He whirled the steeds, and turning his back on the Columbia College Building looming through the grove behind him, sent them galloping towards City Hall placid in its marble serenity just ahead, its flower beds and grasses protected from cattle and pigs by a new picket fence.
Patty squealed and clutched RoBards’ arm, as a decently cowardly young lady ought, when the carriage spun to the left, and RoBards snapped his whip to warn away a foolish girl who swept the crossing, and one of the pestiferous boys who thrust loco-foco matches under every nose.
He almost overran the pretty girl who sold hot corn, and a shriek ended her sweet sing-song, “Lily white corn! Buy my lily white corn!”
Progress was slow among the lumbering busses and stages. Besides, the horses must be dealt with sparingly. They had twenty-seven miles ahead of them before they should reach White Plains, and five or more beyond that. And the paved streets would end at the newly opened Madison Square.
There was much to terrify the eyes in their progress. Dear friends were seen among the funeral followers, and among the fugitives many who had mocked at the prophets of the plague. But Harry Chalender was not to be seen, though RoBards did not mention him, of course. The foreign critics were ridiculing the Yankee passion for questions, but even here bridegrooms did not ask their brides about their bitterest rivals.
The thin and wretched poplar trees along Broadway were drooping under the hot midsummer sun, and the grass was yellow in the yards; for water, the greatest need of New York, was more than usually sparse. It was so expensive that sailing vessels from Europe brought with them casks enough to take them back again.
The pumps at the corners were crowded with negroes and paupers carrying pails, and with gentlemen pausing to drink or to splash their hot faces. The cisterns were dry in the backyards, for no rain had blessed the roofs.
The bride smiled wanly at her husband as they passed Contoit’s Garden, for they had often gone together into its cool shadows. It was as near as they could come to a Watteau idyl in the circumspection of Manhattan proprieties, and he had leant upon the bare board and dabbed at a lemon ice (slyly drenched with surreptitious cognac by the negro waiter) while she dipped the famous Contoit ice cream from an earthenware dish with a black pewter spoon, and crumbled the poundcake with fingers that seemed too delicate for any more difficult office. In his infatuated gaze she wore the grace of Versailles as she carried her spoon curvily to lips like curled rose-petals under the multiple shade of a black scuttle hat adrip with veils and studded with a huge peony that brushed the low branches of the living ceiling. But that was for memory to cherish in a bright niche on the black wall of New York’s fate.
Even when they reached Niblo’s Gardens out at the edge of civilization, in the suburbs about Houston Street, the trees that hung their branches across the high board fence held out no promise of comfort within. The dust that Billy Niblo had come so far to escape was whipped into clouds by innumerable hooves, and fell back in the listless air to stifle the lungs and sting the eyes. Few couples ventured into the bowers where Mrs. Niblo purveyed ice cream to ladies, and port negus to their beaux.
On these woeful nights, in the flower-scented, flower-lanterned gardens, the gleaming lanterns of multi-colored glass flattered not many cheeks, brightened not many eyes. Even the Ravels, who were later to play here for three hundred nights, had just met with disaster; for though they ravished New York with the grace of their acrobatics, their writhing contortions, their dancing, and most of all by their amazing antics upon the new and bewildering invention of roller skates—even they could not bring the morose populace to the Park Theatre, and the cholera closed them out after two weeks of vain battle with the general despair.