she squealed. He loved to hear her squeal.

A rude guffaw of unmannerly laughter brought him back to daylight and indignation, as he heard old farmer Albeson roar:

“Wall, wall! I never seen two bodies with one head till now. Why, it’s Master Dave! and his female bride!”

The farmer’s wife cackled at the wit of her spouse, and Patty giggled with well-bred reserve. She treated the old rustics with the manner she held toward the blacks who had been her father’s slaves when she was younger. But though the Albesons were quick to remind any presumptuous prigs that they were as good as royalty in the great and only republic, they found Patty’s tyranny as pretty as a baby’s.

They led the way into the house. David’s black man Cuff took the horses to the stable, and Patty’s brown woman Teen carried the luggage up the steps and up the stairs to the long, lone room under the eaves, that grazed the four high tops of bedposts carved as if the mahogany had been twisted or braided.

The first duty was to wash off the dust of the travel. When Patty lifted the scuttle hat from the clutter of her curls before the mirror, she screamed with dismay:

“I’m blacker than Teen!”

RoBards himself poured water into the bowl and boasted of its clarity.

“Not much like the soup you get from your city cisterns, eh?”

“It’s cold, though,” she murmured.

She put him out of the room while she changed her dress to a simple, loose house-robe. She slipped out of the steel cuirass of her stays, and the soft sleeves drooped from her shoulders along her arms. There was a girl’s body bewitchingly hinted inside the twinkling wrinkles.

After the return to simple, clinging things of the brief French republic and the early Empire, the fashions had been departing more and more from any respect for God’s image beneath. When Patty came down the steps in something that was rather drapery than a group of balloons, RoBards was amazed to find how human she was after all, how Grecian, somehow; how much quainter, littler, dearer.

She apologized for her immodesty, but gave weariness as her excuse.

“I should have fainted in my room—if you had been there,” she said, with an audacity he had never dreamed her capable of. “But where’s the profit of a swoon if you fall into the arms of another woman—and a black one at that?”

“You don’t have to faint to get into my arms,” he riposted as he crushed her close.

“I’ll faint if you don’t let me out of them, Mist’ RoBards,” she gasped.

Then they went in to tea. She made hardly a pretence of eating. Even if she had not been trained to fast at table like a lady, she would have been too jaded with the travel.

Afterward he walked with her on the narrow piazza in the rising moon, and he felt so wonderfully enriched by her possession, so intimately at home with her, that he asked her if he might smoke.

“I beg you to, Mist’ RoBards,” she said; “I love the flavor of Havana.”

He took from the portmanteau-like lining of his hat one of the cigars he carried there with his red silk handkerchief, his black gloves, and any other small baggage that might otherwise bulge his pockets. As he lighted it with one of the new spiral sulphur matches, he remembered that Harry Chalender had smoked much and expensively.

Harry Chalender even smoked cigars on the street and in office hours, though no gentleman was supposed to do that, and it would have ruined a less secure young man financially and socially. Some of the banks would not lend money to a man eccentric enough to smoke on the street or to wear a mustache. But Harry had dared even to grow and wear a mustache down Broadway. It was to pay a bet on an election, but it shocked the more conservative.

His only effeminacy was his abstention from chewing tobacco and from snuff. Patty often praised him for not spitting tobacco juice about over her skirts and carpets, as so many of the gentlemen did. She had one dress quite ruined on Broadway by a humorist’s ejaculation of such liquor.

Because of Chalender, RoBards flung down his cigar and glared at it where it lay in the grass, as smouldering as his sullen jealousy, and glared back like an eye, watchful and resentful.

Only a little while he was privileged to stroll his porch with his arm about Patty Jessamine’s unfortressed waist, for she tried to smuggle away a yawn under the cover of a delicious sigh, and then protested that she could not keep her eyelids open.

“No wonder!” he answered, “they’re so big!”

She kissed him on the cheek and drifted away before he could retaliate. He walked up and down alone a while, breathing the incense of her possession in the quiet air, still faintly flavored with the perfume she employed.

