He would seek escape from solitude overlooking the multitude by retreating to the inner court and the fountain flaunting its crystal plumes in the turfed garden. But there was that quadrangle of many-windowed walls about him, and he felt Argus eyes upon him everywhere. Behind every curtain somebody seemed to be watching him. The expense of the luxurious hotel was heavy—a dollar a day it cost him, but he could not face boarding-house inquisitiveness.
In his office he would sit and brood across his pine table with its green baize cover, and stare at the pine boxes that held his books and the files of his cases tied with red tape. He would dip his quill into the inkstand of gray stone and make careless scratches on the paper before him. When he looked at them afterward they made him wonder if he were going mad. These crazy designs would serve as evidence for his commitment to any asylum.
On the margins of his briefs he would wake to find that he had been making crude contours of Patty’s scoop hat, her big eyes, or the nape of her neck. He would blot her out in a fury of rage, and attack his work.
The case of Jessamine vs. the City of New York was still hanging fire. Many of the claims of people who were forced to sell their lands for the aqueduct were still unsettled though their farms were covered with stone and trenched with ditches.
Yet now RoBards felt that the city had its justice. He had fought for the country and the country had betrayed him. Vile wickedness had found shelter and prosperity in the gentlest seclusions.
It was a mockery that he should be the counsel for old Jessamine. What did he owe the dotard except hatred for bringing into the world so pretty a perjurer? The father had made Tuliptree Farm almost untenable by his whimpering stupidity and the daughter had driven him into exile by her ruthless frivolity.
From his law office and his hotel RoBards would flee to a club. He had joined the fashionable Union Club just formed, but the members always asked him about his wife, and he had to speak of her with affection and respect.
The affection was still in his heart, but the respect—he marveled at his ability to adore one whom he despised, to hang his whole life on the broken reed of a little woman’s wavering fancy.
He frequented the theatre but he found discomfort there, since almost all the stories dealt with tragic or comic flirtations. He liked to go to the Bowery Theatre, but it was always burning down. Mary Taylor, “Our Mary” as they called her, puzzled him because she had a reputation for private morality and yet she was a convincing actress of spicy rôles. Patty was not an actress at all—she was positively imbecile in the drawing-room plays she had taken part in; yet her private life proved that her home was but a stage to her. Behind the private life of people there was so often another private life. And he had never been admitted until now to the green room of his own domestic theatre. Patty was a convincing actress of Innocence.
Moods of retaliation were frequent. There were opportunities enough. It amazed him now that he was alone in the city to see how many chances were offered him to make some other husband a fool. Young girls of fifteen or sixteen, who had not yet been married, or were only betrothed, dazed him by the black wisdom in their eyes. They scampered and made pretenses of terror before him like kittens or puppies begging him to pursue them.