Before many days Immy was busier than in town. Young men and girls made the quiet yard resound with laughter. The tulip trees learned to welcome and to shelter sentimental couples. Their great branches accepted rope swings, and petticoats went foaming toward the clouds while their wearers shrieked and fell back into the arms of pushing young men.
Picnics filled the groves with mirth, dances called gay cliques to lamplit parlors and to moonlit porches. Tuliptree Farm began to resemble some much frequented roadside tavern. It was as gay as Cato’s once had been outside New York.
Immy seemed to gather lovers as a bright candle summons foolish moths. Patty and her husband were swiftly pushed back upon a shelf of old age whence they watched, incredulous, and unremembering, the very same activities with which they had amazed their own parents.
Two lovers gradually crowded the rest aside. The more attractive to Immy’s parents was a big brave youth named Halleck. He had joined the old Twenty-seventh Regiment, recently reorganized as the Seventh, just in time to be called out in the Astor Place riots.
The citizens had lain fairly quiet for a long while and had not attacked a church or a minister or a theatre for nearly fifteen years. But the arrival of the English actor Macready incensed the idolators of Edwin Forrest and developed a civil war.
Young Halleck was with the Seventh when it marched down to check the vast mob that overwhelmed the police, and drove back a troop of cavalry whose horses were maddened by the cries and the confinement. The populace roared down upon the old Seventh and received three volleys before it returned to civil life.
This exploit in dramatic criticism cost the public thirty-four deaths and an unknown number of wounds. The Seventh had a hundred and forty-one casualties. Halleck had been shot with a pistol and battered with paving stones. To RoBards the lawyer he was a civic hero of the finest sort. The only thing Immy had against him was that her parents recommended him so highly.
Love that will not be coerced turned in protest toward the youth whom her parents most cordially detested, Dr. Chirnside’s son, Ernest, a pallid young bigot, more pious than his father, and as cruel as Cotton Mather. Patty wondered how any daughter of hers could endure the milk-sop. But Immy cultivated him because of his very contrast with her own hilarity.
His young pedantries, his fierce denunciations of the wickedness of his companions, his solemn convictions that man was born lost in Adam’s sin and could only be redeemed from eternal torment by certain dogmas, fascinated Immy, who had overfed on dances and flippancies.
RoBards could not help witnessing from his library window the development of this curious religious romance. Even when he withdrew to his long writing table and made an honest effort to escape the temptation to eavesdropping, he would be pursued by the twangy sententiousness of Ernest and the silvery answers of Immy. There was an old iron settee under his window and a rosebush thereby and the young fanatics would sit there to debate their souls.