Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

Others were to be had of a more public character. It was estimated that there were ten thousand downright wicked women in the town. The streets at night were so crowded with them that innocent young girls, poor seamstresses or polite damsels whom some emergency forced to be abroad, were not only ogled and bespoken, but sometimes seized and kissed by the loiterers.

The haunts of evil were well known, some of them foul dens, but others mansions. Yet the very sense that Patty had absolved him of obligation to her; that she herself had severed their contract, annulled the temptation. What excitement could he find it taking sneakingly what nobody could prevent his taking openly?

Besides, as a lawyer he knew that the traps of blackmail lay all about the town—springes to catch woodcocks. The heads of many families were paying perennial taxes on such indiscretions. He knew of one banker who had been mulcted of thirty thousand dollars just because he chanced to be in the house where Helen Jewett was murdered. The trial of the young clerk charged with the crime was enormously exploited by the noisy newspapers.

That clerk was ruined for life, and he might well have wished that he had been employed by Mr. Tappan, the abolitionist silk merchant who compelled each of his clerks to sign a pledge never to visit a theatre or make acquaintance with actor, actress, or other person of evil life, never to be out of his boarding house after ten o’clock at night, never to miss the two prayer meetings a week, or the two Sunday services, or fail to report of a Monday morning the church, the preacher, and the text of the day before.

A final check upon any recklessness in RoBards’ lonely humors was the feeling that if he also sinned he would be robbed of his precious indignation against Patty. He was no prig, no prude. He had lived. But just now the one food of his soul was the sense of being cruelly wronged. It was gall, but it sustained him somehow.

In the eyes of the law a husband’s infidelity was almost negligible, but RoBards felt that if he were to break his vows he would acquit Patty of blame for being false to hers. There were families in town, according to gossip-mongers and the gossip papers, where husband and wife were mutually and commonly disloyal. But he could think of nothing more hideous than such households.

He was Saint Anthony in a lonely cavern, but only one devil tried his soul and that was the bewitching spirit of his pretty wife. Patty drifted through his dreams like a wind-driven moth. She poised and flitted and opened her arms like a moth’s wings. And it seemed impossible that he should long resist her.

One morning he read in the Herald (whose editor Mr. Bennett had recently had a knockdown fight with General Webb of the Courier) a statement that Mr. Henry Chalender had recovered from his wound and was once more active in the completion of his section of the aqueduct. The Herald added that this news would give relief and pleasure to the numberless admirers of the popular idol.

This paragraph filled RoBards with mixed emotions. During his long indecision, his Hamlet-like soliloquies and postponements, nature had healed the wound in Chalender’s flesh, and, though he would not admit it, had nearly healed the wound in RoBards’ soul.

There was a relief of tension at least. The world was going on. Chalender was well and busy—perhaps he was renewing his amour with Patty. Perhaps, deserted and lonely, she would yield again. That would be a double damnation. Anyone might sin and recover, but to slip back again was to be lost forever.