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Title: The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck
       A Comedy of Limitations

Author: James Branch Cabell

Release Date: November 11, 2003 [EBook #10041]

Language: English

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THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER'S NECK


A Comedy of Limitations

BY

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

"_To this new South, who values her high past in chief, as fit
foundation of that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with
augmenting strokes_."

1915




TO

PRISCILLA BRADLEY CABELL

  "Nightly I mark and praise, or great or small,
  Such stars as proudly struggle one by one
  To heaven's highest place, as Procyon,
  Antarês, Naös, Tejat and Nibal
  Attain supremacy, and proudly fall,
  Still glorious, and glitter, and are gone
  So very soon;--whilst steadfast and alone
  Polaris gleams, and is not changed at all.

  "Daily I find some gallant dream that ranges
  The heights of heaven; and as others do,
  I serve my dream until my dream estranges
  Its errant bondage, and I note anew
  That nothing dims, nor shakes, nor mars, nor changes,
  Fond faith in you and in my love of you."




CONTENTS


PART ONE - PROPINQUITY

PART TWO - RENASCENCE

PART THREE - TERTIUS

PART FOUR - APPRECIATION

PART FIVE - SOUVENIR

PART SIX - BYWAYS

PART SEVEN - YOKED

PART EIGHT - HARVEST

PART NINE - RELICS

PART TEN - IMPRIMIS




In the middle of the cupboard door was the carved figure of a man....
He had goat's legs, little horns on his head, and a long beard; the
children in the room called him, "Major-General-field-sergeant
-commander-Billy-goat's-legs" ... He was always looking at the
table under the looking-glass where stood a very pretty little
shepherdess made of china.... Close by her side stood a little
chimney-sweep, as black as coal and also made of china.... Near
to them stood another figure.... He was an old Chinaman who could nod
his head, and used to pretend he was the grandfather of the shepherdess,
although he could not prove it. He, however, assumed authority over her,
and therefore when "Major-general-field-sergeant-commander-Billy-goat's
-legs" asked for the little shepherdess to be his wife, he nodded his head
to show that he consented.

Then the little shepherdess cried, and looked at her sweetheart, the
chimney-sweep. "I must entreat you," said she, "to go out with me into
the wide world, for we cannot stay here." ... When the chimney-sweep saw
that she was quite firm, he said, "My way is through the stove up the
chimney." ... So at last they reached the top of the chimney.... The sky
with all its stars was over their heads.... They could see for a very
long distance out into the wide world, and the poor little shepherdess
leaned her head on her chimney-sweep's shoulder and wept. "This is too
much," she said, "the world is too large." ... And so with a great deal
of trouble they climbed down the chimney and peeped out.... There lay
the old Chinaman on the floor ... broken into three pieces.... "This is
terrible," said the shepherdess. "He can be riveted," said the
chimney-sweep.... The family had the Chinaman's back mended and a strong
rivet put through his neck; he looked as good as new, but when
"Major-General-field-sergeant-commander-Billy-goat's-legs" again asked
for the shepherdess to be his wife, the old Chinaman could no longer nod
his head.

And so the little china people remained together and were thankful for
the rivet in grandfather's neck, and continued to love each other until
they were broken to pieces.




PART ONE - PROPINQUITY

  _"A singer, eh?... Well, well! but when he sings
  Take jealous heed lest idiosyncrasies
  Entinge and taint too deep his melodies;
  See that his lute has no discordant strings
  To harrow us; and let his vaporings
  Be all of virtue and its victories,
  And of man's best and noblest qualities,
  And scenery, and flowers, and similar things_.

  "Thus bid our paymasters whose mutterings
  Some few deride, and blithely link their rhymes
  At random; and, as ever, on frail wings
  Of wine-stained paper scribbled with such rhymes
  Men mount to heaven, and loud laughter springs
  From hell's midpit, whose fuel is such rhymes."

PAUL VERVILLE. _Nascitur_.




I


At a very remote period, when editorials were mostly devoted to
discussion as to whether the Democratic Convention (shortly to be held
in Chicago) would or would not declare in favor of bi-metallism; when
golf was a novel form of recreation in America, and people disputed how
to pronounce its name, and pedestrians still turned to stare after an
automobile; when, according to the fashion notes, "the godet skirts and
huge sleeves of the present modes" were already doomed to extinction;
when the baseball season had just begun, and some of our people were
discussing the national game, and others the spectacular burning of the
old Pennsylvania Railway depot at Thirty-third and Market Street in
Philadelphia, and yet others the significance of General Fitzhugh Lee's
recent appointment as consul-general to Habana:--at this remote time,
Lichfield talked of nothing except the Pendomer divorce case.

And Colonel Rudolph Musgrave had very narrowly escaped being named as
the co-respondent. This much, at least, all Lichfield knew when George
Pendomer--evincing unsuspected funds of generosity--permitted his wife
to secure a divorce on the euphemistic grounds of "desertion." John
Charteris, acting as Rudolph Musgrave's friend, had patched up this
arrangement; and the colonel and Mrs. Pendomer, so rumor ran, were to be
married very quietly after a decent interval.

Remained only to deliberate whether this sop to the conventions should
be accepted as sufficient.

"At least," as Mrs. Ashmeade sagely observed, "we can combine
vituperation with common-sense, and remember it is not the first time a
Musgrave has figured in an entanglement of the sort. A lecherous race!
proverbial flutterers of petticoats! His surname convicts the man
unheard and almost excuses him. All of us feel that. And, moreover, it
is not as if the idiots had committed any unpardonable sin, for they
have kept out of the newspapers."

Her friend seemed dubious, and hazarded something concerning "the merest
sense of decency."

"In the name of the Prophet, figs! People--I mean the people who count
in Lichfield--are charitable enough to ignore almost any crime which is
just a matter of common knowledge. In fact, they are mildly grateful. It
gives them something to talk about. But when detraction is printed in
the morning paper you can't overlook it without incurring the suspicion
of being illiterate and virtueless. That's Lichfield."

"But, Polly--"

"Sophist, don't I know my Lichfield? I know it almost as well as I know
Rudolph Musgrave. And so I prophesy that he will not marry Clarice
Pendomer, because he is inevitably tired of her by this. He will marry
money, just as all the Musgraves do. Moreover, I prophesy that we will
gabble about this mess until we find a newer target for our stone
throwing, and be just as friendly with the participants to their faces
as we ever were. So don't let me hear any idiotic talk about whether or
no _I_ am going to receive her--"

"Well, after all, she was born a Bellingham. We must remember that."

"Wasn't I saying I knew my Lichfield?" Mrs. Ashmeade placidly observed.

       *       *       *       *       *

And time, indeed, attested her to be right in every particular.

Yet it must be recorded that at this critical juncture chance rather
remarkably favored Colonel Musgrave and Mrs. Pendomer, by giving
Lichfield something of greater interest to talk about; since now, just
in the nick of occasion, occurred the notorious Scott Musgrave murder.
Scott Musgrave--a fourth cousin once removed of the colonel's, to be
quite accurate--had in the preceding year seduced the daughter of a
village doctor, a negligible "half-strainer" up country at Warren; and
her two brothers, being irritated, picked this particular season to
waylay him in the street, as he reeled homeward one night from the
Commodores' Club, and forthwith to abolish Scott Musgrave after the
primitive methods of their lower station in society.

These details, indeed, were never officially made public, since a
discreet police force "found no clues"; for Fred Musgrave (of King's
Garden), as befitted the dead man's well-to-do brother, had been at no
little pains to insure constabulary shortsightedness, in preference to
having the nature of Scott Musgrave's recreations unsympathetically
aired. Fred Musgrave thereby afforded Lichfield a delectable opportunity
(conversationally and abetted by innumerable "they _do_ say's") to
accredit the murder, turn by turn, to every able-bodied person residing
within stone's throw of its commission. So that few had time, now, to
talk of Rudolph Musgrave and Clarice Pendomer; for it was not in
Lichfieldian human nature to discuss a mere domestic imbroglio when
here, also in the Musgrave family, was a picturesque and gory
assassination to lay tongue to.

So Colonel Musgrave was duly reëlected that spring to the librarianship
of the Lichfield Historical Association, and the name of Mrs. George
Pendomer was not stricken from the list of patronesses of the Lichfield
German Club, but was merely altered to "Mrs. Clarice Pendomer."

       *       *       *       *       *

At the bottom of his heart Colonel Musgrave was a trifle irritated that
his self-sacrifice should be thus unrewarded by martyrdom. Circumstances
had enabled him to assume, and he had gladly accepted, the blame for
John Charteris's iniquity, rather than let Anne Charteris know the truth
about her husband and Clarice Pendomer. The truth would have killed
Anne, the colonel believed; and besides, the colonel had enjoyed the
performance of a picturesque action.

And having acted as a hero in permitting himself to be pilloried as a
libertine, it was preferable of course not to have incurred ostracism
thereby. His common-sense conceded this; and yet, to Colonel Musgrave,
it could not but be evident that Destiny was hardly rising to the
possibilities of the situation.




II


Concerning Colonel Musgrave one finds the ensuing account in a
publication of the period devoted to biographies of more or less
prominent Americans. It is reproduced unchanged, because these memoirs
were--in the old days--compiled by the person whom they commemorated.
The custom was a worthy one, since the value of an autobiography is
determined by the nature of its superfluities and falsehoods.

"MUSGRAVE, RUDOLPH VARTREY, editor; _b_. Lichfield, Sill., Mar. 14,
1856; _s_. William Sebastian and Martha (Allardyce) M; _g. s_.
Theodorick Q.M., gov. of Sill. 1805-8, judge of the General Ct.,
1808-11, judge Supreme Ct. of Appeals, 1811-50 and pres. Supreme Ct. of
Appeals, 1841-50; grad. King's Coll. and U. of Sill. Corr. sec.
Lichfield Hist. Soc., and editor Sill. Mag. of Biog. since 1890; dir.
Traders Nat. Bank, Sill.; mem. Soc. of the Sons of Col. Govs., pres.
Sill. Soc. of Protestant Martyrs, comdr. Sill. Mil. Order of Lost
Battles, mem. exec. bd. Sill. Hist. Assn. for the Preservation of Ruins.
Democrat, Episcopalian, unmarried. _Author_: Colonial Lichfield, 1892;
Right on the Scaffold, 1893; Secession and the South, 1894; Chart of the
Descendants of Zenophon Perkins, 1894; Recollections of a Gracious Era,
1895; Notes as to the Vartreys of Westphalia, 1896. Has also written
numerous pamphlets on hist., biog. and geneal. subjects. _Address_:
Lichfield, Sill."

For Colonel Musgrave was by birth the lineal head of all the Musgraves
of Matocton, which is in Lichfield, as degrees are counted there,
equivalent to what being born a marquis would mean in England. Handsome
and trim and affable, he defied chronology by looking ten years younger
than he was known to be. For at least a decade he had been invaluable to
Lichfield matrons alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town
girl," the management of a cotillion and the prevention of unpleasant
pauses among incongruous dinner companies.

In short, he was by all accounts the social triumph of his generation;
and his military title, won by four years of arduous service at
receptions and parades while on the staff of a former Governor of the
State, this seasoned bachelor carried off with plausibility and
distinction.

The story finds him "Librarian and Corresponding Secretary" of the
Lichfield Historical Association, which office he had held for some six
years. The salary was small, and the colonel had inherited little; but
his sister, Miss Agatha Musgrave, who lived with him, was a notable
housekeeper. He increased his resources in a gentlemanly fashion by
genealogical research, directed mostly toward the rehabilitation of
ambiguous pedigrees; and for the rest, no other man could have fulfilled
more gracefully the main duty of the Librarian, which was to exhibit the
Association's collection of relics to hurried tourists "doing"
Lichfield.

His "Library manner" was modeled upon that which an eighteenth century
portrait would conceivably possess, should witchcraft set the canvas
breathing.




III


Also the story finds Colonel Musgrave in the company of his sister on a
warm April day, whilst these two sat upon the porch of the Musgrave home
in Lichfield, and Colonel Musgrave waited until it should be time to
open the Library for the afternoon. And about them birds twittered
cheerily, and the formal garden flourished as gardens thrive nowhere
except in Lichfield, and overhead the sky was a turkis-blue, save for a
few irrelevant clouds which dappled it here and there like splashes of
whipped cream.

Yet, for all this, the colonel was ill-at-ease; and care was on his
brow, and venom in his speech.

"And one thing," Colonel Musgrave concluded, with decision, "I wish
distinctly understood, and that is, if she insists on having young men
loafing about her--as, of course, she will--she will have to entertain
them in the garden. I won't have them in the house, Agatha. You remember
that Langham girl you had here last Easter?" he added, disconsolately
--"the one who positively littered up the house with young men,
and sang idiotic jingles to them at all hours of the night about
the Bailey family and the correct way to spell chicken? She drove me to
the verge of insanity, and I haven't a doubt that this Patricia person
will be quite as obstreperous. So, please mention it to her,
Agatha--casually, of course--that, in Lichfield, when one is partial to
either vocal exercise or amorous daliance, the proper scene of action is
the garden. I really cannot be annoyed by her."

"But, Rudolph," his sister protested, "you forget she is engaged to the
Earl of Pevensey. An engaged girl naturally wouldn't care about meeting
any young men."

"H'm!" said the colonel, drily.

Ensued a pause, during which the colonel lighted yet another cigarette.

Then, "I have frequently observed," he spoke, in absent wise, "that all
young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyes--I
believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being
'dreamy,'--are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish
temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon it, Agatha, the fact that she
contemplates purchasing the right to support a peculiarly disreputable
member of the British peerage will not hinder her in the least from
making advances to all the young men in the neighborhood."

Miss Musgrave was somewhat ruffled. She was a homely little woman with
nothing of the ordinary Musgrave comeliness. Candor even compels the
statement that in her pudgy swarthy face there was a droll suggestion
of the pug-dog.

"I am sure," Miss Musgrave remonstrated, with placid dignity, "that you
know nothing whatever about her, and that the reports about the earl
have probably been greatly exaggerated, and that her picture shows her
to be an unusually attractive girl. Though it is true," Miss Musgrave
conceded after reflection, "that there are any number of persons in the
House of Lords that I wouldn't in the least care to have in my own
house, even with the front parlor all in linen as it unfortunately is.
So awkward when you have company! And the Bible does bid us not to put
our trust in princes, and, for my part, I never thought that photographs
could be trusted, either."

"Scorn not the nobly born, Agatha," her brother admonished her, "nor
treat with lofty scorn the well-connected. The very best people are
sometimes respectable. And yet," he pursued, with a slight hiatus of
thought, "I should not describe her as precisely an attractive-looking
girl. She seems to have a lot of hair,--if it is all her own, which it
probably isn't,--and her nose is apparently straight enough, and I
gather she is not absolutely deformed anywhere; but that is all I can
conscientiously say in her favor. She is artificial. Her hair, now! It
has a--well, you would not call it exactly a crinkle or precisely a
wave, but rather somewhere between the two. Yes, I think I should
describe it as a ripple. I fancy it must be rather like the reflection
of a sunset in--a duck-pond, say, with a faint wind ruffling the water.
For I gather that her hair is of some light shade,--induced, I haven't a
doubt, by the liberal use of peroxides. And this ripple, too, Agatha, it
stands to reason, must be the result of coercing nature, for I have
never seen it in any other woman's hair. Moreover," Colonel Musgrave
continued, warming somewhat to his subject, "there is a dimple--on the
right side of her mouth, immediately above it,--which speaks of the most
frivolous tendencies. I dare say it comes and goes when she
talks,--winks at you, so to speak, in a manner that must be simply
idiotic. That foolish little cleft in her chin, too--"

But at this point, his sister interrupted him.

"I hadn't a notion," said she, "that you had even looked at the
photograph. And you seem to have it quite by heart, Rudolph,--and some
people admire dimples, you know, and, at any rate, her mother had red
hair, so Patricia isn't really responsible. I decided that it would be
foolish to use the best mats to-night. We can save them for Sunday
supper, because I am only going to have eggs and a little cold meat, and
not make company of her."

For no apparent reason, Rudolph Musgrave flushed.

"I inspected it--quite casually--last night. Please don't be absurd,
Agatha! If we were threatened with any other direful visitation
--influenza, say, or the seventeen-year locust,--I should
naturally read up on the subject in order to know what to expect. And
since Providence has seen fit to send us a visitor rather than a
visitation--though, personally, I should infinitely prefer the
influenza, as interfering in less degree with my comfort,--I have, of
course, neglected no opportunity of finding out what we may reasonably
look forward to. I fear the worst, Agatha. For I repeat, the girl's face
is, to me, absolutely unattractive!"

The colonel spoke with emphasis, and flung away his cigarette, and took
up his hat to go.

And then, "I suppose," said Miss Musgrave, absently, "you will be
falling in love with her, just as you did with Anne Charteris and Aline
Van Orden and all those other minxes. I _would_ like to see you married,
Rudolph, only I couldn't stand your having a wife."

"I! I!" sputtered the colonel. "I think you must be out of your head! I
fall in love with that chit! Good Lord, Agatha, you are positively
idiotic!"

And the colonel turned on his heel, and walked stiffly through the
garden. But, when half-way down the path, he wheeled about and came
back.

"I beg your pardon, Agatha," he said, contritely, "it was not my
intention to be discourteous. But somehow--somehow, dear, I don't quite
see the necessity for my falling in love with anybody, so long as I have
you."

And Miss Musgrave, you may be sure, forgave him promptly; and
afterward--with a bit of pride and an infinity of love in her kind,
homely face,--her eyes followed him out of the garden on his way to open
the Library. And she decided in her heart that she had the dearest and
best and handsomest brother in the universe, and that she must remember
to tell him, accidentally, how becoming his new hat was. And then, at
some unspoken thought, she smiled, wistfully.

"She would be a very lucky girl if he did," said Miss Musgrave, apropos
of nothing in particular; and tossed her grizzly head.

"An earl, indeed!" said Miss Musgrave




IV


And this is how it came about:

Patricia Vartrey (a second cousin once removed of Colonel Rudolph
Musgrave's), as the older inhabitants of Lichfield will volubly attest,
was always a person who did peculiar things. The list of her
eccentricities is far too lengthy here to be enumerated; but she began
it by being born with red hair--Titian reds and auburns were
undiscovered euphemisms in those days--and, in Lichfield, this is not
regarded as precisely a lady-like thing to do; and she ended it, as far
as Lichfield was concerned, by eloping with what Lichfield in its horror
could only describe, with conscious inadequacy, as "a quite unheard-of
person."

Indisputably the man was well-to-do already; and from this nightmarish
topsy-turvidom of Reconstruction the fellow visibly was plucking wealth.
Also young Stapylton was well enough to look at, too, as Lichfield
flurriedly conceded.

But it was equally undeniable that he had made his money through a
series of commercial speculations distinguished both by shiftiness and
daring, and that the man himself had been until the War a wholly
negligible "poor white" person,--an overseer, indeed, for "Wild Will"
Musgrave, Colonel Musgrave's father, who was of course the same
Lieutenant-Colonel William Sebastian Musgrave, C.S.A., that met his
death at Gettysburg.

This upstart married Patricia Vartrey, for all the chatter and
whispering, and carried her away from Lichfield, as yet a little dubious
as to what recognition, if any, should be accorded the existence of the
Stapyltons. And afterward (from a notoriously untruthful North, indeed)
came rumors that he was rapidly becoming wealthy; and of Patricia
Vartrey's death at her daughter's birth; and of the infant's health and
strength and beauty, and of her lavish upbringing,--a Frenchwoman,
Lichfield whispered, with absolutely nothing to do but attend upon the
child.

And then, little by little, a new generation sprang up, and, little by
little, the interest these rumors waked became more lax; and it was
brought about, at last, by the insidious transitions of time, that
Patricia Vartrey was forgotten in Lichfield. Only a few among the older
men remembered her; some of them yet treasured, as these fogies so often
do, a stray fan or an odd glove; and in bycorners of sundry
time-toughened hearts there lurked the memory of a laughing word or of a
glance or of some such casual bounty, that Patricia Vartrey had accorded
these hearts' owners when the world was young.

But Agatha Musgrave, likewise, remembered the orphan cousin who had
been reared with her. She had loved Patricia Vartrey; and, in due time,
she wrote to Patricia's daughter,--in stately, antiquated phrases that
astonished the recipient not a little,--and the girl had answered. The
correspondence flourished. And it was not long before Miss Musgrave had
induced her young cousin to visit Lichfield.

Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, be it understood, knew nothing of all this
until the girl was actually on her way. And now, she was to arrive that
afternoon, to domicile herself in his quiet house for two long
weeks--this utter stranger, look you!--and upset his comfort, ask him
silly questions, expect him to talk to her, and at the end of her visit,
possibly, present him with some outlandish gimcrack made of cardboard
and pink ribbons, in which she would expect him to keep his papers. The
Langham girl did that.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is honesty's part to give you the man no better than he was.
Lichfield at large had pampered him; many women had loved him; and above
all, Miss Agatha had spoiled him. After fifteen years of being the pivot
about which the economy of a household revolves, after fifteen years of
being the inevitable person whose approval must be secured before any
domestic alteration, however trivial, may be considered, no mortal man
may hope to remain a paragon of unselfishness.

Colonel Musgrave joyed in the society of women. But he classed
them--say, with the croquettes adorned with pink paper frills which were
then invariably served at the suppers of the Lichfield German Club,--as
acceptable enough, upon a conscious holiday, but wholly incongruous with
the slippered ease of home. When you had an inclination for feminine
society, you shaved and changed your clothes and thought up an impromptu
or so against emergency, and went forth to seek it. That was natural;
but to have a petticoated young person infesting your house, hourly, was
as preposterous as ice-cream soda at breakfast.

The metaphor set him off at a tangent. He wondered if this Patricia
person could not (tactfully) be induced to take her bath after
breakfast, as Agatha did? after he had his? Why, confound the girl, he
was not responsible for there being only one bathroom in the house! It
was necessary for him to have his bath and be at the Library by nine
o'clock. This interloper must be made to understand as much.

The colonel reached the Library undecided as to whether Miss Stapylton
had better breakfast in her room, or if it would be entirely proper for
her to come to the table in one of those fluffy lace-trimmed garments
such as Agatha affected at the day's beginning?

The question was a nice one. It was not as though servants were willing
to be bothered with carrying trays to people's rooms; he knew what
Agatha had to say upon that subject. It was not as though he were the
chit's first cousin, either. He almost wished himself in the decline of
life, and free to treat the girl paternally.

And so he fretted all that afternoon.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then, too, he reflected that it would be very awkward if Agatha should
be unwell while this Patricia person was in the house. Agatha in her
normal state was of course the kindliest and cheeriest gentlewoman in
the universe, but any physical illness appeared to transform her nature
disastrously. She had her "attacks," she "felt badly" very often
nowadays, poor dear; and how was a Patricia person to be expected to
make allowances for the fact that at such times poor Agatha was
unavoidably a little cross and pessimistic?




V


Yet Colonel Musgrave strolled into his garden, later, with a tolerable
affectation of unconcern. Women, after all, he assured himself, were
necessary for the perpetuation of the species; and, resolving for the
future to view these weakly, big-hipped and slope-shouldered makeshifts
of Nature's with larger tolerance, he cocked his hat at a
devil-may-carish angle, and strode up the walk, whistling jauntily and
having, it must be confessed, to the unprejudiced observer very much the
air of a sheep in wolf's clothing.

"At worst," he was reflecting, "I can make love to her. They, as a rule,
take kindlily enough to that; and in the exercise of hospitality a host
must go to all lengths to divert his guests. Failure is not
permitted...."

Then She came to him.

She came to him across the trim, cool lawn, leisurely, yet with a
resilient tread that attested the vigor of her slim young body. She was
all in white, diaphanous, ethereal, quite incredibly incredible; but as
she passed through the long shadows of the garden--fire-new, from the
heart of the sunset, Rudolph Musgrave would have sworn to you,--the lacy
folds and furbelows and semi-transparencies that clothed her were now
tinged with gold, and now, as a hedge or flower-bed screened her from
the horizontal rays, were softened into multitudinous graduations of
grays and mauves and violets.

"Failure is not permitted," he was repeating in his soul....

"You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?" she asked. "How perfectly
entrancing! You see until to-day I always thought that if I had been
offered the choice between having cousins or appendicitis I would have
preferred to be operated on."

And Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about
his heart, that her hair was really like the reflection of a sunset in
rippling waters,--only many times more beautiful, of course,--and that
her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and
that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.

Then he observed that his own mouth was giving utterance to divers
irrelevant and foolish sounds, which eventually resolved themselves into
the statement he was glad to see her. And immediately afterward the
banality of this remark brought the hot blood to his face and, for the
rest of the day, stung him and teased him, somewhere in the background
of his mind, like an incessant insect.

Glad, indeed!

Before he had finished shaking hands with Patricia Stapylton, it was
all over with the poor man.

"Er--h'm!" quoth he.

"Only," Miss Stapylton was meditating, with puckered brow, "it would be
unseemly for me to call you Rudolph--"

"You impertinent minx!" cried he, in his soul; "I should rather think it
would be!"

"--and Cousin Rudolph sounds exactly like a dried-up little man with
eyeglasses and crows' feet and a gentle nature. I rather thought you
were going to be like that, and I regard it as extremely hospitable of
you not to be. You are more like--like what now?" Miss Stapylton put her
head to one side and considered the contents of her vocabulary,--"you
are like a viking. I shall call you Olaf," she announced, when she had
reached a decision.

This, look you, to the most dignified man in Lichfield,--a person who
had never borne a nickname in his life. You must picture for yourself
how the colonel stood before her, big, sturdy and blond, and glared down
at her, and assured himself that he was very indignant; like Timanthes,
the colonel's biographer prefers to draw a veil before the countenance
to which art is unable to do justice.

Then, "I have no admiration for the Northmen," Rudolph Musgrave
declared, stiffly. "They were a rude and barbarous nation, proverbially
addicted to piracy and intemperance."

"My goodness gracious!" Miss Stapylton observed,--and now, for the
first time, he saw the teeth that were like grains of rice upon a pink
rose petal. Also, he saw dimples. "And does one mean all that by a
viking?"

"The vikings," he informed her--and his Library manner had settled upon
him now to the very tips of his fingers--"were pirates. The word is of
Icelandic origin, from _vik_, the name applied to the small inlets along
the coast in which they concealed their galleys. I may mention that Olaf
was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian
monarch to reign in Norway."

"Dear me!" said Miss Stapylton; "how interesting!"

Then she yawned with deliberate cruelty.

"However," she concluded, "I shall call you Olaf, just the same."

"Er--h'm!" said the colonel.

       *       *       *       *       *

And this stuttering boor (he reflected) was Colonel Rudolph Musgrave,
confessedly the social triumph of his generation! This imbecile, without
a syllable to say for himself, without a solitary adroit word within
tongue's reach, wherewith to annihilate the hussy, was a Musgrave of
Matocton!

       *       *       *       *       *

And she did. To her he was "Olaf" from that day forth.

Rudolph Musgrave called her, "You." He was nettled, of course, by her
forwardness--"Olaf," indeed!--yet he found it, somehow, difficult to
bear this fact in mind continuously.

For while it is true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall
in love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily
employed with other matters to have much time to profit by current
literature. Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic.
She prefers to jog along in the old rut, contentedly turning out
chromolithographic sunrises such as they give away at the tea stores,
contentedly staging the most violent and improbable melodramas;
and--sturdy old Philistine that she is--she even now permits her
children to fall in love in the most primitive fashion.

She is not particularly interested in subtleties and soul analyses; she
merely chuckles rather complacently when a pair of eyes are drawn,
somehow, to another pair of eyes, and an indescribable something is
altered somewhere in some untellable fashion, and the world, suddenly,
becomes the most delightful place of residence in all the universe.
Indeed, it is her favorite miracle, this. For at work of this sort the
old Philistine knows that she is an adept; and she has rejoiced in the
skill of her hands, with a sober workmanly joy, since Cain first went
a-wooing in the Land of Nod.

So Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, without understanding what had happened to
him, on a sudden was strangely content with life.

It was at supper--dinner, in Lichfield, when not a formal
entertainment, is eaten at two in the afternoon--that he fell
a-speculating as to whether Her eyes, after all, could be fitly
described as purple.

Wasn't there a grayer luminosity about them than he had at first
suspected?--wasn't the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of
sunlight falling upon a wet slate roof?

It was a delicate question, an affair of nuances, of almost
imperceptible graduations; and in debating a matter of such nicety, a
man must necessarily lay aside all petty irritation, such as being
nettled by an irrational nickname, and approach the question with
unbiased mind.

He did. And when, at last, he had come warily to the verge of decision,
Miss Musgrave in all innocence announced that they would excuse him if
he wished to get back to his work.

He discovered that, somehow, the three had finished supper; and,
somehow, he presently discovered himself in his study, where eight
o'clock had found him every evening for the last ten years, when he was
not about his social diversions. An old custom, you will observe, is not
lightly broken.




VI


Subsequently: "I have never approved of these international marriages,"
said Colonel Musgrave, with heat. "It stands to reason, she is simply
marrying the fellow for his title. _(The will of Jeremiah Brown, dated
29 November, 1690, recorded 2 February, 1690-1, mentions his wife Eliza
Brown and appoints her his executrix.)_ She can't possibly care for him.
_(This, then, was the second wife of Edward Osborne of Henrico, who,
marrying him 15 June, 1694, died before January, 1696-7.)_ But they are
all flibbertigibbets, every one of them. _(She had apparently no
children by either marriage--)_ And I dare say she is no better than the
rest."

Came a tap on the door. Followed a vision of soft white folds and
furbelows and semi-transparencies and purple eyes and a pouting mouth.

"I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, Olaf," the owner of these
vanities complained. "Are you very busy? Cousin Agatha is about her
housekeeping, and I have read the afternoon paper all through,--even the
list of undelivered letters and the woman's page,--and I just want to
see the Gilbert Stuart picture," she concluded,--exercising, one is
afraid, a certain economy in regard to the truth.

This was a little too much. If a man's working-hours are not to be
respected--if his privacy is to be thus invaded on the flimsiest of
pretexts,--why, then, one may very reasonably look for chaos to come
again. This, Rudolph Musgrave decided, was a case demanding firm and
instant action. Here was a young person who needed taking down a peg or
two, and that at once.

But he made the mistake of looking at her first. And after that, he lied
glibly. "Good Lord, no! I am not in the least busy now. In fact, I was
just about to look you two up."

"I was rather afraid of disturbing you." She hesitated; and a lucent
mischief woke in her eyes. "You are so patriarchal, Olaf," she lamented.
"I felt like a lion venturing into a den of Daniels. But if you cross
your heart you aren't really busy--why, then, you can show me the
Stuart, Olaf."

It is widely conceded that Gilbert Stuart never in his after work
surpassed the painting which hung then in Rudolph Musgrave's study,--the
portrait of the young Gerald Musgrave, afterward the friend of Jefferson
and Henry, and, still later, the author of divers bulky tomes,
pertaining for the most part to ethnology. The boy smiles at you from
the canvas, smiles ambiguously,--smiles with a woman's mouth, set above
a resolute chin, however,--and with a sort of humorous sadness in his
eyes. These latter are of a dark shade of blue--purple, if you
will,--and his hair is tinged with red.

"Why, he took after me!" said Miss Stapylton. "How thoughtful of him,
Olaf!"

And Rudolph Musgrave saw the undeniable resemblance. It gave him a queer
sort of shock, too, as he comprehended, for the first time, that the
faint blue vein on that lifted arm held Musgrave blood,--the same blood
which at this thought quickened. For any person guided by appearances,
Rudolph Musgrave considered, would have surmised that the vein in
question contained celestial ichor or some yet diviner fluid.

"It is true," he conceded, "that there is a certain likeness."

"And he is a very beautiful boy," said Miss Stapylton, demurely. "Thank
you, Olaf; I begin to think you are a dangerous flatterer. But he is
only a boy, Olaf! And I had always thought of Gerald Musgrave as a
learned person with a fringe of whiskers all around his face--like a
centerpiece, you know."

The colonel smiled. "This portrait was painted early in life. Our
kinsman was at that time, I believe, a person of rather frivolous
tendencies. Yet he was not quite thirty when he first established his
reputation by his monograph upon _The Evolution of Marriage_. And
afterwards, just prior to his first meeting with Goethe, you will
remember--"

"Oh, yes!" Miss Stapylton assented, hastily; "I remember perfectly. I
know all about him, thank you. And it was that beautiful boy, Olaf, that
young-eyed cherub, who developed into a musty old man who wrote musty
old books, and lived a musty, dusty life all by himself, and never
married or had any fun at all! How _horrid_, Olaf!" she cried, with a
queer shrug of distaste.

"I fail," said Colonel Musgrave, "to perceive anything--ah--horrid in a
life devoted to the study of anthropology. His reputation when he died
was international."

"But he never had any fun, you jay-bird! And, oh, Olaf! Olaf! that boy
could have had so much fun! The world held so much for him! Why, Fortune
is only a woman, you know, and what woman could have refused him
anything if he had smiled at her like that when he asked for it?"

Miss Stapylton gazed up at the portrait for a long time now, her hands
clasped under her chin. Her face was gently reproachful.

"Oh, boy dear, boy dear!" she said, with a forlorn little quaver in her
voice, "how _could_ you be _so_ foolish? _Didn't_ you know there was
something better in the world than grubbing after musty old tribes and
customs and folk-songs? Oh, precious child, how could you?"

Gerald Musgrave smiled back at her, ambiguously; and Rudolph Musgrave
laughed. "I perceive," said he, "you are a follower of Epicurus. For my
part, I must have fetched my ideals from the tub of the Stoic. I can
conceive of no nobler life than one devoted to furthering the cause of
science."

She looked up at him, with a wan smile. "A barren life!" she said: "ah,
yes, his was a wasted life! His books are all out-of-date now, and
nobody reads them, and it is just as if he had never been. A barren
life, Olaf! And that beautiful boy might have had so much fun--Life is
queer, isn't it, Olaf?"

Again he laughed, "The criticism," he suggested, "is not altogether
original. And Science, no less than War, must have her unsung heroes.
You must remember," he continued, more seriously, "that any great work
must have as its foundation the achievements of unknown men. I fancy
that Cheops did not lay every brick in his pyramid with his own hand;
and I dare say Nebuchadnezzar employed a few helpers when he was laying
out his hanging gardens. But time cannot chronicle these lesser men.
Their sole reward must be the knowledge that they have aided somewhat in
the unending work of the world."

Her face had altered into a pink and white penitence which was flavored
with awe.

"I--I forgot," she murmured, contritely; "I--forgot you were--like
him--about your genealogies, you know. Oh, Olaf, I'm very silly! Of
course, it is tremendously fine and--and nice, I dare say, if you like
it,--to devote your life to learning, as you and he have done. I forgot,
Olaf. Still, I am sorry, somehow, for that beautiful boy," she ended,
with a disconsolate glance at the portrait.




VII


Long after Miss Stapylton had left him, the colonel sat alone in his
study, idle now, and musing vaguely. There were no more addenda
concerning the descendants of Captain Thomas Osborne that night.

At last, the colonel rose and threw open a window, and stood looking
into the moonlit garden. The world bathed in a mist of blue and silver.
There was a breeze that brought him sweet, warm odors from the garden,
together with a blurred shrilling of crickets and the conspiratorial
conference of young leaves.

"Of course, it is tremendously fine and--and nice, if you like it," he
said, with a faint chuckle. "I wonder, now, if I do like it?"

He was strangely moved. He seemed, somehow, to survey Rudolph Musgrave
and all his doings with complete and unconcerned aloofness. The man's
life, seen in its true proportions, dwindled into the merest flicker of
a match; he had such a little while to live, this Rudolph Musgrave! And
he spent the serious hours of this brief time writing notes and charts
and pamphlets that perhaps some hundred men in all the universe might
care to read--pamphlets no better and no more accurate than hundreds of
other men were writing at that very moment.

No, the capacity for originative and enduring work was not in him; and
this incessant compilation of dreary footnotes, this incessant rummaging
among the bones of the dead--did it, after all, mean more to this
Rudolph Musgrave than one full, vivid hour of life in that militant
world yonder, where men fought for other and more tangible prizes than
the mention of one's name in a genealogical journal?

He could not have told you. In his heart, he knew that a thorough digest
of the Wills and Orders of the Orphans' Court of any county must always
rank as a useful and creditable performance; but, from without, the
sounds and odors of Spring were calling to him, luring him, wringing his
very heart, bidding him come forth into the open and crack a jest or two
before he died, and stare at the girls a little before the match had
flickered out.

       *       *       *       *       *

At this time he heard a moaning noise. The colonel gave a shrug, sighed,
and ascended to his sister's bedroom. He knew that Agatha must be ill;
and that there is no more efficient quietus to wildish meditations than
the heating of hot-water bottles and the administration of hypnotics he
had long ago discovered.




PART TWO - RENASCENCE

  "As one imprisoned that hath lain alone
  And dreamed of sunlight where no vagrant gleam
  Of sunlight pierces, being freed, must deem
  This too but dreaming, and must dread the sun
  Whose glory dazzles,--even as such-an-one
  Am I whose longing was but now supreme
  For this high hour, and, now it strikes, esteem
  I do but dream long dreamed-of goals are won.

  "Phyllis, I am not worthy of thy love.
  I pray thee let no kindly word be said
  Of me at all, for in the train thereof,
  Whenas yet-parted lips, sigh-visited,
  End speech and wait, mine when I will to move,
  Such joy awakens that I grow afraid."
THOMAS ROWLAND. _Triumphs of Phyllis_.




I


They passed with incredible celerity, those next ten days--those
strange, delicious, topsy-turvy days. To Rudolph Musgrave it seemed
afterward that he had dreamed them away in some vague Lotus Land--in a
delectable country where, he remembered, there were always purple eyes
that mocked you, and red lips that coaxed you now, and now cast gibes at
you.

You felt, for the most part of your stay in this country, flushed and
hot and uncomfortable and unbelievably awkward, and you were mercilessly
bedeviled there; but not for all the accumulated wealth of Samarkand and
Ind and Ophir would you have had it otherwise. Ah, no, not otherwise in
the least trifle. For now uplifted to a rosy zone of acquiescence, you
partook incuriously at table of nectar and ambrosia, and noted abroad,
without any surprise, that you trod upon a more verdant grass than
usual, and that someone had polished up the sun a bit; and, in fine, you
snatched a fearful joy from the performance of the most trivial
functions of life.

Yet always he remembered that it could not last; always he remembered
that in the autumn Patricia was to marry Lord Pevensey. She sometimes
gave him letters to mail which were addressed to that nobleman. He
wondered savagely what was in them; he posted them with a vicious shove;
and, for the time, they caused him acute twinges of misery. But not for
long; no, for, in sober earnest, if some fantastic sequence of events
had made his one chance of winning Patricia Stapylton dependent on his
spending a miserable half-hour in her company, Rudolph Musgrave could
not have done it.

As for Miss Stapylton, she appeared to delight in the cloistered,
easy-going life of Lichfield. The quaint and beautiful old town fell
short in nothing of her expectations, in spite of the fact that she had
previously read John Charteris's tales of Lichfield,--"those effusions
which" (if the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_ is to be trusted) "have
builded, by the strength and witchery of record and rhyme, romance and
poem, a myriad-windowed temple in Lichfield's honor--exquisite,
luminous, and enduring--for all the world to see."

Miss Stapylton appeared to delight in the cloistered easy-going life of
Lichfield,--that town which was once, as the outside world has
half-forgotten now, the center of America's wealth, politics and
culture, the town to which Europeans compiling "impressions" of America
devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and
Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that,
and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater.

Very pleasant, too, it was in the days of Patricia's advent. There were
strikingly few young men about, to be sure; most of them on reaching
maturity had settled in more bustling regions. But many maidens remained
whom memory delights to catalogue,--tall, brilliant Lizzie Allardyce,
the lovely and cattish Marian Winwood, to whom Felix Kennaston wrote
those wonderful love-letters which she published when he married
Kathleen Saumarez, the rich Baugh heiresses from Georgia, the Pride
twins, and Mattie Ferneyhaugh, whom even rival beauties loved, they say,
and other damsels by the score,--all in due time to be wooed and won,
and then to pass out of the old town's life.

Among the men of Rudolph Musgrave's generation--those gallant oldsters
who were born and bred, and meant to die, in Lichfield,--Patricia did
not lack for admirers. Tom May was one of them, of course; rarely a
pretty face escaped the tribute of at least one proposal from Tom May.
Then there was Roderick Taunton, he with the leonine mane, who spared
her none of his forensic eloquence, but found Patricia less tractable
than the most stubborn of juries. Bluff Walter Thurman, too, who was
said to know more of Dickens, whist and criminal law than any other man
living, came to worship at her shrine, as likewise did huge red-faced
Ashby Bland, famed for that cavalry charge which history-books tell you
that he led, and at which he actually was not present, for reasons all
Lichfield knew and chuckled over. And Courtney Thorpe and Charles
Maupin, doctors of the flesh and the spirit severally, were others among
the rivals who gathered about Patricia at decorous festivals when,
candles lighted, the butler and his underlings came with trays of
delectable things to eat, and the "nests" of tables were set out, and
pleasant chatter abounded.

And among Patricia's attendants Colonel Musgrave, it is needless to
relate, was preëminently pertinacious. The two found a deal to talk
about, somehow, though it is doubtful if many of their comments were of
sufficient importance or novelty to merit record. Then, also, he often
read aloud to her from lovely books, for the colonel read admirably and
did not scruple to give emotional passages their value. _Trilby_,
published the preceding spring in book form, was one of these books, for
all this was at a very remote period; and the _Rubaiyat_ was another,
for that poem was as yet unhackneyed and hardly wellknown enough to be
parodied in those happy days.

Once he read to her that wonderful sad tale of Hans Christian Andersen's
which treats of the china chimney-sweep and the shepherdess, who eloped
from their bedizened tiny parlor-table, and were frightened by the
vastness of the world outside, and crept ignominiously back to their fit
home. "And so," the colonel ended, "the little china people remained
together, and were thankful for the rivet in grandfather's neck, and
continued to love each other until they were broken to pieces."

"It was really a very lucky thing," Patricia estimated, "that the
grandfather had a rivet in his neck and couldn't nod to the
billy-goat-legged person to take the shepherdess away into his cupboard.
I don't doubt the little china people were glad of it. But after
climbing so far--and seeing the stars,--I think they ought to have had
more to be glad for." Her voice was quaintly wistful.

"I will let you into a secret--er--Patricia. That rivet was made out of
the strongest material in the whole universe. And the old grandfather
was glad, at bottom, he had it in his neck so that he couldn't nod and
separate the shepherdess from the chimney-sweep."

"Yes,--I guess he had been rather a rip among the bric-à-brac in his day
and sympathized with them?"

"No, it wasn't just that. You see these little china people had forsaken
their orderly comfortable world on the parlor table to climb very high.
It was a brave thing to do, even though they faltered and came back
after a while. It is what we all want to do, Patricia--to climb toward
the stars,--even those of us who are too lazy or too cowardly to attempt
it. And when others try it, we are envious and a little uncomfortable,
and we probably scoff; but we can't help admiring, and there is a rivet
in the neck of all of us which prevents us from interfering. Oh, yes,
we little china people have a variety of rivets, thank God, to prevent
too frequent nodding and too cowardly a compromise with
baseness,--rivets that are a part of us and force us into flashes of
upright living, almost in spite of ourselves, when duty and inclination
grapple. There is always the thing one cannot do for the reason that one
is constituted as one is. That, I take it, is the real rivet in
grandfather's neck and everybody else's."

He spoke disjointedly, vaguely, but the girl nodded. "I think I
understand, Olaf. Only, it is a two-edged rivet--to mix metaphors--and
keeps us stiffnecked against all sorts of calls. No, I am not sure that
the thing one cannot do because one is what one is, proves to be always
a cause for international jubilations and fireworks on the lawn."




II


Thus Lichfield, as to its staid trousered citizenry, fell prostrate at
Miss Stapylton's feet, and as to the remainder of its adults,
vociferously failed to see anything in the least remarkable in her
appearance, and avidly took and compared notes as to her personal
apparel.

"You have brought Asmodeus into Lichfield," Colonel Musgrave one day
rebuked Miss Stapylton, as they sat in the garden. "The demon of pride
and dress is rampant everywhere--er--Patricia. Even Agatha does her hair
differently now; and in church last Sunday I counted no less than seven
duplicates of that blue hat of yours."

Miss Stapylton was moved to mirth. "Fancy your noticing a thing like
that!" said she. "I didn't know you were even aware I had a blue hat."

"I am no judge," he conceded, gravely, "of such fripperies. I don't
pretend to be. But, on the other hand, I must plead guilty to deriving
considerable harmless amusement from your efforts to dress as an example
and an irritant to all Lichfield."

"You wouldn't have me a dowd, Olaf?" said she, demurely. "I have to be
neat and tidy, you know. You wouldn't have me going about in a
continuous state of unbuttonedness and black bombazine like Mrs. Rabbet,
would you?"

Rudolph Musgrave debated as to this. "I dare say," he at last conceded,
cautiously, "that to the casual eye your appearance is somewhat
--er--more pleasing than that of our rector's wife. But, on the
other hand----"

"Olaf, I am embarrassed by such fulsome eulogy. Mrs. Rabbet isn't a day
under forty-nine. And you consider me _somewhat_ better-looking than she
is!"

He inspected her critically, and was confirmed in his opinion.

"Olaf"--coaxingly--"do you really think I am as ugly as that?"

"Pouf!" said the colonel airily; "I dare say you are well enough."

"Olaf"--and this was even more cajoling--"do you know you've never told
me what sort of a woman you most admire?"

"I don't admire any of them," said Colonel Musgrave, stoutly. "They are
too vain and frivolous--especially the pink-and-white ones," he added,
unkindlily.

"Cousin Agatha has told me all about your multifarious affairs of
course. She depicts you as a sort of cardiacal buccaneer and visibly
gloats over the tale of your enormities. She is perfectly dear about
it. But have you never--_cared_--for any woman, Olaf?"

Precarious ground, this! His eyes were fixed upon her now. And hers, for
doubtless sufficient reasons, were curiously intent upon anything in the
universe rather than Rudolph Musgrave.

"Yes," said he, with a little intake of the breath; "yes, I cared once."

"And--she cared?" asked Miss Stapylton.

She happened, even now, not to be looking at him.

"She!" Rudolph Musgrave cried, in real surprise. "Why, God bless my
soul, of course she didn't! She didn't know anything about it."

"You never told her, Olaf?"--and this was reproachful. Then Patricia
said: "Well! and did she go down in the cellar and get the wood-ax or
was she satisfied just to throw the bric-à-brac at you?"

And Colonel Musgrave laughed aloud.

"Ah!" said he; "it would have been a brave jest if I had told her,
wouldn't it? She was young, you see, and wealthy, and--ah, well, I won't
deceive you by exaggerating her personal attractions! I will serve up to
you no praises of her sauced with lies. And I scorn to fall back on the
stock-in-trade of the poets,--all their silly metaphors and similes and
suchlike nonsense. I won't tell you that her complexion reminded me of
roses swimming in milk, for it did nothing of the sort. Nor am I going
to insist that her eyes had a fire like that of stars, or proclaim that
Cupid was in the habit of lighting his torch from them. I don't think
he was. I would like to have caught the brat taking any such liberties
with those innocent, humorous, unfathomable eyes of hers! And they
didn't remind me of violets, either," he pursued, belligerently, "nor
did her mouth look to me in the least like a rosebud, nor did I have the
slightest difficulty in distinguishing between her hands and lilies. I
consider these hyperbolical figures of speech to be idiotic. Ah, no!"
cried Colonel Musgrave, warming to his subject--and regarding it, too,
very intently; "ah, no, a face that could be patched together at the
nearest florist's would not haunt a man's dreams o'nights, as hers does!
I haven't any need for praises sauced with lies! I spurn hyperbole. I
scorn exaggeration. I merely state calmly and judicially that she was
God's masterpiece,--the most beautiful and adorable and indescribable
creature that He ever made."

She smiled at this. "You should have told her, Olaf," said Miss
Stapylton. "You should have told her that you cared."

He gave a gesture of dissent. "She had everything," he pointed out,
"everything the world could afford her. And, doubtless, she would have
been very glad to give it all up for me, wouldn't she?--for me, who
haven't youth or wealth or fame or anything? Ah, I dare say she would
have been delighted to give up the world she knew and loved,--the world
that loved her,--for the privilege of helping me digest old county
records!"

And Rudolph Musgrave laughed again, though not mirthfully.

But the girl was staring at him, with a vague trouble in her eyes. "You
should have told her, Olaf," she repeated.

And at this point he noted that the arbutus-flush in her cheeks began to
widen slowly, until, at last, it had burned back to the little pink
ears, and had merged into the coppery glory of her hair, and had made
her, if such a thing were possible--which a minute ago it manifestly was
not,--more beautiful and adorable and indescribable than ever before.

"Ah, yes!" he scoffed, "Lichfield would have made a fitting home for
her. She would have been very happy here, shut off from the world with
us,--with us, whose forefathers have married and intermarried with one
another until the stock is worthless, and impotent for any further
achievement. For here, you know, we have the best blood in America, and
--for utilitarian purposes--that means the worst blood. Ah, we may prate
of our superiority to the rest of the world,--and God knows, we
do!--but, at bottom, we are worthless. We are worn out, I tell you! we
are effete and stunted in brain and will-power, and the very desire of
life is gone out of us! We are contented simply to exist in Lichfield.
And she--"

He paused, and a new, fierce light came into his eyes. "She was so
beautiful!" he said, half-angrily, between clenched teeth.

"You are just like the rest of them, Olaf," she lamented, with a hint
of real sadness. "You imagine you are in love with a girl because you
happen to like the color of her eyes, or because there is a curve about
her lips that appeals to you. That isn't love, Olaf, as we women
understand it. Ah, no, a girl's love for a man doesn't depend altogether
upon his fitness to be used as an advertisement for somebody's
ready-made clothing."

"You fancy you know what you are talking about," said Rudolph Musgrave,
"but you don't. You don't realize, you see, how beautiful she--was."

And this time, he nearly tripped upon the tense, for her hand was on his
arm, and, in consequence, a series of warm, delicious little shivers was
running about his body in a fashion highly favorable to extreme
perturbation of mind.

"You should have told her, Olaf," she said, wistfully. "Oh, Olaf, Olaf,
why didn't you tell her?"

She did not know, of course, how she was tempting him; she did not know,
of course, how her least touch seemed to waken every pulse in his body
to an aching throb, and set hope and fear a-drumming in his breast.
Obviously, she did not know; and it angered him that she did not.

"She would have laughed at me," he said, with a snarl; "how she would
have laughed!"

"She wouldn't have laughed, Olaf." And, indeed, she did not look as if
she would.

"But much you know of her!" said Rudolph Musgrave, morosely. "She was
just like the rest of them, I tell you! She knew how to stare a man out
of countenance with big purple eyes that were like violets with the dew
on them, and keep her paltry pink-and-white baby face all pensive and
sober, till the poor devil went stark, staring mad, and would have
pawned his very soul to tell her that he loved her! She knew! She did it
on purpose. She would look pensive just to make an ass of you! She--"

And here the colonel set his teeth for a moment, and resolutely drew
back from the abyss.

"She would not have cared for me," he said, with a shrug. "I was not
exactly the sort of fool she cared for. What she really cared for was a
young fool who could dance with her in this silly new-fangled gliding
style, and send her flowers and sweet-meats, and make love to her
glibly--and a petticoated fool who would envy her fine feathers,--and,
at last, a knavish fool who would barter his title for her money. She
preferred fools, you see, but she would never have cared for a
middle-aged penniless fool like me. And so," he ended, with a vicious
outburst of mendacity, "I never told her, and she married a title and
lived unhappily in gilded splendor ever afterwards."

"You should have told her, Olaf," Miss Stapylton persisted; and then she
asked, in a voice that came very near being inaudible: "Is it too late
to tell her now, Olaf?"

The stupid man opened his lips a little, and stood staring at her with
hungry eyes, wondering if it were really possible that she did not hear
the pounding of his heart; and then his teeth clicked, and he gave a
despondent gesture.

"Yes," he said, wearily, "it is too late now."

Thereupon Miss Stapylton tossed her head. "Oh, very well!" said she;
"only, for my part, I think you acted very foolishly, and I don't see
that you have the least right to complain. I quite fail to see how you
could have expected her to marry you--or, in fact, how you can expect
any woman to marry you,--if you won't, at least, go to the trouble of
asking her to do so!"

Then Miss Stapylton went into the house, and slammed the door after her.




III


Nor was that the worst of it. For when Rudolph Musgrave followed her--as
he presently did, in a state of considerable amaze,--his sister
informed him that Miss Stapylton had retired to her room with an
unaccountable headache.

And there she remained for the rest of the evening. It was an unusually
long evening.

Yet, somehow, in spite of its notable length--affording, as it did, an
excellent opportunity for undisturbed work,--Colonel Musgrave found,
with a pricking conscience, that he made astonishingly slight progress
in an exhaustive monograph upon the fragmentary Orderly Book of an
obscure captain in a long-forgotten regiment, which if it had not
actually served in the Revolution, had at least been demonstrably
granted money "for services," and so entitled hundreds of aspirants to
become the Sons (or Daughters) of various international disagreements.

Nor did he see her at breakfast--nor at dinner.




IV


A curious little heartache accompanied Colonel Musgrave on his way home
that afternoon. He had not seen Patricia Stapylton for twenty-four
hours, and he was just beginning to comprehend what life would be like
without her. He did not find the prospect exhilarating.

Then, as he came up the orderly graveled walk, he heard, issuing from
the little vine-covered summer-house, a loud voice. It was a man's
voice, and its tones were angry.

"No! no!" the man was saying; "I'll agree to no such nonsense, I tell
you! What do you think I am?"

"I think you are a jackass-fool," Miss Stapylton said, crisply, "and a
fortune-hunter, and a sot, and a travesty, and a whole heap of other
things I haven't, as yet had time to look up in the dictionary. And I
think--I think you call yourself an English gentleman? Well, all I have
to say is God pity England if her gentlemen are of your stamp! There
isn't a costermonger in all Whitechapel who would dare talk to me as
you've done! I would like to snatch you bald-headed, I would like to
kill you--And do you think, now, if you were the very last man left in
all the _world_ that I would--No, don't you try to answer me, for I
don't wish to hear a single word you have to say. Oh, oh! how _dare_
you!"

"Well, I've had provocation enough," the man's voice retorted, sullenly.
"Perhaps, I have cut up a bit rough, Patricia, but, then, you've been
talkin' like a fool, you know. But what's the odds? Let's kiss and make
up, old girl."

"Don't touch me!" she panted; "ah, don't you _dare!_"

"You little devil! you infernal little vixen? You'll jilt me, will you?"

"Let me go!" the girl cried, sharply. Rudolph Musgrave went into the
summer-house.

The man Colonel Musgrave found there was big and loose-jointed, with
traces of puffiness about his face. He had wheat-colored hair and
weakish-looking, pale blue eyes. One of his arms was about Miss
Stapylton, but he released her now, and blinked at Rudolph Musgrave.

"And who are you, pray?" he demanded, querulously. "What do you want,
anyhow? What do you mean by sneakin' in here and tappin' on a fellow's
shoulder--like a damn' woodpecker, by Jove! I don't know you."

There was in Colonel Musgrave's voice a curious tremor, when he spoke;
but to the eye he was unruffled, even faintly amused.

"I am the owner of this garden," he enunciated, with leisurely
distinctness, "and it is not my custom to permit gentlewomen to be
insulted in it. So I am afraid I must ask you to leave it."

"Now, see here," the man blustered, weakly, "we don't want any heroics,
you know. See here, you're her cousin, ain't you? By God, I'll leave it
to you, you know! She's treated me badly, don't you understand. She's a
jilt, you know. She's playin' fast and loose----"

He never got any further, for at this point Rudolph Musgrave took him by
the coat-collar and half-dragged, half-pushed him through the garden,
shaking him occasionally with a quiet emphasis. The colonel was angry,
and it was a matter of utter indifference to him that they were
trampling over flower-beds, and leaving havoc in their rear.

But when they had reached the side-entrance, he paused and opened it,
and then shoved his companion into an open field, where a number of
cows, fresh from the evening milking, regarded them with incurious eyes.
It was very quiet here, save for the occasional jangle of the cow-bells
and the far-off fifing of frogs in the marsh below.

"It would have been impossible, of course," said Colonel Musgrave, "for
me to have offered you any personal violence as long as you were, in a
manner, a guest of mine. This field, however, is the property of Judge
Willoughby, and here I feel at liberty to thrash you."

Then he thrashed the man who had annoyed Patricia Stapylton.

That thrashing was, in its way, a masterpiece. There was a certain
conscientiousness about it, a certain thoroughness of execution--a
certain plodding and painstaking carefulness, in a word, such as is
possible only to those who have spent years in guiding fat-witted
tourists among the antiquities of the Lichfield Historical Association.

"You ought to exercise more," Rudolph Musgrave admonished his victim,
when he had ended. "You are entirely too flabby now, you know. That path
yonder will take you to the hotel, where, I imagine, you are staying.
There is a train leaving Lichfield at six-fifteen, and if I were you, I
would be very careful not to miss that train. Good-evening. I am sorry
to have been compelled to thrash you, but I must admit I have enjoyed it
exceedingly."

Then he went back into the garden.




V


In the shadow of a white lilac-bush, Colonel Musgrave paused with an
awed face.

"Good Lord!" said he, aghast at the notion; "what would Agatha say if
she knew I had been fighting like a drunken truck-driver! Or, rather,
what would she refrain from saying! Only, she wouldn't believe it of me.
And, for the matter of that," Rudolph Musgrave continued, after a
moment's reflection, "I wouldn't have believed it of myself a week ago.
I think I am changing, somehow. A week ago I would have fetched in the
police and sworn out a warrant; and, if the weather had been as damp as
it is, I would have waited to put on my rubbers before I would have done
that much."




VI


He found her still in the summer-house, expectant of him, it seemed, her
lips parted, her eyes glowing. Rudolph Musgrave, looking down into twin
vivid depths, for a breathing-space, found time to rejoice that he had
refused to liken them to stars. Stars, forsooth!--and, pray, what paltry
sun, what irresponsible comet, what pallid, clinkered satellite, might
boast a purple splendor such as this? For all asterial scintillations,
at best, had but a clap-trap glitter; whereas the glow of Patricia's
eyes was a matter worthy of really serious attention.

"What have you done with him, Olaf?" the girl breathed, quickly.

"I reasoned with him," said Colonel Musgrave. "Oh, I found him quite
amenable to logic. He is leaving Lichfield this evening, I think."

Thereupon Miss Stapylton began to laugh. "Yes," said she, "you must have
remonstrated very feelingly. Your tie's all crooked, Olaf dear, and your
hair's all rumpled, and there's dust all over your coat. You would
disgrace a rag-bag. Oh, I'm glad you reasoned--that way! It wasn't
dignified, but it was dear of you, Olaf. Pevensey's a beast."

He caught his breath at this. "Pevensey!" he stammered; "the Earl of
Pevensey!--the man you are going to marry!"

"Dear me, no!" Miss Stapylton answered, with utmost unconcern; "I would
sooner marry a toad. Why, didn't you know, Olaf? I thought, of course,
you knew you had been introducing athletics and better manners among the
peerage! That sounds like a bill in the House of Commons, doesn't it?"
Then Miss Stapylton laughed again, and appeared to be in a state of
agreeable, though somewhat nervous, elation. "I wrote to him two days
ago," she afterward explained, "breaking off the engagement. So he came
down at once and was very nasty about it."

"You--you have broken your engagement," he echoed, dully; and continued,
with a certain deficiency of finesse, "But I thought you wanted to be a
countess?"

"Oh, you boor, you vulgarian!" the girl cried, "Oh, you do put things so
crudely, Olaf! You are hopeless."

She shook an admonitory forefinger in his direction, and pouted in the
most dangerous fashion.

"But he always seemed so nice," she reflected, with puckered brows,
"until to-day, you know. I thought he would be eminently suitable. I
liked him tremendously until--" and here, a wonderful, tender change
came into her face, a wistful quaver woke in her voice--"until I found
there was some one else I liked better."

"Ah!" said Rudolph Musgrave.

So, that was it--yes, that was it! Her head was bowed now--her glorious,
proud little head,--and she sat silent, an abashed heap of fluffy frills
and ruffles, a tiny bundle of vaporous ruchings and filmy tucks and
suchlike vanities, in the green dusk of the summer-house.

But he knew. He had seen her face grave and tender in the twilight, and
he knew.

She loved some man--some lucky devil! Ah, yes, that was it! And he knew
the love he had unwittingly spied upon to be august; the shamed
exultance of her face and her illumined eyes, the crimson banners her
cheeks had flaunted,--these were to Colonel Musgrave as a piece of
sacred pageantry; and before it his misery was awed, his envy went
posting to extinction.

Thus the stupid man reflected, and made himself very unhappy over it.

Then, after a little, the girl threw back her head and drew a deep
breath, and flashed a tremulous smile at him.

"Ah, yes," said she; "there are better things in life than coronets,
aren't there, Olaf?"

You should have seen how he caught up the word!

"Life!" he cried, with a bitter thrill of speech; "ah, what do I know of
life? I am only a recluse, a dreamer, a visionary! You must learn of
life from the men who have lived, Patricia. I haven't ever lived. I
have always chosen the coward's part. I have chosen to shut myself off
from the world, to posture in a village all my days, and to consider its
trifles as of supreme importance. I have affected to scorn that brave
world yonder where a man is proven. And, all the while, I was afraid of
it, I think. I was afraid of you before you came."

At the thought of this Rudolph Musgrave laughed as he fell to pacing up
and down before her.

"Life!" he cried, again, with a helpless gesture; and then smiled at
her, very sadly. "'Didn't I know there was something better in life than
grubbing after musty tribes and customs and folk-songs?'" he quoted.
"Why, what a question to ask of a professional genealogist! Don't you
realize, Patricia, that the very bread I eat is, actually, earned by the
achievements of people who have been dead for centuries? and in part, of
course, by tickling the vanity of living snobs? That constitutes a nice
trade for an able-bodied person as long as men are paid for emptying
garbage-barrels--now, doesn't it? And yet it is not altogether for the
pay's sake I do it," he added, haltingly. "There really is a fascination
about the work. You are really working out a puzzle,--like a fellow
solving a chess-problem. It isn't really work, it is amusement. And when
you are establishing a royal descent, and tracing back to czars and
Plantagenets and Merovingians, and making it all seem perfectly
plausible, the thing is sheer impudent, flagrant art, and _you_ are the
artist--" He broke off here and shrugged. "No, I could hardly make you
understand. It doesn't matter. It is enough that I have bartered youth
and happiness and the very power of living for the privilege of grubbing
in old county records."

He paused. It is debatable if he had spoken wisely, or had spoken even
in consonance with fact, but his outburst had, at least, the saving
grace of sincerity. He was pallid now, shaking in every limb, and in his
heart was a dull aching. She seemed so incredibly soft and little and
childlike, as she looked up at him with troubled eyes.

"I--I don't quite understand," she murmured. "It isn't as if you were an
old man, Olaf. It isn't as if--"

But he had scarcely heard her. "Ah, child, child!" he cried, "why did
you come to waken me? I was content in my smug vanities. I was content
in my ignorance. I could have gone on contentedly grubbing through my
musty, sleepy life here, till death had taken me, if only you had not
shown me what life might mean! Ah, child, child, why did you waken me?"

"I?" she breathed; and now the flush of her cheeks had widened,
wondrously.

"You! you!" he cried, and gave a wringing motion of his hands, for the
self-esteem of a complacent man is not torn away without agony. "Who
else but you? I had thought myself brave enough to be silent, but still
I must play the coward's part! That woman I told you of--that woman I
loved--was you! Yes, you, you!" he cried, again and again, in a sort of
frenzy.

And then, on a sudden, Colonel Musgrave began to laugh.

"It is very ridiculous, isn't it?" he demanded of her. "Yes, it is
very--very funny. Now comes the time to laugh at me! Now comes the time
to lift your brows, and to make keen arrows of your eyes, and of your
tongue a little red dagger! I have dreamed of this moment many and many
a time. So laugh, I say! Laugh, for I have told you that I love you. You
are rich, and I am a pauper--you are young, and I am old, remember,--and
I love you, who love another man! For the love of God, laugh at me and
have done--laugh! for, as God lives, it is the bravest jest I have ever
known!"

But she came to him, with a wonderful gesture of compassion, and caught
his great, shapely hands in hers.

"I--I knew you cared," she breathed. "I have always known you cared. I
would have been an idiot if I hadn't. But, oh, Olaf, I didn't know you
cared so much. You frighten me, Olaf," she pleaded, and raised a tearful
face to his. "I am very fond of you, Olaf dear. Oh, don't think I am not
fond of you." And the girl paused for a breathless moment. "I think I
might have married you, Olaf," she said, half-wistfully, "if--if it
hadn't been for one thing."

Rudolph Musgrave smiled now, though he found it a difficult business.
"Yes," he assented, gravely, "I know, dear. If it were not for the other
man--that lucky devil! Yes, he is a very, very lucky devil, child, and
he constitutes rather a big 'if,' doesn't he?"

Miss Stapylton, too, smiled a little. "No," said she, "that isn't quite
the reason. The real reason is, as I told you yesterday, that I quite
fail to see how you can expect any woman to marry you, you jay-bird, if
you won't go to the trouble of asking her to do so."

And, this time, Miss Stapylton did not go into the house.




VII


When they went in to supper, they had planned to tell Miss Agatha of
their earth-staggering secret at once. But the colonel comprehended, at
the first glimpse of his sister, that the opportunity would be
ill-chosen.

The meal was an awkward half-hour. Miss Agatha, from the head of the
table, did very little talking, save occasionally to evince views of
life that were both lachrymose and pugnacious. And the lovers talked
with desperate cheerfulness, so that there might be no outbreak so long
as Pilkins--preëminently ceremonious among butlers, and as yet inclined
to scoff at the notion that the Musgraves of Matocton were not divinely
entrusted to his guardianship,--was in the room.

Coming so close upon the heels of his high hour, this contretemps of
Agatha's having one of her "attacks," seemed more to Rudolph Musgrave
than a man need rationally bear with equanimity. Perhaps it was a trifle
stiffly that he said he did not care for any raspberries.

His sister burst into tears.

"That's all the thanks I get. I slave my life out, and what thanks do I
get for it? I never have any pleasure, I never put my foot out of the
house except to go to market,--and what thanks do I get for it? That's
what I want you to tell me with the first raspberries of the season.
That's what I want! Oh, I don't wonder you can't look me in the eye. And
I wish I was dead! that's what I wish!"

Colonel Musgrave did not turn at once toward Patricia, when his sister
had stumbled, weeping, from the dining-room.

"I--I am so sorry, Olaf," said a remote and tiny voice.

Then he touched her hand with his finger-tips, ever so lightly. "You
must not worry about it, dear. I daresay I was unpardonably brusque. And
Agatha's health is not good, so that she is a trifle irritable at times.
Why, good Lord, we have these little set-to's ever so often, and never
give them a thought afterwards. That is one of the many things the
future Mrs. Musgrave will have to get accustomed to, eh? Or does that
appalling prospect frighten you too much?"

And Patricia brazenly confessed that it did not. She also made a face at
him, and accused Rudolph Musgrave of trying to crawl out of marrying
her, which proceeding led to frivolities unnecessary to record, but
found delectable by the participants.




VIII


Colonel Musgrave was alone. He had lifted his emptied coffee-cup and he
swished the lees gently to and fro. He was curiously intent upon these
lees, considered them in the light of a symbol....

Then a comfortable, pleasant-faced mulattress came to clear the
supper-table. Virginia they called her. Virginia had been nurse in turn
to all the children of Rudolph Musgrave's parents; and to the end of her
life she appeared to regard the emancipation of the South's negroes as
an irrelevant vagary of certain "low-down" and probably "ornery" Yankees
--as an, in short, quite eminently "tacky" proceeding which very
certainly in no way affected her vested right to tyrannize over the
Musgrave household.

"Virginia," said Colonel Musgrave, "don't forget to make up a fire in
the kitchen-stove before you go to bed. And please fill the kettle
before you go upstairs, and leave it on the stove. Miss Agatha is not
well to-night."

"Yaas, suh. I unnerstan', suh," Virginia said, sedately.

Virginia filled her tray, and went away quietly, her pleasant yellow
face as imperturbable as an idol's.




PART THREE - TERTIUS

  "It is in many ways made plain to us
  That love must grow like any common thing,
  Root, bud, and leaf, ere ripe for garnering
  The mellow fruitage front us; even thus
  Must Helena encounter Theseus
  Ere Paris come, and every century
  Spawn divers queens who die with Antony
  But live a great while first with Julius.

  "Thus I have spoken the prologue of a play
  Wherein I have no part, and laugh, and sit
  Contented in the wings, whilst you portray
  An amorous maid with gestures that befit
  This lovely rôle,--as who knows better, pray,
  Than I that helped you in rehearsing it?"

Horace Symonds. _Civic Voluntaries_.




I


When the Presidential campaign was at its height; when in various
sections of the United States "the boy orator of La Platte" was making
invidious remarks concerning the Republican Party, and in Canton (Ohio)
Mr. M.A. Hanna was cheerfully expressing his confidence as to the
outcome of it all; when the Czar and the Czarina were visiting President
Faure in Paris "amid unparalleled enthusiasm"; and when semi-educated
people were appraising, with a glibness possible to ignorance only, the
literary achievements of William Morris and George du Maurier, who had
just died:--at this remote time, Roger Stapylton returned to Lichfield.

For in that particular October Patricia's father, an accommodating
physician having declared old Roger Stapylton's health to necessitate a
Southern sojourn, leased the Bellingham mansion in Lichfield. It
happened that, by rare good luck, Tom Bellingham--of the Bellinghams of
Assequin, not the Bellinghams of Bellemeade, who indeed immigrated after
the War of 1812 and have never been regarded as securely established
from a social standpoint,--was at this time in pecuniary difficulties on
account of having signed another person's name to a cheque.

Roger Stapylton refurnished the house in the extreme degree of
Lichfieldian elegance. Colonel Musgrave was his mentor throughout the
process; and the oldest families of Lichfield very shortly sat at table
with the former overseer, and not at all unwillingly, since his dinners
were excellent and an infatuated Rudolph Musgrave--an axiom now in
planning any list of guests,--was very shortly to marry the man's
daughter.

In fact, the matter had been settled; and Colonel Musgrave had received
from Roger Stapylton an exuberantly granted charter of courtship.

This befell, indeed, upon a red letter day in Roger Stapylton's life.
The banker was in business matters wonderfully shrewd, as divers
transactions, since the signing of that half-forgotten contract whereby
he was to furnish a certain number of mules for the Confederate service,
strikingly attested: but he had rarely been out of the country wherein
his mother bore him; and where another nabob might have dreamed of an
earl, or even have soared aspiringly in imagination toward a
marchioness-ship for his only child, old Stapylton retained unshaken
faith in the dust-gathering creed of his youth.

He had tolerated Pevensey, had indeed been prepared to purchase him much
as he would have ordered any other expensive trinket or knickknack which
Patricia desired. But he had never viewed the match with enthusiasm.

Now, though, old Stapylton exulted. His daughter--half a Vartrey
already--would become by marriage a Musgrave of Matocton, no less. Pat's
carriage would roll up and down the oak-shaded avenue from which he had
so often stepped aside with an uncovered head, while gentlemen and
ladies cantered by; and it would be Pat's children that would play about
the corridors of the old house at whose doors he had lived so
long,--those awe-inspiring corridors, which he had very rarely entered,
except on Christmas Day and other recognized festivities, when, dressed
to the nines, the overseer and his uneasy mother were by immemorial
custom made free of the mansion, with every slave upon the big
plantation.

"They were good days, sir," he chuckled. "Heh, we'll stick to the old
customs. We'll give a dinner and announce it at dessert, just as your
honored grandfather did your Aunt Constantia's betrothal--"

For about the Musgraves of Matocton there could be no question. It was
the old man's delight to induce Rudolph Musgrave to talk concerning his
ancestors; and Stapylton soon had their history at his finger-tips. He
could have correctly blazoned every tincture in their armorial bearings
and have explained the origin of every rampant, counter-changed or
couchant beast upon the shield.

He knew it was the _Bona Nova_ in the November of 1619,--for the first
Musgrave had settled in Virginia, prior to his removal to
Lichfield,--which had the honor of transporting the forebear of this
family into America. Stapylton could have told you offhand which scions
of the race had represented this or that particular county in the House
of Burgesses, and even for what years; which three of them were
Governors, and which of them had served as officers of the State Line in
the Revolution; and, in fine, was more than satisfied to have his
daughter play Penelophon to Colonel Musgrave's debonair mature Cophetua.

In a word, Roger Stapylton had acquiesced to the transferal of his
daughter's affections with the peculiar equanimity of a properly reared
American parent. He merely stipulated that, since his business affairs
prevented an indefinite stay in Lichfield, Colonel Musgrave should
presently remove to New York City, where the older man held ready for
him a purely ornamental and remunerative position with the Insurance
Company of which Roger Stapylton was president.

But upon this point Rudolph Musgrave was obdurate.

He had voiced, and with sincerity, as you may remember, his desire to be
proven upon a larger stage than Lichfield afforded. Yet the sincerity
was bred of an emotion it did not survive. To-day, unconsciously,
Rudolph Musgrave was reflecting that he was used to living in Lichfield,
and would appear to disadvantage in a new surrounding, and very probably
would not be half so comfortable.

Aloud he said, in firm belief that he spoke truthfully: "I cannot
conscientiously give up the Library, sir. I realize the work may not
seem important in your eyes. Indeed, in anybody's eyes it must seem an
inadequate outcome of a man's whole life. But it unfortunately happens
to be the only kind of work I am capable of doing. And--if you will
pardon me, sir,--I do not think it would be honest for me to accept this
generous salary and give nothing in return."

But here Patricia broke in.

Patricia agreed with Colonel Musgrave in every particular. Indeed, had
Colonel Musgrave proclaimed his intention of setting up in life as an
assassin, Patricia would readily have asserted homicide to be the most
praiseworthy of vocations. As it was, she devoted no little volubility
and emphasis and eulogy to the importance of a genealogist in the
eternal scheme of things; and gave her father candidly to understand
that an inability to appreciate this fact was necessarily indicative of
a deplorably low order of intelligence.

Musgrave was to remember--long afterward--how glorious and dear this
brightly-colored, mettlesome and tiny woman had seemed to him in the
second display of temper he witnessed in Patricia. It was a revelation
of an additional and as yet unsuspected adorability.

Her father, though, said: "Pat, I've suspected for a long time it was
foolish of me to have a red-haired daughter." Thus he capitulated,--and
with an ineffable air of routine.

Colonel Musgrave was, in a decorous fashion, the happiest of living
persons.




II


Colonel Musgrave was, in a decorous fashion, the happiest of living
persons....

As a token of this he devoted what little ready money he possessed to
renovating Matocton, where he had not lived for twenty years. He rarely
thought of money, not esteeming it an altogether suitable subject for a
gentleman's meditations. And to do him justice, the reflection that old
Stapylton's wealth would some day be at Rudolph Musgrave's disposal was
never more than an agreeable minor feature of Patricia's entourage
whenever, as was very often, Colonel Musgrave fell to thinking of how
adorable Patricia was in every particular.

Yet there were times when he thought of Anne Charteris as well. He had
not seen her for a whole year now, for the Charterises had left
Lichfield shortly after the Pendomer divorce case had been settled, and
were still in Europe.

This was the evening during which Roger Stapylton had favorably received
his declaration; and Colonel Musgrave was remembering the time that he
and Anne had last spoken with a semblance of intimacy--that caustic
time when Anne Charteris had interrupted him in high words with her
husband, and circumstances had afforded to Rudolph Musgrave no choice
save to confess, to this too-perfect woman, of all created beings, his
"true relations" with Clarice Pendomer.

Even as yet the bitterness of that humiliation was not savorless....

It seemed to him that he could never bear to think of the night when
Anne had heard his stammerings through, and had merely listened, and in
listening had been unreasonably beautiful. So Godiva might have looked
on Peeping Tom, with more of wonder than of loathing, just at first....

It had been very hard to bear. But it seemed necessary. The truth would
have hurt Anne too much....

He noted with the gusto of a connoisseur how neatly the dénouement of
this piteous farce had been prepared. His rage with Charteris; Anne's
overhearing, and misinterpretation of, a dozen angry words; that old
affair with Clarice--immediately before her marriage (one of how many
pleasurable gallantries? the colonel idly wondered, and regretted that
he had no Leporello to keep them catalogued for consultation)--and
George Pendomer's long-smoldering jealousy of Rudolph Musgrave: all
fitted in as neatly as the bits of a puzzle.

It had been the simplest matter in the world to shield John Charteris.
Yet, the colonel wished he could be sure it was an unadulterated desire
of protecting Anne which had moved him. There had been very certainly an
enjoyment all the while in reflecting how nobly Rudolph Musgrave was
behaving for the sake of "the only woman he had ever loved." Yes, one
had undoubtedly phrased it thus--then, and until the time one met
Patricia.

But Anne was different, and in the nature of things must always be a
little different, from all other people--even Patricia Stapylton.

Always in reverie the colonel would come back to this,--that Anne could
not be thought of, quite, in the same frame of mind wherein one
appraised other persons. Especially must he concede this curious
circumstance whenever, as to-night, he considered divers matters that
had taken place quite long enough ago to have been forgotten.

It was a foolish sort of a reverie, and scarcely worth the setting down.
It was a reverie of the kind that everyone, and especially everyone's
wife, admits to be mawkish and unprofitable; and yet, somehow, the next
still summer night, or long sleepy Sunday afternoon, or, perhaps, some
cheap, jigging and heartbreaking melody, will set a carnival of old
loves and old faces awhirl in the brain. One grows very sad over it, of
course, and it becomes apparent that one has always been ill-treated by
the world; but the sadness is not unpleasant, and one is quite willing
to forgive.

Yes,--it was a long, long time ago. It must have been a great number of
centuries. Matocton was decked in its spring fripperies of burgeoning,
and the sky was a great, pale turquoise, and the buttercups left a
golden dust high up on one's trousers. One had not become entirely
accustomed to long trousers then, and one was rather proud of them. One
was lying on one's back in the woods, where the birds were astir and
eager to begin their house-building, and twittered hysterically over the
potentialities of straws and broken twigs.

Overhead, the swelling buds of trees were visible against the sky, and
the branches were like grotesque designs on a Japanese plate. There was
a little clump of moss, very cool and soft, that just brushed one's
cheek.

One was thinking--really thinking--for the first time in one's life;
and, curiously enough, one was thinking about a girl, although girls
were manifestly of no earthly importance.

But Anne Willoughby was different. Even at the age when girls seemed
feckless creatures, whose aimings were inexplicable, both as concerned
existence in general, and, more concretely, as touched gravel-shooters
and snowballs, and whose reasons for bursting into tears were recondite,
one had perceived the difference. One wondered about it from time to
time.

Gradually, there awoke an uneasy self-conscious interest as to all
matters that concerned her, a mental pricking up of the ears when her
name was mentioned.

One lay awake o' nights, wondering why her hair curled so curiously
about her temples, and held such queer glowing tints in its depths when
sunlight fell upon it. One was uncomfortable and embarrassed and
Briarean-handed in her presence, but with her absence came the
overwhelming desire of seeing her again.

After a little, it was quite understood that one was in love with Anne
Willoughby....

It was a matter of minor importance that her father was the wealthiest
man in Fairhaven, and that one's mother was poor. One would go away into
foreign lands after a while, and come back with a great deal of
money,--lakes of rupees and pieces of eight, probably. It was very
simple.

But Anne's father had taken an unreasonable view of the matter, and
carried Anne off to a terrible aunt, who returned one's letters
unopened. That was the end of Anne Willoughby.

Then, after an interval--during which one fell in and out of love
assiduously, and had upon the whole a pleasant time,--Anne Charteris had
come to Lichfield. One had found that time had merely added poise and
self-possession and a certain opulence to the beauty which had caused
one's voice to play fantastic tricks in conference with Anne
Willoughby,--ancient, unforgotten conferences, wherein one had pointed
out the many respects in which she differed from all other women, and
the perfect feasibility of marrying on nothing a year.

Much as one loved Patricia, and great as was one's happiness, men did
not love as boys did, after all....

"'Ah, Boy, it is a dream for life too high,'" said Colonel Musgrave, in
his soul. "And now let's think of something sensible. Let's think about
the present political crisis, and what to give the groomsmen, and how
much six times seven is. Meanwhile, you are not the fellow in _Aux
Italiens_, you know; you are not bothered by the faint, sweet smell of
any foolish jasmine-flower, you understand, or by any equally foolish
hankerings after your lost youth. You are simply a commonplace,
every-day sort of man, not thoroughly hardened as yet to being engaged,
and you are feeling a bit pulled down to-night, because your liver or
something is out of sorts."

Upon reflection, Colonel Musgrave was quite sure that he was happy; and
that it was only his liver or something which was upset. But, at all
events, the colonel's besetting infirmity was always to shrink from
making changes; instinctively he balked against commission of any action
which would alter his relations with accustomed circumstances or
persons. It was very like Rudolph Musgrave that even now, for all the
glow of the future's bright allure, his heart should hark back to the
past and its absurd dear memories, with wistfulness.

And he found it, as many others have done, but cheerless sexton's work,
this digging up of boyish recollections. One by one, they come to
light--the brave hopes and dreams and aspirations of youth; the ruddy
life has gone out of them; they have shriveled into an alien, pathetic
dignity. They might have been one's great-grandfather's or Hannibal's or
Adam's; the boy whose life was swayed by them is quite as dead as these.

Amaryllis is dead, too. Perhaps, you drop in of an afternoon to talk
over old happenings. She is perfectly affable. She thinks it is time you
were married. She thinks it very becoming, the way you have stoutened.
And, no, they weren't at the Robinsons'; that was the night little
Amaryllis was threatened with croup.

Then, after a little, the lamps of welcome are lighted in her eyes, her
breath quickens, her cheeks mount crimson flags in honor of her lord,
her hero, her conqueror.

It is Mr. Grundy, who is happy to meet you, and hopes you will stay to
dinner. He patronizes you a trifle; his wife, you see, has told him all
about that boy who is as dead as Hannibal. You don't mind in the least;
you dine with Mr. and Mrs. Grundy, and pass a very pleasant evening.

Colonel Musgrave had dined often with the Charterises.




III


And then some frolic god, _en route_ from homicide by means of an
unloaded pistol in Chicago for the demolishment of a likely ship off
Palos, with the coöperancy of a defective pistonrod, stayed in his
flight to bring Joe Parkinson to Lichfield.

It was Roger Stapylton who told the colonel of this advent, as the very
apex of jocularity.

"For you remember the Parkinsons, I suppose?"

"The ones that had a cabin near Matocton? Very deserving people, I
believe."

"And _their_ son, sir, wants to marry my daughter," said Mr.
Stapylton,--"_my_ daughter, who is shortly to be connected by marriage
with the Musgraves of Matocton! I don't know what this world will come
to next."

It was a treat to see him shake his head in deprecation of such anarchy.

Then Roger Stapylton said, more truculently: "Yes, sir! on account of a
boy-and-girl affair five years ago, this half-strainer, this poor-white
trash, has actually had the presumption, sir,--but I don't doubt that
Pat has told you all about it?"

"Why, no," said Colonel Musgrave. "She did not mention it this
afternoon. She was not feeling very well. A slight headache. I noticed
she was not inclined to conversation."

It had just occurred to him, as mildly remarkable, that Patricia had
never at any time alluded to any one of those countless men who must
have inevitably made love to her.

"Though, mind you, I don't say anything against Joe. He's a fine young
fellow. Paid his own way through college. Done good work in Panama and
in Alaska too. But--confound it, sir, the boy's a fool! Now I put it to
you fairly, ain't he a fool?" said Mr. Stapylton.

"Upon my word, sir, if his folly has no other proof than an adoration of
your daughter," the colonel protested, "I must in self-defense beg leave
to differ with you."

Yes, that was it undoubtedly. Patricia had too high a sense of honor to
exhibit these defeated rivals in a ridiculous light, even to him. It was
a revelation of an additional and as yet unsuspected adorability.

Then after a little further talk they separated. Colonel Musgrave left
that night for Matocton in order to inspect the improvements which were
being made there. He was to return to Lichfield on the ensuing
Wednesday, when his engagement to Patricia was to be announced--"just
as your honored grandfather did your Aunt Constantia's betrothal."

Meanwhile Joe Parkinson, a young man much enamored, who fought the world
by ordinary like Hal o' the Wynd, "for his own hand," was seeing
Patricia every day.




