Within these walls

He called that tulip tree “the bouquet of God,” because it was more like a Titan’s handful of flowers than a tree.

Yet it stood a hundred and fifty feet high, and the stem of it was so large that a man and a girl together could just touch hands about its bole by stretching their arms to full length in a double embrace, and leaning their cheeks against its bark, deep-fluted as a Corinthian column.

This afternoon it meant a torch of welcome on the peak of the last hill; and it was stirred into yellow flame by the breeze that stroked its multitudinous blossoms.

Beneath it, the house looked small, cuddling in the shadow, its roof all pied yellow and green with the fallen saffron petals of the orange-stained tulip cups, with the stripped sheaths of leaf and flower, and the broad, blunt, glossy leaves, and the pistils and stamens shredded and powdery.

To David RoBards the house was home, and never so much home as now that he fled to it with his bride from New York, and from the cholera that had begun another of its grisly pilgrimages about the world. Leaving its religious home in India and traversing Asia and Europe, it had finally stridden overseas to Canada; drifted across the lakes to the new village of Chicago, and descended the Mississippi to devastate New Orleans. In the meanwhile it had crept down the Hudson to where New York’s two hundred thousand souls waited helpless and shuddering.

Invisible devils of pestilence were darting everywhere now, wringing the vitals of the city to an agony, and flinging rich and poor to the cobblestones in such foul and twisted anguishes that the scavengers recoiled, and the nearest of kin or of love shrank away with gorges rising and bowels melting, not with pity, but with fear. In Bellevue Hospital the dead lay on the floor so thickly strewn that the overworked physicians could hardly move about among them. And the nurses detailed from the prison took to drink and fought across the beds of the dying or slept off their liquor on a mattress of corpses.

New York was the prey of confusion. It was the prey of panic. The people were a-shiver like the leaves of the poplars that lined Broadway. The great street was paved all the way now to the farmsteads out at Twenty-third Street. The shops crowding in from Pearl Street had begun to pursue the homes.

Broadway was ceasing to be a lane of homes. But the cholera was faster and fiercer than commerce. It had turned Broadway into a channel of escape. It was all fugitive with citizens fleeing from this new Pompeii whose fires were from within, whose lava seethed in the loins of its people. Half the people—a hundred thousand fled.

The swine that had kept the roadway clean were frightened into the byways by the frightened men and women. The cattle droves that had gone lowing along Broadway in hundreds were thrust aside by the human herds; and their dusty wardens cursed the plague.

The street was full of funerals, lone paupers in carts, merchants with retinues of mourners on foot, moving slowly up to the burial ground for plague victims in Washington Square. Only men, of course, went to the funerals, but women joined the flight. The quick crowded the dead into the flushed gutters, and the hackney coaches, the heavy busses, the light wagons from Ford, the four-horse stages, the Tilburys, chairs, gigs, and phaetons were hurried north in a jumble of wagons and drays filled with baggage and household effects, as well as wives and children.

The city was moving once more out to Chelsea and other rural retreats. A hotel of pine boards had been run up in a Greenwich wheatfield in two days, and it held already five hundred exiles. But Greenwich was not far enough for RoBards and his precious bride. She had been too hardly won to be lightly risked.

He had bought the two bays and the Godwin carriage for the escape, and when he checked his horses under the tree before her home in Park Place, she was waiting on the step.

He had sent ahead his man, Cuff, and her woman, Teen—both of them manumitted only five years before by the New York emancipation law of 1827, both still and forever slaves at heart. They were to prepare his house in the country for the honeymoon. It was up in Westchester, beyond White Plains, near Robbin’s Mills. The stage could have carried the bride and groom, but it was booked for days ahead.

So now he helped her in and bestowed her packages. For all his fear, it was wonderful to feel the exquisite elbow of pretty Patty Jessamine in his palm, and to know that henceforth she was Mistress David RoBards.

He wished that the crowd of young and old bucks who had besought her in marriage since she was fifteen, might have been drawn up in review along Broadway to see him carry her off. Most of all he wished that Harry Chalender might have witnessed his triumph, for he had dreaded Chalender so much among his rivals that he was still surprised at his success. He wondered a little that Chalender had made no resistance to his conquest.

He whirled the steeds, and turning his back on the Columbia College Building looming through the grove behind him, sent them galloping towards City Hall placid in its marble serenity just ahead, its flower beds and grasses protected from cattle and pigs by a new picket fence.

Patty squealed and clutched RoBards’ arm, as a decently cowardly young lady ought, when the carriage spun to the left, and RoBards snapped his whip to warn away a foolish girl who swept the crossing, and one of the pestiferous boys who thrust loco-foco matches under every nose.