Then he went in and up the dark stairs to find her. She lay asleep along the bed as if she had been flung there. She was lying across the border of the candle’s yellow feud with the blue moonlight; they divided her form between dim gold and faint azure. She had fallen aslumber where she fell, and he stole close to wonder over her and to study her unblushing beauty.

Her face was out of the reach of the candle’s flickering gleam, and the moon bewitched it with a mist of sapphire. Through the open window a soft breeze loitered, fingering her curls, lifting them from her snowy neck and letting them fall. And from the tulip tree a long, low branch, studded with empty sconces of living brass, beat upon the pane with muffled strokes.

“Beautiful! beautiful!” he whispered—not to her, nor to himself, but to a something that seemed to watch with him. He longed to be worthy of such beauty, and wondered if she—the she inside that little bosom—were worthy of such treasures, such perils, as her face and her fascinations.

His heart ached with a yearning to shelter her from the evil of the world, the plagues that would rend that lacy fabric, the fiends that would soil its cleanliness. Such a petulant, froward, reckless little imp it was that dwelt inside the alabaster shrine! Such loyalty she had for the gaudy city and its frivolities! Such terror of the pestilence, yet such terror of the great, sweet loneliness of this beloved solitude!

Else, why had she stared back along the road with a sorrow, with a regret that seemed to trail almost like a ribbon reaching all the way to town? Would she ever be divorced from the interests that he could neither understand nor admire?

Well, she was his for a while—for now—and more his own while she slept than while she was awake, for when she was awake her eyes kept studying the plain, dull walls, and his plain, dull self; wondering, no doubt, what substitute he could provide for the dances and picnics and romances that crowded the days and nights in the city.

He bent to kiss a cheek like warm and pliant porcelain, and to draw the quilt across a shoulder escaped from its sleeve, and all aglow, as if light itself slumbered there.

He tiptoed from the room and down the stairs and into the August night. He stepped into a cataract of moonbeams streaming down upon the breathing grass and the somnolent trees, the old walls and fences, and the waft flowers in the unkempt garden.

A wind walked to and fro among them like a prisoner in trailing robes, a wind that seemed to be trying to say something, and could not, because its tongue had been plucked out. But it kept trying inarticulately to mumble a warning—against what?—the hazards of life and love perhaps, and the inevitable calamities that follow success.

He had succeeded in winning Patty Jessamine. But what else had he incurred?

CHAPTER III

Leaving the mansion of such a night and entering a mere house, was less a going in than a going out. The night, vast as space, was yet closer than the flesh, more intimate than the marrow of the bones or the retina that sat behind the eyes and observed.

When he left the roomy dark at last he found Patty still asleep, or pretending to be. He could not quite feel sure of her. He never could. It was only of himself and of his idolatry that he was forever sure.

If she slept indeed it would be cruel to wake her. If she affected slumber, it was because she prayed to be spared his love. In either case he had not the courage to invade her retreat, or compel her withdrawn presence to return.

This sublimity of devotion was ridiculous. But he achieved it.

The morning found him still a bachelor. He was amazed at first to hear women’s voices in another room quarreling; it was Patty berating her stupid maid.

When he met her at the breakfast table she was serene again, and held up her cheek like a flower to be pressed against his lips. She had taken command of the household, imperious as a young queen, a-simmer with overbubbling pride like a little girl suddenly hoisted to the head of the table in her mother’s absence.

Womanlike, she found a strange comfort in the discovery that the china in the house was good, the linen of quality, and the silver dignified. She had erudition of a sort, in a field where he was blankly ignorant. She recognized at once that the gleaming coffee pot was from the elegant hand of Paul Revere himself.

“I didn’t know he was a silversmith,” said RoBards.

“What else was he famous for?” Patty said.

This dazed him as a pretty evidence of the profound difference between a male and a female mind. He started to tell her about what Paul Revere had done when she began to praise his mother’s taste in china. She laughed:

“You never saw the pieces of china I did, did you, Mist’ RoBards?”

“You did china? You never showed me any!”