IV


Colonel Musgrave remained five days at Matocton, that he might put his
house in order against his nearing marriage. It was a pleasant sight to
see the colonel stroll about the paneled corridors and pause to chat
with divers deferential workmen who were putting the last touches there,
or to observe him mid-course in affable consultation with gardeners
anent the rolling of a lawn or the retrimming of a rosebush, and to mark
the bearing of the man so optimistically colored by goodwill toward the
solar system.

He joyed in his old home,--in the hipped roof of it, the mullioned
casements, the wide window-seats, the high and spacious rooms, the
geometrical gardens and broad lawns, in all that was quaint and
beautiful at Matocton,--because it would be Patricia's so very soon, the
lovely frame of a yet lovelier picture, as the colonel phrased it with a
flight of imagery.

Gravely he inspected all the portraits of his feminine ancestors that he
might decide, as one without bias, whether Matocton had ever boasted a
more delectable mistress. Equity--or in his fond eyes at
least,--demanded a negative. Only in one of these canvases, a
counterfeit of Miss Evelyn Ramsay, born a Ramsay of Blenheim, that had
married the common great-great-grandfather of both the colonel and
Patricia--Major Orlando Musgrave, an aide-de-camp to General Charles Lee
in the Revolution,--Rudolph Musgrave found, or seemed to find, dear
likenesses to that demented seraph who was about to stoop to his
unworthiness.

He spent much time before this portrait. Yes, yes! this woman had been
lovely in her day. And this bright, roguish shadow of her was lovely,
too, eternally postured in white patnet, trimmed with a vine of
rose-colored satin leaves, a pink rose in her powdered hair and a huge
ostrich plume as well.

Yet it was an adamantean colonel that remarked:

"My dear, perhaps it is just as fortunate as not that you have quitted
Matocton. For I have heard tales of you, Miss Ramsay. Oh, no! I honestly
do not believe that you would have taken kindlily to any young
person--not even in the guise of a great-great-grand-daughter,--to whom
you cannot hold a candle, madam. A fico for you, madam," said the most
undutiful of great-great-grandsons.

Let us leave him to his roseate meditations. Questionless, in the woman
he loved there was much of his own invention: but the circumstance is
not unhackneyed; and Colonel Musgrave was in a decorous fashion the
happiest of living persons.

Meanwhile Joe Parkinson, a young man much enamored, who fought the
world by ordinary, like Hal o' the Wynd "for his own hand," was seeing
Patricia every day.




V


Joe Parkinson--tall and broad-shouldered, tanned, resolute, chary of
speech, decisive in gesture, having close-cropped yellow hair and frank,
keen eyes like amethysts,--was the one alien present when Colonel
Musgrave came again into Roger Stapylton's fine and choicely-furnished
mansion.

This was on the evening Roger Stapylton gave the long-anticipated dinner
at which he was to announce his daughter's engagement. As much indeed
was suspected by most of his dinner-company, so carefully selected from
the aristocracy of Lichfield; and the heart of the former overseer, as
these handsome, courtly and sweet voiced people settled according to
their rank about his sumptuous table, was aglow with pride.

Then Rudolph Musgrave turned to his companion and said softly: "My dear,
you are like a wraith. What is it?"

"I have a headache," said Patricia. "It is nothing."

"You reassure me," the colonel gaily declared, "for I had feared it was
a heartache--"

She faced him. Desperation looked out of her purple eyes. "It is," the
girl said swiftly.

"Ah--?" Only it was an intake of the breath, rather than an
interjection. Colonel Musgrave ate his fish with deliberation. "Young
Parkinson?" he presently suggested.

"I thought I had forgotten him. I didn't know I cared--I didn't know I
_could_ care so much--" And there was a note in her voice which thrust
the poor colonel into an abyss of consternation.

"Remember that these people are your guests," he said, in perfect
earnest.

"--and I refused him this afternoon for the last time, and he is going
away to-morrow--"

But here Judge Allardyce broke in, to tell Miss Stapylton of the
pleasure with which he had _nolle prosequied_ the case against Tom
Bellingham.

"A son of my old schoolmate, ma'am," the judge explained. "A Bellingham
of Assequin. Oh, indiscreet of course--but, God bless my soul! when were
the Bellinghams anything else? The boy regretted it as much as anybody."

And she listened with almost morbid curiosity concerning the finer
details of legal intricacy.

Colonel Musgrave was mid-course in an anecdote which the lady upon the
other side of him found wickedly amusing.

He was very gay. He had presently secured the attention of the company
at large, and held it through a good half-hour; for by common consent
Rudolph Musgrave was at his best to-night, and Lichfield found his best
worth listening to.

"Grinning old popinjay!" thought Mr. Parkinson; and envied him and
internally noted, and with an unholy fervor cursed, the adroitness of
intonation and the discreetly modulated gesture with which the colonel
gave to every point of his merry-Andrewing its precise value.

The colonel's mind was working busily on matters oddly apart from those
of which he talked. He wanted this girl next to him--at whom he did not
look. He loved her as that whippersnapper yonder was not capable of
loving anyone. Young people had these fancies; and they outlived them,
as the colonel knew of his own experience. Let matters take their course
unhindered, at all events by him. For it was less his part than that of
any other man alive to interfere when Rudolph Musgrave stood within a
finger's reach of, at worst, his own prosperity and happiness.

He would convey no note to Roger Stapylton. Let the banker announce the
engagement. Let the young fellow go to the devil. Colonel Musgrave would
marry the girl and make Patricia, at worst, content. To do otherwise,
even to hesitate, would be the emptiest quixotism....

Then came the fatal thought, "But what a gesture!" To fling away his
happiness--yes, even his worldly fortune,--and to do it smilingly!
Patricia must, perforce, admire him all her life.

Then as old Stapylton stirred in his chair and broke into a wide
premonitory smile, Colonel Musgrave rose to his feet. And of that
company Clarice Pendomer at least thought of how like he was to the boy
who had fought the famous duel with George Pendomer some fifteen years
ago.

Ensued a felicitous speech. Rudolph Musgrave was familiar with his
audience. And therefore:

Colonel Musgrave alluded briefly to the pleasure he took in addressing
such a gathering. He believed no other State in the 'Union could have
afforded an assembly of more distinguished men and fairer women. But the
fact was not unnatural; they might recall the venerable saying that
blood will tell? Well, it was their peculiar privilege to represent
to-day that sturdy stock which, when this great republic was in the
pangs of birth, had with sword and pen and oratory discomfited the
hirelings of England and given to history the undying names of several
Revolutionary patriots,--all of whom he enumerated with the customary
pause after each cognomen to allow for the customary applause.

And theirs, too, was the blood of those heroic men who fought more
recently beneath the stars and bars, as bravely, he would make bold to
say, as Leonidas at Thermopylae, in defense of their loved Southland.
Right, he conceded, had not triumphed here. For hordes of brutal
soldiery had invaded the fertile soil, the tempest of war had swept the
land and left it desolate. The South lay battered and bruised, and pros
trate in blood, the "Niobe of nations," as sad a victim of ingratitude
as King Lear.

The colonel touched upon the time when buzzards, in the guise of
carpet-baggers, had battened upon the recumbent form; and spoke
slightingly of divers persons of antiquity as compared with various
Confederate leaders, whose names were greeted with approving nods and
ripples of polite enthusiasm.

But the South, and in particular the grand old Commonwealth which they
inhabited, he stated, had not long sat among the ruins of her temples,
like a sorrowing priestess with veiled eyes and a depressed soul,
mourning for that which had been. Like the fabled Phoenix, she had risen
from the ashes of her past. To-day she was once more to be seen in her
hereditary position, the brightest gem in all that glorious galaxy of
States which made America the envy of every other nation. Her
battlefields converted into building lots, tall factories smoked where
once a holocaust had flamed, and where cannon had roared you heard
to-day the tinkle of the school bell. Such progress was without a
parallel.

Nor was there any need for him, he was assured, to mention the
imperishable names of their dear homeland's poets and statesmen of
to-day, the orators and philanthropists and prominent business-men who
jostled one another in her splendid, new asphalted streets, since all
were quite familiar to his audience,--as familiar, he would venture to
predict, as they would eventually be to the most cherished recollections
of Macaulay's prophesied New Zealander, when this notorious antipodean
should pay his long expected visit to the ruins of St. Paul's.

In fine, by a natural series of transitions, Colonel Musgrave thus
worked around to "the very pleasing duty with which our host, in view of
the long and intimate connection between our families, has seen fit to
honor me"--which was, it developed, to announce the imminent marriage of
Miss Patricia Stapylton and Mr. Joseph Parkinson.

It may conservatively be stated that everyone was surprised.

Old Stapylton had half risen, with a purple face.

The colonel viewed him with a look of bland interrogation.

There was silence for a heart-beat.

Then Stapylton lowered his eyes, if just because the laws of caste had
triumphed, and in consequence his glance crossed that of his daughter,
who sat motionless regarding him. She was an unusually pretty girl, he
thought, and he had always been inordinately proud of her. It was not
pride she seemed to beg him muster now. Patricia through that moment was
not the fine daughter the old man was sometimes half afraid of. She was,
too, like a certain defiant person--oh, of an incredible beauty, such
as women had not any longer!--who had hastily put aside her bonnet and
had looked at a young Roger Stapylton in much this fashion very long
ago, because the minister was coming downstairs, and they would
presently be man and wife,--provided always her pursuing brothers did
not arrive in time....

Old Roger Stapylton cleared his throat.

Old Roger Stapylton said, half sheepishly: "My foot's asleep, that's
all. I beg everybody's pardon, I'm sure. Please go on"--he had come
within an ace of saying "Mr. Rudolph," and only in the nick of time did
he continue, "Colonel Musgrave."

So the colonel continued in time-hallowed form, with happy allusions to
Mr. Parkinson's anterior success as an engineer before he came "like a
young Lochinvar to wrest away his beautiful and popular fiancée from us
fainthearted fellows of Lichfield"; touched of course upon the colonel's
personal comminglement of envy and rage, and so on, as an old bachelor
who saw too late what he had missed in life; and concluded by proposing
the health of the young couple.

This was drunk with all the honors.




VI


Upon what Patricia said to the colonel in the drawing-room, what Joe
Parkinson blurted out in the hall, and chief of all, what Roger
Stapylton asseverated to Rudolph Musgrave in the library, after the
other guests had gone, it is unnecessary to dwell in this place. To each
of these in various fashions did Colonel Musgrave explain such reasons
as, he variously explained, must seem to any gentleman sufficient cause
for acting as he had done; but most candidly, and even with a touch of
eloquence, to Roger Stapylton.

"You are like your grandfather, sir, at times," the latter said,
inconsequently enough, when the colonel had finished.

And Rudolph Musgrave gave a little bowing gesture, with an entire
gravity. He knew it was the highest tribute that Stapylton could pay to
any man.

"She's a daughter any father might be proud of," said the banker, also.
He removed his cigar from his mouth and looked at it critically. "She's
rather like her mother sometimes," he said carelessly. "Her mother made
a runaway match, you may remember--Damn' poor cigar, this. But no, you
wouldn't, I reckon. I had branched out into cotton then and had a little
place just outside of Chiswick--"

So that, all in all, Colonel Musgrave returned homeward not entirely
dissatisfied.




VII


The colonel sat for a long while before his fire that night. The room
seemed less comfortable than he had ever known it. So many of his books
and pictures and other furnishings had been already carried to Matocton
that the walls were a little bare. Also there was a formidable pile of
bills upon the table by him,--from contractors and upholsterers and
furniture-houses, and so on, who had been concerned in the late
renovation of Matocton,--the heralds of a host he hardly saw his way to
dealing with.

He had flung away a deal of money that evening, with something which to
him was dearer. Had you attempted to condole with him he would not have
understood you.

"But what would you have had a gentleman do, sir?" Colonel Musgrave
would have said, in real perplexity.

Besides, it was, in fact, not sorrow that he felt, rather it was
contentment, when he remembered the girl's present happiness; and what
alone depressed the colonel's courtly affability toward the universe at
large was the queer, horrible new sense of being somehow out of touch
with yesterday's so comfortable world, of being out-moded, of being
almost old.

"Eh, well!" he said; "I am of a certain age undoubtedly."

By an odd turn the colonel thought of how his friends of his own class
and generation had honestly admired the after-dinner speech which he had
made that evening. And he smiled, but very tenderly, because they were
all men and women whom he loved.

"The most of us have known each other for a long while. The most of us,
in fact, are of a certain age.... I think no people ever met the sorry
problem that we faced. For we were born the masters of a leisured,
ordered world; and by a tragic quirk of destiny were thrust into a quite
new planet, where we were for a while the inferiors, and after that just
the competitors of yesterday's slaves.

"We couldn't meet the new conditions. Oh, for the love of heaven, let us
be frank, and confess that we have not met them as things practical go.
We hadn't the training for it. A man who has not been taught to swim may
rationally be excused for preferring to sit upon the bank; and should he
elect to ornament his idleness with protestations that he is
self-evidently an excellent swimmer, because once upon a time his
progenitors were the only people in the world who had the slightest
conception of how to perform a natatorial masterpiece, the thing is
simply human nature. Talking chokes nobody, worse luck.

"And yet we haven't done so badly. For the most part we have sat upon
the bank our whole lives long. We have produced nothing--after
all--which was absolutely earth-staggering; and we have talked a deal of
clap-trap. But meanwhile we have at least enhanced the comeliness of our
particular sand-bar. We have lived a courteous and tranquil and
independent life thereon, just as our fathers taught us. It may be--in
the final outcome of things--that will be found an even finer pursuit
than the old one of producing Presidents.

"Besides, we have produced ourselves. We have been gentlefolk in spite
of all, we have been true even in our iniquities to the traditions of
our race. No, I cannot assert that these traditions always square with
ethics or even with the Decalogue, for we have added a very complex
Eleventh Commandment concerning honor. And for the rest, we have
defiantly embroidered life, and indomitably we have converted the
commonest happening of life into a comely thing. We have been artists if
not artizans."

There was upon the table a large photograph in sepia of Patricia
Stapylton. He studied this now. She was very beautiful, he thought.

"'Nor thou detain her vesture's hem'--" said the colonel aloud. "Oh,
that infernal Yankee understood, even though he was born in Boston!" And
this as coming from a Musgrave of Matocton, may fairly be considered as
a sweeping tribute to the author of _Give All to Love_.

Colonel Musgrave was intent upon the portrait.... So! she had chosen at
last between himself and this young fellow, a workman born of workmen,
who went about the world building bridges and canals and tunnels and
such, in those far countries which were to Colonel Musgrave just so many
gray or pink or fawn-colored splotches on the map. It seemed to Colonel
Musgrave almost an allegory.

So Colonel Musgrave filled a glass with the famed Lafayette madeira of
Matocton, and solemnly drank yet another toast. He loved to do, as you
already know, that which was colorful.

"To this new South," he said. "To this new South that has not any longer
need of me or of my kind.

"To this new South! She does not gaze unwillingly, nor too complacently,
upon old years, and dares concede that but with loss of manliness may
any man encroach upon the heritage of a dog or of a trotting-horse, and
consider the exploits of an ancestor to guarantee an innate and personal
excellence.

"For to her all former glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with
her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain
speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of
that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with augmenting
strokes."

       *       *       *       *       *

And yet--"It may be he will serve you better. But, oh, it isn't
possible that he should love you more than I," said Colonel Musgrave of
Matocton.

The man was destined to remember that utterance--and, with the
recollection, to laugh not altogether in either scorn or merriment.




PART FOUR - APPRECIATION

  "You have chosen; and I cry content thereto,
  And cry your pardon also, and am reproved
  In that I took you for a woman I loved
  Odd centuries ago, and would undo
  That curious error. Nay, your eyes are blue,
  Your speech is gracious, but you are not she,
  And I am older--and changed how utterly!--
  I am no longer I, you are not you.

  "Time, destined as we thought but to befriend
  And guerdon love like ours, finds you beset
  With joys and griefs I neither share nor mend
  Who am a stranger; and we two are met
  Nor wholly glad nor sorry; and the end
  Of too much laughter is a faint regret."

R.E. TOWNSEND. _Sonnets for Elena._




I


Next morning Rudolph Musgrave found the world no longer an impassioned
place, but simply a familiar habitation,--no longer the wrestling-ground
of big emotions, indeed, but undoubtedly a spot, whatever were its other
pretensions to praise, wherein one was at home. He breakfasted on ham
and eggs, in a state of tolerable equanimity; and mildly wondered at
himself for doing it.

The colonel was deep in a heraldic design and was whistling through his
teeth when Patricia came into the Library. He looked up, with the
outlines of a frown vanishing like pencilings under the india-rubber of
professional courtesy,--for he was denoting _or_ at the moment, which is
fussy work, as it consists exclusively of dots.

Then his chair scraped audibly upon the floor as he pushed it from him.
It occurred to Rudolph Musgrave after an interval that he was still
half-way between sitting and standing, and that his mouth was open....

He could hear a huckster outside on Regis Avenue. The colonel never
forgot the man was crying "Fresh oranges!"

"He kissed me, Olaf. Yes, I let him kiss me, even after he had asked me
if he could. No sensible girl would ever do that, of course. And then I
knew--"

Patricia was horribly frightened.

"And afterwards the jackass-fool made matters worse by calling me 'his
darling.' There is no more hateful word in the English language than
'darling.' It sounds like castor-oil tastes, or a snail looks after you
have put salt on him."

The colonel deliberated this information; and he appeared to understand.

"So Parkinson has gone the way of Pevensey,--. and of I wonder how many
others? Well, may Heaven be very gracious to us both!" he said. "For I
am going to do it."

Then composedly he took up the telephone upon his desk and called Roger
Stapylton.

"I want you to come at once to Dr. Rabbet's,--yes, the rectory, next
door to St. Luke's. Patricia and I are to be married there in half an
hour. We are on our way to the City Hall to get the license now.... No,
she might change her mind again, you see.... I have not the least notion
how it happened. I don't care.... Then you will have to be rude to him
or else not see your only daughter married.... Kindly permit me to
repeat, sir, that I don't care about that or anything else. And for the
rest, Patricia was twenty-one last December."

The colonel hung up the receiver. "And now," he said, "we are going to
the City Hall."

"Are you?" said Patricia, with courteous interest. "Well, my way lies
uptown. I have to stop in at Greenberg's and get a mustard plaster for
the parrot."

He had his hat by this. "It isn't cool enough for me to need an
overcoat, is it?"

"I think you must be crazy," she said, sharply.

"Of course I am. So I am going to marry you."

"Let me go--! Oh, and I had thought you were a gentleman--."

"I fear that at present I am simply masculine." He became aware that his
hands, in gripping both her shoulders, were hurting the girl.

"Come now," he continued, "will you go quietly or will I have to carry
you?"

She said, "And you would, too--." She spoke in wonder, for Patricia had
glimpsed an unguessed Rudolph Musgrave.

His hands went under her arm-pits and he lifted her like a feather. He
held her thus at arm's length.

"You--you adorable whirligig!" he laughed. "I am a stronger animal than
you. It would be as easy for me to murder you as it would be for you to
kill one of those flies on the window-pane. Do you quite understand that
fact, Patricia?"

"Oh, but you are an idiot--."

"In wanting you, my dear?"

"Please put me down."

She thoroughly enjoyed her helplessness. He saw it, long before he
lowered her.

"Why, not so much in that," said Miss Stapylton, "because inasmuch as I
am a woman of superlative charm, of course you can't help yourself. But
how do you know that Dr. Rabbet may not be somewhere else, harrying a
defenseless barkeeper, or superintending the making of dress-shirt
protectors for the Hottentots, or doing something else clerical, when we
get to the rectory?"

After an irrelevant interlude she stamped her foot.

"I don't care what you say, I won't marry an atheist. If you had the
least respect for his cloth, Olaf, you would call him up and
arrange--Oh, well! whatever you want to arrange--and permit me to powder
my nose without being bothered, because I don't want people to think you
are marrying a second helping to butter, and I never did like that
Baptist man on the block above, anyhow. And besides," said Patricia, as
with the occurrence of a new view-point, "think what a delicious scandal
it will create!"




II


Patricia spoke the truth. By supper-time Lichfield had so industriously
embroidered the Stapylton dinner and the ensuing marriage with
hypotheses and explanations and unparented rumors that none of the
participants in the affair but could advantageously have exchanged
reputations with Benedict Arnold or Lucretia Borgia, had Lichfield
believed a tithe of what Lichfield was repeating.

A duel was of course anticipated between Mr. Parkinson and Colonel
Musgrave, and the colonel indeed offered, through Major Wadleigh, any
satisfaction which Mr. Parkinson might desire.

The engineer, with garnishments of profanity, considered dueling to be a
painstakingly-described absurdity and wished "the old popinjay" joy of
his bargain.

Lichfield felt that only showed what came of treating poor-white trash
as your equals, and gloried in the salutary moral.




III


Meanwhile the two originators of so much Lichfieldian diversion were not
unhappy.

But indeed it were irreverent even to try to express the happiness of
their earlier married life ...

They were an ill-matched couple in so many ways that no long-headed
person could conceivably have anticipated--in the outcome--more than
decorous tolerance of each other. For apart from the disparity in age
and tastes and rearing, there was always the fact to be weighed that in
marrying the only child of a wealthy man Rudolph Musgrave was making
what Lichfield called "an eminently sensible match"--than which, as
Lichfield knew, there is no more infallible recipe for discord.

In this case the axiom seemed, after the manner of all general rules, to
bulwark itself with an exception. Colonel Musgrave continued to emanate
an air of contentment which fell perilously short of fatuity; and that
Patricia was honestly fond of him was evident to the most impecunious of
Lichfield's bachelors.

True, curtains had been lifted, a little by a little. Patricia could
hardly have told you at what exact moment it was that she discovered
Miss Agatha--who continued of course to live with them--was a
dipsomaniac. Very certainly Rudolph Musgrave was not Patricia's
informant; it is doubtful if the colonel ever conceded his sister's
infirmity in his most private meditations; so that Patricia found the
cause of Miss Agatha's "attacks" to be an open secret of which everyone
in the house seemed aware and of which by tacit agreement nobody ever
spoke. It bewildered Patricia, at first, to find that as concerned
Lichfield at large any over-indulgence in alcohol by a member of the
Musgrave family was satisfactorily accounted for by the matter-of-course
statement that the Musgraves usually "drank,"--just as the Allardyces
notoriously perpetuated the taint of insanity, and the Townsends were
proverbially unable "to let women alone," and the Vartreys were
deplorably prone to dabble in literature. These things had been for a
long while just as they were to-day; and therefore (Lichfield estimated)
they must be reasonable.

Then, too, Patricia would have preferred to have been rid of the old
mulatto woman Virginia, because it was through Virginia that Miss Agatha
furtively procured intoxicants. But Rudolph Musgrave would not consider
Virginia's leaving. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many
years of faithful service" was the formula with which he dismissed the
suggestion ... Afterward Patricia learned from Miss Agatha of the wrong
that had been done Virginia by Olaf's uncle, Senator Edward Musgrave,
the noted ante-bellum orator, and understood that Olaf--without, of
course, conceding it to himself, because that was Olaf's way--was trying
to make reparation. Patricia respected the sentiment, and continued to
fret under its manifestation.

Miss Agatha also told Patricia of how the son of Virginia and Senator
Musgrave had come to a disastrous end--"lynched in Texas, I believe,
only it may not have been Texas. And indeed when I come to think of it,
I don't believe it was, because I know we first heard of it on a Monday,
and Virginia couldn't do the washing that week and I had to send it out.
And for the usual crime, of course. It simply shows you how much better
off the darkies were before the War," Miss Agatha said.

Patricia refrained from comment, not being willing to consider the
deduction strained. For love is a contagious infection; and loving
Rudolph Musgrave so much, Patricia must perforce love any person whom he
loved as conscientiously as she would have strangled any person with
whom he had flirted.

And yet, to Patricia, it was beginning to seem that Patricia Musgrave
was not living, altogether, in that Lichfield which John Charteris has
made immortal--"that nursery of Free Principles" (according to the
_Lichfield Courier-Herald_) "wherein so many statesmen,
lieutenants-general and orators were trained to further the faith of
their fathers, to thrill the listening senates, draft constitutions, and
bruise the paws of the British lion."




IV


It may be remembered that Lichfield had asked long ago, "But who, pray,
are the Stapyltons?" It was characteristic of Colonel Musgrave that he
went about answering the question without delay. The Stapletons--for
"Stapylton" was a happy innovation of Roger Stapylton's dead wife--the
colonel knew to have been farmers in Brummell County, and Brummell
Courthouse is within an hour's ride, by rail, of Lichfield.

So he set about his labor of love.

And in it he excelled himself. The records of Brummell date back to 1750
and are voluminous; but Rudolph Musgrave did not overlook an item in any
Will Book, or in any Orders of the Court, that pertained, however
remotely, to the Stapletons. Then he renewed his labors at the
courthouse of the older county from which Brummell was formed in 1750,
and through many fragmentary, evil-odored and unindexed volumes
indefatigably pursued the family's fortune back to the immigration of
its American progenitor in 1619,--and, by the happiest fatality, upon
the same _Bona Nova_ which enabled the first American Musgrave to grace
the Colony of Virginia with his presence. It could no longer be said
that the wife of a Musgrave of Matocton lacked an authentic and
tolerably ancient pedigree.

The colonel made a book of his Stapyltonian researches which he
vaingloriously proclaimed to be the stupidest reading within the ample
field of uninteresting printed English. Patricia was allowed to see no
word of it until the first ten copies had come from the printer's, very
splendid in green "art-vellum" and stamped with the Stapylton
coat-of-arms in gold.

She read the book. "It is perfectly superb," was her verdict. "It is as
dear as remembered kisses after death and as sweet as a plaintiff in a
breach-of-promise suit. Only I would have preferred it served with a few
kings and dukes for parsley. The Stapletons don't seem to have been
anything but perfectly respectable mediocrities."

The colonel smiled. At the bottom of his heart he shared Patricia's
regret that the Stapylton pedigree was unadorned by a potentate, because
nobody can stay unimpressed by a popular superstition, however crass the
thing may be. But for all this, an appraisal of himself and his own
achievements profusely showed high lineage is not invariably a guarantee
of excellence; and so he smiled and said:

"There are two ends to every stick. It was the Stapletons and others of
their sort, rather than any soft-handed Musgraves, who converted a
wilderness, a little by a little, into the America of to-day. The task
was tediously achieved, and without ostentation; and always the ship had
its resplendent figure-head, as always it had its hidden, nay! grimy,
engines, which propelled the ship. And, however direfully America may
differ from Utopia, to have assisted in the making of America is no mean
distinction. We Musgraves and our peers, I sometimes think, may possibly
have been just gaudy autumn leaves which happened to lie in the path of
a high wind. And to cut a gallant figure in such circumstances does not
necessarily prove the performer to be a _rara avis_, even though he
rides the whirlwind quite as splendidly as any bird existent."

Patricia fluttered, and as lightly and irresponsibly as a wren might
have done, perched on his knee.

"No! there is really something in heredity, after all. Now, you are a
Musgrave in every vein of you. It always seems like a sort of flippancy
for you to appear in public without a stock and a tarnished gilt frame
with most of the gilt knocked off and a catalogue-number tucked in the
corner." Patricia spoke without any regard for punctuation. "And I am so
unlike you. I am only a Stapylton. I do hope you don't mind my being
merely a Stapylton, Olaf, because if only I wasn't too modest to even
think of alluding to the circumstance, I would try to tell you about the
tiniest fraction of how much a certain ravishingly beautiful
half-strainer loves you, Olaf, and the consequences would be
deplorable."

"My dear----" he began.

"Ouch!" said Patricia; "you are tickling me. You don't shave half as
often as you used to, do you? No, nowadays you think you have me safe
and don't have to bother about being attractive. If I had a music-box I
could put your face into it and play all sorts of tunes, only I prefer
to look at it. You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever. And
besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the
House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my
father's side, too, doesn't it, Olaf?"

The colonel laughed. "Madam Vanity!" said he, "I repeat that to be
descended of a line of czars or from a house of emperors is, at the
worst, an empty braggartism, or, at best--upon the plea of heredity--a
handy palliation for iniquity; and to be descended of sturdy and honest
and clean-blooded folk is beyond doubt preferable, since upon quite
similar grounds it entitles one to hope that even now, 'when their
generation is gone, when their play is over, when their panorama is
withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world,' there may yet survive
of them 'some few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have
retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.'"

Patricia--with eyes widened in admiration at his rhetoric,--had turned
an enticing shade of pink.

"I am glad of that," she said.

She snuggled so close he could not see her face now. She was to all
appearances attempting to twist the top-button from his coat.

"I am very glad that it entitles one to hope--about the
children--Because--"

The colonel lifted her a little from him. He did not say anything. But
he was regarding her half in wonder and one-half in worship.

She, too, was silent. Presently she nodded.

He kissed her as one does a very holy relic.

It was a moment to look back upon always. There was no period in Rudolph
Musgrave's life when he could not look back upon this instant and exult
because it had been his.

       *       *       *       *       *

Only, Patricia found out afterward, with an inexplicable disappointment,
that her husband had not been talking extempore, but was freely quoting
his "Compiler's Foreword" just as it figured in the printed book.

One judges this posturing, so inevitable of detection, to have been as
significant of much in Rudolph Musgrave as was the fact of its belated
discovery characteristic of Patricia.

Yet she had read this book about her family from purely normal motives:
first, to make certain how old her various cousins were; secondly, to
gloat over any traces of distinction such as her ancestry afforded;
thirdly, to note with what exaggerated importance the text seemed to
accredit those relatives she did not esteem, and mentally to annotate
each page with unprintable events "which _everybody_ knew about"; and
fourthly, to reflect, as with a gush of steadily augmenting love, how
dear and how unpractical it was of Olaf to have concocted these
date-bristling pages--so staunch and blind in his misguided gratitude
toward those otherwise uninteresting people who had rendered possible
the existence of a Patricia.




V


Matters went badly with Patricia in the ensuing months. Her mother's
blood told here, as Colonel Musgrave saw with disquietude. He knew the
women of his race had by ordinary been unfit for childbearing; indeed,
the daughters of this famous house had long, in a grim routine,
perished, just as Patricia's mother had done, in their first maternal
essay. There were many hideous histories the colonel could have told you
of, unmeet to be set down, and he was familiar with this talk of pelvic
anomalies which were congenital. But he had never thought of Patricia,
till this, as being his kinswoman, and in part a Musgrave.

And even now the Stapylton blood that was in her pulled Patricia through
long weeks of anguish. Surgeons dealt with her very horribly in a famed
Northern hospital, whither she had been removed. By her obdurate
request--and secretly, to his own preference, since it was never in his
power to meet discomfort willingly--Colonel Musgrave had remained in
Lichfield. Patricia knew that officious people would tell him her life
could be saved only by the destruction of an unborn boy.

She never questioned her child would be a boy. She knew that Olaf wanted
a boy.

"Oh, even more than he does me, daddy. And so he mustn't know, you see,
until it is all over. Because Olaf is such an ill-informed person that
he really believes he prefers me."

"Pat," her father inconsequently said, "I'm proud of you! And--and, by
God, if I _want_ to cry, I guess I am old enough to know my own mind!
And I'll help you in this if you'll only promise not to die in spite of
what these damn' doctors say, because you're _mine_, Pat, and so you
realize a bargain is a bargain."

"Yes--I am really yours, daddy. It is just my crazy body that is a
Musgrave," Patricia explained. "The real me is an unfortunate Stapylton
who has somehow got locked up in the wrong house. It is not a desirable
residence, you know, daddy. No modern improvements, for instance. But I
have to live in it!... Still, I have not the least intention of dying,
and I solemnly promise that I won't."

So these two hoodwinked Rudolph Musgrave, and brought it about by
subterfuge that his child was born. At most he vaguely understood that
Patricia was having rather a hard time of it, and steadfastly drugged
this knowledge by the performance of trivialities. He was eating a
cucumber sandwich at the moment young Roger Musgrave came into the
world, and by that action very nearly accomplished Patricia's death.




VI


And the gods cursed Roger Stapylton with such a pride in, and so great a
love for, his only grandson that the old man could hardly bear to be out
of the infant's presence. He was frequently in Lichfield nowadays; and
he renewed his demands that Rudolph Musgrave give up the
exhaustively-particularized librarianship, so that "the little coot"
would be removed to New York and all three of them be with Roger
Stapylton always.

Patricia had not been well since little Roger's birth.

It was a peaked and shrewish Patricia, rather than Rudolph Musgrave, who
fought out the long and obstinate battle with Roger Stapylton.

She was jealous at the bottom of her heart. She would not have anyone,
not even her father, be too fond of what was preëminently hers; the
world at large, including Rudolph Musgrave, was at liberty to adore her
boy, as was perfectly natural, but not to meddle: and in fine, Patricia
was both hysterical and vixenish whenever a giving up of the Library
work was suggested.

The old man did not quarrel with her. And with Roger Stapylton's
loneliness in these days, and the long thoughts it bred, we have nothing
here to do. But when he died, stricken without warning, some five years
after Patricia's marriage, his will was discovered to bequeath
practically his entire fortune to little Roger Musgrave when the child
should come of age; and to Rudolph Musgrave, as Patricia's husband, what
was a reasonable income when judged by Lichfield's unexacting standards
rather than by Patricia's anticipations. In a word, Patricia found that
she and the colonel could for the future count upon a little more than
half of the income she had previously been allowed by Roger Stapylton.

"It isn't fair!" she said. "It's monstrous! And all because you were so
obstinate about your picayune Library!"

"Patricia--" he began.

"Oh, I tell you it's absurd, Olaf! The money logically ought to have
been left to me. And here I will have to come to you for every penny of
_my_ money. And Heaven knows I have had to scrimp enough to support us
all on what I used to have--Olaf," Patricia said, in another voice,
"Olaf! why, what is it, dear?"

"I was reflecting," said Colonel Musgrave, "that, as you justly observe,
both Agatha and I have been practically indebted to you for our support
these past five years--"




VII


It must be enregistered, not to the man's credit, but rather as a simple
fact, that it was never within Colonel Musgrave's power to forget the
incident immediately recorded.

He forgave; when Patricia wept, seeing how leaden-colored his handsome
face had turned, he forgave as promptly and as freely as he was learning
to pardon the telling of a serviceable lie, or the perpetration of an
occasional barbarism in speech, by Patricia. For he, a Musgrave of
Matocton, had married a Stapylton; he had begun to comprehend that their
standards were different, and that some daily conflict between these
standards was inevitable.

And besides, as it has been veraciously observed, the truth of an insult
is the barb which prevents its retraction. Patricia spoke the truth:
Rudolph Musgrave and all those rationally reliant upon Rudolph Musgrave
for support, had lived for some five years upon the money which they
owed to Patricia. He saw about him other scions of old families who
accepted such circumstances blithely: but, he said, he was a Musgrave
of Matocton; and, he reflected, in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed
is necessarily very unhappy.

He did not mean to touch a penny of such moneys as Roger Stapylton had
bequeathed to him; for the colonel considered--now--it was a man's duty
personally to support his wife and child and sister. And he vigorously
attempted to discharge this obligation, alike by virtue of his salary at
the Library, and by spasmodic raids upon his tiny capital, and--chief of
all--by speculation in the Stock Market.

Oddly enough, his ventures were through a long while--for the most
part--successful. Here he builded a desperate edifice whose foundations
were his social talents; and it was with quaint self-abhorrence he often
noted how the telling of a smutty jest or the insistence upon a
manifestly superfluous glass of wine had purchased from some properly
tickled magnate a much desiderated "tip."

And presently these tips misled him. So the colonel borrowed from
"Patricia's account."

And on this occasion he guessed correctly.

And then he stumbled upon such a chance for reinvestment as does not
often arrive. And so he borrowed a trifle more in common justice to
Patricia....




VIII


When those then famous warriors, Colonel Gaynor and Captain Green, were
obstinately fighting extradition in Quebec; when in Washington the
Senate was wording a suitable resolution wherewith to congratulate Cuba
upon that island's brand-new independence; and when Messieurs
Fitzsimmons and Jeffries were making amicable arrangements in San
Francisco to fight for the world's championship:--at this remote time,
in Chicago (on the same day, indeed, that in this very city Mr. S.E.
Gross was legally declared the author of a play called Cyrano de
Bergerac), the Sons of the Colonial Governors opened their tenth
biennial convention. You may depend upon it that Colonel Rudolph
Musgrave represented the Lichfield chapter.

It was two days later the telegram arrived. It read:

  _Agatha very ill come to me roger in perfect health._
  PATRICIA.

He noted how with Stapyltonian thrift Patricia telegraphed ten words
precisely....

And when he had reached home, late in the evening, the colonel, not
having taken his bunch of keys with him, laid down his dress-suit case
on the dark porch, and reached out one hand to the door-bell. He found
it muffled with some flimsy, gritty fabric. He did not ring.

Upon the porch was a rustic bench. He sat upon it for a quarter of an
hour--precisely where he had first talked with Agatha about Patricia's
first coming to Lichfield.... Once the door of a house across the street
was opened, with a widening gush of amber light wherein he saw three
women fitting wraps about them. One of them was adjusting a lace scarf
above her hair.

"No, we're not a _bit_ afraid--Just around the corner, you know--_Such_
a pleasant evening----" Their voices carried far in the still night.

Rudolph Musgrave was not thinking of anything. Presently he went around
through the side entrance, and thus came into the kitchen, where the old
mulattress, Virginia, was sitting alone. The room was very hot.... In
Agatha's time supper would have been cooked upon the gas-range in the
cellar, he reflected.... Virginia had risen and made as though to take
his dress-suit case, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an
idol's.

"No--don't bother, Virginia," said Colonel Musgrave.

He met Patricia in the dining-room, on her way to the kitchen. She had
not chosen--as even the most sensible of us will instinctively decline
to do--to vex the quiet of a house wherein death was by ringing a bell.

Holding his hand in hers, fondling it as she talked, Patricia told how
three nights before Miss Agatha had been "queer, you know," at supper.
Patricia had not liked to leave her, but it was the night of the Woman's
Club's second Whist Tournament. And Virginia had promised to watch Miss
Agatha. And, anyhow, Miss Agatha had gone to bed before Patricia left
the house, and _anybody_ would have thought she was going to sleep all
night. And, in fine, Patricia's return at a drizzling half-past eleven
had found Miss Agatha sitting in the garden, in her night-dress only,
weeping over fancied grievances--and Virginia asleep in the kitchen. And
Agatha had died that afternoon of pneumonia.

Even in the last half-stupor she was asking always when would Rudolph
come? Patricia told him....

Rudolph Musgrave did not say anything. Without any apparent emotion he
put Patricia aside, much as he did the dress-suit case which he had
forgotten to lay down until Patricia had ended her recital.

He went upstairs--to the front room, Patricia's bedroom. Patricia
followed him.

Agatha's body lay upon the bed, with a sheet over all. The undertaker's
skill had arranged everything with smug and horrible tranquillity.

Rudolph Musgrave remembered he was forty-six years old; and when in all
these years had there been a moment when Agatha--the real Agatha--had
not known that what he had done was self-evidently correct, because
otherwise Rudolph would not have done it?

"I trust you enjoyed your whist-game, Patricia."

"Well, I couldn't help it. I'm not running a sanitarium. I wasn't
responsible for her eternal drinking."

The words skipped out of either mouth like gleeful little devils.

Then both were afraid, and both were as icily tranquil as the thing upon
the bed. You could not hear anything except the clock upon the mantel.
Colonel Musgrave went to the mantel, opened the clock, and with an odd
deliberation removed the pendulum from its hook. Followed one metallic
gasp, as of indignation, and then silence.

He spoke, still staring at the clock, his back turned to Patricia. "You
must be utterly worn out. You had better go to bed."

He shifted by the fraction of an inch the old-fashioned "hand-colored"
daguerreotype of his father in Confederate uniform. "Please don't wear
that black dress again. It is no cause for mourning that we are rid of
an encumbrance."

Behind him, very far away, it seemed, he heard Patricia wailing,
"Olaf----!"

Colonel Musgrave turned without any haste. "Please go," he said, and
appeared to plead with her. "You must be frightfully tired. I am sorry
that I was not here. I seem always to evade my responsibilities,
somehow--"

Then he began to laugh. "It _is_ rather amusing, after all. Agatha was
the most noble person I have ever known. The--this habit of hers to
which you have alluded was not a part of her. And I loved Agatha. And I
suppose loving is not altogether dependent upon logic. In any event, I
loved Agatha. And when I came back to her I had come home,
somehow--wherever she might be at the time. That has been true, oh, ever
since I can remember--"

He touched the dead hand now. "Please go!" he said, and he did not look
toward Patricia. "For Agatha loved me better than she did God, you know.
The curse was born in her. She had to pay for what those dead,
soft-handed Musgraves did. That is why her hands are so cold now. She
had to pay for the privilege of being a Musgrave, you see. But then we
cannot always pick and choose as to what we prefer to be."

"Oh, yes, of course, it is all my fault. Everything is my fault. But God
knows what would have become of you and your Agatha if it hadn't been
for me. Oh! oh!" Patricia wailed. "I was a child and I hadn't any better
sense, and I married you, and you've been living off my money ever
since! There hasn't been a Christmas present or a funeral wreath bought
in this house since I came into it I didn't pick out and pay for out of
my own pocket. And all the thanks I get for it is this perpetual
fault-finding, and I wish I was dead like this poor saint here. She
spent her life slaving for you. And what thanks did she get for it? Oh,
you ought to go down on your knees, Rudolph Musgrave--!"

"Please leave," he said.

"I will leave when I feel like it, and not a single minute before, and
you might just as well understand as much. You _have_ been living off my
money. Oh, you needn't go to the trouble of lying. And she did too. And
she hated me, she always hated me, because I had been fool enough to
marry you, and she carried on like a lunatic more than half the time,
and I always pretended not to notice it, and this is my reward for
trying to behave like a lady."

Patricia tossed her head. "Yes, and you needn't look at me as if I were
some sort of a bug you hadn't ever seen before and didn't approve of,
because I've seen you try that high-and-mighty trick too often for it to
work with me."

Patricia stood now beneath the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave.
She had insisted, long ago, that it be hung in her own bedroom--"because
it was through that beautiful boy we first got really acquainted, Olaf."
The boy smiles at you from the canvas, smiles ambiguously, as the
colonel now noted.

"I think you had better go," said Colonel Musgrave. "Please go,
Patricia, before I murder you."

She saw that he was speaking in perfect earnest.




