“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: