Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

The old man joined his two little grandchildren in the cluster of young tulip trees, and RoBards later built a fence about the knoll to make it sacred ground.

The New York papers published encomiums upon Mr. Jessamine and called him one of the merchant princes who had made New York the metropolis of the New World. A stranger reading them would have imagined him a giant striding through a great long day to a rich sunset.

But RoBards remembered him as one whose toil had been rewarded with unmerited burlesque. And for nights and nights afterward he was wakened by Patty strangling with sobs:

“Poor papa! I was so mean to him. The last word he had from me was a scolding. He was afraid of life like a baby in the dark. Poor little papa! I was so mean to you! and you asked me to forgive you!”

Then RoBards would gather her to his breast and his heart would swell with pain till it seemed ready to burst. He would clench Patty to him as if by that constriction their two hearts might become one. And he would stare up at the invisible ceiling, as Dives looked up from hell for a touch of some cool finger on his forehead. After a while the mercy would be granted; he would know by the soft slow rhythm of Patty’s bosom that she was asleep; and thanking God for that peace, beatitude of all beatitudes, he would draw his eyelids down over his eyes to shut out the black. His own breath would take up the cadence of the tulip boughs lulled by the soft wind that fanned the window and fingered the curtains drowsily.

And the walls of that tormented home would be filled with the stately calm of the grave, until the resurrection of the next day’s sun.

The question of returning at once to town was answered by Mrs. Jessamine’s inability to rise from her bed after the funeral of her husband. She had had the harder life of the two.

She had been that woman so much praised, who effaced herself, spoke with a low voice, went often to church, and often to childbed, who brought up her children in the fear of God, nursed them, mended their clothes and their manners, and saw them go forth to their various miseries, to death, to marriage, to maternity. She had been a good wife for a good long life and had taken passively what God or her husband or her children brought home.

And the horror of that estate had been growing upon womankind through the centuries until the greatest revolution the world has ever known began to seethe, and a sex began to demand the burdens of equality instead of the mixture of idolatry and contempt that had been its portion.

Mrs. Jessamine had never joined any of the women’s rights movements; nor had she joined in their denunciation. She had felt that her time was passed for demanding anything. Her children had all grown beyond even the pretense of piety toward her; but her husband had returned to second childishness and renewed her motherhood.