IX


Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had declined to speak
with innumerable sympathetic cousins--Vartreys and Fentons and
Allardyces and Musgraves, to the fifth and sixth remove--who had come
from all quarters, with visiting-cards and low-voiced requests to be
informed "if there is anything we can possibly do."

Rudolph Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had not any strength
for anger now, and hardly for grief, Agatha had been his charge; and the
fact that he had never plucked up courage to allude to her practises was
now an enormity in which he could not quite believe. His cowardice and
its fruitage confronted him, and frightened him into a panic frenzy of
remorse.

Agatha had been his charge; and he had entrusted the stewardship to
Patricia. Between them--that Patricia might have her card-game, that he
might sit upon a platform for an hour or two with a half-dozen other
pompous fools--they had let Agatha die. There was no mercy in him for
Patricia or for himself. He wished Patricia had been a man. Had any man
--an emperor or a coal-heaver, it would not have mattered--spoken as
Patricia had done within the moment, here, within arm's reach of the
poor flesh that had been Agatha's, Rudolph Musgrave would have known his
duty. But, according to his code, it was not permitted to be
discourteous to a woman....

He caught himself with grotesque meanness wishing that Agatha had been
there,--privileged by her sex where he was fettered,--she who was so
generous of heart and so fiery of tongue at need; and comprehension that
Agatha would never abet or adore him any more smote him anew.

       *       *       *       *       *

And chance reserved for him more poignant torture. Next day, while
Rudolph Musgrave was making out the list of honorary pall-bearers, the
postman brought a letter which had been forwarded from Chicago. It was
from Agatha, written upon the morning of that day wherein later she had
been, as Patricia phrased it, "queer, you know."

He found it wildly droll to puzzle out those "crossed" four sheets of
trivialities written in an Italian hand so minute and orderly that the
finished page suggested a fly-screen. He had so often remonstrated with
Agatha about her penuriousness as concerned stationery.

"Selina Brice & the Rev'd Henry Anstruther, who now has a church in
Seattle, have announced their engagement. Stanley Haggage has gone to
Alabama to marry Leonora Bright, who moved from here a year ago. They
are both as poor as church mice, & I think marriage in such a case an
unwise step for anyone. It brings cares & anxieties enough any way,
without starting out with poverty to increase and render deeper every
trouble...."

Such was the tenor of Agatha's last letter, of the last self-expression
of that effigy upstairs who (you could see) knew everything and was not
discontent.

Here the dead spoke, omniscient; and told you that Stanley Haggage had
gone to Alabama, and that marriage brought new cares and anxieties.

"I cannot laugh," said Rudolph Musgrave, aloud. "I know the jest
deserves it. But I cannot laugh, because my upper lip seems to be made
of leather and I can't move it. And, besides, I loved Agatha to a degree
which only You and I have ever known of. She never understood quite how
I loved her. Oh, won't You make her understand just how I loved her? For
Agatha is dead, because You wanted her to be dead, and I have never told
her how much I loved her, and now I cannot ever tell her how much I
loved her. Oh, won't You please show me that You have made her
understand? or else have me struck by lightning? or do _anything_....?"

Nothing was done.




X


And afterward Rudolph Musgrave and his wife met amicably, and without
reference to their last talk. Patricia wore black-and-white for some six
months, and Colonel Musgrave accepted the compromise tacitly. All passed
with perfect smoothness between them; and anyone in Lichfield would have
told you that the Musgraves were a model couple.

She called him "Rudolph" now.

"Olaf is such a silly-sounding nickname for two old married people, you
know," Patricia estimated.

The colonel negligently said that he supposed it did sound odd.

"Only I don't think Clarice Pendomer would care about coming," he
resumed,--for the two were discussing an uncompleted list of the people
Patricia was to invite to their first house-party.

"And for heaven's sake, why not? We always have her to everything."

He could not tell her it was because the Charterises were to be among
their guests. So he said: "Oh, well--!"

"Mrs. C.B. Pendomer, then"--Patricia wrote the name with a flourish.
"Oh, you jay-bird, I'm not jealous. Everybody knows you never had any
more morals than a tom-cat on the back fence. It's a lucky thing the boy
didn't take after you, isn't it? He doesn't, not a bit. No, Harry
Pendomer is the puniest black-haired little wretch, whereas your other
son, sir, resembles his mother and is in consequence a ravishingly
beautiful person of superlative charm--"

He was staring at her so oddly that she paused. So Patricia was familiar
with that old scandal which linked his name with Clarice Pendomer's! He
was wondering if Patricia had married him in the belief that she was
marrying a man who, appraised by any standards, had acted infamously.

"I was only thinking you had better ask Judge Allardyce, Patricia. You
see, he is absolutely certain not to come--"

       *       *       *       *       *

This year the Musgraves had decided not to spend the spring alone
together at Matocton, as they had done the four preceding years.

"It looks so silly," as Patricia pointed out.

And, besides, a house-party is the most economical method,--as she also
pointed out, being born a Stapylton--of paying off your social
obligations, because you can always ask so many people who, you know,
have made other plans, and cannot accept.

       *       *       *       *       *

"So we will invite Judge Allardyce, of course," said Patricia. "I had
forgotten his court met in June. Oh, and Peter Blagden too. It had
slipped my mind his uncle was dead...."

"I learned this morning Mrs. Haggage was to lecture in Louisville on the
sixteenth. She was reading up in the Library, you see--"

"Rudolph, you are the lodestar of my existence. I will ask her to come
on the fourteenth and spend a week. I never could abide the hag, but she
has such a--There! I've made a big blot right in the middle of
'darling,' and spoiled a perfectly good sheet of paper!... You'd better
mail it at once, though, because the evening-paper may have something in
it about her lecture."




XI


Rudolph--"

"Why--er--yes, dear?"

This was after supper, and Patricia was playing solitaire. Her husband
was reading the paper.

"Agatha told me all about Virginia, you know--"

Here Colonel Musgrave frowned. "It is not a pleasant topic."

"You jay-bird, you behave entirely too much as if you were my
grandfather. As I was saying, Agatha told me all about your uncle and
Virginia," Patricia hurried on. "And how she ran away afterwards, and
hid in the woods for three days, and came to your father's plantation,
and how your father bought her, and how her son was born, and how her
son was lynched--"

"Now, really, Patricia! Surely there are other matters which may be more
profitably discussed."

"Of course. Now, for instance, why is the King of Hearts the only one
that hasn't a moustache?" Patricia peeped to see what cards lay beneath
that monarch, and upon reflection moved the King of Spades into the
vacant space. She was a devotee of solitaire and invariably cheated at
it.

She went on, absently: "But don't you see? That colored boy was your own
first cousin, and he was killed for doing exactly what his father had
done. Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of
flubdub and laid him out in state when he died--and they poured kerosene
upon the son and burned him alive. And I believe Virginia thinks that
wasn't fair."

"What do you mean?"

"I honestly believe Virginia hates the Musgraves. She is only a negro,
of course, but then she was a mother once--Oh, yes! all I need is a
black eight--" Patricia demanded, "Now look at your brother Hector--the
awfully dissipated one that died of an overdose of opiates. When it
happened wasn't Virginia taking care of him?"

"Of course. She is an invaluable nurse."

"And nobody else was here when Agatha went out into the rain. Now, what
if she had just let Agatha go, without trying to stop her? It would have
been perfectly simple. So is this. All I have to do is to take them off
now."

Colonel Musgrave negligently returned to his perusal of the afternoon
paper. "You are suggesting--if you will overlook my frankness--the most
deplorable sort of nonsense, Patricia."

"I know exactly how Balaam felt," she said, irrelevantly, and fell to
shuffling the cards. "You don't, and you won't, understand that Virginia
is a human being. In any event, I wish you would get rid of her."

"I couldn't decently do that," said Rudolph Musgrave, with careful
patience. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many years of
faithful service. Nothing more strikingly attests the folly of freeing
the negro than the unwillingness of the better class of slaves to leave
their former owners--"

"Now you are going to quote a paragraph or so from your Gracious Era. As
if I hadn't read everything you ever wrote! You are a fearful humbug in
some ways, Rudolph."

"And you are a red-headed rattlepate, madam. But seriously, Patricia,
you who were reared in the North are strangely unwilling to concede that
we of the South are after all best qualified to deal with the Negro
Problem. We know the negro as you cannot ever know him."

"You! Oh, God ha' mercy on us!" mocked Patricia. "There wasn't any Negro
Problem hereabouts, you beautiful idiot, so long as there were any
negroes. Why, to-day there is hardly one full-blooded negro in
Lichfield. There are only a thousand or so of mulattoes who share the
blood of people like your Uncle Edward. And for the most part they take
after their white kin, unfortunately. And there you have the Lichfield
Negro Problem in a nutshell. It is a venerable one and fully set forth
in the Bible. You needn't attempt to argue with me, because you are a
ninnyhammer, and I am a second Nestor. The Holy Scriptures are perfectly
explicit as to what happens to the heads of the children and their teeth
too."

"I wish you wouldn't jest about such matters--"

"Because it isn't lady-like? But, Rudolph, you know perfectly well that
I am not a lady."

"My dear!" he cried, in horror that was real, "and what on earth have I
said even to suggest--"

"Oh, not a syllable; it isn't at all the sort of thing that your sort
_says_ ... And I am not your sort. I don't know that I altogether wish I
were. But _if_ I were, it would certainly make things easier," Patricia
added sharply.

"My dear--!" he again protested.

"Now, candidly, Rudolph"--relinquishing the game, she fell to shuffling
the cards--"just count up the number of times this month that my--oh,
well! I really don't know what to call it except my deplorable omission
in failing to be born a lady--has seemed to you to yank the very last
rag off the gooseberry-bush?"

He scoffed. "What nonsense! Although, of course, Patricia--"

She nodded, mischief in her brightly-colored tiny face. "Yes, that is
just your attitude, you beautiful idiot."

"--although, of course--now, quite honestly, Patricia, I have
occasionally wished that you would not speak of sacred and--er,
physical and sociological matters in exactly the tone in which--well! in
which you sometimes do speak of them. It may sound old-fashioned, but I
have always believed that decency is quite as important in mental
affairs as it is in physical ones, and that as a consequence, a
gentlewoman should always clothe her thoughts with at least the same
care she accords her body. Oh, don't misunderstand me! Of course it
doesn't do any harm, my dear, between us. But outside--you see, for
people to know that you think about such things must necessarily give
them a false opinion of you."

Patricia meditated.

She said, with utter solemnity, "Anathema maranatha! oh, hell to damn!
may the noses of all respectable people be turned upside down and
jackasses dance eternally upon their grandmothers' graves!"

"Patricia--!" cried a shocked colonel.

"I mean every syllable of it. No, Rudolph; _I_ can't help it if the
vinaigretted beauties of your boyhood were unabridged dictionaries of
prudery. You see, I know almost all the swearwords there are. And I read
the newspapers, and medical books, and even the things that boys chalk
up on fences. In consequence I am not a bit whiteminded, because if you
use your mind at all it gets more or less dingy, just like using
anything else."

He could not help but laugh, much as he disapproved. Patricia fluttered
and, as a wren might have done, perched presently upon his knee.

"Rudolph, can't you laugh more often, and not devote so much time to
tracing out the genealogies of those silly people, and being so
tediously beautiful and good?" she asked, and with a hint of
seriousness. "Rudolph, you don't know how I would adore you if you would
rob a church or cut somebody's throat in an alley, and tell me all about
it because you knew I wouldn't betray you. You are so infernally
respectable in everything you do! How did you come to bully me that day
at the Library? It seems almost as if those two were different people...
doesn't it, Rudolph?"

"My dear," the colonel said whimsically, "I am afraid we are rather like
the shepherdess and the chimney-sweep of the fable I read you very long
ago. We climbed up so far that we could see the stars, once, very long
ago, Patricia, and we have come back to live upon the parlor table. I
suppose it happens to all the little china people."

She took his meaning. Each was aware of an odd sense of intimacy.
"Everything we have to be glad for now, Rudolph, is the rivet in
grandfather's neck. It is rather a fiasco, isn't it?"

"Eh, there are all sorts of rivets, Patricia. And the thing one cannot
do because one is what one is, need not be necessarily a cause for
grief."




XII


It was excellent to see Jack Charteris again, as Colonel Musgrave did
within a few days of this. Musgrave was unreasonably fond of the
novelist and frankly confessed it would be as preposterous to connect
Charteris with any of the accepted standards of morality as it would be
to judge an artesian-well from the standpoint of ethics.

Anne was not yet in Lichfield. She had broken the journey to visit a
maternal grand-aunt and some Virginia cousins, in Richmond, Charteris
explained, and was to come thence to Matocton.

"And so you have acquired a boy and, by my soul, a very handsome wife,
Rudolph?"

"It is sufficiently notorious," said Colonel Musgrave. "Yes, we are
quite absurdly happy." He laughed and added: "Patricia--but you don't
know her droll way of putting things--says that the only rational
complaint I can advance against her is her habit of rushing into a
hospital every month or so and having a section or two of her person
removed by surgeons. It worries me,--only, of course, it is not the
sort of thing you can talk about. And, as Patricia says, it _is_ an
unpleasant thing to realize that your wife is not leaving you through
the ordinary channels of death or of type-written decrees of the court,
but only in vulgar fractions, as it were--"

"Please don't be quite so brutal, Rudolph. It is not becoming in a
Musgrave of Matocton to speak of women in any tone other than the most
honeyed accents of chivalry."

"Oh, I was only quoting Patricia," the colonel largely said,
"and--er--Jack," he continued. "By the way, Jack, Clarice Pendomer will
be at Matocton--"

"I rejoice in her good luck," said Charteris, equably.

"--and--well! I was wondering--?"

"I can assure you that there will be no--trouble. That skeleton is
safely locked in its closet, and the key to that closet is missing--more
thanks to you. You acted very nobly in the whole affair, Rudolph. I wish
I could do things like that. As it is, of course, I shall always detest
you for having been able to do it."

Charteris said, thereafter: "I shall always envy you, though, Rudolph.
No other man I know has ever attained the good old troubadourish ideal
of _domnei_--that love which rather abhors than otherwise the notion of
possessing its object. I still believe it was a distinct relief to a
certain military officer, whose name we need not mention, when Anne
decided not to marry you."

The colonel grinned, a trifle consciously. "Well, Anne meant youth, you
comprehend, and all the things we then believed in, Jack. It would have
been decidedly difficult to live up to such a contract, and--as it
were--to fulfil every one of the implied specifications!"

"And yet"--here Charteris flicked his cigarette--"Anne ruled in the
stead of Aline Van Orden. And Aline, in turn, had followed Clarice
Pendomer. And before the coming of Clarice had Pauline Romeyne, whom
time has converted into Polly Ashmeade, reigned in the land--"

"Don't be an ass!" the colonel pleaded; and then observed,
inconsequently: "I can't somehow quite realize Aline is dead. Lord,
Lord, the letters that I wrote to her! She sent them all back, you know,
in genuine romantic fashion, after we had quarreled. I found those
boyish ravings only the other day in my father's desk at Matocton, and
skimmed them over. I shall read them through some day and appropriately
meditate over life's mysteries that are too sad for tears."

He meditated now.

"It wouldn't be quite equitable, Jack," the colonel summed it up, "if
the Aline I loved--no, I don't mean the real woman, the one you and all
the other people knew, the one that married the enterprising brewer and
died five years ago--were not waiting for me somewhere. I can't express
just what I mean, but you will understand, I know--?"

"That heaven is necessarily run on a Mohammedan basis? Why, of course,"
said Mr. Charteris. "Heaven, as I apprehend it, is a place where we
shall live eternally among those ladies of old years who never
condescended actually to inhabit any realm more tangible than that of
our boyish fancies. It is the obvious definition; and I defy you to
evolve a more enticing allurement toward becoming a deacon."

"You romancers are privileged to talk nonsense anywhere," the colonel
estimated, "and I suppose that in the Lichfield you have made famous,
Jack, you have a double right."

"Ah, but I never wrote a line concerning Lichfield. I only wrote about
the Lichfield whose existence you continue to believe in, in spite of
the fact that you are actually living in the real Lichfield," Charteris
returned. "The vitality of the legend is wonderful."

He cocked his head to one side--an habitual gesture with Charteris--and
the colonel noted, as he had often done before, how extraordinarily
reminiscent Jack was of a dried-up, quizzical black parrot. Said
Charteris:

"I love to serve that legend. I love to prattle of 'ole Marster' and
'ole Miss,' and throw in a sprinkling of 'mockin'-buds' and 'hants' and
'horg-killing time,' and of sweeping animadversions as to all 'free
niggers'; and to narrate how 'de quality use ter cum'--you spell it
c-u-m because that looks so convincingly like dialect--'ter de gret
hous.' Those are the main ingredients. And, as for the unavoidable
love-interest--" Charteris paused, grinned, and pleasantly resumed:
"Why, jes arter dat, suh, a hut Yankee cap'en, whar some uv our folks
done shoot in de laig, wuz lef on de road fer daid--a quite notorious
custom on the part of all Northern armies--un Young Miss had him fotch
up ter de gret hous, un nuss im same's he one uv de fambly, un dem two
jes fit un argufy scanlous un never spicion huccum dey's in love wid
each othuh till de War's ovuh. And there you are! I need not mention
that during the tale's progress it is necessary to introduce at least
one favorable mention of Lincoln, arrange a duel 'in de low grouns'
immediately after day-break, and have the family silver interred in the
back garden, because these points will naturally suggest themselves."

"Jack, Jack!" the colonel cried, "it is an ill bird that fouls its own
nest."

"But, believe me, I don't at heart," said Charteris, in a queer earnest
voice. "There is a sardonic imp inside me that makes me jeer at the
commoner tricks of the trade--and yet when I am practising that trade,
when I am writing of those tender-hearted, brave and gracious men and
women, and of those dear old darkies, I very often write with tears in
my eyes. I tell you this with careful airiness because it is true and
because it would embarrass me so horribly if you believed it."

Then he was off upon another tack. "And wherein, pray, have I harmed
Lichfield by imagining a dream city situated half way between Atlantis
and Avalon and peopled with superhuman persons--and by having called
this city Lichfield? The portrait did not only flatter Lichfield, it
flattered human nature. So, naturally, it pleased everybody. Yes, that,
I take it, is the true secret of romance--to induce the momentary
delusion that humanity is a superhuman race, profuse in aspiration, and
prodigal in the exercise of glorious virtues and stupendous vices. As a
matter of fact, all human passions are depressingly chicken-hearted, I
find. Were it not for the police court records, I would pessimistically
insist that all of us elect to love one person and to hate another with
very much the same enthusiasm that we display in expressing a preference
for rare roast beef as compared with the outside slice. Oh, really,
Rudolph, you have no notion how salutary it is to the self-esteem of us
romanticists to run across, even nowadays, an occasional breach of the
peace. For then sometimes--when the coachman obligingly cuts the
butler's throat in the back-alley, say--we actually presume to think for
a moment that our profession is almost as honest as that of making
counterfeit money...."

The colonel did not interrupt his brief pause of meditation. Then the
novelist said:

"Why, no; if I were ever really to attempt a tale of Lichfield, I would
not write a romance but a tragedy. I think that I would call my tragedy
_Futility_, for it would mirror the life of Lichfield with unengaging
candor; and, as a consequence, people would complain that my tragedy
lacked sustained interest, and that its participants were inconsistent;
that it had no ordered plot, no startling incidents, no high endeavors,
and no especial aim; and that it was equally deficient in all
time-hallowed provocatives of either laughter or tears. For very few
people would understand that a life such as this, when rightly viewed,
is the most pathetic tragedy conceivable."

"Oh, come, now, Jack! come, recollect that your reasoning powers are
almost as worthy of employment as your rhetorical abilities! We are not
quite so bad as that, you know. We may be a little behind the times in
Lichfield; we certainly let well enough alone, and we take things pretty
much as they come; but we meddle with nobody, and, after all, we don't
do any especial harm."

"We don't do anything whatever in especial, Rudolph. That would be
precisely the theme of my story of the real Lichfield if I were ever
bold enough to write it. There seems to be a sort of blight upon
Lichfield. Oh, yes! it would be unfair, perhaps, to contrast it with the
bigger Southern cities, like Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans; but
even the inhabitants of smaller Southern towns are beginning to buy
excursion tickets, and thereby ascertain that the twentieth century has
really begun. Yes, it is only in Lichfield I can detect the raw stuff of
a genuine tragedy; for, depend upon it, Rudolph, the most pathetic
tragedy in life is to get nothing in particular out of it."

"But, for my part, I don't see what you are driving at," the colonel
stoutly said.

And Charteris only laughed. "And I hardly expected you to do so,
Rudolph--or not yet, at least."




PART FIVE - SOUVENIR

  "I am contented by remembrances--
  Dreams of dead passions, wraiths of vanished times,
  Fragments of vows, and by-ends of old rhymes--
  Flotsam and jetsam tumbling in the seas
  Whereon, long since, put forth our argosies
  Which, bent on traffic in the Isles of Love,
  Lie foundered somewhere in some firth thereof,
  Encradled by eternal silences."

  "Thus, having come to naked bankruptcy,
  Let us part friends, as thrifty tradesmen do
  When common ventures fail, for it may be
  These battered oaths and rhymes may yet ring true
  To some fair woman's hearing, so that she
  Will listen and think of love, and I of you."

F. Ashcroft Wheeler. _Revisions_.




I


When the _Reliance_, the _Constitution_ and the _Columbia_ were holding
trial races off Newport to decide which one of these yachts should
defend the _America's_ cup; when the tone of the Japanese press as to
Russia's actions in Manchuria was beginning to grow ominous; when the
Jews of America were drafting a petition to the Czar; and when it was
rumored that the health of Pope Leo XIII was commencing to fail:--at
this remote time, the Musgraves gave their first house-party.

And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted and admired the apparent
unconcern with which John Charteris and Clarice Pendomer encountered at
Matocton. And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted with approval the
intimacy which was, obviously, flourishing between the little novelist
and Patricia.

Also Colonel Musgrave had presently good reason to lament a contretemps,
over which he was sulking when Mrs. Pendomer rustled to her seat at the
breakfast-table, with a shortness of breath that was partly due to the
stairs, and in part attributable to her youthful dress, which fitted a
trifle too perfectly.

"Waffles?" said Mrs. Pendomer. "At my age and weight the first is an
experiment and the fifth an amiable indiscretion of which I am
invariably guilty. Sugar, please." She yawned, and reached a
generously-proportioned arm toward the sugar-bowl. "Yes, that will do,
Pilkins."

Colonel Musgrave--since the remainder of his house-party had already
breakfasted--raised his fine eyes toward the chandelier, and sighed, as
Pilkins demurely closed the dining-room door.

Leander Pilkins--butler for a long while now to the Musgraves of
Matocton--would here, if space permitted, be the subject of an encomium.
Leander Pilkins was in Lichfield considered to be, upon the whole, the
handsomest man whom Lichfield had produced; for this quadroon's skin was
like old ivory, and his profile would have done credit to an emperor.
His terrapin is still spoken of in Lichfield as people in less favored
localities speak of the Golden Age, and his mayonnaise (boasts
Lichfield) would have compelled an Olympian to plead for a second
helping. For the rest, his deportment in all functions of butlership is
best described as super-Chesterfieldian; and, indeed, he was generally
known to be a byblow of Captain Beverley Musgrave's, who in his day was
Lichfield's arbiter as touched the social graces. And so, no more of
Pilkins.

Mrs. Pendomer partook of chops. "Is this remorse," she queried, "or a
convivially induced requirement for bromides? At this unearthly hour of
the morning it is very often difficult to disentangle the two."

"It is neither," said Colonel Musgrave, and almost snappishly.

Followed an interval of silence. "Really," said Mrs. Pendomer, and as
with sympathy, "one would think you had at last been confronted with one
of your thirty-seven pasts--or is it thirty-eight, Rudolph?"

Colonel Musgrave frowned disapprovingly at her frivolity; he swallowed
his coffee, and buttered a superfluous potato. "H'm!" said he; "then you
know?"

"I know," sighed she, "that a sleeping past frequently suffers from
insomnia."

"And in that case," said he, darkly, "it is not the only sufferer."

Mrs. Pendomer considered the attractions of a third waffle--a mellow
blending of autumnal yellows, fringed with a crisp and irresistible
brown, that, for the moment, put to flight all dreams and visions of
slenderness.

"And Patricia?" she queried, with a mental hiatus.

Colonel Musgrave flushed.

"Patricia," he conceded, with mingled dignity and sadness, "is, after
all, still in her twenties----"

"Yes," said Mrs. Pendomer, with a dryness which might mean anything or
nothing; "she _was_ only twenty-one when she married you."

"I mean," he explained, with obvious patience, "that at her age she--not
unnaturally--takes an immature view of things. Her unspoiled purity,"
he added, meditatively, "and innocence and general unsophistication are,
of course, adorable, but I can admit to thinking that for a journey
through life they impress me as excess baggage."

"Patricia," said Mrs. Pendomer, soothingly, "has ideals. And ideals,
like a hare-lip or a mission in life, should be pitied rather than
condemned, when our friends possess them; especially," she continued,
buttering her waffle, "as so many women have them sandwiched between
their last attack of measles and their first imported complexion. No one
of the three is lasting, Rudolph."

"H'm!" said he.

There was another silence. The colonel desperately felt that matters
were not advancing.

"H'm!" said she, with something of interrogation in her voice.

"See here, Clarice, I have known you----"

"You have not!" cried she, very earnestly; "not by five years!"

"Well, say for some time. You are a sensible woman----"

"A man," Mrs. Pendomer lamented, parenthetically, "never suspects a
woman of discretion, until she begins to lose her waist."

"--and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact, and finer
instincts,--and that sort of thing, you know--to help me out of a deuce
of a mess."

Mrs. Pendomer ate on, in an exceedingly noncommittal fashion, as he
paused, inquiringly.

"She has been reading some letters," said he, at length; "some letters
that I wrote a long time ago."

"In the case of so young a girl," observed Mrs. Pendomer, with perfect
comprehension, "I should have undoubtedly recommended a judicious
supervision of her reading-matter."

"She was looking through an old escritoire," he explained; "Jack
Charteris had suggested that some of my father's letters--during the
War, you know--. might be of value--"

He paused, for Mrs. Pendomer appeared on the verge of a question.

But she only said, "So it was Mr. Charteris who suggested Patricia's
searching the desk. Ah, yes! And then--?"

"And it was years ago--and just the usual sort of thing, though it may
have seemed from the letters--Why, I hadn't given the girl a thought,"
he cried, in virtuous indignation, "until Patricia found the
letters--and read them!"

"Naturally," she assented--"yes,--just as I read George's."

The smile with which she accompanied this remark, suggested that both
Mr. Pendomer's correspondence and home life were at times of an
interesting nature.

"I had destroyed the envelopes when she returned them," continued
Colonel Musgrave, with morose confusion of persons. "Patricia doesn't
even know who the girl was--her name, somehow, was not mentioned."

"'Woman of my heart'--'Dearest girl in all the world,'" quoted Mrs.
Pendomer, reminiscently, "and suchlike tender phrases, scattered in with
a pepper-cruet, after the rough copy was made in pencil, and dated just
'Wednesday,' or 'Thursday,' of course. Ah, you were always very careful,
Rudolph," she sighed; "and now that makes it all the worse, because--as
far as all the evidence goes--these letters may have been returned
yesterday."

"Why--!" Colonel Musgrave pulled up short, hardly seeing his way clear
through the indignant periods on which he had entered. "I declined,"
said he, somewhat lamely, "to discuss the matter with her, in her
present excited and perfectly unreasonable condition."

Mrs. Pendomer's penciled eyebrows rose, and her lips--which were quite
as red as there was any necessity for their being--twitched.

"Hysterics?" she asked.

"Worse!" groaned Colonel Musgrave; "patient resignation under unmerited
affliction!"

He had picked up a teaspoon, and he carefully balanced it upon his
forefinger.

"There were certain phrases in these letters which were, somehow,
repeated in certain letters I wrote to Patricia the summer we were
engaged, and--not to put too fine a point upon it--she doesn't like it."

Mrs. Pendomer smiled, as though she considered this not improbable; and
he continued, with growing embarrassment and indignation:

"She says there must have been others"--Mrs. Pendomer's smile grew
reminiscent--"any number of others; that she is only an incident in my
life. Er--as you have mentioned, Patricia has certain notions--Northern
idiocies about the awfulness of a young fellow's sowing his wild oats,
which you and I know perfectly well he is going to do, anyhow, if he is
worth his salt. But she doesn't know it, poor little girl. So she won't
listen to reason, and she won't come downstairs--which," lamented
Rudolph Musgrave, plaintively, "is particularly awkward in a
house-party."

He drummed his fingers, for a moment, on the table.

"It is," he summed up, "a combination of Ibsen and hysterics, and
of--er, rather declamatory observations concerning there being one law
for the man and another for the woman, and Patricia's realization of the
mistake we both made--and all that sort of nonsense, you know, exactly
as if, I give you my word, she were one of those women who want to
vote." The colonel, patently, considered that feminine outrageousness
could go no farther. "And she is taking menthol and green tea and
mustard plasters and I don't know what all, in bed, prior to--to----"

"Taking leave?" Mrs. Pendomer suggested.

"Er--that was mentioned, I believe," said Colonel Musgrave. "But of
course she was only talking."

Mrs. Pendomer looked about her; and, without, the clean-shaven lawns
and trim box-hedges were very beautiful in the morning sunlight; within,
the same sunlight sparkled over the heavy breakfast service, and gleamed
in the high walnut panels of the breakfast-room. She viewed the
comfortable appointments about her a little wistfully, for Mrs.
Pendomer's purse was not over-full.

"Of course," said she, as in meditation, "there was the money."

"Yes," said Rudolph Musgrave, slowly; "there was the money."

He sprang to his feet, and drew himself erect. Here was a moment he must
give its full dramatic value.

"Oh, no, Clarice, my marriage may have been an eminently sensible one,
but I love my wife. Oh, believe me, I love her very tenderly, poor
little Patricia! I have weathered some forty-seven birthdays; and I have
done much as other men do, and all that--there have been flirtations and
suchlike, and--er--some women have been kinder to me than I deserved.
But I love her; and there has not been a moment since she came into my
life I haven't loved her, and been--" he waved his hands now impotently,
almost theatrically--"sickened at the thought of the others."

Mrs. Pendomer's foot tapped the floor whilst he spoke. When he had made
an ending, she inclined her head toward him.

"Thank you!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Colonel Musgrave bit his lip; and he flushed.

"That," said he, hastily, "was different."

But the difference, whatever may have been its nature, was seemingly a
matter of unimportance to Mrs. Pendomer, who was in meditation. She
rested her ample chin on a much-bejeweled hand for a moment; and, when
Mrs. Pendomer raised her face, her voice was free from affectation.

"You will probably never understand that this particular July day is a
crucial point in your life. You will probably remember it, if you
remember it at all, simply as that morning when Patricia found some
girl-or-another's old letters, and behaved rather unreasonably about
them. It was the merest trifle, you will think.... John Charteris
understands women better than you do, Rudolph."

"I need not pretend at this late day to be as clever as Jack," the
colonel said, in some bewilderment. "But why not more succinctly state
that the Escurial is not a dromedary, although there are many flies in
France? For what on earth has Jack to do with crucial points and July
mornings?"

"Why, I suppose, I only made bold to introduce his name for the sake of
an illustration, Rudolph. For the last person in the world to realize,
precisely, why any woman did anything is invariably the woman who did
it.... Yet there comes in every married woman's existence that time when
she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be
taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life--as a life which had
run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar
with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she
ever came into that life. A woman never realizes that of her lover,
somehow. But to know that your husband, the father of your child, has
lived for other women a life in which you had no part, and never can
have part!--she realizes that, at one time or another, and--and it
sickens her." Mrs. Pendomer smiled as she echoed his phrase, but her
eyes were not mirthful.

"Ah, she hungers for those dead years, Rudolph, and, though you devote
your whole remaining life to her, nothing can ever make up for them; and
she always hates those shadowy women who have stolen them from her. A
woman never, at heart, forgives the other women who have loved her
husband, even though she cease to care for him herself. For she
remembers--ah, you men forget so easily, Rudolph! God had not invented
memory when he created Adam; it was kept for the woman."

Then ensued a pause, during which Rudolph Musgrave smiled down upon her,
irresolutely; for he abhorred "a scene," as his vernacular phrased it,
and to him Clarice's present manner bordered upon both the scenic and
the incomprehensible.

"Ah!--you women!" he temporized.

There was a glance from eyes whose luster time and irregular living had
conspired to dim.

"Ah!--you men!" Mrs. Pendomer retorted. "And there we have the tragedy
of life in a nutshell!"

Silence lasted for a while. The colonel was finding this matutinal talk
discomfortably opulent in pauses.

"Rudolph, and has it never occurred to you that in marrying Patricia you
swindled her?"

And naturally his eyebrows lifted.

"Because a woman wants love."

"Well, well! and don't I love Patricia?"

"I dare say that you think you do. Only you have played at loving so
long you are really unable to love anybody as a girl has every right to
be loved in her twenties. Yes, Rudolph, you are being rather subtly
punished for the good times you have had. And, after all, the saddest
punishment is something that happens in us, not something which happens
to us."

"I wish you wouldn't laugh, Clarice----"

"I wish I didn't have to. For I would get far more comfort out of
crying, and I don't dare to, because of my complexion. It comes in a
round pasteboard box nowadays, you know, Rudolph, with French
mendacities all over the top--and my eyebrows come in a fat crayon, and
the healthful glow of my lips comes in a little porcelain tub."

Mrs. Pendomer was playing with a teaspoon now, and a smile hovered about
the aforementioned lips.

"And yet, do you remember, Rudolph," said she, "that evening at
Assequin, when I wore a blue gown, and they were playing _Fleurs
d'Amour_, and--you said--?"

"Yes"--there was an effective little catch in his voice--"you were a
wonderful girl, Clarice--'my sunshine girl,' I used to call you. And
blue was always your color; it went with your eyes so exactly. And those
big sleeves they wore then--those tell-tale, crushable sleeves!--they
suited your slender youthfulness so perfectly! Ah, I remember it as
though it were yesterday!"

Mrs. Pendomer majestically rose to her feet.

"It was pink! And it was at the Whitebrier you said--what you said!
And--and you don't deserve anything but what you are getting," she
concluded, grimly.

"I--it was so long ago," Rudolph Musgrave apologized, with mingled
discomfort and vagueness.

"Yes," she conceded, rather sadly; "it was so long--oh, very long ago!
For we were young then, and we believed in things, and--and Jack
Charteris had not taken a fancy to me--" She sighed and drummed her
fingers on the table. "But women have always helped and shielded you,
haven't they, Rudolph? And now I am going to help you too, for you have
shown me the way. You don't deserve it in the least, but I'll do it."




II


Thus it shortly came about that Mrs. Pendomer mounted, in meditative
mood, to Mrs. Musgrave's rooms; and that Mrs. Pendomer, recovering her
breath, entered, without knocking, into a gloom where cologne and
menthol and the odor of warm rubber contended for mastery. For Patricia
had decided that she was very ill indeed, and was sobbing softly in bed.

Very calmly, Mrs. Pendomer opened a window, letting in a flood of fresh
air and sunshine; very calmly, she drew a chair--a substantial
arm-chair--to the bedside, and, very calmly, she began:

"My dear, Rudolph has told me of this ridiculous affair, and--oh, you
equally ridiculous girl!"

She removed, with deft fingers, a damp and clinging bandage from about
Patricia's head, and patted the back of Patricia's hand, placidly.
Patricia was by this time sitting erect in bed, and her coppery hair was
thick about her face, which was colorless; and, altogether, she was very
rigid and very indignant and very pretty, and very, very young.

"How dare he tell you--or anybody else!" she cried.

"We are such old friends, remember," Mrs. Pendomer pleaded, and
rearranged the pillows, soothingly, about her hostess; "and I want to
talk to you quietly and sensibly."

Patricia sank back among the pillows, and inhaled the fresh air, which,
in spite of herself, she found agreeable. "I--somehow, I don't feel very
sensible," she murmured, half sulky and half shame-faced.

Mrs. Pendomer hesitated for a moment, and then plunged into the heart of
things. "You are a woman, dear," she said, gently, "though heaven knows
it must have been only yesterday you were playing about the nursery--and
one of the facts we women must face, eventually, is that man is a
polygamous animal. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but it is true.
Civilization may veneer the fact, but nothing will ever override it, not
even in these new horseless carriages. A man may give his wife the best
that is in him--his love, his trust, his life's work--but it is only the
best there is left. We give our hearts; men dole out theirs, as people
feed bread to birds, with a crumb for everyone. His wife has the
remnant. And the best we women can do is to remember we are credibly
informed that half a loaf is preferable to no bread at all."

Her face sobered, and she added, pensively: "We might contrive a better
universe, we sister women, but this is not permitted us. So we must take
it as it is."

Patricia stirred, as talking died away. "I don't believe it," said she;
and she added, with emphasis: "And, anyhow, I hate that nasty trollop!"

"Ah, but you do believe it." Mrs. Pendomer's voice was insistent. "You
knew it years before you went into long frocks. That knowledge is, I
suppose, a legacy from our mothers."

Patricia frowned, petulantly, and then burst into choking sobs. "Oh!"
she cried, "it's damnable! Some other woman has had what I can never
have. And I wanted it so!--that first love that means everything--the
love he gave her when I was only a messy little girl, with pig-tails and
too many hands and feet! Oh, that--that hell-cat! She's had everything!"

There was an interval, during which Mrs. Pendomer smiled crookedly, and
Patricia continued to sob, although at lengthening intervals. Then, Mrs.
Pendomer lifted the packet of letters lying on the bed, and cleared her
throat.

"H'm!" said she; "so this is what caused all the trouble? You don't
mind?"

And, considering silence as equivalent to acquiescence, she drew out a
letter at hazard, and read aloud:

"'Just a line, woman of all the world, to tell you ... but what have I
to tell you, after all? Only the old, old message, so often told that it
seems scarcely worth while to bother the postman about it. Just three
words that innumerable dead lips have whispered, while life was yet good
and old people were unreasonable and skies were blue--three words that
our unborn children's children will whisper to one another when we too
have gone to help the grasses in their growing or to nourish the
victorious, swaying hosts of some field of daffodils. Just three
words--that is my message to you, my lady.... Ah, it is weary waiting
for a sight of your dear face through these long days that are so much
alike and all so empty and colorless! My heart grows hungry as I think
of your great, green eyes and of the mouth that is like a little wound.
I want you so, O dearest girl in all the world! I want you.... Ah, time
travels very slowly that brings you back to me, and, meanwhile, I can
but dream of you and send you impotent scrawls that only vex me with
their futility. For my desire of you--'

"The remainder," said Mrs. Pendomer, clearing her throat once more,
"appears to consist of insanity and heretical sentiments, in about equal
proportions, all written at the top of a boy's breaking voice. It isn't
Colonel Musgrave's voice--quite--is it?"

During the reading, Patricia, leaning on one elbow, had regarded her
companion with wide eyes and flushed cheeks. "Now, you see!" she cried
indignantly; "he loved her! He was simply crazy about her."

"Why, yes." Mrs. Pendomer replaced the letter, carefully, almost
caressingly, among its companions. "My dear, it was years ago. I think
time has by this wreaked a vengeance far more bitter than you could ever
plan on the woman who, after all, never thought to wrong you. For the
bitterest of all bitter things to a woman--to some women, at least--is
to grow old."

She sighed, and her well-manicured fingers fretted for a moment with the
counterpane.

"Ah, who will write the tragedy of us women who were 'famous Southern
beauties' once? We were queens of men while our youth lasted, and
diarists still prattle charmingly concerning us. But nothing was
expected of us save to be beautiful and to condescend to be made much
of, and that is our tragedy. For very few things, my dear, are more
pitiable than the middle-age of the pitiful butterfly woman, whose mind
cannot--cannot, because of its very nature--reach to anything higher!
Middle-age strips her of everything--the admiration, the flattery, the
shallow merriment--all the little things that her little mind longs
for--and other women take her place, in spite of her futile, pitiful
efforts to remain young. And the world goes on as before, and there is a
whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly
superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she
is old--ah, so old!--under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty
fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy
this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a
note of earnestness in her voice.

"Such a woman," said Patricia, with distinctness, "deserves no pity."

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer conceded, drily, "she doesn't get it. Probably,
because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist
sloth and gluttony--the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch
of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a pleasing
or heroic figure."

Mrs. Pendomer paused for a breathing-space, and smiled, though not very
pleasantly.

"It is, doubtless," said she, "a sight for gods--and quite certainly for
men--to laugh at, this silly woman striving to regain a vanished
frugality of waist. Yes, I suppose it is amusing--but it is also
pitiful. And it is more pitiful still if she has ever loved a man in the
unreasoning way these shallow women sometimes do. Men age so slowly; the
men a girl first knows are young long after she has reached
middle-age--yes, they go on dancing cotillions and talking nonsense in
the garden, long after she has taken to common-sense shoes. And the man
is still young--and he cares for some other woman, who is young and has
all that she has lost--and it seems so unfair!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Patricia regarded her for a moment. The purple eyes were alert, their
glance was hard. "You seem to know all about this woman," Patricia
began, in a level voice. "I have heard, of course, what everyone in
Lichfield whispers about you and Rudolph. I have even teased Rudolph
about it, but until to-day I had believed it was a lie."

"It is often a mistake to indulge in uncommon opinions," said Mrs.
Pendomer. "You get more fun and interest out of it, I don't deny, but
the bill, my dear, is unconscionable."

"So! you confess it!"

"My dear, and who am I to stand aside like a coward and see you make a
mountain of this boy-and-girl affair--an affair which Rudolph and I had
practically forgotten--oh, years ago!--until to-day? Why--why, you
_can't_ be jealous of me!" Mrs. Pendomer concluded, half-mockingly.

Patricia regarded her with deliberation.

In the windy sunlight, Mrs. Pendomer was a well-preserved woman, but,
unmistakably, preserved; moreover, there was a great deal of her, and
her nose was in need of a judicious application of powder, of which
there was a superfluity behind her ears. Was this the siren Patricia had
dreaded? Patricia clearly perceived that, whatever had been her
husband's relations with this woman, he had been manifestly entrapped
into the imbroglio--a victim to Mrs. Pendomer's inordinate love of
attention, which was, indeed, tolerably notorious; and Patricia's anger
against Rudolph Musgrave gave way to a rather contemptuous pity and a
half-maternal remorse for not having taken better care of him.