“It was nothing to boast of. But when I was a little girl at Mrs. Okill’s school, I drew a pattern of a tea-set—a wreath of sweet peas and convolvulus surrounding my initial and a lamb holding a cross. My cousin Peter, who was going out to China as a supercargo, said he would take it with him and have it put on a tea-set. He made fun of my drawing and wrote on the design under the lamb: ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ And in about a year the set came round the Horn in one of my uncle’s ships. But the foolish, long-tailed apes in China had put on every cup and saucer the words, ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ I cried for days, and broke every piece to flinders.”

She could laugh with him now, and when she laughed he found a new excuse for a new adoration. He was not gifted in frivolity, and the old house seemed to store up her mirth for dark days when remembered laughter would make a more heartbreaking echo than the remembered drip of tears.

Breakfast left his soul famished for her love, but she would not be serious. She flitted and chirped like a bird that lures a hunter away from her nest.

She seemed to evade him, “to lock herself from his resort,” to be preparing retreats and defences. He was humiliated and shamefully ashamed to find that she was not yet his wife save by ceremony and appearance. He had sharply rebuked the old farmer for a crassly familiar joke or two upon a consummation devotedly to be wished, but he would have hung his head if the truth were known.

Then finally, suddenly, strangely, she was his, and in a manner of no sanctity at all, in a mood of eddying passion, like an evil intrigue. Many of the bachelors, and many of the married men, kept mistresses, but Patty was his wife. And yet he felt a bewildering sense of infidelity to somebody, something. Was it because she seemed afterwards to wear a look of guilt? Was she thinking that she was disloyal to that man Chalender, whose ghost perhaps by now had left his body and followed her up into this citadel?

If she seemed to feel guilty, she betrayed also an exhilaration in the crime, a bravado he had never imagined her capable of.

He was the one that suffered remorse, and he came to wonder if it were not after all man and not woman who had invented modesty and chastity, and who upheld them as ideals which women accepted rather in obedience than in conviction.

Evidently woman must be controlled and coerced for her own salvation.

There had been recently a flurry of a few insane zealots who had coined a new phrase, “Women’s Rights,” and had invented an obscene garment named after a shameless Mrs. Bloomer. In Boston a few benighted wearers of this atrocity had been properly mobbed off the streets. They were even less popular and less likely to succeed than the anti-slavery fanatics.

RoBards was glad that Patty was at the other extreme from such bigots. He would rather have her a butterfly than a beetle. He loved her for saying once:

“I want to be ruled, Mist’ RoBards, if you please!”

And by God he would rule her—and for God he would rule her, and save her, soul and body. If either failed it would be his fault.

Pride in her meekness, fear for her frailty, pity for her lack of intellect, and wonder at her graces, were intertwisted with moods of a groveling unworthiness of her, of upstaring rapture before her mystic wisdoms.

Her purity seemed to be replenished after the storms of love, as the blue sky came back innocent and untarnished after a black cloud and lightning. Quick tempests rose and passed, and a fleet angelic quality brought her down to earth on and in a rainbow from heaven.

He found himself studying her as a botanist studies a flower. In their loneliness they dwelt as on a desert island.

But she could ride a little and he had good saddle horses, and she found many occasions for excursions to White Plains. They rode often together up to the Northcastle post office, where the stage flung off the New York papers and the letters. She had a brave beauty as she rode, her long skirt like a spinnaker at the horse’s flank, her veil flying from her hat, her silhouette one with the horse’s back, where her arched thigh rose above it and clasped the saddle horn.

The news from the city was blacker every day, and she was more and more content with her exile, until a letter came to tell her that Harry Chalender had not died after all, but had somehow won his duel with the Asiatic death. The same post brought her word that her father had also passed the crisis. She made a great noise of delight in the recovery of her father. But she said nothing more of Harry Chalender.

And so his name rang aloud in the back of RoBards’ mind. He was hard to please: if she had exclaimed upon Chalender’s escape he would have winced. Yet her silence was unendurable.

In a ferocious quarrel that began in nothing at all, and was, on his part, only the outcry of a love too exacting, because it was too hungry, she flung at him:

“I needn’t have married you, Mist’ RoBards! You made me. You kept at me.”

“Hush, sweetheart!” he pleaded, “you don’t want the servants to hear.”

“What do I care for servants? If I hadn’t been such a fool as to listen to you, I might have married Harry Chalender.”

