When Patty made her entrance, swimming in like a mermaid waist-deep in a peach-blossom billow, all the babble stopped. All the eyes rolled her way. Her husband following her, slim, black, and solemn, felt a mere lackey, and yet was proud to lag at heel of such a vision.
His pride sickened and his heart lurched when he saw Harry Chalender push forward and lift her hand to his lips. 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. 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. She bowed so low that she almost sat on the floor. And Webster, looking down on her, bent till his vast skull was almost on a level with Patty’s little china-doll head.
Her humility was such a pretty tribute to his genius that his confusion was perfect. His mastiff jaws wagged with the shock of her grace. His huge eyes saddened in a distress of homage. For once he could find no words. There was only a groan of contentment in that columnar throat, equally famous for its thirst and for the eloquence of the angelic voice that stormed the senate chamber and shook the judicial benches, yet purled like a brook at a female ear.
Patty almost swooned when she learned that she was to go out on Webster’s arm.
When the black servants folded back the doors, a table like a lake of mahogany waited them, gleaming with a flotilla of heavily laden silver, platters, tureens, baskets, and bowls in a triple line.
Patty and the leonine Daniel followed the lady of the mansion, and when she was formally handed to her throne, the clatter began. The servants fairly rained food upon the guests, soup and fish and ham and turkey, venison and mutton, corn and all the vegetables available, sweets of every savor, cheeses and fruits, claret and champagne and a dulcet Madeira brought down from the attic where it had spent its years swinging from the heat of the sun-baked roof to the chill of the long winters.