"No," answered Mrs. Pendomer, to her unspoken thought; "no woman could
be seriously jealous of me. Yes, I dare say, I am _passée_ and vain and
frivolous and--harmless. But," she added, meditatively, "you hate me,
just the same."

"My dear Mrs. Pendomer----" Patricia began, with cool courtesy; then
hesitated. "Yes," she conceded; "I dare say, it is unreasonable--but I
do hate you like the very old Nick."

"Why, then," spoke Mrs. Pendomer, with cheerfulness, "everything is as
it should be." She rose and smiled. "I am sorry to say I must be leaving
Matocton to-day; the Ullwethers are very pressing, and I really don't
know how to get out of paying them a visit----"

"So sorry to lose you," cooed Patricia; "but, of course, you know best.
I believe some very good people are visiting the Ullwethers nowadays?"
She extended the letters, blandly. "May I restore your property?" she
queried, with utmost gentleness.

"Thanks!" Clarice Pendomer took them, and kissed her hostess, not
without tenderness, on the brow. "My dear, be kind to Rudolph. He--he is
rather an attractive man, you know,--and other women are kind to him. We
of Lichfield have always said that he and Jack Charteris were the most
dangerous men that even Lichfield has ever produced----"

"Why, do people really find Mr. Charteris particularly attractive?"
Patricia demanded, so quickly and so innocently that Mrs. Pendomer could
not deny herself the glance of a charlatan who applauds his fellow's
legerdemain.

And Patricia colored.

"Oh, well--! You know how Lichfield gossips," said Mrs. Pendomer.




III


Colonel Musgrave had smoked a preposterous number of unsatisfying
cigarettes on the big front porch of Matocton whilst Mrs. Pendomer was
absent on her mission; and on her return, flushed and triumphant, he
rose in eloquent silence.

"I've done it, Rudolph," said Mrs. Pendomer.

"Done what?" he queried, blankly.

"Restored what my incomprehensible lawyers call the _status quo_;
achieved peace with honor; carried off the spoils of war; and--in
short--arranged everything," answered Mrs. Pendomer, and sank into a
rustic chair, which creaked admonishingly. "And all," she added,
bringing a fan into play, "without a single falsehood. _I_ am not to
blame if Patricia has jumped at the conclusion that these letters were
written to me."

"My word!" said Rudolph Musgrave, "your methods of restoring domestic
peace to a distracted household are, to say the least, original!" He
seated himself, and lighted another cigarette.

"Oh, well, Patricia is not deaf, you know, and she has lived in
Lichfield quite a while." Mrs. Pendomer said abruptly, "I have half a
mind to tell you some of the things I know about Aline Van Orden."

"Please don't," said Colonel Musgrave, "for I would inevitably beard you
on my own porch and smite you to the door-mat. And I am hardly young
enough for such adventures."

"And poor Aline is dead! And the rest of us are middle-aged now,
Rudolph, and we go in to dinner with the veterans who call us 'Madam,'
and we are prominent in charitable enterprises.... But there was a time
when we were not exactly hideous in appearance, and men did many mad
things for our sakes, and we never lose the memory of that time.
Pleasant memories are among the many privileges of women. Yes," added
Mrs. Pendomer, meditatively, "we derive much the same pleasure from them
a cripple does from rearranging the athletic medals he once won, or a
starving man from thinking of the many excellent dinners he has eaten;
but we can't and we wouldn't part with them, nevertheless."

Rudolph Musgrave, however, had not honored her with much attention, and
was puzzling over the more or less incomprehensible situation; and,
perceiving this, she ran on, after a little:

"Oh, it worked--it worked beautifully! You see, she would always have
been very jealous of that other woman; but with me it is different. She
has always known that scandalous story about you and me. And she has
always known me as I am--a frivolous and--say, corpulent, for it is a
more dignified word--and generally unattractive chaperon; and she can't
think of me as ever having been anything else. Young people never really
believe in their elders' youth, Rudolph; at heart, they think we came
into the world with crow's-feet and pepper-and-salt hair, all complete.
So, she is only sorry for you now--rather as a mother would be for a
naughty child; as for me, she isn't jealous--but," sighed Mrs. Pendomer,
"she isn't over-fond of me."

Colonel Musgrave rose to his feet. "It isn't fair," said he; "the
letters were distinctly compromising. It isn't fair you should shoulder
the blame for a woman who was nothing to you. It isn't fair you should
be placed in such a false position."

"What matter?" pleaded Mrs. Pendomer. "The letters are mine to burn, if
I choose. I have read one of them, by the way, and it is almost word for
word a letter you wrote me a good twenty years ago. And you re-hashed it
for Patricia's benefit too, it seems! You ought to get a mimeograph. Oh,
very well! It doesn't matter now, for Patricia will say nothing--or not
at least to you," she added.

"Still----" he began.

"Ah, Rudolph, if I want to do a foolish thing, why won't you let me?
What else is a woman for? They are always doing foolish things. I have
known a woman to throw a man over, because she had seen him without a
collar; and I have known another actually to marry a man, because she
happened to be in love with him. I have known a woman to go on wearing
pink organdie after she has passed forty, and I have known a woman to go
on caring for a man who, she knew, wasn't worth caring for, long after
he had forgotten. We are not brave and sensible, like you men. So why
not let me be foolish, if I want to be?"

"If," said Colonel Musgrave in some perplexity, "I understand one word
of this farrago, I will be--qualified in various ways."

"But you don't have to understand," she pleaded.

"You mean--?" he asked.

"I mean that I was always fond of Aline, anyhow."

"Nonsense!" And he was conscious, with vexation, that he had undeniably
flushed.

"I mean, then, I am a woman, and _I_ understand. Everything is as near
what it should be as is possible while Patricia is seeing so much of--we
will call it the artistic temperament." Mrs. Pendomer shrugged. "But if
I went on in that line you would believe I was jealous. And heaven knows
I am not the least bit so--with the unavoidable qualification that,
being a woman, I can't help rising superior to common-sense."

He said, "You mean Jack Charteris--? But what on earth has he to do with
these letters?"

"I don't mean any proper names at all. I simply mean you are not to undo
my work. It would only signify trouble and dissatisfaction and giving up
all this"--she waved her hand lightly toward the lawns of
Matocton,--"and it would mean our giving you up, for, you know, you
haven't any money of your own, Rudolph. Ah, Rudolph, we can't give you
up! We need you to lead our Lichfield germans, and to tell us naughty
little stories, and keep us amused. So _please_ be sensible, Rudolph."

"Permit me to point out I firmly believe that silence is the perfectest
herald of joy," observed Colonel Musgrave. "Only I do _not_ understand
why you should have dragged John Charteris's name into this ludicrous
affair----"

"You really do not understand----?"

But Colonel Musgrave's handsome face declared very plainly that he did
not.

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer reflected, "I dare say it is best, upon the whole,
you shouldn't. And now you must excuse me, for I am leaving for the
Ullwethers' to-day, and I shan't ever be invited to Matocton again, and
I must tell my maid to pack up. She is a little fool and it will break
her heart to be leaving Pilkins. All human beings are tediously alike.
But, allowing ample time for her to dispose of my best lingerie and of
her unavoidable lamentations, I ought to make the six-forty-five. I have
noticed that one usually does--somehow," said Mrs. Pendomer, and seemed
to smack of allegories.

And yet it may have been because she knew--as who knew
better?--something of that mischief's nature which was now afoot.




IV


The colonel burned the malefic letters that afternoon. Indeed, the
episode set him to ransacking the desk in which Patricia had found
them--a desk which, as you have heard, was heaped with the miscellaneous
correspondence of the colonel's father dating back a half-century and
more. Much curious matter the colonel discovered there, for "Wild Will"
Musgrave's had been a full-blooded career. And over one packet of
letters, in particular, the colonel sat for a long while with an
unwontedly troubled face.




PART SIX - BYWAYS

  "Cry _Kismet!_ and take heart. Eros is gone,
  Nor may we follow to that loftier air
  Olympians breathe. Take heart, and enter where
  A lighter Love, vine-crowned, laughs i' the sun,
  Oblivious of tangled webs ill-spun
  By ancient wearied weavers, for it may be
  His guidance leads to lovers of such as we
  And hearts so credulous as to be won.

  "Cry _Kismet!_ Put away vain memories
  Of all old sorrows and of all old joys,
  And learn that life is never quite amiss
  So long as unreflective girls and boys
  Remember that young lips were meant to kiss,
  And hold that laughter is a seemly noise."

PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. _Egeria Answers._




I


Patricia sat in the great maple-grove that stands behind Matocton, and
pondered over a note from her husband, who was in Lichfield
superintending the appearance of the July number of the _Lichfield
Historical Association's Quarterly Magazine_. Mr. Charteris lay at
her feet, glancing rapidly over a lengthy letter, which was from his
wife, in Richmond.

The morning mail was just in, and Patricia had despatched Charteris for
her letters, on the plea that the woods were too beautiful to leave, and
that Matocton, in the unsettled state which marks the end of the week in
a house-party, was intolerable.

She, undoubtedly, was partial to the grove, having spent the last ten
mornings there. Mr. Charteris had overrated her modest literary
abilities so far as to ask her advice in certain details of his new
book, which was to appear in the autumn, and they had found a vernal
solitude, besides being extremely picturesque, to be conducive to the
forming of really matured opinions. Moreover, she was assured that none
of the members of the house-party would misunderstand her motives;
people were so much less censorious in the country; there was something
in the pastoral purity of Nature, seen face to face, which brought out
one's noblest instincts, and put an end to all horrid gossip and
scandal-mongering.

Didn't Mrs. Barry-Smith think so? And what was her real opinion of that
rumor about the Hardresses, and was the woman as bad as people said she
was? Thus had Patricia spoken in the privacy of her chamber, at that
hour when ladies do up their hair for the night, and discourse of
mysteries. It is at this time they are said to babble out their hearts
to one another; and so, beyond doubt, this must have been the real state
of the case.

As Patricia admitted, she had given up bridge and taken to literature
only during the past year. She might more honestly have said within the
last two weeks. In any event, she now conversed of authors with a fitful
persistence like that of an ill-regulated machine. Her comments were
delightfully frank and original, as she had an unusually good memory. Of
two books she was apt to prefer the one with the wider margin, and she
was becoming sufficiently familiar with a number of poets to quote them
inaccurately.

We have all seen John Charteris's portraits, and most of us have read
his books--or at least, the volume entitled _In Old Lichfield_, which
caused the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_ to apostrophize its author as a
"Child of Genius! whose ardent soul has sounded the mysteries of life,
whose inner vision sweeps over ever widening fields of thought, and
whose chiseled phrases continue patriotically to perpetuate the beauty
of Lichfield's past." But for present purposes it is sufficient to say
that this jewelsmith of words was slight and dark and hook-nosed, and
that his hair was thin, and that he was not ill-favored. It may be of
interest to his admirers--a growing cult--to add that his reason for
wearing a mustache in a period of clean-shaven faces was that, without
it, his mouth was not pleasant to look upon.

"Heigho!" Patricia said, at length, with a little laugh; "it is very
strange that both of our encumbrances should arrive on the same day!"

"It is unfortunate," Mr. Charteris admitted, lazily; "but the blessed
state of matrimony is liable to these mishaps. Let us be thankful that
my wife's whim to visit her aunt has given us, at least, two perfect,
golden weeks. Husbands are like bad pennies; and wives resemble the cat
whose adventures have been commemorated by one of our really popular
poets. They always come back."

Patricia communed with herself, and to Charteris seemed, as she sat in
the chequered sunlight, far more desirable than a married woman has any
right to be.

"I wish--" she began, slowly. "Oh, but, you know, it was positively
criminal negligence not to have included a dozen fairies among my
sponsors."

"I too have desiderated this sensible precaution," said Charteris, and
laughed his utter comprehension. "But, after all," he said, and snapped
his fingers gaily, "we still have twenty-four hours, Patricia! Let us
forget the crudities of life, and say foolish things to each other. For
I am pastorally inclined this morning, Patricia; I wish to lie at your
feet and pipe amorous ditties upon an oaten reed. Have you such an
article about you, Patricia?"

He drew a key-ring from his pocket, and pondered over it.

"Or would you prefer that I whistle into the opening of this door-key,
to the effect that we must gather our rose-buds while we may, for Time
is still a-flying, fa-la, and that a drear old age, not to mention our
spouses, will soon descend upon us, fa-la-di-leero? A door-key is not
Arcadian, Patricia, but it makes a very creditable noise."

"Don't be foolish, _mon ami_!" she protested, with an indulgent smile.
"I am unhappy."

"Unhappy that I have chanced to fall in love with you, Patricia? It is
an accident which might befall any really intelligent person."

She shrugged her shoulders, ruefully.

"I have done wrong to let you talk to me as you have done of late.
I--oh, Jack, I am afraid!"

Mr. Charteris meditated. Somewhere in a neighboring thicket a bird
trilled out his song--a contented, half-hushed song that called his mate
to witness how infinitely blest above all other birds was he. Mr.
Charteris heard him to the end, and languidly made as to applaud; then
Mr. Charteris raised his eyebrows.

"Of your husband, Patricia?" he queried.

"I--Rudolph doesn't bother about me nowadays sufficiently to--notice
anything."

Mr. Charteris smiled. "Of my wife, Patricia?"

"Good gracious, no! I have not the least doubt you will explain matters
satisfactorily to your wife, for I have always heard that practise makes
perfect."

Mr. Charteris laughed--a low and very musical laugh.

"Of me, then, Patricia?"

"I--I think it is rather of myself I am afraid. Oh, I hate you when you
smile like that! You have evil eyes, Jack! Stop it! Quit hounding me
with your illicit fascinations." The hand she had raised in threatening
fashion fell back into her lap, and she shrugged her shoulders once
more. "My nerves are somewhat upset by the approaching prospect of
connubial felicity, I suppose. Really, though, _mon ami_, your conceit
is appalling."

Charteris gave vent to a chuckle, and raised the door-key to his lips.

"When you are quite through your histrionic efforts," he suggested,
apologetically, "I will proceed with my amorous pipings. Really,
Patricia, one might fancy you the heroine of a society drama, working up
the sympathies of the audience before taking to evil ways. Surely, you
are not about to leave your dear, good, patient husband, Patricia?
Heroines only do that on dark and stormy nights, and in an opera
toilette; wearing her best gown seems always to affect a heroine in that
way."

Mr. Charteris, at this point, dropped the key-ring, and drew nearer to
her; his voice sank to a pleading cadence.

"We are in Arcadia, Patricia; virtue and vice are contraband in this
charming country, and must be left at the frontier. Let us be adorably
foolish and happy, my lady, and forget for a little the evil days that
approach. Can you not fancy this to be Arcadia, Patricia?--it requires
the merest trifle of imagination. Listen very carefully, and you will
hear the hoofs of fauns rustling among the fallen leaves; they are
watching us, Patricia, from behind every tree-bole. They think you a
dryad--the queen of all the dryads, with the most glorious eyes and hair
and the most tempting lips in all the forest. After a little, shaggy,
big-thewed ventripotent Pan will grow jealous, and ravish you away from
me, as he stole Syrinx from her lover. You are very beautiful, Patricia;
you are quite incredibly beautiful. I adore you, Patricia. Would you
mind if I held your hand? It is a foolish thing to do, but it is
preëminently Arcadian."

She heard him with downcast eyes; and her cheeks flushed a pink color
that was agreeable to contemplation.

"Do--do you really care for me, Jack?" she asked, softly; then cried,
"No, no, you needn't answer--because, of course, you worship me madly,
unboundedly, distractedly. They all do, but you do it more convincingly.
You have been taking lessons at night-school, I dare say, at all sorts
of murky institutions. And, Jack, really, cross my heart, I always
stopped the others when they talked this way. I tried to stop you, too.
You know I did?"

She raised her lashes, a trifle uncertainly, and withdrew her hand from
his, a trifle slowly. "It is wrong--all horribly wrong. I wonder at
myself, I can't understand how in the world I can be such a fool about
you. I must not be alone with you again. I must tell my
husband--everything," she concluded, and manifestly not meaning a word
of what she said.

"By all means," assented Mr. Charteris, readily. "Let's tell my wife,
too. It will make things so very interesting."

"Rudolph would be terribly unhappy," she reflected.

"He would probably never smile again," said Mr. Charteris. "And my
wife--oh, it would upset Anne, quite frightfully! It is our altruistic,
nay, our bounden duty to save them from such misery."

"I--I don't know what to do!" she wailed.

"The obvious course," said he, after reflection, "is to shake off the
bonds of matrimony, without further delay. So let's elope, Patricia."

Patricia, who was really unhappy, took refuge in flippancy, and laughed.

"I make it a rule," said she, "never to elope on Fridays. Besides, now
I think of it, there is, Rudolph--Ah, Rudolph doesn't care a button's
worth about me, I know. The funny part is that he doesn't know it. He
has simply assumed he is devoted to me, because all respectable people
are devoted to their wives. I can assure you, _mon ami_, he would be a
veritable Othello, if there were any scandal, and would infinitely
prefer the bolster to the divorce-court. He would have us followed and
torn apart by wild policemen."

Mr. Charteris meditated for a moment.

"Rudolph, as you are perfectly aware, would simply deplore the terribly
lax modern notions in regard to marriage and talk to newspaper reporters
about this much--" he measured it between thumb and forefinger
--"concerning the beauty and chivalry of the South. He would
do nothing more. I question if Rudolph Musgrave would ever in any
circumstances be capable of decisive action."

"Ah, don't make fun of Rudolph!" she cried, quickly. "Rudolph can't help
it if he is conscientious and in consequence rather depressing to live
with. And for all that he so often plays the jackass-fool about women,
like Grandma Pendomer, he is a man, Jack--a well-meaning, clean and
dunderheaded man! You aren't; you are puny and frivolous, and you sneer
too much, and you are making a fool of me, and--and that's why I like
you, I suppose. Oh, I wish I were good! I have always tried to be good,
and there doesn't seem to be a hatpin in the world that makes a halo
sit comfortably. Now, Jack, you know I've tried to be good! I've never
let you kiss me, and I've never let you hold my hand--until to-day--
and--and----"

Patricia paused, and laughed.

"But we were talking of Rudolph," she said, with a touch of weariness.
"Rudolph has all the virtues that a woman most admires until she
attempts to live in the same house with them."

"I thank you," said Mr. Charteris, "for the high opinion you entertain
of my moral character." He bestowed a reproachful sigh upon her, and
continued: "At any rate, Rudolph Musgrave has been an unusually lucky
man--the luckiest that I know of."

Patricia had risen as if to go. She turned her big purple eyes on him
for a moment.

"You--you think so?" she queried, hesitatingly.

Afterward she spread out her hands in a helpless gesture, and laughed
for no apparent reason, and sat down again.

"Why?" said Patricia.

It took Charteris fully an hour to point out all the reasons.

Patricia told him very frankly that she considered him to be talking
nonsense, but she seemed quite willing to listen.




II


Sunset was approaching on the following afternoon when Rudolph Musgrave,
fresh from Lichfield,--whither, as has been recorded, the bringing out
of the July number of the _Lichfield Historical Associations Quarterly
Magazine_ had called him,--came out on the front porch at Matocton. He
had arrived on the afternoon train, about an hour previously, in time to
superintend little Roger's customary evening transactions with an
astounding quantity of bread and milk; and, Roger abed, his father,
having dressed at once for supper, found himself ready for that meal
somewhat in advance of the rest of the house-party.

Indeed, only one of them was visible at this moment--a woman, who was
reading on a rustic bench some distance from the house, and whose back
was turned to him. The poise of her head, however, was not unfamiliar;
also, it is not everyone who has hair that is like a nimbus of
thrice-polished gold.

Colonel Musgrave threw back his shoulders, and drew a deep breath.
Subsequently, with a fine air of unconcern, he inspected the view from
the porch, which was, in fact, quite worthy of his attention.
Interesting things have happened at Matocton--many events that have been
preserved in the local mythology, not always to the credit of the old
Musgraves, and a few which have slipped into a modest niche in history.
It was, perhaps, on these that Colonel Musgrave pondered so intently.

Once the farthingaled and red-heeled gentry came in sluggish barges to
Matocton, and the broad river on which the estate faces was thick with
bellying sails; since the days of railroads, one approaches the mansion
through the maple-grove in the rear, and enters ignominiously by the
back-door.

The house stands on a considerable elevation. The main portion, with its
hipped roof and mullioned windows, is very old, but the two wings that
stretch to the east and west are comparatively modern, and date back
little over a century. Time has mellowed them into harmony with the
major part of the house, and the kindly Virginia creeper has done its
utmost to conceal the fact that they are constructed of plebeian bricks
which were baked in this country; but Matocton was Matocton long before
these wings were built, and a mere affair of yesterday, such as the
Revolution, antedates them. They were not standing when Tarleton paid
his famous visit to Matocton.

In the main hall, you may still see the stairs up which he rode on
horseback, and the slashes which his saber hacked upon the hand-rail.

To the front of the mansion lies a close-shaven lawn, dotted with
sundry oaks and maples; and thence, the formal gardens descend in six
broad terraces. There is when summer reigns no lovelier spot than this
bright medley of squares and stars and triangles and circles--all Euclid
in flowerage--which glow with multitudinous colors where the sun
strikes. You will find no new flowers at Matocton, though. Here are
verbenas, poppies, lavender and marigolds, sweet-william, hollyhocks and
columbine, phlox, and larkspur, and meadowsweet, and heart's-ease, just
as they were when Thomasine Musgrave, Matocton's first châtelaine, was
wont to tend them; and of all floral parvenus the gardens are innocent.
Box-hedges mark the walkways.

The seventh terrace was, until lately, uncultivated, the trees having
been cleared away to afford pasturage. It is now closely planted with
beeches, none of great size, and extends to a tangled thicket of
fieldpines and cedar and sassafras and blackberry bushes, which again
masks a drop of some ten feet to the river.

The beach here is narrow; at high tide, it is rarely more than fifteen
feet in breadth, and is in many places completely submerged. Past this,
the river lapses into the horizon line without a break, save on an
extraordinarily clear day when Bigelow's Island may be seen as a dim
smudge upon the west.

All these things, Rudolph Musgrave regarded with curiously deep interest
for one who had seen them so many times before. Then, with a shrug of
the shoulders, he sauntered forward across the lawn. He had planned
several appropriate speeches, but, when it came to the point of giving
them utterance, he merely held out his hand in an awkward fashion, and
said:

"Anne!"

She looked up from her reading.

She did this with two red-brown eyes that had no apparent limits to
their depth. Her hand was soft; it seemed quite lost in the broad palm
of a man's hand.

"Dear Rudolph," she said, as simply as though they had parted yesterday,
"it's awfully good to see you again."

Colonel Musgrave cleared his throat, and sat down beside her.

A moment later Colonel Musgrave cleared his throat once more.

Then Mrs. Charteris laughed. It was a pleasant laugh--a clear, rippling
carol of clean mirth that sparkled in her eyes, and dimpled in her
wholesome cheeks.

"So! do you find it very, very awkward?"

"Awkward!" he cried. Their glances met in a flash of comprehension which
seemed to purge the air. Musgrave was not in the least self-conscious
now. He laughed, and lifted an admonitory forefinger.

"Oh, good Cynara," he said, "I am not what I was. And so I cannot do it,
my dear--I really cannot possibly live up to the requirements of being a
Buried Past. In a proper story-book or play, I would have to come back
from New Zealand or the Transvaal, all covered with glory and epaulets,
and have found you in the last throes of consumption: instead, you have
fattened, Anne, which a Buried Past never does, and which shows a sad
lack of appreciation for my feelings. And I--ah, my dear, I must confess
that my hair is growing gray, and that my life has not been entirely
empty without you, and that I ate and enjoyed two mutton-chops at
luncheon, though I knew I should see you to-day. I am afraid we are
neither of us up to heroics, Anne. So let's be sensible and comfy, my
dear."

"You brute!" she cried--not looking irreparably angry, yet not without a
real touch of vexation; "don't you know that every woman cherishes the
picture of her former lovers sitting alone in the twilight, and growing
lackadaisical over undying memories and faded letters? And you--you
approach me, after I don't dare to think how many years, as calmly as if
I were an old schoolmate of your mother's, and attempt to talk to me
about mutton-chops! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Rudolph
Musgrave. You might, at least, have started a little at seeing me, and
have clasped your hand to your heart, and have said, 'You, you!' or
something of the sort. I had every right to expect it."

Mrs. Charteris pouted, and then trifled for a moment with the pages of
her book.

"And--and I want to tell you that I am sorry for the way I spoke to
you--that night," she swiftly said. Anne did not look at him. "Women
don't understand things that are perfectly simple to men, I suppose--I
mean--that is, Jack said--"

"That you ought to apologize? It was very like him"--and Colonel
Musgrave smiled to think how like John Charteris it was. "Jack is quite
wonderful," he observed.

She looked up, saying impulsively, "Rudolph, you don't know how happy he
makes me."

"Heartless woman, and would you tempt me to end the tragedy of my life
with a Shakesperian fifth act of poisonings and assassination? I spurn
you, temptress. For, after all, it was an unpleasantly long while ago we
went mad for each other," Musgrave announced, and he smiled. "I fancy
that the boy and girl we knew of are as dead now as Nebuchadnezzar.
'Marian's married, and I sit here alive and merry at'--well, not at
forty year, unluckily--"

"If you continue in that heartless strain, I shall go into the house,"
Mrs. Charteris protested.

Her indignation was exaggerated, but it was not altogether feigned;
women cannot quite pardon a rejected suitor who marries and is content.
They wish him all imaginable happiness and prosperity, of course; and
they are honestly interested in his welfare; but it seems unexpectedly
callous in him. And besides his wife is so perfectly commonplace.

Mrs. Charteris, therefore, added, with emphasis: "I am really
disgracefully happy."

"Glad to hear it," said Musgrave, placidly. "So am I."

"Oh, Rudolph, Rudolph, you are hopeless!" she sighed. "And you used to
make such a nice lover!"

Mrs. Charteris looked out over the river, which was like melting gold,
and for a moment was silent.

"I was frightfully in love with you, Rudolph," she said, as half in
wonder. "After--after that horrible time when my parents forced us to
behave rationally, I wept--oh, I must have wept deluges! I firmly
intended to pine away to an early grave. And that second time I liked
you too, but then--there was Jack, you see."

"H'm!" said Colonel Musgrave; "yes, I see."

"I want you to continue to be friends with Jack," she went on, and her
face lighted up, and her voice grew tender. "He has the artistic
temperament, and naturally that makes him sensitive, and a trifle
irritable at times. It takes so little to upset him, you see, for he
feels so acutely what he calls the discords of life. I think most men
are jealous of his talents; so they call him selfish and finicky and
conceited. He isn't really, you know. Only, he can't help feeling a
little superior to the majority of men, and his artistic temperament
leads him to magnify the lesser mishaps of life--such as the steak being
overdone, or missing a train. Oh, really, a thing like that worries him
as much as the loss of a fortune, or a death in the family, would upset
anyone else. Jack says there are no such things as trifles in a
harmonious and well-proportioned life, and I suppose that's true to men
of genius. Of course, I am rather a Philistine, and I grate on him at
times--that is, I used to, but he says I have improved wonderfully. And
so we are ridiculously happy, Jack and I."

Musgrave cast about vainly for an appropriate speech. Then he
compromised with his conscience, and said: "Your husband is a very
clever man."

"Isn't he?" She had flushed for pleasure at hearing him praised. Oh,
yes, Anne loved Jack Charteris! There was no questioning that; it was
written in her face, was vibrant in her voice as she spoke of him.

"Now, really, Rudolph, aren't his books wonderful? I don't appreciate
them, of course, for I'm not clever, but I know you do. I don't see why
men think him selfish. I know better. You have to live with Jack to
really appreciate him. And every day I discover some new side of his
character that makes him dearer to me. He's so clever--and so noble.
Why, I remember--Well, before Jack made his first hit with _Astaroth's
Lackey_, he lived with his sister. They hadn't any money, and, of
course, Jack couldn't be expected to take a clerkship or anything like
that, because business details make his head ache, poor boy. So, his
sister taught school, and he lived with her. They were very happy--his
sister simply adores him, and I am positively jealous of her
sometimes--but, unfortunately, the bank in which she kept her money
failed one day. I remember it was just before he asked me to marry him,
and told me, in his dear, laughing manner, that he hadn't a penny in
the world, and that we would have to live on bread and cheese and
kisses. Of course, I had a plenty for us both, though, so we weren't
really in danger of being reduced to that. Well, I wanted to make his
sister an allowance. But Jack pointed out, with considerable reason,
that one person could live very comfortably on an income that had
formerly supported two. He said it wasn't right I should be burdened
with the support of his family. Jack was so sensitive, you see, lest
people might think he was making a mercenary marriage, and that his
sister was profiting by it. Now, I call that one of the noblest things I
ever heard of, for he is devotedly attached to his sister, and,
naturally, it is a great grief to him to see her compelled to work for a
living. His last book was dedicated to her, and the dedication is one of
the most tender and pathetic things I ever read."

Musgrave was hardly conscious of what she was saying. She was not
particularly intelligent, this handsome, cheery woman, but her voice,
and the richness and sweetness of it, and the vitality of her laugh,
contented his soul.

Anne was different; the knowledge came again to him quite simply that
Anne was different, and in the nature of things must always be a little
different from all other people--even Patricia Musgrave. He had no
desire to tell Anne Charteris of this, no idea that it would affect in
any way the tenor of his life. He merely accepted the fact that she was,
after all, Anne Willoughby, and that her dear presence seemed, somehow,
to strengthen and cheer and comfort and content beyond the reach of
expression.

Yet Musgrave recognized her lack of cleverness, and liked and admired
her none the less. A vision of Patricia arose--a vision of a dainty,
shallow, Dresden-china face with a surprising quantity of vivid hair
about it. Patricia was beautiful; and Patricia was clever, in her
pinchbeck way. But Rudolph Musgrave doubted very much if her mocking
eyes now ever softened into that brooding, sacred tenderness he had seen
in Anne's eyes; and he likewise questioned if a hurried, happy thrill
ran through Patricia's voice when Patricia spoke of her husband.

"You have unquestionably married an unusual man," Musgrave said. "I--by
Jove, you know, I fancy my wife finds him almost as attractive as you
do."

"Ah, Rudolph, I can't fancy anyone whom--whom you loved caring for
anyone else. Don't I remember, sir, how irresistible you can be when you
choose?"

Anne laughed, and raised plump hands to heaven.

"Really, though, women pursue him to a perfectly indecent extent. I have
to watch over him carefully; not that I distrust him, of course,
for--dear Jack!--he is so devoted to me, and cares so little for other
women, that Joseph would seem in comparison only a depraved _roué_. But
the _women_--why, Rudolph, there was an Italian countess at Rome--the
impudent minx!--who actually made me believe--However, Jack
explained all that, after I had made both a spectacle and a nuisance of
myself, and he had behaved so nobly in the entire affair that for days
afterwards I was positively limp with repentance. Then in Paris that
flighty Mrs. Hardress--but he explained that, too. Some women are
shameless, Rudolph," Mrs. Charteris concluded, and sighed her pity for
them.

"Utterly so," Musgrave assented, gravely.

He was feeling a thought uncomfortable. To him the place had grown
portentous. The sun was low, and the long shadows of the trees were
black on the dim lawn. People were assembling for supper, and passing to
and fro under low-hanging branches; and the gaily-colored gowns of the
women glimmered through a faint blue haze like that with which Boucher
and Watteau and Fragonard loved to veil, and thereby to make wistful,
somehow, the antics of those fine parroquet-like manikins who figure in
their _fêtes galantes._

Inside the house, someone was playing an unpleasant sort of air on the
piano--an air which was quite needlessly creepy and haunting and
insistent. It all seemed like a grim bit out of a play. The tenderness
and pride that shone in Anne's eyes as she boasted of her happiness
troubled Rudolph Musgrave. He had a perfectly unreasonable desire to
carry her away, by force, if necessary, and to protect her from clever
people, and to buy things for her.

"So, I am an old, old married woman now, and--and I think in some ways
I suit Jack better than a more brilliant person might. I am glad your
wife has taken a fancy to him. And I want you to profit by her example.
Jack says she is one of the most attractive women he ever met. He asked
me to-day why I didn't do my hair like hers. She must make you very
happy, Rudolph?"

"My wife," Colonel Musgrave said, "is in my partial opinion, a very
clever and very beautiful woman."

"Yes; cleverness and beauty are sufficient to make any man happy, I
suppose," Anne hazarded. "Jack says, though--_Are_ cleverness and beauty
the main things in life, Rudolph?"

"Undoubtedly," he protested.

"Now, that," she said, judicially, "shows the difference in men. Jack
says a man loves a woman, not for her beauty or any other quality she
possesses, but just because she is the woman he loves and can't help
loving."

"Ah! I dare say that is the usual reason. Yes," said Colonel
Musgrave,--"because she is the woman he loves and cannot help loving!"

Anne clapped her hands. "Ah, so I have penetrated your indifference at
last, sir!"

Impulsively, she laid her hand upon his arm, and spoke with earnestness.
"Dear Rudolph, I am so glad you've found the woman you can really love.
Jack says there is only one possible woman in the world for each man,
and that only in a month of Sundays does he find her."

"Yes." said Musgrave. He had risen, and was looking down in friendly
fashion into her honest, lovely eyes. "Yes, there is only one possible
woman. And--yes, I think I found her, Anne, some years ago."




III


Thus it befell that all passed smoothly with Rudolph Musgrave and Anne
Charteris, with whom he was not in the least in love any longer (he
reflected), although in the nature of things she must always seem to him
a little different from all other people.

And it befell, too, that the following noon--this day being a Sunday,
warm, clear, and somnolent--Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave sat upon
the lawn before Matocton, and little Roger Musgrave was with them. In
fact, these two had been high-handedly press-ganged by this small despot
to serve against an enemy then harassing his majesty's equanimity and by
him, revilingly, designated as Nothing-to-do.

And so Anne made for Roger--as she had learned to do for her dead
son--in addition to a respectable navy of paper boats, a vast number of
"boxes" and "Nantucket sinks" and "picture frames" and "footballs." She
had used up the greater part of a magazine before the imp grew tired of
her novel accomplishments.

For as he invidiously observed, "I can make them for myself now, most
as good as you, only I always tear the bottom of the boat when you pull
it out, and my sinks are kind of wobbly. And besides, I've made up a
story just like your husband gets money for doing. And if I had a
quarter I would buy that green and yellow snake in the toy-store window
and wiggle it at people and scare them into fits."

"Sonnikins," said Colonel Musgrave, "suppose you tell us the story, and
then we will see if it is really worth a quarter, and try to save you
from this unblushing mendicancy."

"Well, God bless Father and Mother and little cousins--Oh, no, that's
what I say at night." Roger's voice now altered, assuming shrill
singsong cadences. His pensive gravity would have appeared excessive if
manifested by the Great Sphinx. "What I meant to say was that once upon
a time when the Battle of Gettysburg was going on and houses were being
robbed and burned, and my dear grandfather was being shot through the
heart, a certain house, where the richest man in town lived, was having
feast and merriment, never dreaming of any harm, or thinking of their
little child Rachel, who was on the front porch watching the battle and
screaming with joy at every man that fell dead. One dark-faced man was
struck with a bullet and was hurt. He saw the child laughing at him and
his heart was full of revenge. So that night, when all had gone to bed,
the old dark-faced man went softly in the house and got the little girl
and set the house on fire. And he carried her out in the mountains, and
is that worth a quarter?"

"Good heavens, no!" said Anne. "How dare you leave us in such harrowing
suspense?"

"Well, a whole lot more happened, because all the while Rachel was
asleep. When she woke up, she did not know where under the sun she was.
So she walked along for about an hour and came to a little village, and
after a few minutes she came to a large rock, and guess who she met? She
met her father, and when he saw her he hugged her so hard that when he
got through she did not have any breath left in her. And they walked
along, and after a while they came to the wood, and it was now about six
o'clock, and it was very dark, and just then nine robbers jumped out
from behind the trees, and they took a pistol and shot Rachel's father,
and the child fainted. Her papa was dead, so she dug a hole and buried
him, and went right back home. And of course that was all, and if I had
that snake, I wouldn't try to scare you with it, father, anyhow."

So Colonel Musgrave gave his son a well-earned coin, as the colonel
considered, and it having been decreed, "Now, father, _you_ tell a
story," obediently read aloud from a fat red-covered book. The tale was
of the colonel's selecting, and it dealt with a shepherdess and a
chimney-sweep.

"And so," the colonel perorated, "the little china people remained
together, and were thankful for the rivet in grandfather's neck, and
continued to love each other until they were broken to pieces--And
the tale is a parable, my son. You will find that out some day. I wish
you didn't have to."

"But is that all, father?"

"You will find it rather more than enough, sonnikins, when you begin to
interpret. Yes, that is all. Only you are to remember always that they
climbed to the very top of the chimney, where they could see the stars,
before they decided to go back and live upon the parlor table under the
brand-new looking-glass. For the stars are disconcertingly unconcerned
when you have climbed to them, and so altogether unimpressed by your
achievement that it is the nature of all china people to slink home
again, precisely as your Rachel did--and as Mrs. Charteris will assure
you."

"I?" said Anne. "Now, honestly, Rudolph, I was thinking you ought not to
let him sit upon the grass, because he really has a cold. And if I were
you, I would give him a good dose of castor-oil to-night. Some people
give it in lemon-juice, I know, but I found with my boy that peppermint
is rather less disagreeable. And you could easily send somebody over to
the store at the station----"

Anne broke off short. "Was I being inadequate again? I am sorry, but
with children you never know what a cold may lead to, and I really do
not believe it good for him to sit in this damp grass."

"Sonnikins," said Rudolph Musgrave, "you had better climb up into my
lap, before you and I are Podsnapped from the universe by the only
embodiment of common-sense just now within our reach."

He patted the boy's head and latterly resumed: "I am afraid of you,
Anne. Whenever I am imagining vain things or stitching romantic
possibilities, like embroideries, about the fabric of my past, I always
find the real you in my path, as undeniable as a gas-bill. I don't
believe you ever dare to think, because there is no telling what it
might lead to. You are simply unassailably armored by the courage of
other people's convictions."

Her candid eyes met his over the boy's bright head. "And what in the
world are you talking about?"

"I am lamenting. I am rending the air and beating my breast on account
of your obstinate preference for being always in the right. I do wish
you would endeavor to impersonate a human being a trifle more
convincingly----"

But the great gong, booming out for luncheon, interrupted him at this
point, and Colonel Musgrave was never permitted to finish his complaint
against Anne's unimaginativeness.




IV


On that same Sunday morning, while Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave
contended with little Roger's boredom on the lawn before Matocton,
Patricia and Charteris met by accident on the seventh terrace of the
gardens. Patricia had mentioned casually at the breakfast-table that she
intended to spend the forenoon on this terrace unsabbatically making
notes for a paper on "The Symbolism of Dante," which she was to read
before the Lichfield Woman's Club in October; but Mr. Charteris had not
overheard her.

He was seated on the front porch, working out a somewhat difficult point
in his new book, when it had first occurred to him that this particular
terrace would be an inspiring and appropriate place in which to think
the matter over, undisturbed, he said. And it was impossible he should
have known that anyone was there, as the seventh terrace happens to be
the only one that, being planted with beech-trees, is completely
screened from observation. From the house, you cannot see anything that
happens there.

It was a curious accident, though. It really seemed, now that Patricia
had put an ending to their meetings in the maple-grove, Fate was
conspiring to bring them together.

However, as Mr. Charteris pointed out, there could be no possible
objection to this conspiracy, since they had decided that their
friendship was to be of a purely platonic nature. It was a severe trial
to him, he confessed, to be forced to put aside certain dreams he had
had of the future--mad dreams, perhaps, but such as had seemed very dear
and very plausible to his impractical artistic temperament.

Still, it heartened him to hope that their friendship--since it was to
be no more--might prove a survival, or rather a veritable renaissance,
of the beautiful old Greek spirit in such matters. And, though the blind
chance that mismanaged the world had chained them to uncongenial, though
certainly well-meaning, persons, this was no logical reason why he and
Patricia should be deprived of the pleasures of intellectual
intercourse. Their souls were too closely akin.

For Mr. Charteris admitted that his soul was Grecian to the core, and
out of place and puzzled and very lonely in a sordid, bustling world;
and he assured Patricia--she did not object if he called her
Patricia?--that her own soul possessed all the beauty and purity and
calm of an Aphrodite sculptured by Phidias. It was such a soul as Horace
might have loved, as Theocritus might have hymned in glad Greek song.
Patricia flushed, and dissented somewhat.

"Frankly, _mon ami_," she said, "you are far too attractive for your
company to be quite safe. You are such an adept in the nameless little
attentions that women love--so profuse with lesser sugar-plums of speech
and action--that after two weeks one's husband is really necessary as an
antidote. Sugar-plums are good, but, like all palatable things,
unwholesome. So I shall prescribe Rudolph's company for myself, to ward
off an attack of moral indigestion. I am very glad he has come
back--really glad," she added, conscientiously. "Poor old Rudolph! what
between his interminable antiquities and those demented sections of the
alphabet--What are those things, _mon ami_, that are always going up and
down in Wall Street?"

"Elevators?" Mr. Charteris suggested.

"Oh, you jay-bird! I mean those N.P.'s and N.Y.C.'s and those other
letters that are always having flurries and panics and passed dividends.
They keep him incredibly busy."

And she sighed, tolerantly. Patricia had come within the last two weeks
to believe that she was neglected, if not positively ill-treated, by her
husband; and she had no earthly objection to Mr. Charteris thinking
likewise. Her face expressed patient resignation now, as they walked
under the close-matted foliage of the beech-trees, which made a
pleasant, sun-flecked gloom about them.

Patricia removed her hat--the morning really was rather close--and
paused where a sunbeam fell upon her copper-colored hair, and glorified
her wistful countenance. She sighed once more, and added a finishing
touch to the portrait of a _femme incomprise_.

"Pray, don't think, _mon ami_," she said very earnestly, "that I am
blaming Rudolph! I suppose no wife can ever hope to have any part in her
husband's inner life."

"Not in her own husband's, of course," said Charteris, cryptically.

"No, for while a woman gives her heart all at once, men crumble theirs
away, as one feeds bread to birds--a crumb to this woman, a crumb to
that--and such a little crumb, sometimes! And his wife gets what is left
over."

"Pray, where did you read that?" said Charteris.

"I didn't read it anywhere. It was simply a thought that came to me,"
Patricia lied, gently. "But don't let's try to be clever. Cleverness is
always a tax, but before luncheon it is an extortion. Personally, it
makes me feel as if I had attended a welsh-rabbit supper the night
before. Your wife must be very patient."

"My wife," cried Charteris, in turn resolved to screen an unappreciative
mate, "is the most dear and most kind-hearted among the Philistines. And
yet, at times, I grant you--"

"Oh, but, of course!" Patricia said impatiently. "I don't for a moment
question that your wife is an angel."

"And why?" His eyebrows lifted, and he smiled.

"Why, wasn't it an angel," Patricia queried, all impishness now, "who
kept the first man and woman out of paradise?"

"If--if I thought you meant that----!" he cried; and then he shrugged
his shoulders. "My wife's virtues merit a better husband than Fate has
accorded her. Anne is the best woman I have ever known."

Patricia was not unnaturally irritated. After all, one does not take the
trouble to meet a man accidentally in a plantation of young beech-trees
in order to hear him discourse of his wife's good qualities; and
besides, Mr. Charteris was speaking in a disagreeably solemn manner,
rather as if he fancied himself in a cathedral.

Therefore Patricia cast down her eyes again, and said:

"Men of genius are so rarely understood by their wives."

"We will waive the question of genius." Mr. Charteris laughed heartily,
but he had flushed with pleasure.

"I suppose," he continued, pacing up and down with cat-like fervor,
"that matrimony is always more or less of a compromise--like two
convicts chained together trying to catch each other's gait. After a
while, they succeed to a certain extent; the chain is still heavy, of
course, but it does not gall them as poignantly as it used to do. And I
fear the artistic temperament is not suited to marriage; its capacity
for suffering is too great."

Mr. Charteris caught his breath in shuddering fashion, and he paused
before Patricia. After a moment he grasped her by both wrists.

"We are chained fast enough, my lady," he cried, bitterly, "and our
sentence is for life! There are green fields yonder, but our allotted
place is here in the prison-yard. There is laughter yonder in the
fields, and the scent of wild flowers floats in to us at times when we
are weary, and the whispering trees sway their branches over the
prison-wall, and their fruit is good to look on, and they hang within
reach--ah, we might reach them very easily! But this is forbidden fruit,
my lady; and it is not included in our wholesome prison-fare. And so
don't think of it! We have been happy, you and I, for a little. We
might--don't think of it! Don't dare think of it! Go back and help your
husband drag his chain; it galls him as sorely as it does you. It galls
us all. It is the heaviest chain was ever forged; but we do not dare
shake it off!"

"I--oh, Jack, Jack, don't you dare to talk to me like that! We must be
brave. We must be sensible." Patricia, regardless of her skirts, sat
down upon the ground, and produced a pocket-handkerchief. "I--oh, what
do you mean by making me so unhappy?" she demanded, indignantly.

"Ah, Patricia," he murmured, as he knelt beside her, "how can you hope
to have a man ever talk to you in a sane fashion? You shouldn't have
such eyes, Patricia! They are purple and fathomless like the ocean, and
when a man looks into them too long his sanity grows weak, and sinks
and drowns in their cool depths, and the man must babble out his foolish
heart to you. Oh, but indeed, you shouldn't have such eyes, Patricia!
They are dangerous, and to ask anybody to believe in their splendor is
an insult to his intelligence, and besides, they are much too bright to
wear in the morning. They are bad form, Patricia."

"We must be sensible," she babbled. "Your wife is here; my husband is
here. And we--we aren't children or madmen, Jack dear. So we really must
be sensible, I suppose. Oh, Jack," she cried, upon a sudden; "this isn't
honorable!"

"Why, no! Poor little Anne!"

Mr. Charteris's eyes grew tender for a moment, because his wife, in a
fashion, was dear to him. Then he laughed, very musically.

"And how can a man remember honor, Patricia, when the choice lies
between honor and you? You shouldn't have such hair, Patricia! It is a
net spun out of the raw stuff of fire and blood and of portentous
sunsets; and its tendrils have curled around what little honor I ever
boasted, and they hold it fast, Patricia. It is dishonorable to love
you, but I cannot think of that when I am with you and hear you speak.
And when I am not with you, just to remember that dear voice is enough
to set my pulses beating faster. Oh, Patricia, you shouldn't have such a
voice!"

Charteris broke off in speech. "'Scuse me for interruptin'," the old
mulattress Virginia was saying, "but Mis' Pilkins sen' me say lunch
raydy, Miss Patrisy."

Virginia seemed to notice nothing out-of-the-way. Having delivered her
message, she went away quietly, her pleasant yellow face as
imperturbable as an idol's. But Patricia shivered.

"She frightens me, _mon ami_. Yes, that old woman always gives me
gooseflesh, and I don't know why--because she is as deaf as a post--and
I simply can't get rid of her. She is a sort of symbol--she, and how
many others, I wonder!... Oh, well, let's hurry."

So Mr. Charteris was never permitted to finish his complaint against
Patricia's voice.

It was absolutely imperative they should be on time for luncheon; for,
as Patricia pointed out, the majority of people are censorious and lose
no opportunity for saying nasty things. They are even capable of
sneering at a purely platonic friendship which is attempting to preserve
the beautiful old Greek spirit.

       *       *       *       *       *

She was chattering either of her plans for the autumn, or of Dante and
the discovery of his missing cantos, or else of how abominably Bob
Townsend had treated Rosalind Jemmett, and they had almost reached the
upper terrace--little Roger, indeed, his red head blazing in the
sunlight, was already sidling by shy instalments toward them--when
Patricia moaned inconsequently and for no ascertainable cause fainted.

It was the first time for four years she had been guilty of such an
indiscretion, she was shortly afterward explaining to various members of
the Musgraves' house-party. It was the heat, no doubt. But since
everybody insisted upon it, she would very willingly toast them in
another bumper of aromatic spirits of ammonia.

"Just look at that, Rudolph! you've spilt it all over your coat sleeve.
I do wish you would try to be a little less clumsy. Oh, well, I'm spruce
as a new penny now. So let's all go to luncheon."




V


Patricia had not been in perfect health for a long while. It seemed to
her, in retrospect, that ever since the agonies of little Roger's birth
she had been the victim of what she described as "a sort of
all-overishness." Then, too, as has been previously recorded, Patricia
had been operated upon by surgeons, and more than once....

"Good Lord!" as she herself declared, "it has reached the point that
when I see a turkey coming to the dinner-table to be carved I can't help
treating it as an ingénue."

Yet for the last four years she had never fainted, until this. It
disquieted her. Then, too, awoke faint pricking memories of certain
symptoms ... which she had not talked about ...

Now they alarmed her; and in consequence she took the next morning's
train to Lichfield.




VI


Mrs. Ashmeade, who has been previously quoted, now comes into the story.
She is only an episode. Still, her intervention led to peculiar
results--results, curiously enough, in which she was not in the least
concerned. She simply comes into the story for a moment, and then goes
out of it; but her part is an important one.

She is like the watchman who announces the coming of Agamemnon;
Clytemnestra sharpens her ax at the news, and the fatal bath is prepared
for the _anax andron_. The tragedy moves on; the house of Atreus falls,
and the wrath of implacable gods bellows across the heavens; meanwhile,
the watchman has gone home to have tea with his family, and we hear no
more of him. There are any number of morals to this.

Mrs. Ashmeade comes into the story on the day Patricia went to
Lichfield, and some weeks after John Charteris's arrival at Matocton.
Since then, affairs had progressed in a not unnatural sequence. Mr.
Charteris, as we have seen, attributed it to Fate; and, assuredly, there
must be a special providence of some kind that presides over country
houses--a freakish and whimsical providence, which hugely rejoices in
confounding one's sense of time and direction.

Through its agency, people unaccountably lose their way in the simplest
walks, and turn up late and embarrassed for luncheon. At the end of the
evening, it brings any number of couples blinking out of the dark, with
no idea the clock was striking more than half-past nine.

And it delights in sending one into the garden--in search of roses or
dahlias or upas-trees or something of the sort, of course--and thereby
causing one to encounter the most unlikely people, and really, quite the
last person one would have thought of meeting, as all frequenters of
house-party junketings will assure you. And thus is this special
house-party providence responsible for a great number of marriages, and,
it may be, for a large percentage of the divorce cases; for, if you
desire very heartily to see anything of another member of a house-party,
this lax-minded and easy-going providence will somehow always bring the
event about in a specious manner, and without any apparent thought of
the consequences.

And the Musgraves' house-party was no exception.

Mrs. Ashmeade, for reasons of her own, took daily note of this. The
others were largely engrossed by their own affairs; they did not
seriously concern themselves about the doings of their fellow-guests.
And, besides, if John Charteris manifestly sought the company of
Patricia Musgrave, her husband did not appear to be exorbitantly
dissatisfied or angry or even lonely; and, be this as it might, the fact
remained that Celia Reindan was at this time more than a little
interested in Teddy Anstruther; and Felix Kennaston was undeniably very
attentive to Kathleen Saumarez; and Tom Gelwix was quite certainly
devoting the major part of his existence to sitting upon the beach with
Rosalind Jemmett.

For, in Lichfield at all events, everyone's house has at least a pane or
so of glass in it; and, if indiscriminate stone-throwing were ever to
become the fashion, there is really no telling what damage might ensue.
And so had Mrs. Ashmeade been a younger woman--had time and an adoring
husband not rendered her as immune to an insanity _à deux_ as any of us
may hope to be upon this side of saintship or senility--why, Mrs.
Ashmeade would most probably have remained passive, and Mrs. Ashmeade
would never have come into this story at all.

As it was, she approached Rudolph Musgrave with a fixed purpose this
morning as he smoked an after-breakfast cigarette on the front porch of
Matocton. And,

"Rudolph," said Mrs. Ashmeade, "are you blind?"

"You mean--?" he asked, and he broke off, for he had really no
conception of what she meant.

And Mrs. Ashmeade said, "I mean Patricia and Charteris. Did you think I
was by any chance referring to the man in the moon and the Queen of
Sheba?"

If ever amazement showed in a man's eyes, it shone now in Rudolph
Musgrave's. After a little, the pupils widened in a sort of terror. So
this was what Clarice Pendomer had been hinting at.

"Nonsense!" he cried. "Why--why, it is utter, preposterous, Bedlamite
nonsense!" He caught his breath in wonder at the notion of such a jest,
remembering a little packet of letters hidden in his desk. "It--oh, no,
Fate hasn't quite so fine a sense of humor as that. The thing is
incredible!" Musgrave laughed, and flushed. "I mean----"

"I don't think you need tell me what you mean," said Mrs. Ashmeade. She
sat down in a large rocking-chair, and fanned herself, for the day was
warm. "Of course, it is officious and presumptuous and disagreeable of
me to meddle. I don't mind your thinking that. But Rudolph, don't make
the mistake of thinking that Fate ever misses a chance of humiliating us
by showing how poor are our imaginations. The gipsy never does. She is a
posturing mountebank, who thrives by astounding humanity."

Mrs. Ashmeade paused, and her eyes were full of memories, and very wise.

"I am only a looker-on at the tragic farce that is being played here,"
she continued, after a little, "but lookers-on, you know, see most of
the game. They are not playing fairly with you, Rudolph. When people set
about an infringement of the Decalogue they owe it to their self-respect
to treat with Heaven as a formidable antagonist. To mark the cards is
not enough. They are not playing fairly, my dear, and you ought to know
it."

He walked up and down the porch once or twice, with his hands behind
him; then he stopped before Mrs. Ashmeade, and smiled down at her.
Without, many locusts shrilled monotonously.

"No, I do not think you are officious or meddling or anything of the
sort, I think you are one of the best and kindest-hearted women in the
world. But--bless your motherly soul, Polly! the thing is utterly
preposterous. Of course, Patricia is young, and likes attention, and it
pleases her to have men admire her. That, Polly, is perfectly natural.
Why, you wouldn't expect her to sit around under the trees, and read
poetry with her own husband, would you? We have been married far too
long for that, Patricia and I. She thinks me rather prosy and stupid at
times, poor girl, because--well, because, in point of fact, I am. But,
at the bottom of her heart--Oh, it's preposterous! We are the best
friends in the world, I tell you! It is simply that she and Jack have a
great deal in common--"

"You don't understand John Charteris. I do," said Mrs. Ashmeade,
placidly. "Charteris is simply a baby with a vocabulary. His moral
standpoint is entirely that of infancy. It would be ludicrous to
describe him as selfish, because he is selfishness incarnate. I
sometimes believe it is the only characteristic the man possesses. He
reaches out his hand and takes whatever he wants, just as a baby would,
quite simply, and as a matter of course. He wants your wife now, and he
is reaching out his hand to take her. He probably isn't conscious of
doing anything especially wrong; he is always so plausible in whatever
he does that he ends by deceiving himself, I suppose. For he is always
plausible. It is worse than useless to argue any matter with him,
because he invariably ends by making you feel as if you had been caught
stealing a hat. The only argument that would get the better of John
Charteris is knocking him down, just as spanking is the only argument
which ever gets the better of a baby. Yes, he is very like a
baby--thoroughly selfish and thoroughly dependent on other people; only,
he is a clever baby who exaggerates his own helplessness in order to
appeal to women. He has a taste for women. And women naturally like him,
for he impresses them as an irresponsible child astray in an artful and
designing world. They want to protect him. Even I do, at times. It is
really maternal, you know; we would infinitely prefer for him to be soft
and little, so that we could pick him up, and cuddle him. But as it is,
he is dangerous. He believes whatever he tells himself, you see."

Her voice died away, and Mrs. Ashmeade fanned herself in the fashion
addicted by perturbed women who, nevertheless, mean to have their say
out--slowly and impersonally, and quite as if she was fanning some one
else through motives of charity.

"I don't question," Musgrave said, at length, "that Jack is the highly
estimable character you describe. But--oh, it is all nonsense, Polly!"
he cried, with petulance, and with a tinge--if but the merest nuance
--of conviction lacking in his voice.

The fan continued its majestic sweep from the shade into the sunlight,
and back again into the shadow. Without, many locusts shrilled
monotonously.

"Rudolph, I know what you meant by saying that Fate hadn't such a fine
sense of humor."

"My dear madam, it was simply thrown out, in the heat of
conversation--as an axiom----"

For a moment the fan paused; then went on as before. It was never
charged against Pauline Ashmeade, whatever her shortcomings, that she
was given to unnecessary verbiage.

Colonel Musgrave was striding up and down, divided between a disposition
to swear at the universe at large and a desire to laugh at it. Somehow,
it did not occur to him to doubt what she had told him. He comprehended
now that, chafing under his indebtedness in the affair of Mrs. Pendomer,
Charteris would most naturally retaliate by making love to his
benefactor's wife, because the colonel also knew John Charteris. And for
the rest, it was useless to struggle against a Fate that planned such
preposterous and elaborate jokes; one might more rationally depend on
Fate to work out some both ludicrous and horrible solution, he
reflected, remembering a little packet of letters hidden in his desk.

Nevertheless, he paused after a while, and laughed, with a tolerable
affectation of mirth.

"I say--I--and what in heaven's name, Polly, prompted you to bring me
this choice specimen of a mare's-nest?"

"Because I am fond of you, I suppose. Isn't one always privileged to be
disagreeable to one's friends? We have been friends a long while, you
know."

Mrs. Ashmeade was looking out over the river now, but she seemed to see
a great way, a very great way, beyond its glaring waters, and to be
rather uncertain as to whether what she beheld there was of a humorous
or pathetic nature.

"Rudolph, do you remember that evening--the first summer that I knew
you--at Fortress Monroe, when we sat upon the pier so frightfully late,
and the moon rose out of the bay, and made a great, solid-looking,
silver path that led straight over the rim of the world, and you talked
to me about--about what, now?"

"Oh, yes, yes!--I remember perfectly! One of the most beautiful evenings
I ever saw. I remember it quite distinctly. I talked--I--and what, in
the Lord's name, did I talk about, Polly?"

"Ah, men forget! A woman never forgets when she is really friends with a
man. I know now you were telling me about Anne Charteris, for you have
been in love with her all your life, Rudolph, in your own particular
half-hearted and dawdling fashion. Perhaps that is why you have had so
many affairs. You plainly found the run of women so unimportant that it
put every woman on her pride to prove she was different. Yes, I
remember. But that night I thought you were trying to make love to me,
and I was disappointed in you, and--yes, rather pleased. Women are all
vain and perfectly inconsistent. But then, girl-children always take
after their fathers."

Mrs. Ashmeade rose from her chair. Her fan shut with a snap.

"You were a dear boy, Rudolph, when I first knew you--and what I liked
was that you never made love to me. Of all the boys I have known and
helped to form, you were the only sensible one--the only one who never
presumed. That was rather clever of you, Rudolph. It would have been
ridiculous, for even arithmetically I am older than you.

"Wouldn't it have been ridiculous, Rudolph?" she demanded, suddenly.

"Not in the least," Musgrave protested, in courteous wise. "You--why,
Polly, you were a wonderfully handsome woman. Any boy----"

"Oh, yes!--I was. I'm not now, am I, Rudolph?" Mrs. Ashmeade threw back
her head and laughed naturally. "Ah, dear boy that was, it is unfair,
isn't it, for an old woman to seize upon you in this fashion, and insist
on your making love to her? But I will let you off. You don't have to do
it."

She caught her skirts in her left hand, preparatory to going, and her
right hand rested lightly on his arm. She spoke in a rather peculiar
voice.

"Yes," she said, "the boy was a very, very dear boy, and I want the man
to be equally brave and--sensible."

Musgrave stared after her. "I wonder--I wonder--? Oh, no, that
couldn't be," he said, and wearily.

"There must be some preposterous situations that don't come about."

       *       *       *       *       *

And afterward he strolled across the lawn, where the locusts were
shrilling, as if in a stubborn prediction of something which was
inevitable, and he meditated upon a great number of things. There were a
host of fleecy little clouds in the sky. He looked up at them,
interrogatively.

And then he smiled and shook his head.

"Yet I don't know," said he; "for I am coming to the conclusion that the
world is run on an extremely humorous basis."

And oddly enough, it was at the same moment that Patricia--in
Lichfield--reached the same conclusion.




PART SEVEN - YOKED

  "We are as time moulds us, lacking wherewithal
  To shape out nobler fortunes or contend
  Against all-patient Fates, who may not mend
  The allotted pattern of things temporal
  Or alter it a jot or e'er let fall
  A single stitch thereof, until at last
  The web and its drear weavers be overcast
  And predetermined darkness swallow all.

  "They have ordained for us a time to sing,
  A time to love, a time wherein to tire
  Of all spent songs and kisses; caroling
  Such elegies as buried dreams require,
  Love now departs, and leaves us shivering
  Beside the embers of a burned-out fire."

PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. _Egeria Answers._




I


The doctor's waiting-room smelt strongly of antiseptics. That was
Patricia's predominating thought as she wandered aimlessly about the
apartment. She fingered its dusty furniture. She remembered afterward
the steel-engraving of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, with General Lee
explaining some evidently important matter to those attentive and
unhumanly stiff politicians; and she remembered, too, how in depicting
one statesman, who unavoidably sat with his back to the spectator, the
artist had exceeded anatomical possibilities in order to obtain a
recognizable full-faced portrait. Yet at the time this picture had not
roused her conscious attention.

She went presently to the long table austerely decorated with two rows
of magazines, each partly covered by its neighbor, just as shingles are
placed. The arrangement irritated her unreasonably. She wanted to
disarrange these dog-eared pamphlets, to throw them on the floor, to
destroy them. She wondered how many other miserable people had tried to
read these hateful books while they waited in this abominable room.

She started when the door of the consultation-room opened. The doctor
was patting the silk glove of a harassed-looking woman in black as he
escorted her to the outer door, and was assuring her that everything was
going very well indeed, and that she was not to worry, and so on.

And presently he spoke with Patricia, for a long while, quite levelly,
of matters which it is not suitable to record. Discreet man that he was,
Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia
should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke
concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although
obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his
opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment
at the time of little Roger's birth.

She was dividedly conscious of a desire to laugh and of the notion that
she must remain outwardly serious, because though this horrible
Pemberton man was talking abject nonsense, she would presently be having
him as a dinner-guest.

But what if he were not talking nonsense? The possibility, considered,
roused a sensation of falling through infinity.

"Yes, yes," Patricia civilly assented. "These young doctors have taken
this out of me, and that out of me, as you might take the works out of a
watch. And it has done no good; and they were mistaken in their first
diagnoses, because what they took for true osteomalacia was only----
Would you mind telling me again? Oh, yes; I had only a
pseudo-osteomalacic rhachitic pelvis, to begin with. To think of
anybody's being mistaken about a simple little trouble like that! And I
suppose I was just born with it, like my mother and all those other
luckless women with Musgrave blood in them?"

"Fehling and Schliephake at least consider this variety of pelvic
anomaly to be congenital in the majority of cases. But, without going
into the question of heredity at all, I think it only, fair to tell you,
Mrs. Musgrave----" And Pemberton went on talking.

Neither of the two showed any emotion.

The doctor went on talking. Patricia did not listen. The man was
talking, she comprehended, but to her his words seemed blurred and
indistinguishable. "Like a talking-machine when it isn't wound up
enough," she decided.

Subconsciously Patricia was thinking, "You have two big beads of
perspiration on your nose, and if I were to allude to the fact you would
very probably die of embarrassment."

Aloud Patricia said: "You mean, then, that, to cap it all, a functional
disorder of my heart has become organic, so that I would inevitably die
under another operation? or even at a sudden shock? And that particular
operation is now the solitary chance of saving my life! The dilemma is
neat, isn't it? How God must laugh at the jokes He contrives," said
Patricia. "I wish that I could laugh. And I will. I don't care whether
you think me a reprobate or not, Dr. Pemberton, I want a good stiff
drink of whiskey--the Musgrave size."

He gave it to her.




II


Patricia had as yet an hour to spend in Lichfield before her train left.
She passed it in the garden of her own home, where she had first seen
Rudolph Musgrave and he had fought with Pevensey. All that seemed very
long ago.

The dahlia leaves, she noticed, were edged with yellow. She must look to
it that the place was more frequently watered; and that the bulbs were
dug up in September. Next year she meant to set the dahlias thinly, like
a hedge....

"Oh, yes, I meant to. Only I won't be alive next year," she recollected.

She went about the garden to see if Ned had weeded out the wild-pea
vines--a pest which had invaded the trim place lately. Only a few of the
intruders remained, burnt-out and withered as they are annually by the
mid-summer sun. There would be no more fight until next April.

"Oh, and I have prayed to You, I have always tried to do what You
wanted, and I never asked You to let me be born locked up in a
good-for-nothing Musgrave body! And You won't even let me see a
wild-pea vine again! That isn't much to ask, I think. But You won't let
me do it. You really do have rather funny notions about Your jokes."

She began to laugh.

"Oh, very well!" Patricia said aloud. "It is none of my affair that You
elect to run Your world on an extremely humorous basis."

She was at Matocton in good time for luncheon.




III


Colonel Musgrave had a brief interview with his wife after luncheon. He
began with quiet remonstrance, and ended with an unheard extenuation of
his presumption. Patricia's speech on this occasion was of an unfettered
and heady nature.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she said, when she had finally
paused for breath, and had wiped away her tears, and had powdered her
nose, viciously, "to bully a weak and defenseless woman in this way. I
dare say everybody in the house has heard us--brawling and squabbling
just like a hod-carrier and his wife. What's that? You haven't said a
word for fifteen minutes? Oh, la, la, la! well, I don't care. Anyhow, I
have, and I am perfectly sure they heard me, and I am sure I don't care
in the least, and it's all your fault, anyway. Oh, but you have an
abominable nature, Rudolph--a mean and cruel and suspicious nature. Your
bald-headed little Charteris is nothing whatever to me; and I would have
been quite willing to give him up if you had spoken to me in a decent
manner about it. You only _said_----? I don't care what you said; and
besides, if you did speak to me in a decent manner, it simply shows that
your thoughts were so horrid and vulgar that even you weren't so
abandoned as to dare to put them into words. Very well, then, I won't be
seen so much with him in future. I realize you are quite capable of
beating me if I don't give way to your absurd prejudices. Yes, you are,
Rudolph; you're just the sort of man to take pleasure in beating a
woman. After the exhibition of temper you've given this afternoon, I
believe you are capable of anything. Hand me that parasol! Don't keep on
talking to me; for I don't wish to hear anything you have to say. You're
simply driving me to my grave with your continual nagging and abuse and
fault-finding. I'm sure I wish I were dead as much as you do. Is my hat
on straight? How do you expect me to see into that mirror if you stand
directly in front of it? There! not content with robbing me of every
pleasure in life, I verily believe you were going to let me go
downstairs with my hat cocked over one ear. And don't you snort and look
at me like that. I'm not going to meet Mr. Charteris. I'm going driving
with Felix Kennaston; he asked me at luncheon. I suppose you'll object
to him next; you object to all my friends. Very well! Now you've made me
utterly miserable for the entire afternoon, and I'm sure I hope you are
satisfied."

There was a rustle of skirts, and the door slammed.




IV


Colonel Musgrave went to his own room, where he spent an interval in
meditation. He opened his desk and took out a small packet of papers,
some of which he read listlessly. How curiously life re-echoed itself!
he reflected, for here, again, were castby love-letters potent to breed
mischief; and his talk with Polly Ashmeade had been peculiarly
reminiscent of his more ancient talk with Clarice Pendomer. Everything
that happened seemed to have happened before.

But presently he shook his head, sighing. Chance had put into his hands
a weapon, and a formidable weapon, it seemed to him, but the colonel did
not care to use it. He preferred to strike with some less grimy cudgel.

Then he rang for one of the servants, questioned him, and was informed
that Mr. Charteris had gone down to the beach just after luncheon. A
moment later, Colonel Musgrave was walking through the gardens in this
direction.

As he came to the thicket which screens the beach, he called
Charteris's name loudly, in order to ascertain his whereabouts. And the
novelist's voice answered--yet not at once, but after a brief silence.
It chanced that, at this moment, Musgrave had come to a thin place in
the thicket, and could plainly see Mr. Charteris; he was concealing some
white object in the hollow of a log that lay by the river. A little
later, Musgrave came out upon the beach, and found Charteris seated upon
the same log, an open book upon his knees, and looking back over his
shoulder wonderingly.

"Oh," said John Charteris, "so it was you, Rudolph? I could not imagine
who it was that called."

"Yes--I wanted a word with you, Jack."

Now, there are five little red-and-white bath-houses upon the beach at
Matocton; the nearest of them was some thirty feet from Mr. Charteris.
It might have been either imagination or the prevalent breeze, but
Musgrave certainly thought he heard a door closing. Moreover, as he
walked around the end of the log, he glanced downward as in a casual
manner, and perceived a protrusion which bore an undeniable resemblance
to the handle of a parasol. Musgrave whistled, though, at the bottom of
his heart, he was not surprised; and then, he sat down upon the log, and
for a moment was silent.

"A beautiful evening," said Mr. Charteris.

Musgrave lighted a cigarette.

"Jack, I have something rather difficult to say to you--yes, it is
deuced difficult, and the sooner it is over the better. I--why,
confound it all, man! I want you to stop making love to my wife."

Mr. Charteris's eyebrows rose. "Really, Colonel Musgrave----." he began,
coolly.

"Now, you are about to make a scene, you know," said Musgrave, raising
his hand in protest, "and we are not here for that. We are not going to
tear any passions to tatters; we are not going to rant; we are simply
going to have a quiet and sensible talk. We don't happen to be
characters in a romance; for you aren't Lancelot, you know, and I am not
up to the part of Arthur by a great deal. I am not angry, I am not
jealous, nor do I put the matter on any high moral grounds. I simply say
it won't do--no, hang it, it won't do!"

"I dare not question you are an authority in such matters," said John
Charteris, sweetly--"since among many others, Clarice Pendomer is near
enough to be an obtainable witness."

Colonel Musgrave grimaced. "But what a gesture!" he thought,
half-enviously. Jack Charteris, quite certainly, meant to make the most
of the immunity Musgrave had purchased for him. None the less, Musgrave
had now his cue. Patricia must be listening.

And so what Colonel Musgrave said was: "Put it that a burnt child dreads
the fire--is that a reason he should not warn his friends against it?"

"At least," said Charteris at length, "you are commendably frank. I
appreciate that, Rudolph. I honestly appreciate the fact you have come
to me, not as the husband of that fiction in which kitchen-maids
delight, breathing fire and speaking balderdash, but as one sensible man
to another. Let us be frank, then; let us play with the cards upon the
table. You have charged me with loving your wife; and I answer you
frankly--I do. She does me the honor to return this affection. What,
then, Rudolph?"

Musgrave blew out a puff of smoke. "I don't especially mind," he said,
slowly. "According to tradition, of course, I ought to spring at your
throat with a smothered curse. But, as a matter of fact, I don't see why
I should be irritated. No, in common reason," he added, upon
consideration, "I am only rather sorry for you both."

Mr. Charteris sprang to his feet, and walked up and down the beach. "Ah,
you hide your feelings well," he cried, and his laughter was a trifle
unconvincing and a bit angry. "But it is unavailing with me. I know! I
know the sick and impotent hatred of me that is seething in your heart;
and I feel for you the pity you pretend to entertain toward me. Yes, I
pity you. But what would you have? Frankly, while in many ways an
estimable man, you are no fit mate for Patricia. She has the sensitive,
artistic temperament, poor girl; and only we who are cursed with it can
tell you what its possession implies. And you--since frankness is the
order of the day, you know--well, you impress me as being a trifle
inadequate. It is not your fault, perhaps, but the fact remains that you
have never amounted to anything personally. You have simply traded upon
the accident of being born a Musgrave of Matocton. In consequence you
were enabled to marry Patricia's money, just as the Musgraves of
Matocton always marry some woman who is able to support them. Ah, but it
was her money you married, and not Patricia! Any community of interest
between you was impossible, and is radically impossible. Your marriage
was a hideous mistake, just as mine was. For you are starving her soul,
Rudolph, just as Anne has starved mine. And now, at last, when Patricia
and I have seen our single chance of happiness, we cannot--no! we cannot
and we will not--defer to any outworn tradition or to fear of Mrs.
Grundy's narrow-minded prattle!"

Charteris swept aside the dogmas of the world with an indignant gesture
of somewhat conscious nobility; and he turned to his companion in an
attitude of defiance.

Musgrave was smiling. He smoked and seemed to enjoy his cigarette.

The day was approaching sunset. The sun, a glowing ball of copper, hung
low in the west over a rampart of purple clouds, whose heights were
smeared with red. A slight, almost imperceptible, mist rose from the
river, and, where the horizon should have been, a dubious cloudland
prevailed. Far to the west were orange-colored quiverings upon the
stream's surface, but, nearer, the river dimpled with silver-tipped
waves; and, at their feet, the water grew transparent, and splashed over
the sleek, brown sand, and sucked back, leaving a curved line of
bubbles which, one by one, winked, gaped and burst. There was a drowsy
peacefulness in the air; behind them, among the beeches, were many
stealthy wood-sounds; and, at long intervals, a sleepy, peevish
twittering went about the nested trees.

In Colonel Musgrave's face, the primal peace was mirrored.

"May I ask," said he at length, "what you propose doing?"

Mr. Charteris answered promptly. "I, of course, propose," said he, "to
ask Patricia to share the remainder of my life."

"A euphemism, as I take it, for an elopement. I hardly thought you
intended going so far."

"Rudolph!" cried Charteris, drawing himself to his full height--and he
was not to blame for the fact that it was but five-feet-six--"I am, I
hope, an honorable man! I cannot eat your salt and steal your honor. So
I loot openly, or not at all."

The colonel shrugged his shoulders.

"I presuppose you have counted the cost--and estimated the necessary
breakage?"

"True love," the novelist declared, in a hushed, sweet voice, "is above
such considerations."

"I think," said Musgrave slowly, "that any love worthy of the name will
always appraise the cost--to the woman. It is of Patricia I am
thinking."

"She loves me," Charteris murmured. He glanced up and laughed. "Upon my
soul, you know, I cannot help thinking the situation a bit
farcical--you and I talking over matters in this fashion. But I honestly
believe the one chance of happiness for any of us hinges on Patricia and
me chucking the whole affair, and bolting."

"No! it won't do--no, hang it, Jack, it will not do!" Musgrave glanced
toward the bath-house, and he lifted his voice. "I am not considering
you in the least--and under the circumstances, you could hardly expect
me to. It is of Patricia I am thinking. I haven't made her altogether
happy. Our marriage was a mating of incongruities--and possibly you are
justified in calling it a mistake. Yet, day in and day out, I think we
get along as well together as do most couples; and it is wasting time to
cry over spilt milk. Instead, it rests with us, the two men who love
her, to decide what is best for Patricia. It is she and only she we must
consider."

"Ah, you are right!" said Charteris, and his eyes grew tender. "She must
have what she most desires; and all must be sacrificed to that." He
turned and spoke as simply as a child. "Of course, you know, I shall be
giving up a great deal for love of her, but--I am willing."

Musgrave looked at him for a moment. "H'm doubtless," he assented. "Why,
then, we won't consider the others. We will not consider your wife,
who--who worships you. We won't consider the boy. I, for my part, think
it is a mother's duty to leave an unsullied name to her child, but,
probably, my ideas are bourgeois. We won't consider Patricia's
relatives, who, perhaps, will find it rather unpleasant. In short, we
must consider no one save Patricia."

"Of course, one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."

"No; the question is whether it is absolutely necessary to make the
omelet. I say no."

"And I," quoth Charteris smiling gently, "say yes."

"For Patricia," Musgrave went on, as in meditation, but speaking very
clearly, "it means giving up--everything. It means giving up her friends
and the life to which she is accustomed; it means being ashamed to face
those who were formerly her friends. We, the world, our world of
Lichfield, I mean--are lax enough as to the divorce question, heaven
knows, but we can't pardon immorality when coupled with poverty. And you
would be poor, you know. Your books are tremendously clever, Jack,
but--as I happen to know--the proceeds from them would not support two
people in luxury; and Patricia has nothing. That is a sordid detail, of
course, but it is worth considering. Patricia would never be happy in a
three-pair back."

Mr. Charteris was frankly surprised. "Patricia has--nothing?"

"Bless your soul, of course not! Her father left the greater part of his
money to our boy, you know. Most of it is still held in trust for our
boy, who is named after him. Not a penny of it belongs to Patricia, and
even I cannot touch anything but a certain amount of interest."

Mr. Charteris looked at the colonel with eyes that were sad and hurt
and wistful. "I am perfectly aware of your reason for telling me this,"
he said, candidly. "I know I have always been thought a mercenary man
since my marriage. At that time I fancied myself too much in love with
Anne to permit any sordid considerations of fortune to stand in the way
of our union. Poor Anne! she little knows what sacrifices I have made
for her! She, too, would be dreadfully unhappy if I permitted her to
realize that our marriage was a mistake."

"God help her--yes!" groaned Musgrave.

"And as concerns Patricia, you are entirely right. It would be hideously
unfair to condemn her to a life of comparative poverty. My books sell
better than you think, Rudolph, but still an author cannot hope to
attain affluence so long as he is handicapped by any reverence for the
English language. Yes, I was about to do Patricia a great wrong. I
rejoice that you have pointed out my selfishness. For I have been
abominably selfish. I confess it."

"I think so," assented Musgrave, calmly. "But, then, my opinion is,
naturally, rather prejudiced."

"Yes, I can understand what Patricia must mean to you"--Mr. Charteris
sighed, and passed his hand over his forehead in a graceful
fashion,--"and I, also, love her far too dearly to imperil her
happiness. I think that heaven never made a woman more worthy to be
loved. And I had hoped--ah, well, after all, we cannot utterly defy
society! Its prejudices, however unfounded, must be respected. What
would you have? This dunderheaded giantess of a Mrs. Grundy condemns me
to be miserable, and I am powerless. The utmost I can do is to refrain
from whining over the unavoidable. And, Rudolph, you have my word of
honor that henceforth I shall bear in mind more constantly my duty
toward one of my best and oldest friends. I have not dealt with you
quite honestly. I confess it, and I ask your pardon." Mr. Charteris held
out his hand to seal the compact.

"Word of honor?" queried Colonel Musgrave, with an odd quizzing sort of
fondness for the little novelist, as the colonel took the proffered
hand. "Why, then, that is settled, and I am glad of it. I told you, you
know, it wouldn't do. See you at supper, I suppose?"

And Rudolph Musgrave glanced at the bath-house, turned on his heel, and
presently plunged into the beech plantation, whistling cheerfully. The
effect of the melody was somewhat impaired by the apparent necessity of
breaking off, at intervals, in order to smile.

The comedy had been admirably enacted, he considered, on both sides; and
he did not object to Jack Charteris's retiring with all the honors of
war.




V


The colonel had not gone far, however, before he paused, thrust both
hands into his trousers' pockets, and stared down at the ground for a
matter of five minutes.

Musgrave shook his head. "After all," said he, "I can't trust them.
Patricia is too erratic and too used to having her own way. Jack will
try to break off with her now, of course; but Jack, where women are
concerned, is as weak as water. It is not a nice thing to do, but--well!
one must fight fire with fire."

Thereupon, he retraced his steps. When he had come to the thin spot in
the thicket, Rudolph Musgrave left the path, and entered the shrubbery.
There he composedly sat down in the shadow of a small cedar. The sight
of his wife upon the beach in converse with Mr. Charteris did not appear
to surprise Colonel Musgrave.

Patricia was speaking quickly. She held a bedraggled parasol in one
hand. Her husband noted, with a faint thrill of wonder, that, at times,
and in a rather unwholesome, elfish way, Patricia was actually
beautiful. Her big eyes glowed; they flashed with changing lights as
deep waters glitter in the sun; her copper-colored hair seemed luminous,
and her cheeks flushed, arbutus-like. The soft, white stuff that gowned
her had the look of foam; against the gray sky she seemed a freakish
spirit in the act of vanishing. For sky and water were all one lambent
gray by this. In the west was a thin smear of orange; but, for the rest,
the world was of a uniform and gleaming gray. She and Charteris stood in
the heart of a great pearl.

"Ah, believe me," she was saying, "Rudolph isn't an ophthalmic bat. But
God keep us all respectable! is Rudolph's notion of a sensible
morning-prayer. So he just preferred to see nothing and bleat out
edifying axioms. That is one of his favorite tricks. No, it was a comedy
for my benefit, I tell you. He will allow a deal for the artistic
temperament, no doubt, but he doesn't suppose you fetch along a
white-lace parasol when you go to watch a sunset--especially a parasol
he gave me last month."

"Indeed," protested Mr. Charteris, "he saw nothing. I was too quick for
him."

She shrugged her shoulders. "I saw him looking at it. Accordingly, I
paid no attention to what he said. But you--ah, Jack, you were splendid!
I suppose we shall have to elope at once now, though?"

Charteris gave her no immediate answer. "I am not quite sure, Patricia,
that your husband is not--to a certain extent--in the right. Believe me,
he did not know you were about. He approached me in a perfectly
sensible manner, and exhibited commendable self-restraint; he has played
a difficult part to admiration. I could not have done it better myself.
And it is not for us who have been endowed with gifts denied to Rudolph,
to reproach him for lacking the finer perceptions and sensibilities of
life. Yet, I must admit that, for the time, I was a little hurt by his
evident belief that we would allow our feeling for each other--which is
rather beyond his comprehension, isn't it, dear?--to be coerced by
mercenary considerations."

"Oh, Rudolph is just a jackass-fool, anyway." She was not particularly
interested in the subject.

"He can't help that, you know," Charteris reminded her, gently; then, he
asked, after a little: "I suppose it is all true?"

"That what is true?"

"About your having no money of your own?" He laughed, but she could see
how deeply he had been pained by Musgrave's suspicions. "I ask, because,
as your husband has discovered, I am utterly sordid, my lady, and care
only for your wealth."

"Ah, how can you expect a man like that to understand--you? Why, Jack,
how ridiculous in you to be hurt by what the brute thinks! You're as
solemn as an owl, my dear. Yes, it's true enough. My father was not very
well pleased with us--and that horrid will--Ah, Jack, Jack, how
grotesque, how characteristic it was, his thinking such things would
influence you--you, of all men, who scarcely know what money is!"

"It was even more grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking
it," Charteris said, sadly. "But what would you have? I am so abominably
in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man
lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters. It really did. And
then, besides--ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought
that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would
willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess you
always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage--an idyl of blissful
poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks
at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that
until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For
poor old prosaic Rudolph is in the right, after all. Your delicate,
tender beauty must not be dragged down to face the unlovely realities
and petty deprivations and squalid makeshifts of such an existence as
ours would be. True, I would glory in them--ah, luxury and riches mean
little to me, my dear, and I can conceive of no greater happiness than
to starve with you. But true love knows how to sacrifice itself. Your
husband was right; it would not be fair to you, Patricia."

"You--you are going to leave me?"

"Yes; and I pray that I may be strong enough to relinquish you forever,
because your welfare is more dear to me than my own happiness. No, I do
not pretend that this is easy to do. But when my misery is earned by
serving you I prize my misery." Charteris tried to smile. "What would
you have? I love you," he said, simply.

"Ah, my dear!" she cried.

Musgrave's heart was sick within him as he heard the same notes in her
voice that echoed in Anne's voice when she spoke of her husband. This
was a new Patricia; her speech was low and gentle now, and her eyes held
a light Rudolph Musgrave had not seen there for a long while.

"Ah, my dear, you are the noblest man I have ever known; I wish we women
could be like men. But, oh, Jack, Jack, don't be quixotic! I can't give
you up, my dear--that would never be for my good. Think how unhappy I
have been all these years; think how Rudolph is starving my soul! I want
to be free, Jack; I want to live my own life,--for at least a month or
so--"

Patricia shivered here. "But none of us is sure of living for a month.
You've shown me a glimpse of what life might be; don't let me sink back
into the old, humdrum existence from a foolish sense of honor! I tell
you, I should go mad! I mean to have my fling while I can get it. And I
mean to have it with you, Jack--just you! I don't fear poverty. You
could write some more wonderful books. I could work, too, Jack dear.
I--I could teach music--or take in washing--or something, anyway. Lots
of women support themselves, you know. Oh, Jack, we would be so happy!
Don't be honorable and brave and disagreeable, Jack dear!"

For a moment Charteris was silent. The nostrils of his beak-like nose
widened a little, and a curious look came into his face. He discovered
something in the sand that interested him.

"After all," he demanded, slowly, "is it necessary--to go away--to be
happy?"

"I don't understand." Her hand lifted from his arm; then quick remorse
smote her, and it fluttered back, confidingly.

Charteris rose to his feet. "It is, doubtless, a very spectacular and
very stirring performance to cast your cap over the wind-mill in the
face of the world; but, after all, is it not a bit foolish, Patricia?
Lots of people manage these things--more quietly."

"Oh, Jack!" Patricia's face turned red, then white, and stiffened in a
sort of sick terror. She was a frightened Columbine in stone. "I thought
you cared for me--really, not--that way."

Patricia rose and spoke with composure. "I think I'll go back to the
house, Mr. Charteris. It's a bit chilly here. You needn't bother to
come."

Then Mr. Charteris laughed--a choking, sobbing laugh. He raised his
hands impotently toward heaven. "And to think," he cried, "to think that
a man may love a woman with his whole heart--with all that is best and
noblest in him--and she understand him so little!"

"I do not think I have misunderstood you," Patricia said, in a crisp
voice. "Your proposition was very explicit. I--am sorry. I thought I had
found one thing in the world which I would regret to leave--"

"And you really believed that I could sully the great love I bear you by
stooping to--that! You really believed that I would sacrifice to you my
home life, my honor, my prospects--all that a man can give--without
testing the quality of your love! You did not know that I spoke to try
you--you actually did not know! Eh, but yours is a light nature,
Patricia! I do not reproach you, for you are only as your narrow
Philistine life has made you. Yet I had hoped better things of you,
Patricia. But you, who pretend to care for me, have leaped at your first
opportunity to pain me--and, if it be any comfort to you, I confess you
have pained me beyond words." And he sank down on the log, and buried
his face in his hands.

She came to him--it was pitiable to see how she came to him, laughing
and sobbing all in one breath--and knelt humbly by his side, and raised
a grieved, shamed, penitent face to his.

"Forgive me!" she wailed; "oh, forgive me!"

"You have pained me beyond words, Patricia," he repeated. He was not
angry--only sorrowful and very much hurt.

"Ah, Jack! dear Jack, forgive me!"

Mr. Charteris sighed. "But, of course, I forgive you, Patricia," he
said. "I cannot help it, though, that I am foolishly sensitive where you
are concerned. And I had hoped you knew as much."

She was happy now. "Dear boy," she murmured, "don't you see it's just
these constant proofs of the greatness and the wonderfulness of your
love--Really, though, Jack, wasn't it too horrid of me to misunderstand
you so? Are you quite sure you're forgiven me entirely--without any
nasty little reservations?"

Mr. Charteris was quite sure. His face was still sad, but it was
benevolent.

"Don't you see," she went on, "that it's just these things that make me
care for you so much, and feel sure as eggs is eggs we will be happy?
Ah, Jack, we will be so utterly happy that I am almost afraid to think
of it!" Patricia wiped away the last tear, and laughed, and added, in a
matter-of-fact fashion: "There's a train at six-five in the morning; we
can leave by that, before anyone is up."

Charteris started. "Your husband loves you," he said, in gentle reproof.
"And quite candidly, you know, Rudolph is worth ten of me."

"Bah, I tell you, that was a comedy for my benefit," she protested, and
began to laugh. Patricia was unutterably happy now, because she, and not
John Charteris, had been in the wrong. "Poor Rudolph!--he has such a
smug horror of the divorce-court that he would even go so far as to
pretend to be in love with his own wife in order to keep out of it.
Really, Jack, both our better-halves are horribly commonplace and they
will be much better off without us."

"You forget that Rudolph has my word of honor," said Mr. Charteris, in
indignation.

And that instant, with one of his baffling changes of mood, he began to
laugh. "Really, though, Patricia, you are very pretty. You are April
embodied in sweet flesh; your soul is just a wisp of April cloud, and
your life an April day, half sun that only seems to warm, and half
tempest that only plays at ferocity; but you are very pretty. That is
why I am thinking, light-headedly, it would be a fine and past doubt an
agreeable exploit to give up everything for such a woman, and am
complacently comparing myself to Antony at Actium. I am thinking it
would be an interesting episode in one's _Life and Letters_. You see, my
dear, I honestly believe the world revolves around John
Charteris--although of course I would never admit that to you if I
thought for a moment you would take me seriously."

Then presently, sighing, he was grave again. "But, no! Rudolph has my
word of honor," Mr. Charteris repeated, and with unconcealed regret.

"Ah, does that matter?" she cried. "Does anything matter, except that we
love each other? I tell you I have given the best part of my life to
that man, but I mean to make the most of what is left. He has had my
youth, my love--there was a time, you know, when I actually fancied I
cared for him--and he has only made me unhappy. I hate him, I loathe
him, I detest him, I despise him! I never intend to speak to him
again--oh, yes, I shall have to at supper, I suppose, but that doesn't
count. And I tell you I mean to be happy in the only way that's
possible. Everyone has a right to do that. A woman has an especial
right to take her share of happiness in any way she can, because her
hour of it is so short. Sometimes--sometimes the woman knows how short
it is and it almost frightens her.... But at best, a woman can be really
happy through love alone, Jack dear, and it's only when we are young and
good to look at that men care for us; after that, there is nothing left
but to take to either religion or hand-embroidery, so what does it
matter, after all? Yes, they all grow tired after a while. Jack, I am
only a vain and frivolous person of superlative charm, but I love you
very much, my dear, and I solemnly swear to commit suicide the moment my
first wrinkle arrives. You shall never grow tired of me, my dear."

She laughed to think how true this was.

She hurried on: "Jack, kneel down at once, and swear that you are
perfectly sore with loving me, as that ridiculous person says in
Dickens, and whose name I never could remember. Oh, I forgot--Dickens
caricatures nature, doesn't he, and isn't read by really cultured
people? You will have to educate me up to your level, Jack, and I warn
you in advance you will not have time to do it. Yes, I am quite aware
that I am talking nonsense, and am on the verge of hysterics, thank you,
but I rather like it. It is because I am going to have you all to myself
for whatever future there is, and the thought makes me quite drunk. Will
you kindly ring for the patrol-wagon, Jack? Jack, are you quite sure you
love me? Are you perfectly certain you never loved any one else half so
much? No, don't answer me, for I intend to do all the talking for both
of us for the future! I shall tyrannize over you frightfully, and you
will like it. All I ask in return is that you will be a good boy--by
which I mean a naughty boy--and do solemnly swear, promise and affirm
that you will meet me at the side-door at half-past five in the morning,
with a portmanteau and the intention of never going back to your wife.
You swear it? Thank you so much! Now, I think I would like to cry for a
few minutes, and, after that, we will go back to the house, before
supper is over and my eyes are perfectly crimson."

In fact, Mr. Charteris had consented. Patricia was irresistible as she
pleaded and mocked and scolded and coaxed and laughed and cried, all in
one bewildering breath. Her plan was simple; it was to slip out of
Matocton at dawn, and walk to the near-by station. There they would take
the train, and snap their fingers at convention. The scheme sounded
preposterous in outline, but she demonstrated its practicability in
performance. And Mr. Charteris consented.

Rudolph Musgrave sat in the shadow of the cedar with fierce and confused
emotions whirling in his soul. He certainly had never thought of this
contingency.




PART EIGHT - HARVEST

  "Time was I coveted the woes they rued
  Whose love commemorates them,--I that meant
  To get like grace of love then!--and intent
  To win as they had done love's plenitude,
  Rapture and havoc, vauntingly I sued
  That love like theirs might make a toy of me,
  At will caressed, at will (if publicly)
  Demolished, as Love found or found not good.

  "To-day I am no longer overbrave.
  I have a fever,--I that always knew
  This hour was certain!--and am too weak to rave,
  Too tired to seek (as later I must do)
  Tried remedies--time, manhood and the grave--
  To drug, abate and banish love of you."
ALLEN ROSSITER. _A Fragment_.




I


When Patricia and Charteris had left the beach, Colonel Musgrave parted
the underbrush and stepped down upon the sand He must have air--air and
an open place wherein to fight this out.

Night had risen about him in bland emptiness. There were no stars
overhead, but a patient, wearied, ancient moon pushed through the
clouds. The trees and the river conferred with one another doubtfully.

He paced up and down the beach....

Musgrave laughed in the darkness. His heart was racing, racing in him,
and his thoughts were blown foam. He raised his hat and bowed
fantastically in the darkness, because the colonel loved his gesture.

"Signor Lucifer, I present my compliments. You have discoursed with me
very plausibly. I honor your cunning, signor, but if you are indeed a
gentleman, as I have always heard, you will now withdraw and permit me
to regard the matter from a standpoint other than my own. For the others
are weak, signor; as you have doubtless discovered, good women and bad
men are the weakest of their sex. I am the strongest among them, for all
that I am no Hercules; and the outcome of this matter must rest with
me."

So he sat presently upon the log, where Charteris had sat when Musgrave
came to this beach at sunset. Very long ago that seemed now. For now the
colonel was tired--physically outworn, it seemed to him, as if after
prolonged exertion--and now the moon looked down upon him, passionless,
cold, inexorable, and seemed to await the colonel's decision.

And it was woefully hard to come to any decision. For, as you know by
this, it was the colonel's besetting infirmity to shrink from making
changes; instinctively he balked--under shelter of whatever
grandiloquent excuse--against commission of any action which would alter
his relations with accustomed circumstances or persons. To guide events
was never his forte, as he forlornly knew; and here he was condemned
perforce to play that uncongenial rôle, with slender chances of reward.

Yet always Anne's face floated in the darkness. Always Anne's voice
whispered through the lisping of the beeches, through the murmur of the
water....

He sat thus for a long while.




II


Musgrave was, not unnaturally, late for supper. It is not to be supposed
that at this meal the colonel faltered in his duties as a host, for, to
the contrary, he narrated several anecdotes in his neatest style. It was
with him a point of honor always to be in company the social triumph of
his generation. He observed with idle interest that Charteris and
Patricia avoided each other in a rather marked manner. Both seemed a
trifle more serious than they were wont to be.

After supper, Tom Gelwix brought forth a mandolin, and most of the
house-party sang songs, sentimental and otherwise, upon the front porch
of Matocton. Anne had disappeared somewhere. Musgrave subsequently
discovered her in one of the drawing-rooms, puzzling over a number of
papers which her maid had evidently just brought to her.

Mrs. Charteris looked up with a puckered brow. "Rudolph," said she,
"haven't you an account at the Occidental Bank?"

"Hardly an account, dear lady,--merely a deposit large enough to
entitle me to receive monthly notices that I have overdrawn it."

"Why, then, of course, you have a cheque-book. Horrible things, aren't
they?--such a nuisance remembering to fill out those little stubs. Of
course, I forgot to bring mine with me--I always do; and equally, of
course, a vexatious debt turns up and finds me without an Occidental
Bank cheque to my name."

Musgrave was amused. "That," said he, "is easily remedied. I will get
you one; though even if--Ah, well, what is the good of trying to teach
you adorable women anything about business! You shall have your
indispensable blank form in three minutes."

He returned in rather less than that time, with the cheque. Anne was
alone now. She was gowned in some dull, soft, yellow stuff, and sat by a
small, marble-topped table, twiddling a fountain-pen.

"You mustn't sneer at my business methods, Rudolph," she said, pouting a
little as she filled out the cheque. "It isn't polite, sir, in the first
place, and, in the second, I am really very methodical. Of course, I am
always losing my cheque-book, and drawing cheques and forgetting to
enter them, and I usually put down the same deposit two or three
times--all women do that; but, otherwise, I am really very careful. I
manage all the accounts; I can't expect Jack to do that, you know." Mrs.
Charteris signed her name with a flourish, and nodded at the colonel
wisely. "Dear infant, but he is quite too horribly unpractical. Do you
know this bill has been due--oh, for months--and he forgot it entirely
until this evening. Fortunately, he can settle it to-morrow; those
disagreeable publishers of his have telegraphed for him to come to New
York at once, you know. Otherwise--dear, dear! but marrying a genius is
absolutely ruinous to one's credit, isn't it, Rudolph? The tradespeople
will refuse to trust us soon."

Involuntarily, Musgrave had seen the cheque. It was for a considerable
amount, and it was made out to John Charteris.

"Beyond doubt," said Musgrave, in his soul, "Jack is colossal! He is
actually drawing on his wife for the necessary expenses for running away
with another woman!"

The colonel sat down abruptly before the great, open fireplace, and
stared hard at the pine-boughs which were heaped up in it.

"A penny," said she, at length.

He glanced up with a smile. "My dear madam, it would be robbery! For a
penny, you may read of the subject of my thoughts in any of the yellow
journals, only far more vividly set forth, and obtain a variety of more
or less savory additions, to boot. I was thinking of the Lethbury case,
and wondering how we could have been so long deceived by the man."

"Ah, poor Mrs. Lethbury!" Anne sighed, "I am very sorry for her,
Rudolph; she was a good woman, and was always interested in charitable
work."

"Do you know," said Colonel Musgrave, with deliberation, "it is she I
cannot understand. To discover that he had been systematically
hoodwinking her for some ten years; that, after making away with as much
of her fortune as he was able to lay hands on, he has betrayed business
trust after business trust in order to--to maintain another
establishment; that he has never cared for her, and has made her his
dupe time after time, in order to obtain money for his gambling debts
and other even less reputable obligations--she must realize all these
things now, you know, and one would have thought no woman's love could
possibly survive such a test. Yet, she is standing by him through thick
and thin. Yes, I confess, Amelia Lethbury puzzles me. I don't understand
her mental attitude."

Musgrave was looking at Anne very intently as he ended.

"Why, but of course," said Anne, "she realizes that it was all the fault
of that--that other woman; and, besides, the--the entanglement has been
going on only a little over eight years--not ten, Rudolph."

She was entirely in earnest; Colonel Musgrave could see it plainly.

"I admit I hadn't looked on it in that light," said he, at length, and
was silent for a moment Then, "Upon my soul, Anne," he cried, "I believe
you think the woman is only doing the natural thing, only doing the
thing one has a right to expect of her, in sticking to that blackguard
after she has found him out!"

Mrs. Charteris raised her eyebrows; she was really surprised.
"Naturally, she must stand by her husband when he is in trouble; why,
if his own wife didn't, who would, Rudolph? It is just now that he needs
her most. It would be abominable to desert him now."

Anne paused and thought. "Depend upon it, she knows a better side of his
nature than we can see; she knows him, possibly, to have been misled, or
to have acted thoughtlessly; because otherwise, she would not stand by
him so firmly." Having reached this satisfactory conclusion, Anne began
to laugh--at Musgrave's lack of penetration, probably. "So, you see,
Rudolph, in either case, her conduct is perfectly natural."

"And this," he cried, "this is how women reason!"

"Am I very stupid? Jack says I am a bit illogical at times. But,
Rudolph, you mustn't expect a woman to judge the man she loves; if you
call on her to do that, she doesn't reason about it; she just goes on
loving him, and thinking how horrid you are. Women love men as they do
children; they punish them sometimes, but only in deference to public
opinion. A woman will always find an excuse for the man she loves. If he
deserts her, she is miserable until she succeeds in demonstrating to
herself it was entirely her own fault; after that, she is properly
repentant, but far less unhappy; and, anyhow, she goes on loving him
just the same."

The colonel pondered over this. "Women are different," he said.

"I don't know. I think that, if all women could be thrown with good
men, they would all be good. Women want to be good; but there comes a
time to each one of them when she wants to make a certain man happy, and
wants that more than anything else in the world; and then, of course, if
he wants--very much--for her to be bad, she will be bad. A bad woman is
always to be explained by a bad man."

Anne nodded, very wisely; then, she began to laugh, but this time at
herself. "I am talking quite like a book," she said. "Really, I had no
idea I was so clever. But I have thought of this before, Rudolph, and
been sorry for those poor women who--who haven't found the right sort of
man to care for."

"Yes." Musgrave's face was alert. "You have been luckier than most,
Anne," he said.

"Lucky!" she cried, and that queer little thrill of happiness woke again
in her rich voice. "Ah, you don't know how lucky I have been, Rudolph! I
have never cared for any one except--well, yes, you, a great while
ago--and Jack. And you are both good men. Ah, Rudolph, it was very dear
and sweet and foolish, the way we loved each other, but you don't
mind--very, very much--do you, if I think Jack is the best man in the
world, and by far the best man in the world for me? He is so good to me;
he is so good and kind and considerate to me, and, even after all these
years of matrimony, he is always the lover. A woman appreciates that,
Rudolph; she wants her husband to be always her lover, just as Jack is,
and never to give in when she coaxes--because she only coaxes when she
knows she is in the wrong--and never, never, to let her see him shaving
himself. If a husband observes these simple rules, Rudolph, his wife
will be a happy woman; and Jack does. In consequence, every day I live I
grow fonder of him, and appreciate him more and more; he grows upon me
just as a taste for strong drink might. Without him--without him--"
Anne's voice died away; then she faced Musgrave, indignantly. "Oh,
Rudolph!" she cried, "how horrid of you, how mean of you, to come here
and suggest the possibility of Jack's dying or running away from me, or
doing anything dreadful like that!"

Colonel Musgrave was smiling, "I?" said he, equably. "My dear madam! if
you will reconsider,--"

"No," she conceded, after deliberation, "it wasn't exactly your fault. I
got started on the subject of Jack, and imagined all sorts of horrible
and impossible things. But there is a sort of a something in the air
to-night; probably a storm is coming down the river. So I feel very
morbid and very foolish, Rudolph; but, then, I am in love, you see.
Isn't it funny, after all these years?" Anne asked with a smile;--"and
so you are not to be angry, Rudolph."

"My dear," he said, "I assure you, the emotion you raise in me is very
far from resembling that of anger." Musgrave rose and laughed. "I fear,
you know, we will create a scandal if we sit here any longer. Let's see
what the others are doing."




III


That night, after his guests had retired, Colonel Musgrave smoked a
cigarette on the front porch of Matocton. The moon, now in the zenith,
was bright and chill. After a while, Musgrave raised his face toward it,
and laughed.

"Isn't it--isn't it funny?" he demanded, echoing Anne's query ruefully.

"Eh, well! perhaps I still retained some lingering hope; in a season of
discomfort, most of us look vaguely for a miracle. And, at times, it
comes, but, more often, not; life isn't always a pantomime, with a fairy
god-mother waiting to break through the darkness in a burst of glory and
reunite the severed lovers, and transform their enemies into pantaloons.
In this case, it is certain that the fairy will not come. I am condemned
to be my own god in the machine."

Having demonstrated this to himself, Musgrave went into the house and
drugged his mind correcting proofsheets--for the _Lichfield Historical
Association's Quarterly Magazine_--and brought down to the year 1805 his
"List of Wills Recorded in Brummell County."




IV


The night was well advanced when Charteris stepped noiselessly into the
room. The colonel was then sedately writing amid a host of motionless
mute watchers, for at Matocton most of the portraits hang in the East
Drawing-room.

Thus, above the great marble mantel,--carved with thyrsi, and supported
by proud deep-bosomed caryatides,--you will find burly Sebastian
Musgrave, "the Speaker," an all-overbearing man even on canvas. "Paint
me among dukes and earls with my hat on, to show I am in all things a
Republican, and the finest diamond in the Colony shall be yours," he had
directed the painter, and this was done. Then there is frail Wilhelmina
Musgrave--that famed beauty whose two-hundred-year-old story all
Lichfield knows, and no genealogist has ever cared to detail--eternally
weaving flowers about her shepherd hat. There, too, is Evelyn Ramsay,
before whose roguish loveliness, as you may remember, the colonel had
snapped his fingers in those roseate days when he so joyously considered
his profound unworthiness to be Patricia's husband. There is also the
colonial governor of Albemarle--a Van Dyck this--two Knellers, and
Lely's portrait of Thomas Musgrave, "the poet," with serious blue eyes
and flaxen hair. The painting of Captain George Musgrave, who
distinguished himself at the siege of Cartagena, is admittedly an
inferior piece of work, but it has vigor, none the less; and below it
hangs the sword which was presented to him by the Lord High Admiral.

So quietly did Charteris come that the colonel was not aware of his
entrance until the novelist had coughed gently. He was in a
dressing-gown, and looked unusually wizened.

"I saw your light," he said. "I don't seem to be able to sleep, somehow.
It is so infernally hot and still. I suppose there is going to be a
thunderstorm. I hate thunderstorms. They frighten me." The little man
was speaking like a peevish child.

"Oh, well--! it will at least clear the air," said Rudolph Musgrave.
"Sit down and have a smoke, won't you?"

"No, thanks." Charteris had gone to the bookshelves and was gently
pushing and pulling at the books so as to arrange their backs in a
mathematically straight line. "I thought I would borrow something to
read--Why, this is the Tennyson you had at college, isn't it? Yes, I
remember it perfectly."

These two had roomed together through their college days.

"Yes; it is the old Tennyson. And yonder is the identical Swinburne you
used to spout from, too. Lord, Jack, it seems a century since I used to
listen by the hour to _The Triumph of Time and Dolores!_"

"Ah, but you didn't really care for them--not even then." Charteris
reached up, his back still turned, and moved a candlestick the fraction
of an inch. "There is something so disgustingly wholesome about you,
Rudolph. And it appears to be ineradicable. I can't imagine how I ever
came to be fond of you."

The colonel was twirling his pen, his eyes intent upon it. "And yet--we
_were_ fond of each other, weren't we, Jack?"

"Why, I positively adored you. You were such a strong and healthy
animal. Upon my word, I don't believe I ever missed a single football
game you played in. In fact, I almost learned to understand the game on
your account. You see--it was so good to watch you raging about with
touzled hair, like the only original bull of Bashan, and the others
tumbling like ninepins. It used to make me quite inordinately proud."

The colonel smoked. "But, Lord! how proud _I_ was when you got medals!"

"Yes--I remember."

"Even if I did bully you sometimes. Remember how I used to twist your
arm to make you write my Latin exercises, Jack?"

"I liked to have you do that," Charteris said, simply. "It hurt a great
deal, but I liked it."

He had come up behind the colonel, who was still seated. "Yes, that was
a long while ago," said Charteris. "It is rather terrible--isn't it?--to
reflect precisely how long ago it was. Why, I shall be bald in a year or
two from now. But you have kept almost all your beautiful hair,
Rudolph."

Charteris touched the colonel's head, stroking his hair ever so lightly
once or twice. It was in effect a caress.

The colonel was aware of the odor of myrrh which always accompanied
Charteris and felt that the little man was trembling.

"Isn't there--anything you want to tell me, Jack?" the colonel said. He
sat quite still.

There was the tiniest pause. The caressing finger-tips lifted from
Musgrave's head, but presently gave it one more brief and half-timid
touch.

"Why, only _au revoir_, I believe. I am leaving at a rather ungodly hour
to-morrow and won't see you, but I hope to return within the week."

"I hope so, Jack."

"And, after all, it is too late to be reading. I shall go back to bed
and take more trional. And then, I dare say, I shall sleep. So good-by,
Rudolph."

"Good-night, Jack."

"Oh, yes--! I meant good-night, of course."

The colonel sighed; then he spoke abruptly:

"No, just a moment, Jack. I didn't ask you to come here to-night; but
since you have come, by chance, I am going to follow the promptings of
that chance, and strike a blow for righteousness with soiled weapons.
Jack, do you remember suggesting that my father's correspondence during
the War might be of value, and that his desk ought to be overhauled?"

"Why, yes, of course. Mrs. Musgrave was telling me she began the task,"
said Charteris, and smiled a little.

"Unluckily; yes--but--well! in any event, it suggested to me that old
letters are dangerous. I really had no idea what that desk contained. My
father had preserved great stacks of letters. I have been going through
them. They were most of them from women--letters which should never have
been written in the first place, and which he certainly had no right to
keep."

"What! and is 'Wild Will's' love-correspondence still extant? I fancy it
made interesting reading, Rudolph."

"There were some letters which in a measure concern you, Jack." The
colonel handed him a small packet of letters. "If you will read the top
one it will explain. I will just go on with my writing."

He wrote steadily for a moment or two.... Then Charteris laughed
musically.

"I have always known there was a love-affair between my mother and 'Wild
Will.' But I never suspected until to-night that I had the honor to be
your half-brother, Rudolph--one of 'Wild Will's' innumerable bastards."
Charteris was pallid, and though he seemed perfectly composed, his eyes
glittered as with gusty brilliancies. "I understand now why my reputed
father always made such a difference between my sister and myself. I
never liked old Alvin Charteris, you know. It is a distinct relief to be
informed I have no share in his blood, although of course the knowledge
comes a trifle suddenly."

"Perhaps I should have kept that knowledge to myself. I know it would
have been kinder. I had meant to be kind. I loathe myself for dabbling
in this mess. But, in view of all things, it seemed necessary to let you
know I am your own brother in the flesh, and that Patricia is your
brother's wife."

"I see," said Charteris. "According to your standards that would make a
great difference. I don't know, speaking frankly, that it makes much
difference with me." He turned again to the bookshelves, so that
Musgrave could no longer see his face. Charteris ran his fingers
caressingly over the backs of a row of volumes. "I loved my mother,
Rudolph. I never loved anyone else. That makes a difference." Then he
said, "We Musgraves--how patly I catalogue myself already!--we Musgraves
have a deal to answer for, Rudolph."

"And doesn't that make it all the more our duty to live clean and honest
lives? to make the debt no greater than it is?" Both men were oddly
quiet.

"Eh, I am not so sure." John Charteris waved airily toward Sebastian
Musgrave's counterfeit, then toward the other portraits. "It was they
who compounded our inheritances, Rudolph--all that we were to have in
this world of wit and strength and desire and endurance. We know their
histories. They were proud, brave and thriftless, a greedy and lecherous
race, who squeezed life dry as one does an orange, and left us the
dregs. I think that it is droll, but I am not sure it places us under
any obligation. In fact, I rather think God owes us an apology,
Rudolph."

He spoke with quaint wistfulness. The colonel sat regarding him in
silence, with shocked, disapproving eyes. Then Charteris cocked his head
to one side and grinned like a hobgoblin.

"What wouldn't you give," he demanded, "to know what I am really
thinking of at this very moment while I talk so calmly? Well, you will
never know. And for the rest, you are at liberty to use your
all-important documents as you may elect. I am John Charteris; whatever
man begot my body, he is rotten bones to-day, and it is as such I value
him. I was never anybody's son--or friend or brother or lover,--but just
a pen that someone far bigger and far nobler than John Charteris writes
with occasionally. Whereas you--but, oh, you are funny, Rudolph!" And
then, "Good-night, dear brother," Charteris added, sweetly, as he left
the room.

       *       *       *       *       *

And Rudolph Musgrave could not quite believe in the actuality of what
had just happened. In common with most of us, he got his general notions
concerning the laws of life from reading fiction; and here was the
material for a Renaissance tragedy wasted so far as any dénouement went.
Destiny, once more, was hardly rising to the possibilities of the
situation. The weapon chance had forged had failed Rudolph Musgrave
utterly; and, indeed, he wondered now how he could ever have esteemed it
formidable. Jack was his half-brother. In noveldom or in a melodrama
this discovery would have transformed their mutual dealings; but as a
workaday world's fact, Musgrave would not honestly say that it had in
any way affected his feelings toward Jack, and it appeared to have left
Charteris equally unaltered.

"I am not sure, though. We can only guess where Jack is concerned. He
goes his own way always, tricky and furtive and lonelier than any other
human being I have ever known. It is loneliness that looks out of his
eyes, really, even when he is mocking and sneering," the colonel
meditated.

Then he sighed and went back to the tabulation of his lists of wills.




V


The day was growing strong in the maple-grove behind Matocton. As yet,
the climbing sun fired only the topmost branches, and flooded them with
a tempered radiance through which birds plunged and shrilled vague
rumors to one another. Beneath, a green twilight lingered--twilight
which held a gem-like glow, chill and lucent and steady as that of an
emerald. Vagrant little puffs of wind bustled among the leaves, with a
thin pretense of purpose, and then lapsed, and merged in the large,
ambiguous whispering which went stealthily about the grove.

Rudolph Musgrave sat on a stone beside the road that winds through the
woods toward the railway station, and smoked, nervously. He was
disheartened of the business of living, and, absurdly enough, as it
seemed to him, he was hungry.

"It has to be done quietly and without the remotest chance of Anne's
ever hearing of it, and without the remotest chance of its ever having
to be done again. I have about fifteen minutes in which to convince
Patricia both of her own folly and of the fact that Jack is an
unmitigated cad, and to get him off the place quietly, so that Anne will
suspect nothing. And I never knew any reasonable argument to appeal to
Patricia, and Jack will be a cornered rat! Yes, it is a large contract,
and I would give a great deal--a very great deal--to know how I am going
to fulfil it."

At this moment his wife and Mr. Charteris, carrying two portmanteaux,
came around a bend in the road not twenty feet from Musgrave. They were
both rather cross. In the clean and more prosaic light of morning an
elopement seemed almost silly; moreover, Patricia had had no breakfast,
and Charteris had been much annoyed by his wife, who had breakfasted
with him, and had insisted on driving to the station with him. It was a
trivial-seeming fact, but, perhaps, not unworthy of notice, that
Patricia was carrying her own portmanteau, as well as an umbrella.

The three faced one another in the cool twilight. The woods stirred
lazily about them. The birds were singing on a wager now.

"Ah," said Colonel Musgrave, "so you have come at last. I have been
expecting you for some time."

Patricia dropped her portmanteau, sullenly. Mr. Charteris placed his
with care to the side of the road, and said, "Oh!" It was perhaps the
only observation that occurred to him.

"Patricia," Musgrave began, very kindly and very gravely, "you are
about to do a foolish thing. At the bottom of your heart, even now, you
know you are about to do a foolish thing--a thing you will regret
bitterly and unavailingly for the rest of time. You are turning your
back on the world--our world--on the one possible world you could ever
be happy in. You can't be happy in the half-world, Patricia; you aren't
that sort. But you can never come back to us then, Patricia; it doesn't
matter what the motive was, what the temptation was, or how great the
repentance is--you cannot ever return. That is the law, Patricia;
perhaps, it isn't always a just law. We didn't make it, you and I, but
it is the law, and we must obey it. Our world merely says that, leaving
it once, you cannot ever return: such is the only punishment it awards
you, for it knows, this wise old world of ours, that such is the
bitterest punishment which could ever be devised for you. Our world has
made you what you are; in every thought and ideal and emotion you
possess, you are a product of our world. You couldn't live in the
half-world, Patricia; you are a product of our world that can never take
root in that alien soil. Come back to us before it is too late,
Patricia!"

Musgrave shook himself all over, rather like a Newfoundland dog coming
out of the water, and the grave note died from his voice. He smiled, and
rubbed his hands together.

"And now," said he, "I will stop talking like a problem play, and we
will say no more about it. Give me your portmanteau, my dear, and upon
my word of honor, you will never hear a word further from me in the
matter. Jack, here, can take the train, just as he intended. And--and
you and I will go back to the house, and have a good, hot breakfast
together. Eh, Patricia?"

She was thinking, unreasonably enough, how big and strong and clean her
husband looked in the growing light. It was a pity Jack was so small.
However, she faced Musgrave coldly, and thought how ludicrously wide of
the mark were all these threats of ostracism. She shudderingly wished he
would not talk of soil and taking root and hideous things like that, but
otherwise the colonel left her unmoved. He was certainly good-looking,
though.

Charteris was lighting a cigarette, with a queer, contented look. He
knew the value of Patricia's stubbornness now; still, he appeared to be
using an unnecessary number of matches.

"I should have thought you would have perceived the lack of dignity, as
well as the utter uselessness, in making such a scene," Patricia said.
"We aren't suited for each other, Rudolph; and it is better--far better
for both of us--to have done with the farce of pretending to be. I am
sorry that you still care for me. I didn't know that. But, for the
future, I intend to live my own life."

Patricia's voice faltered, and she stretched out her hands a little
toward her husband in an odd gust of friendliness. He looked so kind;
and he was not smiling in that way she never liked. "Surely that isn't
so unpardonable a crime, Rudolph?" she asked, almost humbly.

"No, my dear," he answered, "it is not unpardonable--it is impossible.
You can't lead your own life, Patricia; none of us can. Each life is
bound up with many others, and every rash act of yours, every hasty word
of yours, must affect to some extent the lives of those who are nearest
and most dear to you. But, oh, it is not argument that I would be at!
Patricia, there was a woman once--She was young, and wealthy, and--ah,
well, I won't deceive you by exaggerating her personal attractions! I
will serve up to you no praises of her sauced with lies. But fate and
nature had combined to give her everything a woman can desire, and all
this that woman freely gave to me--to me who hadn't youth or wealth or
fame or anything! And I can't stand by, for that dear dead girl's sake,
and watch your life go wrong, Patricia!"

"You are just like the rest of them, Olaf"--and when had she used that
half-forgotten nickname last, he wondered. "You imagine you are in love
with a girl because you happen to like the color of her eyes, or because
there is a curve about her lips that appeals to you. That isn't love,
Olaf, as we women understand it."

And wildly hideous and sad, it seemed to Colonel Musgrave--this dreary
parody of their old love-talk. Only, he dimly knew that she had
forgotten John Charteris existed, and that to her this moment seemed no
less sardonic.

Charteris inhaled, lazily; yet, he did not like the trembling about
Patricia's mouth. Her hands, too, opened and shut tight before she
spoke.

"It is too late now," she said, dully. "I gave you all there was to
give. You gave me just what Grandma Pendomer and all the others had left
you able to give. That remnant isn't love, Olaf, as we women understand
it. And, anyhow, it is too late now."

Yet Patricia was remembering a time when Rudolph's voice held always
that grave, tender note in speaking to her; it seemed a great while ago.
And he was big and manly, just like his voice, Rudolph was; and he
looked very kind. Desperately, Patricia began to count over the times
her husband had offended her. Hadn't he talked to her in the most
unwarrantable manner only yesterday afternoon?

"Too late!--oh, not a bit of it!" Musgrave cried. His voice sank
persuasively. "Why, Patricia, you are only thinking the matter over for
the first time. You have only begun to think of it. Why, there is the
boy--our boy, Patricia! Surely, you hadn't thought of Roger?"

He had found the right chord at last. It quivered and thrilled under his
touch; and the sense of mastery leaped in his blood. Of a sudden, he
knew himself dominant. Her face was red, then white, and her eyes
wavered before the blaze of his, that held her, compellingly.

"Now, honestly, just between you and me," the colonel said,
confidentially, "was there ever a better and braver and quainter and
handsomer boy in the world? Why, Patricia, surely, you wouldn't
willingly--of your own accord--go away from him, and never see him
again? Oh, you haven't thought, I tell you! Think, Patricia! Don't you
remember that first day, when I came into your room at the hospital and
he--ah, how wrinkled and red and old-looking he was then, wasn't he,
little wife? Don't you remember how he was lying on your breast, and how
I took you both in my arms, and held you close for a moment, and how for
a long, long while there wasn't anything left of the whole wide world
except just us three and God smiling down upon us? Don't you remember,
Patricia? Don't you remember his first tooth--why, we were as proud of
him, you and I, as if there had never been a tooth before in all the
history of the world! Don't you remember the first day he walked? Why,
he staggered a great distance--oh, nearly two yards!--and caught hold of
my hand, and laughed and turned back--to you. You didn't run away from
him then, Patricia. Are you going to do it now?"

She struggled under his look. She had an absurd desire to cry, just that
he might console her. She knew he would. Why was it so hard to remember
that she hated Rudolph! Of course, she hated him; she loved that other
man yonder. His name was Jack. She turned toward Charteris, and the
reassuring smile with which he greeted her, impressed Patricia as being
singularly nasty. She hated both of them; she wanted--in that brief time
which remained for having anything--only her boy, her soft, warm little
Roger who had eyes like Rudolph's.

"I--I--it's too late, Rudolph," she stammered, parrot-like. "If you had
only taken better care of me, Rudolph! If--No, it's too late, I tell
you! You will be kind to Roger. I am only weak and frivolous and
heartlesss. I am not fit to be his mother. I'm not fit, Rudolph!
Rudolph, I tell you I'm not fit! Ah, let me go, my dear!--in mercy, let
me go! For I haven't loved the boy as I ought to, and I am afraid to
look you in the face, and you won't let me take my eyes away--you won't
let me! Ah, Rudolph, let me go!"

"Not fit?" His voice thrilled with strength, and pulsed with tender
cadences. "Ah, Patricia, I am not fit to be his father! But, between
us--between us, mightn't we do much for him? Come back to us,
Patricia--to me and the boy! We need you, my dear. Ah, I am only a
stolid, unattractive fogy, I know; but you loved me once, and--I am the
father of your child. My standards are out-of-date, perhaps, and in any
event they are not your standards, and that difference has broken many
ties between us; but I am the father of your child. You must--you _must_
come back to me and the boy!" Musgrave caught her face between his
hands, and lifted it toward his. "Patricia, don't make any mistake!
There is nothing you care for so much as that boy. You can't give him
up! If you had to walk over red-hot ploughshares to come to him, you
would do it; if you could win him a moment's happiness by a lifetime of
poverty and misery and degradation, you would do it. And so would I,
little wife. That is the tie which still unites us; that is the tie
which is too strong ever to break. Come back to us, Patricia--to me and
the boy."

"I--Jack, Jack, take me away!" she wailed helplessly.

Charteris came forward with a smile. He was quite sure of Patricia now.

"Colonel Musgrave," he said, with a faint drawl, "if you have entirely
finished your edifying and, I assure you, highly entertaining monologue,
I will ask you to excuse us. I--oh, man, man!" Charteris cried, not
unkindly, "don't you see it is the only possible outcome?"

Musgrave faced him. The glow of hard-earned victory was pulsing in the
colonel's blood, but his eyes were chill stars. "Now, Jack," he said,
equably, "I am going to talk to you. In fact, I am going to discharge an
agreeable duty toward you."

Musgrave drew close to him. Charteris shrugged his shoulders; his smile,
however, was not entirely satisfactory. It did not suggest enjoyment.

"I don't blame you for being what you are," Musgrave went on, curtly.
"You were born so, doubtless. I don't blame a snake for being what it
is. But, when I see a snake, I claim the right to set my foot on its
head; when I see a man like you--well, this is the right I claim."

Thereupon Rudolph Musgrave struck his half-brother in the face with his
open hand. The colonel was a strong man, physically, and, on this
occasion, he made no effort to curb his strength.

"Now," Musgrave concluded, "you are going away from this place very
quickly, and you are going alone. You will do this because I tell you to
do so, and because you are afraid of me. Understand, also--if you will
be so good--that the only reason I don't give you a thorough thrashing
is that I don't think you are worth the trouble. I only want Patricia to
perceive exactly what sort of man you are."

The blow staggered Charteris. He seemed to grow smaller. His clothes
seemed to hang more loosely about him. His face was paper-white, and the
red mark showed plainly upon it.

"There would be no earthly sense in my hitting you back," he said
equably. "It would only necessitate my getting the thrashing which, I
can assure you, we are equally anxious to avoid. Of course you are able
to knock me down and so on, because you are nearly twice as big as I am.
I fail to see that proves anything in particular. Come, Patricia!" And
he turned to her, and reached out his hand.

She shrank from him. She drew away from him, without any vehemence, as
if he had been some slimy, harmless reptile. A woman does not like to
see fear in a man's eyes; and there was fear in Mr. Charteris's eyes,
for all that he smiled. Patricia's heart sickened. She loathed him, and
she was a little sorry for him.

"Oh, you cur, you cur!" she gasped, in a wondering whisper. Patricia
went to her husband, and held out her hands. She was afraid of him. She
was proud of him, the strong animal. "Take me away, Rudolph," she said,
simply; "take me away from that--that coward. Take me away, my dear. You
may beat me, too, if you like, Rudolph. I dare say I have deserved it.
But I want you to deal brutally with me, to carry me away by force, just
as you threatened to do the day we were married--at the Library, you
remember, when the man was crying 'Fresh oranges!' and you smelt so
deliciously of soap and leather and cigarette smoke."

Musgrave took both her hands in his. He smiled at Charteris.

The novelist returned the smile, intensifying its sweetness. "I fancy,
Rudolph," he said, "that, after all, I shall have to take that train
alone."

Mr. Charteris continued, with a grimace: "You have no notion, though,
how annoying it is not to possess an iota of what is vulgarly considered
manliness. But what am I to do? I was not born with the knack of
enduring physical pain. Oh, yes, I am a coward, if you like to put it
nakedly; but I was born so, willy-nilly. Personally, if I had been
consulted in the matter, I would have preferred the usual portion of
valor. However! the sanctity of the hearth has been most edifyingly
preserved--and, after all, the woman is not worth squabbling about."

There was exceedingly little of the mountebank in him now; he kicked
Patricia's portmanteau, frankly and viciously, as he stepped over it to
lift his own. Holding this in one hand, John Charteris spoke, honestly:

"Rudolph, I had a trifle underrated your resources. For you are a brave
man--we physical cowards, you know, admire that above all things--and a
strong man and a clever man, in that you have adroitly played upon the
purely brutal traits of women. Any she-animal clings to its young and
looks for protection in its mate. Upon a higher ground I would have
beaten you, but as an animal you are my superior. Still, a thing done
has an end. You have won back your wife in open fight. I fancy, by the
way, that you have rather laid up future trouble for yourself in doing
so, but I honor the skill you have shown. Colonel Musgrave, it is to you
that, as the vulgar phrase it, I take off my hat."

Thereupon, Mr. Charteris uncovered his head with perfect gravity, and
turned on his heel, and went down the road, whistling melodiously.

Musgrave stared after him, for a while. The lust of victory died; the
tumult and passion and fervor were gone from Musgrave's soul. He could
very easily imagine the things Jack Charteris would say to Anne
concerning him; and the colonel knew that she would believe them all. He
had won the game; he had played it, heartily and skilfully and
successfully; and his reward was that the old bickerings with Patricia
should continue, and that Anne should be taught to loathe him. He
foresaw it all very plainly as he stood, hand in hand with his wife.

But Anne would be happy. It was for that he had played.




VI


They came back to Matocton almost silently. The spell of the dawn was
broken; it was honest, garish day now, and they were both hungry.

Patricia's spirits were rising, as a butterfly's might after a
thunderstorm. Since she had only a few months to live, she would at
least not waste them in squabbling. She would be conscientiously
agreeable to everybody.

"Ah, Rudolph, Rudolph!" she cooed, "if I had only known all along that
you loved me!"

"My dear," he protested, fondly, "it seemed such a matter of course." He
was a little tired, perhaps; the portmanteau seemed very heavy.

