Yet to print it in a story seemed infamous. And Patty added:
“I found her crying over it! Crying her heart out over that woman and her brat! What can we do to save that child?”
“Ah, what can we do,” RoBards groaned, “to save ourselves?”
There was something in his look that checked Patty’s ire, made her blench, shiver, and walk away. Perhaps she was thinking of—of what RoBards dared not remember.
That night RoBards was wakened from sleep by a bewildering dream of someone sobbing. He woke and heard sobs. They had invaded his slumber and coerced the dream.
He sat up and looked about. Patty undressed and freezing had glanced into the purloined romance; and it had fastened on her. She was weeping over Hester Prynne and her child Pearl, and Dimmesdale, the wretched partner in their expiation.
When RoBards drowsily asked what had made her cry, she sat on the edge of his bed and read to him. Whether it were the contagion of her grief or the skill of the author, he felt himself driven almost to tears. He flung a blanket about Patty’s quivering shoulders and clung to her, wondering at this mystery of the world: that lovers long dead in obscurity, and lovers who had never lived at all, should be made to walk so vividly through the landscapes of imagination that thousands of strangers should weep for them.
Or was it for their woes that one wept? Or for one’s own in the masquerade of other names and scenes?
CHAPTER XXXVI
The tenderest moods of devotion and shared sorrows alternated with wrangles so bitter that murder seemed to hang in the air. Money was the root of most of the quarreling.