“Hush!” he stormed, “or, by——”

“By who, what?” she screamed, staring up at him as if in desire as in need of a beating. When he could not smite such beauty, she cried at him:

“This house! This terrible tomb! My father would have called it this damned house. Well, it’s nothing but a madhouse to me, one of those places where they lock people up so that they may go insane really.”

He choked. It was bad enough for a lady to swear, for his wife of all ladies to swear, but there was a sacrilege in her curse upon this home.

This anathema and this bridal rebellion must be kept secret. Walls had ears but no lips to speak. Servants, however, had both long ears and large mouths; and negroes were blabbers.

And so for the sake of quiet, he crushed back his own wrath and his sense of her wickedness, and fell on his knees before her, imploring pardon as an idolater might prostrate himself before a shrine whence he received only divine outrage and injustice. And she was appeased by his surrender! And lifted him up in her arms amorously!

He resented her caresses more than her cruelty, but he preferred them because they were private and murmurous. He had an inherited passion for secrecy.

One day he learned that she had ordered her horse saddled without consulting him, or inviting him to ride with her. He sent the nag back to the stables, and when she came out habited, she was furious.

“You can’t ride alone about these woods,” he said.

“Why not? Who’s to harm me?”

“What if the horse bolted and flung you against a rock, or fell on you or dragged you? Besides, there are many bad characters hereabouts. Only a mile down the road is a family called Lasher.”

“Those poor wretches in that tumbledown hut? Who’s afraid of them?”

“They’re descendants of the Cowboys and Skinners who used to murder and torture people here during the Revolution. We’re in the old Neutral Ground, where those hyenas used to prey on patriots and Tories alike. They burned homes, hung old ministers up by the neck to make them tell where their money was, mistreated women—did everything horrible. Major André was captured by some of them just a few miles from here. Those Lashers are sons of one of the worst of the Skinners, and I wouldn’t trust you among them.”

When she insisted, he said, “You shall not go!”

Three days later he read in his Herald that Mr. Harry Chalender was so far recovered from the cholera that he had gone to recuperate at his farm near the village of Sing Sing, not far from the country seat of Mr. Irving, the well-known writer.

Sing Sing was only a few miles away. RoBards handed the paper to his wife, with an accusing finger pointing to the notice. She met his eye with a bland gaze, and said:

“I knew it. That is where I wanted to ride. But you wouldn’t let me.”

“Why didn’t you ask me to go along with you?”

“You don’t like Harry.”

This logic dazed him.

“Because I don’t like him, you are to visit him secretly?”

“But his mother and sisters are there, Mist’ RoBards! Am I to forsake my every friend?”

“Friend!” he groaned.

And that made her laugh. She flung her arms about him and said:

“The only time you’re funny is when you’re mad, Mist’ RoBards. I love you jealous.”

A few weeks later when he and Patty came back from a tour of their fields with the farmer, they saw a cariole (a “carry-all,” as she called it) hitched to the post in front of the gate. On the porch they found Chalender, pale, lean, weak, but still smiling.

The cry that escaped Patty’s lips was so poignant with welcome that RoBards’ heart went rocking in his breast.

If Chalender had been in his usual health, RoBards might have killed him. It was, oddly, wickeder to kill an ill man than a well one.

He wanted to challenge the fellow to a duel, but dueling was against the laws of the nation, and latterly against the more powerful laws of fashion. Besides, what excuse could he give for a challenge?

And the scandal of it! The newspapers were diabolically scandalous nowadays; foreign travelers said they had never imagined anything so outrageous as the American newspapers.

When RoBards saw Patty drop down in front of Chalender and hold his hand, he had an impulse to shoot the dog dead. But he could not stain Tuliptree Farm with blood.

While he waited for the stableman to take the horses, he could see that Chalender’s manner with Patty was intimate, emotional, intense. He was probably bewailing his loss of her. RoBards felt that the innocent old house was depraved by such insolence, but in order to deny his wife the luxury of another festival of his jealousy, when he came up on the porch he greeted Chalender as cordially as he could, and complimented him on his appearance—which was altogether too hale to please RoBards.

Harry Chalender usually suited his talk to his company, and the gallant became at once the man of affairs.

