Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

But in an incredibly short time the train was running among streets. They were in New York already and the city was decorated “like as if they was a weddin’ in every last house.”

Loops of bunting and marvelous clevernesses of flag arrangement bedecked all the homes, and throngs were hastening south to the heart of the city and the grandest parade of modern times.

One pitiful, forlorn little old woman was seemingly the only human being left behind to guard Westchester County till its populace returned from the excursion to New York City. Westchester had presented the metropolis with one of its rivers, and it went down to make the bestowal formal.

Mrs. Lasher had not the money nor the time for such a journey. Water to her was the odious stuff she lugged from the well to the washtub or the stove. New York meant scarce more to her than Bombay or Hong-Kong. She hardly lifted her eyes from her toil to note who passed her hovel or in which direction. Yet she had watched for RoBards and had run out to taunt him with his cruelty to her.

And now she was multiplied in his eyes into an endless procession of visions more terrible to him than an army with banners, more numerous than the parading hosts that poured along the streets of New York.

While the bands thumped and brayed and the horses’ hoofs crackled on the cobblestones, and the soldiers and firemen and temperance folk strutted, he seemed to see only that little despondent hag wringing her work-tanned fingers over the loss of her good-for-nothing son. She was bitter against RoBards for sending the lout away to be a sailor. What would she have said if she had known—what would she say when she learned as learn she surely must—that RoBards had saved her boy from the perils of the seven seas by immuring him in the foundation walls of his home?

The Russians had been wont to build a living virgin into the walls they wished to sanctify. He had sacrificed a lad and he was doomed to stand guard over the altar. He was as much a prisoner as the dead Jud—chained to a corpse.

It terrified him to think that the half-crazed old mother had the franchise of Tuliptree Farm for this day, since there was never a soul left on the place to prevent her wandering about. What if she chose the opportunity to visit the home where she had never been invited to call? Just to see how her betters lived, she might climb in at a window and wander about the rooms. He saw her in his fancy gasping at the simple things that would be splendor to her pauper’s eye.

What if the blood of her son should cry aloud to her like Abel’s from the ground, and draw her to the cellar? What if she should see through the clumsy disguise of spiderwebs and begin tearing at the foundation stones with those old hen’s-claw fingers of hers?

It was a ridiculous image to be afraid of, but RoBards could not banish it.