“Papa, I been thinkin’. You know when I was little I was going to be the man who lights the street lamps; an’ ’en I was goin’ to be a night watchman when I got grown up; an’ ’en I was goin’ to be a lawyer like you are, and help you. But now I guess I’ll be a nengineer an’ build waterworks an’ aqueducks an’ things like that—like Uncle Harry did the Croton. And some day they’ll have a percession for me, too. You just wait and see.”
There was no need for restraint of the laughter with which oldsters mock youngsters’ dreams. That fatal reference to Chalender wrung the lips of Patty and her husband with sardonic misery. They had once been innocent, too, and they were still innocent in ambition. It was life that made fun of them. What sport would it make of their children?
CHAPTER XXV
The next morning RoBards was awake very betimes, driven from needed sleep by an onslaught of terrors. A thousand little fiends assailed him and bound him like Gulliver held fast with threads. RoBards would never take anxiety lying down, but rose and fought it. So now he broke the withes of remorse and prophetic frenzy and met the future with defiance.
He took up the morning paper to make sure that yesterday’s pageant had actually occurred. He glanced hastily through the pages first to see if his own history had transpired. He half expected to read some clamorous announcement of a mysterious body found in an old house in Westchester near Robbin’s Mills.
There was no mention of such a discovery, and he read of the immortal yesterday, “the most numerous and imposing procession ever seen in any American city.”
The town had apparently solved its chief problem. His own had just been posed. How long could he hope to escape discovery? Perhaps the news was already out. Perhaps the jaded revelers returning to Westchester had been met by Mrs. Lasher screaming like a fury. Perhaps the house had caught fire and the cellar walls had broken open with the heat and the collapse of the timbers, as he had seen big warehouses during the Great Fire broken open like crushed hickory nuts.
An unendurable need to make sure with his own eyes of the state of affairs goaded him to action. He ran upstairs to tell Patty some lie about the necessity for the trip. She was so heavenly asleep that he could not break the spell. The children were asleep, too.
So he told Cuff to tell them that he had been called back to the country.
He had the luck to meet a cab and the driver had a good horse that reached the City Hall Station of the New York and Harlem Railroad just in time to catch a train North.