“That’s the Bronx down there, isn’t it, Dave? We ought to have it in New York now. It would put an end to this cholera. That’s one reason why I’m up here in this solitude. New York is dying of thirst; we’ve got to have water; we’ve put it off too long. But nobody can decide what to do. The conservative crowd says the well water that was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us. But our fathers died in great agony, and we’re doing the same. The New York water is good enough for cholera and yellow fever. It’s a fine thing, too, for Greenwich Village, and other far-off points that the whole town runs away to every few summers. But New York has got to get good water and plenty of it—or move out of New York.

“Funny, isn’t it, how people hate to be saved? I was reading that when Pontius Pilate brought water into Jerusalem, the Jews rose in a mob and demanded somebody’s life—as they did on a certain other famous occasion. And no doubt it will be devilish hard—pardon me, Patty!—to persuade the New York mob to take water—and pay for it.

“You could divide the town into two parties, the Drys and the Wets. And we Wets are at war among ourselves. One party wants to get a supply from the Passaic River; some favor our Croton; some lean toward your Bronx.”

RoBards answered with dubious irony:

“I’d thank them to lean the other way. If New York lays hands on our classic stream, I’ll rise in a mob myself.”

Chalender offered an argument he probably supposed to be irresistible:

“You could sell out your holdings at a vast profit, and get very rich without a stroke of work. I’m casting about for a few quiet investments. If I only knew which way the cat would jump, I could do very handsomely by myself.”

RoBards answered coldly:

“Different people have different standards of honesty.”

Patty gasped at the directness of this stab, but Chalender laughed:

“And some people call that honesty which is really only an indifference to opportunity. Most of these starving farmers up here would shout with joy if I offered them twenty-five dollars an acre. If I sold it later for a hundred, they would howl that I had cheated them. But think how much more gracefully I should spend it.”

RoBards nodded. “As for grace, you could have no rivals.”

Chalender did not wince; he did not even shrug. He went on:

“But the thing will have to be decided by an election.”

“You can always buy votes. One of the inalienable rights of our citizens is the right to sell their birthrights.”

“Yes, but it takes such a pile of money to buy enough birthrights. Nobody can vote without owning real estate, and property gives people expensive notions. That’s why I am in favor of universal suffrage. I should be willing even to give the ladies the vote—or anything else the darlings desire.”

RoBards was hot enough to sneer:

“In a ladies’ election you would bribe them all with a smile.”

“Thanks!” said Chalender, destroying the insult by accepting it as a compliment. “But let me have a look at your Bronx, won’t you? As an engineer it fascinates me. It is the real reason for my visit to-day.”

This thin duplicity made even Patty blush. RoBards bowed:

“Our sacred Bandusian font is always open for inspection, but it’s really not for sale.”

“Not even to save New York from depopulation?”

“That would be a questionable service to the world,” RoBards grumbled. “The town is overgrown already past the island’s power to support. Two hundred thousand is more than enough. Let the people get out of the pest-hole into the country and till the farms.”

“You are merciless to us poor cits. No, my dear RoBards, what New York wants she will take. She is the city of destiny. Some day the whole island will be one swarm up to the Harlem, and it will have a gigantic thirst. Doesn’t the Bible say something about the blessedness of him who gives a cup of water to the least of these? Think what blessings will fall on the head of him who brings gallons of water to every man Jack in the greatest of American cities! Quench New York’s thirst and you will check the plagues and the fevers that hold her back from supremacy.”

“Her supremacy will do the world no good. It will only make her a little more vicious; give crime and every evil a more comfortable home.”

“Is there no wickedness up here in Arcadia?”

“None compared to the foulness of the Five Points.”

“Isn’t that because there is almost nobody up here to be wicked—or to be wicked with?”

“Whatever the reason, we are not complaining of the dearth.”

“That’s fine! It’s a delight to find somebody content with something. But show me your Bronx, and I may do you a service. You won’t object if I find fault with the stream, because then I shall have ammunition to fight with against your real enemies, who want to dam the brook at Williams’s Bridge and pipe it into town. You and I should be the best of friends; for I want the people to look to the Croton for their help. It will enable New York to wash its face oftener, and drink something soberer than brandy. And it will enrich me through the sale of the miserable lands that have grown nothing for me but taxes and mortgage interest.”

