Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

The first slab of marble that Chalender cut served him as a pretext for a visit to Tuliptree Farm. He brought it across country in a wagon and laid it down at Patty’s feet. He said he had been writing a poem all the way over, but the jolting of the wagon had knocked the meter askew, and the sight of RoBards had knocked the whole thing out of his sconce.

That was his way. He had hoped not to find RoBards at home. Finding him there, he was impudent enough to conceal his dismay in its own exaggeration. He pretended to be caught in a rendezvous and played the scene with an imitation of the bombast of the popular young actor, Edwin Forrest.

Patty laughed equally at Chalender’s burlesque of guilt and at her husband’s efforts to pretend amusement. Then she insisted that the slab be set down before the fireplace as a hearthstone, to replace the old block of slate that had been quietly cracking and chipping for years.

This whim of hers offended her husband exquisitely, but she thwarted him by a show of hysterics, and he dared not protest; for she was once more in one of those states of mind and body where she must not be crossed. She was like a rose-tree budding every year with a new flower. Her third baby had died in the spring following the great fire. Still Nature would not relent, and another was already aglow within her protesting flesh. And in the fall of 1837, that baby followed its brother to the grave. But that was to be expected.

Nobody counted on raising more than half the children the Lord allotted. It was a woman’s duty to bear enough to have a few left to mature. Since nobody had discovered a preventive of disease, it was evidently Heaven’s pleasure to take back its loaned infants after running them through a brief hell of whooping cough, chicken pox, measles, fits, red gum, and scarlatina.

Patty was an unheroic mother. She fought the doctor’s and the nurse’s orders to keep the babies bandaged tightly, and she was impatient with the theory that it was a good thing for a baby to cry all the time, and that it was well to have all the diseases and get them over with—or go under with them.

Heaven was pleased that a wife should multiply her kind. What else was she for? If Heaven subtracted, that was the pleasure of Heaven. The orders were to bear much fruit. Families of sixteen or more children were not unusual, and a dozen was hardly more than normal. Most of the family would soon be found in the graveyard, but that had always been so. The death rate among mothers was horrible, too; but they died in the line of duty and their husbands remembered them tenderly—unless their successors were over-jealous. And it was a man’s duty to keep on taking wives so that the race should not perish—as it was a soldier’s duty, as soon as one charger died under him, to capture another.

Patty grew almost blasphemous over the curse upon her sex. She resented her seizure by one of the wandering souls, and the long exile it meant from “the pursuit of happiness.” She called it “unconstitutional!” When the day of travail came she screamed like a tormented child, and when her hard-won puppet was taken from her she wept like a little girl whose toy is wrested away.

Those weird deaths of souls hardly yet born were devastating to RoBards. He frightened Patty so by the first hideous sob she heard from him that he concealed his grief from her and sought only to console her as if he had lost nothing. It cost him heavily to deny himself the relief of outcry.

On one subject at least he and Patty did not disagree. She would not have her lost babies taken to either of the graveyards at White Plains and Armonk. She asked to have their hardly tenanted bodies kept on the farm, and chose for them a nook where a covey of young tulip trees had gathered like a little outpost of sentinels.