In the fields about the tavern hundreds of horned pedestrians were content to graze at ease, while the cholera made New York a human slaughter-house. They had walked a long way to die, and they were in no haste.
The inn’s good host, Colonel Varian, veteran of the War of 1812, gave the city travelers a welcome all the heartier for the contrast between Patty Jessamine and the disgusted and disgusting drovers, who bellowed their orders for his ale as if they had caught their voices, as well as their fragrance, from their cattle.
In a secluded nook Patty forgot to be exquisite, and ate with the sincerity of hunger, and made fatigue an excuse for sipping a noggin from the brandy bottle that was a necessary part of all tableware. Then she prinked a little, and left at Varian’s what dust she had absorbed on the road hitherto. And so they drove on.
The pad-pad of the horses’ feet, the hot air, the winding miles of uphill and down, brought her great eyelids over the dear eyes wearied with terror, and she slept at last against her husband’s shoulder. He had wanted to discourse to her of the historic places they passed; for this ground was classic with Washington’s retreats to victory; these fields and creeks had been clotted with the blood of patriots. But history had never interested her, though it was RoBards’ passion—next to her.
He felt strangely like a father carrying a daughter home from school, though he was not more than eight years her senior. But she was such a child! though already entering seventeen. He gazed down at her admiringly, and her head had fallen back until she seemed to gaze up at him, though her eyes were closed and he knew she slept.
In her poke bonnet her face was like a fragment of bisque at the bottom of a basket. The brows and the arched eyelids, the tiny path along the bridge of her nose, the curled nostrils, the incredible grace and petulant pathos of her lips, severed a little as she panted, and the whorl of her chin, were of too studied a perfection, he thought, to have grown merely by any congress of blood and flesh.
He could hardly endure not to bend and kiss her, but that would have brought her eyes open and he could not study her as now, when she lay before him like some rare object of vertu, some priceless thing in tinted Carrara that he had bought overseas and was hurrying to his private gallery, its one gem, and never to be shared with the public gaze.
It seemed that only now he had a first moment of leisure to review the surprise of her capture. She was his wife almost before he dreamed that he had any hope of winning her at all. It would have been ungallant but quaintly truthful to say that she had carried him off on this odd elopement, in which the fleeing couple were man and wife, whom no one pursued.
CHAPTER II
This was no such runaway match as that famous affair of a cousin of hers, who had stolen from a masked ball with a forbidden suitor, had crossed the Hudson, and ridden forty miles on horseback in the night to find a parson to marry them.