That bold foray against the respectabilities had revealed how easy it was for forbidden young Romeos to creep into the parlors of the city Capulets and steal thence their Juliets.
But that elopement had the excuse of thwarting parental tyranny. This was a flight from Sodom condemned.
When RoBards first pleaded with Patty to marry him and be gone from the accursed town, she had smiled drearily.
“You don’t want me to run away like Lot’s wife?”
“Yes! yes!”
“But she died looking back, and I’m afraid I’d meet her fate. I’d cry myself into another pillar of salt, and become only another milestone on the Post Road. Would you like me like that, Mister RoBards?”
She had somehow never learned to call him by his first name, before they were married. And by some stranger mystery of shyness, after they were married, she dared the “David” only on occasions of peculiar emotion. Even after she bore him children, she called him “Mister RoBards.”
She had laughed away his alarm, though her merriment was sickly. And then her uncle had gone with the other members of the Board of Health to inspect the quarantine station established at Staten Island against the infected foreigners, swarming overseas in sailing vessels like vast unclean buzzards; and in two weeks every member of that board was dead save one; and he was not her uncle.
This had ended her laughter in terror. She had denounced the authorities for the ignominy of her uncle’s fate. Wealthy as he had been, his body was carried out to the old Potter’s Field in Washington Square, and buried in that notorious spot hitherto devoted to the paupers, the criminals, and the overripe fruit of the gallows tree.
Then one day a nameless corpse was found in Park Place, before her very door; a cousin of hers that she loved was called to the inquest; and nine of the twenty on the coroner’s board were dead in a few days, and her cousin was one of them.