But RoBards was not content, and he was a whit churlish as he led Chalender along the high ridges, and let him remark the silver highway the river laid among the winding hills of Northcastle, down into the balsam-snowed levels of the White Plains.

Little as RoBards approved his tenacious guest, he approved himself less. He felt a fool for letting Chalender pink him so with his clumsy sarcasms, but he could not find wit for retort or take refuge in a lofty tolerance.

He suffered a boorish confusion when Chalender said at last, as they returned to the house and the cocktails that Patty had waiting for them on the porch:

“I agree with you, David. The Bronx is not our river. I can honestly oppose its choice. But it’s a pretty country you have here. I love the sea and the Sound and the big Hudson, but there is a peculiar grace about these inland hills of Westchester. I shall hope to see much of them in the coming years.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I shall bid for a contract to build a section of the Croton waterway. That may mean that I shall spend several years in your neighborhood. My office will be the heights along the Hudson. That is only a few miles away and a pleasant gallop. You won’t mind if I drop in upon you now and then when I am lonely?”

Though Chalender ignored Patty’s existence in making this plea, RoBards felt that it was meant for her. But what could he say except a stupidly formal:

“It will be an honor to receive one of the captains of so great an enterprise.”

“Thanks! And I can count upon always finding you here?”

Now RoBards amazed himself when he answered:

“I fear not. We came up only to escape the cholera. When that is over, we shall return to New York. I have my law practice to remember.”

He could feel, like hot irons in his cheek, the sharp eyes of Patty. He knew what she was thinking. He had said that he wanted to dwell here forever. And now he was pretending that he was only a brief visitor.

Instead of gasping with the shock of her husband’s perversion, she snickered a little. It was as if he heard a sleighbell tinkle in the distance. But someone else was in that sleigh with his sweetheart.

He could not understand Patty. He seemed to please her most by his most unworthy actions. He wondered if she had scented the jealousy that had prompted his words, and had taken it once more as an unwitting tribute to her.

He thought he detected a triumphant smile on Chalender’s face, and he longed to erase it with the flat of his hand. Instead, he found himself standing up to bow in answer to Chalender’s bow, like a jointed zany.

The inscrutable Patty, when Chalender had driven out of sight of the little lace handkerchief she waved at him, turned to her husband with sudden anger in her face. He braced himself for a rebuke, but again she confused him by saying:

“The impudence of Harry Chalender! Daring to crowd in on our honeymoon! It was splendid how you made him understand that we RoBardses don’t welcome him here.”

“Did I? Don’t we?” stammered RoBards, so pitifully rejoiced to find her loyal to him and to their sacred union that he gathered her in his arms, and almost sobbed, “Oh, my dear! my sweet! my darling!”

Though she was as soft and flexile as a shaft of weeping willow, somehow she was like a stout spar upholding him in the deep waters of fear, and he felt most ludicrously happy when she talked nursery talk to him and cooed:

“Poor, little David baby wants its Patty to love it, doesn’t it?”

He could not answer in her language, but he felt a divinity in it, and was miserably drenched in ecstasy. And she had used his first name!

CHAPTER IV

By and by the summer sifted from the trees and ebbed from the sky. The honeymoon passed like a summer, in days and nights of hot beauty, in thunder-salvos of battle, in passions of impatient rain.

For a while the autumn was a greater splendor, a transit from a green earth starred with countless blossoms of scarlet, purple, azure, to a vast realm of gold—red gold, yellow gold, green gold, but always and everywhere gold. All Westchester was a treasure-temple of glory. Then the grandeur dulled, the gold was gilt, was only patches of gilt, was russet, was shoddy. The trees were bare. Sharp outlines of unsuspected landscape came forth like hags whose robes have dropped from their gaunt bones. The wind grew despondent. Savor went with color; hope was memory; warmth, chill.

Something mournful in the air reminded RoBards of a poem that Mr. Bryant, the editor of the Post, had written a few years before:

“The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year,

Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere;

Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;