He almost overran the pretty girl who sold hot corn, and a shriek ended her sweet sing-song, “Lily white corn! Buy my lily white corn!”

Progress was slow among the lumbering busses and stages. Besides, the horses must be dealt with sparingly. They had twenty-seven miles ahead of them before they should reach White Plains, and five or more beyond that. And the paved streets would end at the newly opened Madison Square.

There was much to terrify the eyes in their progress. Dear friends were seen among the funeral followers, and among the fugitives many who had mocked at the prophets of the plague. But Harry Chalender was not to be seen, though RoBards did not mention him, of course. The foreign critics were ridiculing the Yankee passion for questions, but even here bridegrooms did not ask their brides about their bitterest rivals.

The thin and wretched poplar trees along Broadway were drooping under the hot midsummer sun, and the grass was yellow in the yards; for water, the greatest need of New York, was more than usually sparse. It was so expensive that sailing vessels from Europe brought with them casks enough to take them back again.

The pumps at the corners were crowded with negroes and paupers carrying pails, and with gentlemen pausing to drink or to splash their hot faces. The cisterns were dry in the backyards, for no rain had blessed the roofs.

The bride smiled wanly at her husband as they passed Contoit’s Garden, for they had often gone together into its cool shadows. It was as near as they could come to a Watteau idyl in the circumspection of Manhattan proprieties, and he had leant upon the bare board and dabbed at a lemon ice (slyly drenched with surreptitious cognac by the negro waiter) while she dipped the famous Contoit ice cream from an earthenware dish with a black pewter spoon, and crumbled the poundcake with fingers that seemed too delicate for any more difficult office. In his infatuated gaze she wore the grace of Versailles as she carried her spoon curvily to lips like curled rose-petals under the multiple shade of a black scuttle hat adrip with veils and studded with a huge peony that brushed the low branches of the living ceiling. But that was for memory to cherish in a bright niche on the black wall of New York’s fate.

Even when they reached Niblo’s Gardens out at the edge of civilization, in the suburbs about Houston Street, the trees that hung their branches across the high board fence held out no promise of comfort within. The dust that Billy Niblo had come so far to escape was whipped into clouds by innumerable hooves, and fell back in the listless air to stifle the lungs and sting the eyes. Few couples ventured into the bowers where Mrs. Niblo purveyed ice cream to ladies, and port negus to their beaux.

On these woeful nights, in the flower-scented, flower-lanterned gardens, the gleaming lanterns of multi-colored glass flattered not many cheeks, brightened not many eyes. Even the Ravels, who were later to play here for three hundred nights, had just met with disaster; for though they ravished New York with the grace of their acrobatics, their writhing contortions, their dancing, and most of all by their amazing antics upon the new and bewildering invention of roller skates—even they could not bring the morose populace to the Park Theatre, and the cholera closed them out after two weeks of vain battle with the general despair.

There were sad memories for the RoBards twain on every hand. Herealong they had walked and wooed; at this house or that they had met for dinner or dance, and now the homes where carriages had been packed for balls, were hushed with dread, or shaken with the outcries of woe.

It seemed good to turn away from Broadway at Madison Square, and join the dust-misted Post Road, with its huge stages lurching perilously, and racking the bones of the tossed passengers bound for Harlem, New Rochelle, Rye, and all the towns beyond to Boston.

From here on, the highway ran through farmland, broken now and then by dwellings, or by warder trees that sheltered mansions in the garden deeps; but the heat was ruthless and beat with oven-glow upon grain and grass praying in vain for relief.

Past the cattle marts of Bull’s Head Village, on up Murray’s Hill, and down through the village of Odellville, their horses trotted doggedly, threaded McGowan’s Pass, and climbed Breakneck Hill, the scene of so many fatal mishaps that Patty was in a panic. She clung to her husband’s arm with such anxiety that he could hardly manage his team. But to their surprise they got down alive into the plains of Harlem.

RoBards had counted on resting his bride and his horses at Harlem Village while they took dinner there at three. But Harlem was in even direr estate than New York, and a pallid negro, who brought water to the horses, stammered a warning against the accursed spot. Families had been annihilated by the cholera in a night. Under the big willow by the church a corpse had been found, and of the coroner’s jury of twelve, all were dead in a week save one. The firehouse at Harlem was a fearsome place, as RoBards could see; for it was a morgue where two overworked black men nailed together pine boxes, and nailed the dead into them in dozens. The rumor had spread that in their haste they were burying some of the villagers alive in the churchyard.

Patty implored her husband to drive on, and he lashed the horses to a run to outrace her fears. He would not have hurt animal or man, except for her; but for her he was strangely capable of anything, cruel or sublime.