But the big tree at the window would try to quiet him like an old nurse; it would go “Hush, hush!” The house would seem to sigh, to creak as if its bones complained. And it, too, would counsel him, “No! no!”
The ferocity of such debates would wear him out more than a prolonged contest in court, and he would sink back and draw sleep over him as a black blanket of respite from thought.
At other times when Patty was gracious and full of laughter, when she was in a mood to be a child with her children and play with them, there would be a heavenliness in life that made RoBards cry aloud within himself, “Thank God I kept the secret.”
By and by there was a child again at Patty’s little breast—the fifth in number, the third alive. She had resigned herself to motherhood now. She nursed the babe and took all the care of it without complaint. She met RoBards at night when he came up from town, with stories of the wonderful things the new son had achieved or the older babes had said.
It pleased him quaintly to find his wild, restless Patty becoming a subdued and comfortable matron, telling unimportant anecdotes importantly. She kept her grace and her beauty and she could never grow slattern; but she was maternal now to her marrow.
Regarding the deep peace of his country family, RoBards was profoundly glad that he had forgone the swift passionate delights of revenge. If he had slain Chalender or published the scandal in the courts, Patty would not have been his now. That child whom she had named after himself, David Junior, would have been doomed to an unhonored name. This house would have been pointed to as a monument of scandal. It would be neglected, empty, haunted.
The neighbors never dreamed of the hidden shame. They said: “Nothin’ ever happens up your way. You’re one lucky man.”
Nearly every other dwelling had some scandal hung upon it like a signboard from a tavern. Not many miles up the road was a house of a strange memory. A widow lived there—she called herself a widow, but the neighbors called her “a queer un.” They told how a negro preacher freed by his master had settled up in New Hampshire fifty years before and been so much respected that he had married a white woman and had many children; and these children had had children. And one of them had married this woman when she was young and high-stepping. The first she knew of her husband’s grand-parentage was when a gossip twitted her with it. She said nothing, but made an excuse for a trip to the Bermudas with her husband. As soon as she got him there, she sold him at a good price into slavery, and came home calling herself a widow.
For that matter, one of the presidents of the United States had been sued in the open courts by a negress for the support of their child; it was said that he sold many of his mulatto children, and that his only indulgence was that when any of his own escaped he would not hunt them with hounds, but laughed and let the rascals escape if they could.
The present president of the United States had been in the divorce court and had turned Washington inside out with domestic bickerings.