Always she vowed that she would have no more children: it hurt too much to see them die. And RoBards, though he longed for a forest of sons about him, felt a justice in her claim that she should have the decision since she carried the burden. But she was so tempting and so temptable that now and again passion blinded them again to peril, and she was trapped anew. Sometimes, in his black agonies of mourning, RoBards believed that these children were snatched from them because they were conceived in tempests of rapture, and not in the mood of prayer and consecration with which the preacher, Dr. Chirnside, declared the parental altar should be approached.
But Patty mocked RoBards’s solemnity when he broached the subject, and giggled at him as she peeked between her fingers and snickered, “Shame on you!” She had two weapons that always put him to utter rout—a naughty smile of pretended shock, and the quivering upper lip and tremulous wet eyelids of being about to cry.
Often when her frivolous hilarities angered him and he made ready to denounce her, the mere tightening of the silken threads of her eyebrows and the puckering of her thimble chin admonished him that a shower of tears was in her sky, and he forbore. He could not endure to give her pain. His whole desire was to make her life one long, long blissfulness.
Yet he seemed disqualified for this. He could rarely achieve entertainment. She did not find the luxury in his society that he found in hers. He had her beauty to bask in and she had only his tiresome earnestness or labored humor. Nowadays when he was kept in the city for a week or two during the sessions of the courts, she would not go to town with him. She pretended that it was the quiet contentment of the farmstead that held her, but he was not convinced.
Patty’s father and mother still lived at Tuliptree Farm, and both were so querulous that Patty could hardly endure them. Yet she would not stay in town.
It was more than a coincidence that Harry Chalender was neighbors with her now. He carried the city with him. He was New York enough for her.
The times being hard and fees hard to collect, RoBards closed up the house in St. John’s Square. He could not rent it, but it was expensive to keep up, and lonely; so he took a room at the gorgeous new Astor House.
Often when he came to the farm from the hot town he would note a strange elusiveness in Patty, the guilt of a mouse caught nibbling a cake. Or, else, she would be a little too glad to see him. The most suspicious trait was her occasional unusual solicitude for him: her anxiety to be sure just when he would return.
Sometimes when he rode into the yard Cuff would say, “You jest missed Mista Chalenda.” He felt that he read a veiled disappointment in the ivory eyeballs as they rolled away from his scrutiny. But how could he ask an ex-slave such questions as rose to his tortured mind? How could he resent a servant’s unspoken criticism, without exposing the whole problem of his wife’s integrity?
He would say to Patty carelessly: