Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

This sent a graveyard chill through RoBards’ heart, for it meant that home to her was not in the solitude of his heart, but in the center of the mob.

Home was to her more definitely the house in Park Place, her father’s house to which he must take her till he found another lodging. Her father and mother greeted her as a prodigal and him as a mere body servant—which was what he felt himself to be.

The chief talk was of the cholera and its havoc. Three thousand and five hundred dead made up its toll in the city, but the menace was gone, and those who lived were doubly glad. The crowds in the streets showed no gaps; there were no ruins visible. New houses were going up, narrow streets being widened and the names changed.

It was only when the Sabbath called them to church, or some brilliant performance took them to see Fanny Kemble and her father at the Park Theatre, and they inquired for one friend or another, that they learned dreadfully how many good friends had been hurried feet first to Washington Square, whence they would never return.

Dinners were few, since nearly every family wore mourning for someone; but gradually the gayety returned in full sweep. The dead were forgotten, and the plans for preventing a return of the plague were dismissed as a tiresome matter of old-fashioned unimportance. The pumps and cisterns were no longer blamed for the slaughter of the innocents.

And now Patty must go into eclipse gradually. She grew more and more peevish. When she complained that everybody worth while was moving uptown, RoBards bought a house in St. John’s Park, just south of Canal Street, and only a little distance from the Hudson River. The house was new and modern, with a new cistern in the rear. Only a few steps away was a pump supplied with water from the new city water works in the salubrious region of Thirteenth Street and Broadway. There was a key that admitted the family to the umbrageous park, behind whose high fence there was seclusion.

There was something aristocratic and European, too, about the long iron rail fence that framed the entire square, the same in front of every house, and giving them all a formal uniform, a black court dress.

But even aristocracy palled. Patty found but a brief pleasure in the privilege of walking there at twilight, and she dared not venture out before dusk. It was chill then and she shivered as she sat on a bench and breathed in the gloom that drooped from the naked branches like a shroud. She did not want to be a mother yet, and she faced the ordeal with dread, knowing how many mothers die, how few babies lived, for all the pain of their long preparation.

The winter was cold and she complained of the dark of nights, though her husband multiplied the spermaceti candles and the astral lamps till her room was as dazzling as an altar. He filled the bins in the hall closet with the best Liverpool coal and kept the grates roaring. But she wailed of mornings when he had to break the ice in the water pitcher for her and she huddled all day by the red-hot iron stove. She made her servants keep it charged with blazing wood, until RoBards was sure that the house would be set on fire.

When spring came again and released grass, birds, trees, souls, flowers, the very air from the gyves of winter, she was so much more a prisoner that she herself pleaded to be taken back to Tuliptree Farm. If she could not meet people she did not want to see them pass her windows, or hear them laugh as they went by in shadows of evening time. On the farm she could wander about the yard unterrified and, with increasing heaviness, devote herself to the flowerbeds. She fled at the sight of any passerby and was altogether as hidden and craven as only a properly bred American wife undergoing the shameful glory of motherhood could be.