To-day, RoBards longed most for some anæsthesia of the soul, some drug for the spirit, some nepenthe to avert and annul the slow surgery of age that excises the graces and leaves scars everywhere; he yearned for some mystic laughing gas to give Patty to carry her through the news that another woman, a young woman, had wrenched her boy’s heart away from his mother.
Lacking such an ether, he had recourse to a tender deception, and urged that he must be getting back to town; he would shortly be needed in the law courts; he could not face the long evenings alone in New York without his beautiful wife for company. She beamed a little at his good intentions, and rose to be at her packing.
This was better than an onset of grief, but he noted that she did not receive the word of a return to the city with her usual clamor of joy.
It was her appetite that had dulled, and not the feast, for New York offered all its former riches multiplied. Already there were eight hundred thousand people in the welter of the city. It was greater than Rome had ever been. It had passed Berlin, which had lost a hundred thousand in the rebellion of 1848—most of them freedom-loving souls who had come to America. New York was now ahead of Naples, Venice—of many a proud capital. John Pintard’s prophecy made at the beginning of the century still held good: he had predicted that the city would grow at such a rate that by the year 1900 it would have a population of five millions.
He did not foresee the cataclysm that would sharply and suddenly cut its growth down to a third of what it had been. That cataclysm was now silently preparing, like the hushed strain that at its exact moment explodes an earthquake.
CHAPTER XLIV
Though Patty greeted the decision to leave the country dumbly, the boy Junior emitted noise enough for two.
When his father asked him what difference it made to him, he dodged awkwardly, talking of the beauty of the woods, the cider taste and fragrance of the air, the ugliness and noise of the city. He waxed so fervid that his father said:
“You ought to go in for poetry as a business.”
He could hardly accuse his son of hypocrisy, since he himself was conniving in the secret for Patty’s sake.