"A woman likes to be told--a woman likes to be told every day.
Otherwise, she forgets," Patricia murmured. Then her face grew tenderly
reproachful. "Ah, Rudolph, Rudolph, see what your carelessness and
neglect has nearly led to! It nearly led to my running away with a man
like--like that! It would have been all your fault, Rudolph, if I had.
You know it would have been, Rudolph."

And Patricia sighed once more, and then laughed and became magnanimous.

"Yes--yes, after all, you are the boy's father." She smiled up at him
kindly and indulgently. "I forgive you, Rudolph," said Patricia.

He must have shown that pardon from Patricia just now was not unflavored
with irony, for she continued, in another voice: "Who, after all, is the
one human being you love? You know that it's the boy, and just the boy
alone. I gave you that boy. You should remember that, I think--"

"I do remember it, Patricia--"

"I bore the child. I paid the price, not you," Patricia said, very
quiet. "No, I don't mean the price all women have to pay--" She paused
in their leisurely progress, and drew vague outlines in the roadway with
the ferrule of her umbrella before she looked up into Rudolph Musgrave's
face. She appraised it for a long while and quite as if her husband were
a stranger.

"Yes, I could make you very sorry for me, if I wanted to." Her thoughts
ran thus. "But what's the use? You could only become an interminable
nuisance in trying to soothe my dying hours. You have just obstinately
squatted around in Lichfield and devoted all your time to being
beautiful and good and mooning around women for I don't know how many
years. You make me tired, and I have half a mind to tell you so right
now. And there really is no earthly sense in attempting to explain
things to you. You have so got into the habit of being beautiful and
good that you are capable of quoting Scripture after I have finished.
Then I would assuredly box your jaws, because I don't yearn to be a poor
stricken dear and weep on anybody's bosom. And I don't particularly care
about your opinion of me, anyway."

Aloud she said: "Oh, well! let's go and get some breakfast."




VII


And thus the situation stayed. Patricia told him nothing. And Rudolph
Musgrave, knowing that according to his lights he had behaved not
unhandsomely, was the merest trifle patronizing and rather like a person
speaking from a superior plane in his future dealings with Patricia.
Moreover, he was engrossed at this time by his scholarly compilation of
Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to 1800, which was printed the
following February.

She told him nothing. She was a devoted mother for two days' space, and
then candidly decided that Roger was developing into the most
insufferable of little prigs.

"And, besides, if he had never been born I would quite probably have
lived to keep my teeth in a glass of water at night. And I can't help
thinking of that privilege being denied me whenever I look at him."

She told Rudolph Musgrave nothing. She was finding it mildly amusing to
note how people came and went at Matocton, and to appraise these people
disinterestedly, because she would never see them again.

Patricia was drawing her own conclusions as to Lichfield's aristocracy.
These people--for the most part a preposterously handsome race--were the
pleasantest of companions and their manners were perfection; but there
was enough of old Roger Stapylton's blood in Patricia's veins to make
her feel, however obscurely, that nobody is justified in living without
even an attempt at any personal achievement. The younger men evinced a
marked tendency to leave Lichfield, to make their homes elsewhere, she
noted, and they very often attained prominence; there was Joe Parkinson,
for instance, who had lunched at Oyster Bay only last Thursday,
according to the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_. And, meanwhile, the men of
her husband's generation clung to their old mansions, and were
ornamental, certainly, and were, very certainly, profoundly
self-satisfied; for they adhered to the customs of yesterday under the
comfortable delusion that this was the only way to uphold yesterday's
ideals. But what, in heaven's name, had any of these men of Rudolph
Musgrave's circle ever done beyond enough perfunctory desk-work, say, to
furnish him food and clothes?

"A hamlet of Hamlets," was Patricia's verdict as to Lichfield--"whose
actual tragedy isn't that their fathers were badly treated, but that
they themselves are constitutionally unable to do anything except talk
about how badly their fathers were treated."

No, it was not altogether that these men were indolent. Rudolph and
Rudolph's peers had been reared in the belief that when any manual labor
became inevitable, you as a matter of course entrusted its execution to
a negro; and, forced themselves to labor, they not unnaturally complied
with an ever-present sense of unfair treatment, and, in consequence,
performed the work inefficiently. Lichfield had no doubt preserved a
comely manner of living; but it had produced in the last half-century
nothing of real importance except John Charteris.




VIII


For Charteris was important. Patricia was rereading all the books that
Charteris had published, and they engrossed her with an augmenting
admiration.

But it is unnecessary to dilate upon the marvelous and winning pictures
of life in Lichfield before the War between the States which Charteris
has painted in his novels. "Even as the king of birds that with
unwearied wing soars nearest to the sun, yet wears upon his breast the
softest down,"--as we learn from no less eminent authority than that of
the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_--"so Mr. Charteris is equally expert in
depicting the derring-do and tenderness of those glorious days of
chivalry, of fair women and brave men, of gentle breeding, of splendid
culture and wholesome living."

Patricia was not a little puzzled by these books. The traditional
Lichfield, she decided in the outcome, may very possibly have been just
the trick-work of a charlatan's cleverness; but, even in that event,
here were the tales of life in Lichfield--ardent, sumptuous and
fragrant throughout with the fragrance of love and roses, of rhyme and
of youth's lovely fallacies; and for the pot-pourri, if it deserved no
higher name, all who believed that living ought to be a uniformly noble
transaction could not fail to be grateful eternally.

Esthetic values apart--and, indeed, to all such values Patricia accorded
a provisional respect--what most impressed her Stapyltonian mind was the
fact that these books represented, in a perfectly tangible way, success.
Patricia very heartily admired success when it was brevetted as such by
the applause of others. And while to be a noted stylist, and even to be
reasonably sure of annotated reissuement for the plaguing of unborn
schoolchildren, was all well enough, in an unimportant, high-minded way,
Patricia was far more vividly impressed by the blunt figures which told
how many of John Charteris's books had been bought and paid for. She
accepted these figures as his publishers gave them forth, implicitly;
and she marveled over and took odd joy in these figures. They enabled
her to admire Charteris's books without reservation.

By this time Mrs. Ashmeade had managed, in the most natural manner, to
tell Patricia a deal concerning Charteris. No halo graced the portrait
Mrs. Ashmeade painted.... But, indeed, Patricia now viewed John
Charteris, considered as a person, without any particular bias. She did
not especially care--now--what the man had done or had omitted to do.

But the venerable incongruity of the writer and his work confronted her
intriguingly. A Charteris writes _In Old Lichfield;_ a Cockney
drug-clerk writes _The Eve of St. Agnes;_ a genteel printer evolves a
Lovelace; and a cutpurse pens the _Ballad of Dead Ladies_ in a brothel.
It is manifestly impossible; and it happens.

So here, then, was a knave who held, somehow, the keys to a courtlier
and nobler world. These tales made living seem a braver business, for
all that they were written by a poltroon. Was it pure posturing?
Patricia, at least, thought it was not. At worst, such dexterous
maintenance of a pose was hardly despicable, she considered. And,
anyhow, she preferred to believe that Charteris had by some miracle put
the best of himself into these books, had somehow clarified the
abhorrent mixture of ability and evil which was John Charteris; and the
best in him she found, on this hypothesis, to be a deal more admirable
than the best in Rudolph Musgrave.

"It _is_ a part of Jack," she fiercely said. "It is, because I know it
is. All this is part of him--as much a part of him as the cowardice and
the trickery. So I don't really care if he is a liar and a coward. I
ought to, I suppose. But at the bottom of my heart I admire him. He has
made something; he has created these beautiful books, and they will be
here when we are all dead. He doesn't leave the world just as he found
it. That is the only real cowardice, I think--especially as I am going
to do it----"

And later she said, belligerently: "If I had been a man I could have at
least assassinated somebody who was prominent. I do wish Rudolph was
not such a stick-in-the-mud. And I wish I liked Rudolph better. But on
the whole I prefer the physical coward to the moral one. Rudolph simply
bores me stiff with his benevolent airs. He just walks around the place
forgiving me sixty times to the hour, and if he doesn't stop it I am
going to slap him."

Thus Patricia.




IX


The world knows how Charteris was killed in Fairhaven by Jasper
Hardress--the husband of "that flighty Mrs. Hardress" Anne had spoken
of.

"And I hardly know," said Mrs. Ashmeade, "whether more to admire the
justice or the sardonic humor of the performance. Here after hundreds of
entanglements with women, John Charteris manages to be shot by a jealous
maniac on account of a woman with whom--for a wonder--his relations were
proven to be innocent. The man needed killing, but it is asking too much
of human nature to put up with his being made a martyr of."

She cried a little, though. "It--it's because I remember him when he was
turning out his first mustache," she explained, lucidly.

       *       *       *       *       *

But with the horror and irony of John Charteris's assassination the
biographer of Rudolph Musgrave has really nothing to do save in so far
as this event influenced the life of Rudolph Musgrave.

It was on the day of Charteris's death--a fine, clear afternoon in late
September--that Rudolph Musgrave went bass-fishing with some eight of
his masculine guests. Luncheon was brought to them in a boat about two
o'clock, along with the day's mail.

"I say--! But listen, everybody!" cried Alfred Chayter, whose mail
included a morning paper--the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_, in fact.

He read aloud.

"I wish I could be with Anne," thought Colonel Musgrave. "It may be I
could make things easier."

But Anne was in Lichfield now....

He had just finished dressing for supper when it occurred to him that
since their return from the river he had not seen Patricia. He was
afraid that Patricia, also, would be upset by this deplorable news.

As he crossed the hall Virginia came out of Patricia's rooms. The
colonel raised his voice in speaking to her, for with age Virginia was
growing very deaf.

"Yaas, suh," she said, "I'm doin' middlin' well, suh, thank yeh, suh.
Jus' took the evenin' mail to Miss Patricy, like I always do, suh." She
went away quietly, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an
idol's.

He went into Patricia's bedroom. Patricia had been taking an afternoon
nap, and had not risen from the couch, where she lay with three or four
unopened letters upon her breast. Two she had opened and dropped upon
the floor. She seemed not to hear him when he spoke her name, and yet
she was not asleep, because her eyes were partly unclosed.

There was no purple glint in them, as once there had been always. Her
countenance, indeed, showed everywhere less brightly tinted than
normally it should be. Her heavy copper-colored hair, alone undimmed,
seemed, like some parasitic growth (he thought), to sustain its beauty
by virtue of having drained Patricia's body of color and vitality.

There was a newspaper in her right hand, with flamboyant headlines,
because to Lichfield the death of John Charteris was an event of
importance.

Patricia seemed very young. You saw that she had suffered. You knew it
was not fair to hurt a child like that.

But, indeed, Rudolph Musgrave hardly realized as yet that Patricia was
dead. For Colonel Musgrave was thinking of that time when this same
Patricia had first come to him, fire-new from the heart of an ancient
sunset, and he had noted, for the first time, that her hair was like the
reflection of a sunset in rippling waters, and that her mouth was an
inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her eyes
were purple glimpses of infinity.

"This same Patricia!" he said, aloud.




PART NINE - RELICS

  "You have chosen the love 'that lives sans murmurings,
  Sans passion,' and incuriously endures
  The gradual lapse of time. You have chosen as yours
  A level life of little happenings;
  And through the long autumnal evenings
  Lord Love, no doubt, is of the company,
  And hugs your ingleside contentedly,
  Smiles at old griefs, and rustles needless wings.

  "And yet I think that sometimes memories
  Of divers trysts, of blood that urged like wine
  On moonlit nights, and of that first long kiss
  Whereby your lips were first made one with mine,
  Awake and trouble you, and loving is
  Once more important and perhaps divine."

  ALLEN ROSSITER. _Two in October._




I


To those who knew John Charteris only through the medium of the printed
page it must have appeared that the novelist was stayed in mid-career by
an accident of unrelieved and singular brutality. And truly, thus
extinguished by the unfounded jealousy of a madman, the force of
Charteris's genius seemed, and seems to-day, as emphasized by that
sinister caprice of chance which annihilated it.

But people in Lichfield, after the manner of each prophet's countrymen,
had their own point of view. The artist always stood between these
people and the artist's handiwork, in part obscuring it.

In any event, it was generally agreed in Lichfield that Anne Charteris's
conduct after her husband's death was not all which could be desired. To
begin with, she attended the funeral, in black, it was true, but wearing
only the lightest of net veils pinned under her chin--"more as if she
were going somewhere on the train, you know, than as if she were in
genuine bereavement."

"Jack didn't approve of mourning. He said it was a heathen survival."
That was the only explanation she offered.

It seemed inadequate to Lichfield. It was preferable, as good taste
went, for a widow to be too overcome to attend her husband's funeral at
all. And Mrs. Charteris had not wept once during the church ceremony,
and had not even had hysterics during the interment at Cedarwood; and
she had capped a scandalous morning's work by remaining with the
undertaker and the bricklayers to supervise the closing of John
Charteris's grave.

"Why, but of course. It is the last thing I will ever be allowed to do
for him," she had said, in innocent surprise. "Why shouldn't I?"

Her air was such that you were both to talk to her about appearances.

"Because she isn't a bit like a widow," as Mrs. Ashmeade pointed out.
"Anybody can condole with a widow, and devote two outer sheets to
explaining that you realize nothing you can say will be of any comfort
to her, and begin at the top of the inside page by telling her how much
better off he is to-day--which I have always thought a double-edged
assertion when advanced to a man's widow. But you cannot condole with a
lantern whose light has been blown out. That is what Anne is."

Mrs. Ashmeade meditated and appeared dissatisfied. "And John Charteris
of all people!"

Anne was presently about the Memorial Edition of her husband's
collected writings. It was magnificently printed and when marketed
achieved a flattering success. Robert Etheridge Townsend was
commissioned to write the authorized _Life of John Charteris_ and to
arrange the two volumes of _Letters_.

Anne was considered an authority on literature and art in general,
through virtue of reflected glory. And in the interviews she granted
various journalists it was noticeable that she no longer referred to
"Jack" or to "Mr. Charteris," but to "my husband." To have been his wife
was her one claim on estimation. And, for the rest, it is inadequate to
love the memory of a martyr. Worship is demanded; and so the wife became
the priestess.




II


Into Colonel Musgrave's mental processes during this period it will not
do to pry too closely. The man had his white nights and his battles, in
part with real grief and regret, and in part with sundry emotions which
he took on faith as the emotions he ought to have, and, therefore,
manifestly, suffered under.... "Patricia was my wife, Jack was my
brother," ran his verdict in the outcome; and beyond that he did not
care to go.

For death cowed his thoughts. In the colonel's explicit theology dead
people were straightway conveyed to either one or the other of two
places. He had very certainly never known anybody who in his opinion
merited the torments of his orthodox Gehenna; so that in imagination he
vaguely populated its blazing corridors with Nero and Judas and Caesar
Borgia and Henry VIII, and Spanish Inquisitors and the aboriginal
American Indians--excepting of course his ancestress Pocahontas--and
with Benedict Arnold and all the "carpet-baggers" and suchlike other
eminent practitioners of depravity. For no one whom Rudolph Musgrave
had ever encountered in the flesh had been really and profoundly wicked,
Rudolph Musgrave considered; and so, he always gravely estimated
this-or-that acquaintance, after death, to be "better off, poor
fellow"--as the colonel phrased it, with a tinge of
self-contradiction--even if he actually refrained in fancy from endowing
the deceased with aureate harps and crowns and footgear. In fine, death
cowed the colonel's thoughts; beyond the grave they did not care to
venture, and when confronted with that abyss they decorously balked.

Patricia and Jack were as a matter of course "better off," then--and,
miraculously purged of faults, with all their defects somehow remedied,
the colonel's wife and brother, with Agatha and the colonel's other
interred relatives, were partaking of dignified joys in bright supernal
iridescent realms, which the colonel resignedly looked forward to
entering, on some comfortably remote day or another, and thus rejoining
his transfigured kindred.... Such was the colonel's charitable decision,
in the forming whereof logic was in no way implicated. For religion, as
the colonel would have told you sedately, was not a thing to be reasoned
about. Attempting to do that, you became in Rudolph Musgrave's honest
eyes regrettably flippant.

Meanwhile Cousin Lucy Fentnor was taking care of the colonel and little
Roger. And Lichfield, long before the lettering on Patricia's tombstone
had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy
Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave,
upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here
nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished
second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep
house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial
arrangement, without provoking scandal's tongue to more than a jocose
innuendo or two when people met for "auction"--that new-fangled
perplexing variant of bridge, just introduced, wherein you bid on the
suits.... And, besides, Cousin Lucy Fentnor (as befitted any one born an
Allardyce) was to all accounts a notable housekeeper, famed alike for
the perilous glassiness of her hardwood floors, her dexterous management
of servants, her Honiton-braid fancy-work (familiar to every patron of
Lichfield charity bazaars), and her unparalleled calves-foot jelly.
Under Cousin Lucy Fentnor's systematized coddling little Roger grew like
the proverbial ill weed, and the colonel likewise waxed perceptibly in
girth.

Thus it was that accident and a woman's intervention seemed once more to
combine in shielding Rudolph Musgrave from discomfort. And in
consequence it was considered improbable that at this late day the
colonel would do the proper thing by Clarice Pendomer, as, at the first
tidings of Patricia's death, had been authentically rumored among the
imaginative; and, in fact, Lichfield no longer considered that
necessary. The claim of outraged morality against these two had been
thrown out of court, through some unworded social statute of
limitation, as far as Lichfield went. Of course it was interesting to
note that the colonel called at Mrs. Pendomer's rather frequently
nowadays; but, then, Clarice Pendomer had all sorts of callers
now--though not many in skirts--and she played poker with men for money
until unregenerate hours of the night, and was reputed with a wealth of
corroborative detail to have even less discussable sources of income: so
that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained
within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been
born a Bellingham.... But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is
quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this
chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital
aspirations of Cousin Lucy Fentnor.

And, moreover, the colonel--in colloquial phrase at least--went
everywhere. After the six months of comparative seclusion which decency
exacted of his widowerhood--and thereby afforded him ample leisure to
complete and publish his _Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to
1800_--the colonel, be it repeated, went everywhere; and people found
him no whit the worse company for his black gloves and the somber band
stitched to his coatsleeve. So Lichfield again received him gladly, as
the social triumph of his generation. Handsome and trim and affable, no
imaginable tourist could possibly have divined--for everybody in
Lichfield knew, of course--that Rudolph Musgrave had rounded his
half-century; and he stayed, as ever, invaluable to Lichfield matrons
alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town" girl, the management
of a cotillon, and the prevention of unpleasant pauses among incongruous
dinner-companies.

But of Anne Charteris he saw very little nowadays. And, indeed, it was
of her own choice that Anne lived apart from Lichfieldian junketings,
contented with her dreams and her pride therein, and her remorseful
tender memories of the things she might have done for Jack and had not
done--lived upon exalted levels nowadays, to which the colonel's more
urbane bereavement did not aspire.




III


"Charteris" was engraved in large, raised letters upon the granite
coping over which Anne stepped to enter the trim burial-plot wherein her
dead lay.

The place to-day is one of the "points of interest" in Cedarwood.
Tourists, passing through Lichfield, visit it as inevitably as they do
the graves of the Presidents, the Southern generals and the many other
famous people which the old cemetery contains; and the negro hackmen of
Lichfield are already profuse in inaccurate information concerning its
occupant. In a phrase, the post card which pictures "E 9436--Grave of
John Charteris" is among the seven similar misinterpretations of
localities most frequently demanded in Lichfieldian drugstores and
news-stands.

Her victoria had paused a trifle farther up the hill, where two big
sycamores overhung the roadway. She came into the place alone, walking
quickly, for she was unwarrantably flustered by her late encounter. And
when she found, of all people, Rudolph Musgrave standing by her
husband's grave, as in a sort of puzzled and yet reverent meditation,
she was, and somehow as half-guiltily, assuring herself there was no
possible reason for the repugnance--nay, the rage,--which a mere
glimpse of trudging, painted and flamboyant Clarice Pendomer had
kindled. Yet it must be recorded that Anne had always detested Clarice.

Now Anne spoke, as the phrase runs, before she thought. "She came with
you!"

And he answered, as from the depths of an uncalled-for comprehension
which was distinctly irritating:

"Yes. And Harry, too, for that matter. Only our talk got somehow to be
not quite the sort it would be salutary for him to take an interest in.
So we told Harry to walk on slowly to the gate, and be sure not to do
any number of things he would never have thought of if we hadn't
suggested them. You know how people are with children----"

"Harry is--her boy?" Anne, being vexed, had almost added--"and yours?"

"Oh----! Say the _fons et origo_ of the Pendomer divorce case, poor
little chap. Yes, Harry is her boy."

Anne said, and again, as she perceived within the moment, a thought too
expeditiously: "I wish you wouldn't bring them here, Colonel Musgrave."

Indeed, it seemed to her flat desecration that Musgrave should have
brought his former mistress into this hallowed plot of ground. She did
not mind--illogically, perhaps--his bringing the child.

"Eh----? Oh, yes," said Colonel Musgrave. He was sensibly nettled. "You
wish 'Colonel Musgrave' wouldn't bring them here. But then, you see, we
had been to Patricia's grave. And we remembered how Jack stood by us
both when--when things bade fair to be even more unpleasant for Clarice
and myself than they actually were. You shouldn't, I think, grudge even
such moral reprobates the privilege of being properly appreciative of
what he did for both of us. Besides, you always come on Saturdays, you
know. We couldn't very well anticipate that you would be here this
afternoon."

So he had been at pains to spy upon her! Anne phrased it thus in her
soul, being irritated, and crisply answered:

"I am leaving Lichfield to-morrow. I had meant this to be my farewell to
them until October."

Colonel Musgrave had glanced toward the little headstone, with its
rather lengthy epitaph, which marked the resting-place of this woman's
only child; and then to the tall shaft whereon was engraved just "John
Charteris." The latter inscription was very characteristic of her
view-point, he reflected; and yet reasonable, too; as one might mention
a Hector or a Goethe, say, without being at pains to disclaim allusion
to the minor sharers of either name.

"Yes," he said. "Well, I shall not intrude."

"No--wait," she dissented.

Her voice was altered now, for there had come into it a marvelous
gentleness.

And Colonel Musgrave remained motionless. The whole world was
motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him.

Sunset was at hand. On one side was the high wooden fence which showed
the boundary of Cedarwood, and through its palings and above it, was
visible the broad, shallow river, comfortably colored, for the most
part, like _café au lait_, but flecked with many patches of foam and
flat iron-colored rocks and innumerable islets, some no bigger than a
billiard-table, but with even the tiniest boasting a tree or two. On the
other--westward--was a mounting vista of close-shaven turf, and many
copings, like magnified geometrical problems, and a host of stunted
growing things--with the staid verdancy of evergreens predominant--and a
multitude of candid shafts and slabs and crosses and dwarfed lambs and
meditant angels.

Some of these thronged memorials were tinged with violet, and others
were a-glitter like silver, just as the ordered trees shaded them or no
from the low sun. The disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly
knew, was very anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the
whole, a kindly wisdom.

She was considering the change in him. Anne was recollecting that
Colonel Musgrave had somewhat pointedly avoided her since her widowhood.
He seemed almost a stranger nowadays.

And she could not recognize in the man any resemblance to the boy whom
she remembered--so long ago--excepting just his womanish mouth, which
was as in the old time very full and red and sensitive. And,
illogically enough, both this great change in him and this one feature
that had never changed annoyed her equally.

She was also worried by his odd tone of flippancy. It jarred, it
vaguely--for the phrase has no equivalent--"rubbed her the wrong way."
Here at a martyr's tomb it was hideously out-of-place, and yet she did
not see her way clear to rebuke. So she remained silent.

But Rudolph Musgrave was uncanny in some respects. For he said within
the moment, "I am not a bit like John Charteris, am I?"

"No," she answered, quietly. It had been her actual thought.

Anne stayed a tiny while quite motionless. Her eyes saw nothing
physical. It was the attitude, Colonel Musgrave reflected, of one who
listens to a far-off music and, incommunicably, you knew that the music
was of a martial sort. She was all in black, of course, very slim and
pure and beautiful. The great cluster of red roses, loosely held, was
like blood against the somber gown.

The widow of John Charteris, in fine, was a very different person from
that Anne Willoughby whom Rudolph Musgrave had loved so long and long
ago. This woman had tasted of tonic sorrows unknown to Rudolph Musgrave,
and had got consolation too, somehow, in far half-credible uplands
unvisited by him. But, he knew, she lived, and was so exquisite, mainly
by virtue of that delusion which he, of all men, had preserved; Anne
Charteris was of his creation, his masterpiece; and viewing her, he was
aware of great reverence and joy.

Anne was happy. It was for that he had played.

But aloud, "I am envious," Rudolph Musgrave declared. "He is the single
solitary man I ever knew whose widow was contented to be simply his
relict for ever and ever, amen. For you will always be just the woman
John Charteris loved, won't you? Yes, if you lived to be thirty-seven
years older than Methuselah, and every genius and potentate in the world
should come a-wooing in the meantime, it never would occur to you that
you could possibly be anything, even to an insane person, except his
relict. And he has been dead now all of three whole years! So I am
envious, just as we ordinary mortals can't help being of you both;
and--may I say it?--I am glad."




IV


They were standing thus when a boy of ten or eleven came unhurriedly
into the "section." He assumed possession of Colonel Musgrave's hand as
though the action were a matter of course.

"I got lost, Colonel Musgrave," the child composedly announced. "I
walked ever so far, and the gate wasn't where we left it. And the roads
kept turning and twisting so, it seemed I'd never get anywhere. I don't
like being lost when it's getting dark and there's so many dead people
'round, do you?"

The colonel was moved to disapproval. "Young man, I suppose your poor
deserted mother is looking for you everywhere, and has probably torn out
every solitary strand of hair she possesses by this time."

"I reckon she is," the boy assented. The topic did not appear to be in
his eyes of preëminent importance.

Then Anne Charteris said, "Harry," and her voice was such that Rudolph
Musgrave wheeled with amazement in his face.

The boy had gone to her complaisantly, and she stood now with one hand
on either of his shoulders, regarding him. Her lips were parted, but
they did not move at all.

"You are Mrs. Pendomer's boy, aren't you?" said Anne Charteris, in a
while. She had some difficulty in articulation.

"Yes'm," Harry assented, "and we come here 'most every Wednesday, and,
please, ma'am, you're hurtin' me."

"I didn't mean to--dear," the woman added, painfully. "Don't interfere
with me, Rudolph Musgrave! Your mother must be very fond of you, Harry.
I had a little boy once. I was fond of him. He would have been eleven
years old last February."

"Please, ma'am, I wasn't eleven till April, and I ain't tall for my age,
but Tubby Parsons says----"

The woman gave an odd, unhuman sound. "Not until April!"

"Harry," said Colonel Musgrave then, "an enormous whale is coming down
the river in precisely two minutes. Perhaps if you were to look through
the palings of that fence you might see him. I don't suppose you would
care to, though?"

And Harry strolled resignedly toward the fence. Harry Pendomer did not
like this funny lady who had hurt, frightened eyes. He did not believe
in the whale, of course, any more than he did in Santa Claus. But like
most children, he patiently accepted the fact that grown people are
unaccountable overlords appointed by some vast _bêtise_, whom, if only
through prudential motives, it is preferable to humor.




V


Colonel Musgrave stood now upon the other side of John Charteris's
grave--just in the spot that was reserved for her own occupancy some
day.

"You are ill, Anne. You are not fit to be out. Go home."

"I had a little boy once," she said. "'But that's all past and gone, and
good times and bad times and all times pass over.' There's an odd simple
music in the sentence, isn't there? Yet I remember it chiefly because I
used to read that book to him and he loved it. And it was my child that
died. Why is this other child so like him?"

"Oh, then, that's it, is it?" said Rudolph Musgrave, as in relief.
"Bless me, I suppose all these little shavers are pretty much alike. I
can only tell Roger from the other boys by his red head. Humanity in the
raw, you know. Still, it is no wonder it gave you a turn. You had much
better go home, however, and not take any foolish risks, and put your
feet in hot water, and rub cologne on your temples, and do all the other
suitable things----"

"I remember now," she continued, without any apparent emotion, and as
though he had not spoken. "When I came into the room you were saying
that the child must be considered. You were both very angry, and I was
alarmed--foolishly alarmed, perhaps. And my--and John Charteris said,
'Let him tell, then'--and you told me--"

"The truth, Anne."

"And he sat quietly by. Oh, if he'd had the grace, the common
manliness--!" She shivered here. "But he never interrupted you. I--I was
not looking at him. I was thinking how vile you were. And when you had
ended, he said, 'My dear, I am sorry you should have been involved in
this. But since you are, I think we can assure Rudolph that both of us
will regard his confidence as sacred.' Then I remembered him, and
thought how noble he was! And all those years that were so happy, hour
by hour, he was letting you--meet his bills!" She seemed to wrench out
the inadequate metaphor.

You could hear the far-off river, now, faint as the sound of boiling
water.

After a few pacings Colonel Musgrave turned upon her. He spoke with a
curious simplicity.

"There isn't any use in lying to you. You wouldn't believe. You would
only go to some one else--some woman probably,--who would jump at the
chance of telling you everything and a deal more. Yes, there are a great
many 'they _do_ say's' floating about. This was the only one that came
near being--serious. The man was very clever.--Oh, he wasn't vulgarly
lecherous. He was simply--Jack Charteris. He always irritated Lichfield,
though, by not taking Lichfield very seriously. You would hear every
by-end of retaliative and sniggered-over mythology, and in your present
state of mind you would believe all of them. I happen to know that a
great many of these stories are not true."

"A great many of these stories," Anne repeated, "aren't true! A great
many aren't! That ought to be consoling, oughtn't it?" She spoke without
a trace of bitterness.

"I express myself very badly. What I really mean, what I am aiming at,
is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to
ask, because I will answer them truthfully. Very few people would. You
see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just
stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second," he added, as
with venom, "that it is only human nature to dislike you."

Anne was not angry. It had come to her, quite as though she were
considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion,
true.

"There is sunlight and fresh air in the street," John Charteris had been
wont to declare, "and there is a culvert at the corner. I think it is a
mistake for us to emphasize the culvert."

So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence. She saw this now.
It did not matter. It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more.

"I've only one question, I think. Why did you do it?" She spoke with
bright amazement in her eyes.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he seriocomically deplored. "Why, because it was
such a noble thing to do. It was so like the estimable young man in a
play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes
a curtain-call immediately afterwards. In fine, I simply observed to
myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, 'But what a gesture!'" And
he parodied an actor's motion in this rôle.

She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity. Anne did not
understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth. And so,

"You haven't _any_ sense of humor," he lamented. "You used to have a
deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and
diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates. Well, it
was because it helped him a little. Oh, I am being truthful now. I had
some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I
never did. I ought to have, perhaps. But I didn't."

"My friend, you are being almost truthful. But I want the truth entire."

"It isn't polite to disbelieve people," he reproved her; "or at the very
least, according to the best books on etiquette, you ought not to do it
audibly. Would you mind if I smoked? I could be more veracious then.
There is something in tobacco that makes frankness a matter of course. I
thank you."

He produced an amber holder, fitted a cigarette into it, and presently
inhaled twice. He said, with a curt voice:

"The reason, naturally, was you. You may remember certain things that
happened just before John Charteris came and took you. Oh, that is
precisely what he did! You are rather a narrow-minded woman now, in
consequence--or in my humble opinion, at least--and deplorably superior.
It pleased the man to have in his house--if you will overlook my
venturing into metaphor,--one cool room very sparsely furnished where he
could come when the mood seized him. He took the raw material from me,
wherewith to build that room, because he wanted that room. I acquiesced,
because I had not the skill wherewith to fight him."

Anne understood him now, as with a great drench of surprise. And fear
was what she felt in chief when she saw for just this moment as though
it had lightened, the man's face transfigured, and tender, and strange
to her.

"I tried to buy your happiness, to--yes, just to keep you blind
indefinitely. Had the price been heavier, I would have paid it the more
gladly. Fate has played a sorry trick. _You_ would never have seen
through him. My dear, I have wanted very often to shake you," he said.

And she knew, in a glorious terror, that she desired him to shake her,
and as she had never desired anything else in life.

"Oh, well, I am just a common, ordinary, garden-sort of fool. The
Musgraves always are, in one fashion or another," he sulkily concluded.
And now the demigod was merely Rudolph Musgrave again, and she was not
afraid any longer, but only inexpressibly fordone.

"Isn't that like a woman?" he presently demanded of the June heavens.
"To drag something out of a man with inflexibility, monomania and moral
grappling-irons, and _then_ not like it! Oh, very well! I am disgusted
by your sex's axiomatic variability. I shall take Harry to his fond
mamma at once."

She did not say anything. A certain new discovery obsessed her like a
piece of piercing music.

Then Rudolph Musgrave gave the tiniest of gestures downward. "And I have
told you this, in chief, because we two remember him. He wanted you. He
took you. You are his. You will always be. He gave you just a fragment
of himself. That fragment was worth more than everything I had to
offer."

Anne very carefully arranged her roses on the ivy-covered grave. "I do
not know--meanwhile, I give these to our master. And my real widowhood
begins to-day."

And as she rose he looked at her across the colorful mound, and smiled,
half as with embarrassment. A lie, he thought, might ameliorate the
situation, and he bravely hazarded a prodigious one. "Is it necessary to
tell you that Jack loved you? And that the others never really counted?"

He rejoiced to see that Anne believed him. "No," she assented, "no, not
with him. Oddly enough, I am proud of that, even now. But--don't you
see?--I never loved him. I was just his priestess--the priestess of a
stucco god! Otherwise, I would know it wasn't his fault, but altogether
that of--the others."

He grimaced and gave a bantering flirt of his head. He said, with
quizzing eyes:

"Would it do any good to quote Lombroso, and Maudsley, and Gall, and
Krafft-Ebing, and Flechsig, and so on? and to tell you that the
excessive use of one brain faculty must necessarily cause a lack of
nutriment to all the other brain-cells? It would be rather up-to-date.
There is a deal I could tell you also as to what poisonous blood he
inherited; but to do this I have not the right." And then Rudolph
Musgrave said in all sincerity: "'A wild, impetuous whirlwind of passion
and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling in
the heart of it.'"

She had put aside alike the drolling and the palliative suggestion, like
flimsy veils. "I think it wouldn't do any good whatever. When growing
things are broken by the whirlwind, they don't, as a rule, discuss the
theory of air-currents as a consolation. Men such as he was take what
they desire. It isn't fair--to us others. But it's true, for all that--"

Their eyes met warily; and for no reason which they shared in common
they smiled together.

"Poor little Lady of Shalott," said Rudolph Musgrave, "the mirror is
cracked from side to side, isn't it? I am sorry. For life is not so
easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a
bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it
are so childishly simple--and implacable. And one of these laws seems to
be that in our little planet, might makes right--"

He stayed to puff his cigarette.

"Oh, Rudolph dear, don't--don't be just a merry-Andrew!" she cried
impulsively, before he had time to continue, which she perceived he
meant to do, as if it did not matter.

And he took her full meaning, quite as he had been used in the old times
to discourse upon a half-sentence. "I am afraid I am that, rather," he
said, reflectively. "But then Clarice and I could hardly have weathered
scandal except by making ourselves particularly agreeable to everybody.
And somehow I got into the habit of making people laugh. It isn't very
difficult. I am rather an adept at telling stories which just graze
impropriety, for instance. You know, they call me the social triumph of
my generation. And people are glad to see me because I am 'so awfully
funny' and 'simply killing' and so on. And I suppose it tells in the
long run--like the dyer's hand, you know."

"It does tell." Anne was thinking it would always tell. And that, too,
would be John Charteris's handiwork.

Ensued a silence. Rudolph Musgrave was painstakingly intent upon his
cigarette. A nestward-plunging bird called to his mate impatiently.
Then Anne shook her head impatiently.

"Come, while I'm thinking, I will drive you back to Lichfield."

"Oh, no; that wouldn't do at all," he said, with absolute decision. "No,
you see I have to return the boy. And I can't quite imagine your
carriage waiting at the doors of 'that Mrs. Pendomer.'"

"Oh," Anne fleetingly thought, "_he_ would have understood." But aloud
she only said: "And do you think I hate her any longer? Yes, it is true
I hated her until to-day, and now I'm just sincerely sorry for her. For
she and I--and you and even the child yonder--and all that any of us is
to-day--are just so many relics of John Charteris. Yet he has done with
us--at last!"

She said this with an inhalation of the breath; but she did not look at
him.

"Take care!" he said, with an unreasonable harshness. "For I forewarn
you I am imagining vain things."

"I'm not afraid, somehow." But Anne did not look at him.

He saw as with a rending shock how like the widow of John Charteris was
to Anne Willoughby; and unforgotten pulses, very strange and irrational
and dear, perplexed him sorely. He debated, and flung aside the
cigarette as an out-moded detail of his hobbling part.

"You say I did a noble thing for you. I tried to. But quixotism has its
price. To-day I am not quite the man who did that thing. John Charteris
has set his imprint too deep upon us. We served his pleasure. We are not
any longer the boy and girl who loved each other."

She waited in the rising twilight with a yet averted face. The world was
motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him. And the
disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly knew, was very
anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the whole, a kindly
wisdom.

So that, "My dear, my dear!" he swiftly said: "I don't think I can word
just what my feeling is for you. Always my view of the world has been
that you existed, and that some other people existed--as accessories--"

Then he was silent for a heart-beat, appraising her. His hands lifted
toward her and fell within the moment, as if it were in impotence.

Anne spoke at last, and the sweet voice of her was very glad and proud
and confident.

"My friend, remember that I have not thanked you. You have done the most
foolish and--the manliest thing I ever knew a man to do, just for my
sake. And I have accepted it as if it were a matter of course. And I
shall always do so. Because it was your right to do this very brave and
foolish thing for me. I know you joyed in doing it. Rudolph ... you
cannot understand how glad I am you joyed in doing it."

Their eyes met. It is not possible to tell you all they were aware of
through that moment, because it is a knowledge so rarely apprehended,
and even then for such a little while, that no man who has sensed it can
remember afterward aught save the splendor and perfection of it.

       *       *       *       *       *

And yet Anne looked back once. There was just the tall, stark shaft, and
on it "John Charteris." The thing was ominous and vast, all colored like
wet gravel, save where the sunlight tipped it with clean silver very
high above their reach.

"Come," she quickly said to Rudolph Musgrave; "come, for I am afraid."




VI


And are we then to leave them with glad faces turned to that new day
wherein, above the ashes of old errors and follies and mischances and
miseries, they were to raise the structure of such a happiness as earth
rarely witnesses? Would it not be, instead, a grateful task more fully
to depicture how Rudolph Musgrave's love of Anne won finally to its
reward, and these two shared the evening of their lives in tranquil
service of unswerving love come to its own at last?

Undoubtedly, since the espousal of one's first love--by oneself--is a
phenomenon rarely encountered outside of popular fiction, it would be a
very gratifying task to record that Anne and Rudolph Musgrave were
married that autumn; that subsequently Lichfield was astounded by the
fervor of their life-long bliss; that Colonel and (the second) Mrs.
Musgrave were universally respected, in a word, and their dinner-parties
were always prominently chronicled by the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_;
and that Anne took excellent care of little Roger, and that she and her
second husband proved eminently suited to each other.

But, as a matter of fact, not one of these things ever happened....

"I have been thinking it over," Anne deplored. "Oh, Rudolph dear, I
perfectly realize you are the best and noblest man I ever knew. And I
have always loved you very much, my dear; that is why I could never
abide poor Mrs. Pendomer. And yet--it is a feeling I simply can't
explain----"

"That you belong to Jack in spite of everything?" the colonel said.
"Why, but of course! I might have known that Jack would never have
allowed any simple incidental happening such as his death to cause his
missing a possible trick."

Anne would have comforted Rudolph Musgrave; but, to her discomfiture,
the colonel was grinning, however ruefully.

"I was thinking," he stated, "of the only time that I ever, to my
knowledge, talked face to face with the devil. It is rather odd how
obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers;
and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device
of introducing a refrain--so that the idlest remarks of as much as three
years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!...
However, were it within my power, I would evoke Amaimon straightway now
to come up yonder, through your hearthrug, and to answer me quite
honestly if I did not tell him on the beach at Matocton that this,
precisely this, would be the outcome of your knowing everything!"

"I told you that I couldn't, quite, _explain_----" Anne said.

"Eh, but I can, my dear," he informed her. "The explanation is that
Lichfield bore us, shaped us, and made us what we are. We may not enjoy
a monopoly of the virtues here in Lichfield, but there is one trait at
least which the children of Lichfield share in common. We are loyal. We
give but once; and when we give, we give all that we have; and when we
have once given it, neither common-sense, nor a concourse of
expostulating seraphim, nor anything else in the universe, can induce us
to believe that a retraction, or even a qualification, of the gift would
be quite worthy of us."

"But that--that's foolish. Why, it's unreasonable," Anne pointed out.

"Of course it is. And that is why I am proud of Lichfield. And that is
why you are to-day Jack's wife and always will be just Jack's wife--and
why to-day I am Patricia's husband--and why Lichfield to-day is
Lichfield. There is something braver in life than to be just reasonable,
thank God! And so, we keep the faith, my dear, however obsolete we find
fidelity to be. We keep to the old faith--we of Lichfield, who have
given hostages to the past. We remember even now that we gave freely in
an old time, and did not haggle.... And so, we are proud--yes! we are
consumedly proud, and we know that we have earned the right to be
proud."

A little later Colonel Musgrave said:

"And yet--it takes a monstrous while to dispose of our universe's
subtleties. I have loved you my whole life long, as accurately as we
can phrase these matters. There is no--no _reasonable_ reason why you
should not marry me now; and you would marry me if I pressed it. And I
do not press it. Perhaps it all comes of our both having been reared in
Lichfield. Perhaps that is why I, too, have been 'thinking it over.' You
see," he added, with a smile, "the rivet in grandfather's neck is not
lightly to be ignored, after all. No, you do not know what I am talking
about, my dear. And--well, anyhow, I belong to Patricia. Upon the whole,
I am glad that I belong to Patricia; for Patricia and what Patricia
meant to me was the one vital thing in a certain person's rather
hand-to-mouth existence--oh, yes, in spite of everything! I know it now.
Anne Charteris," the colonel cried, "I wouldn't marry you or any other
woman breathing, even though you were to kneel and implore me upon the
knees of a centipede. For I belong to Patricia; and the rivet stays
unbroken, after all."

"Oh, and am I being very foolish again?" Anne asked. "For I have been
remembering that when--when Jack was not quite truthful about some
things, you know,--the truth he hid was always one which would have hurt
me. And I like to believe that was, at least in part, the reason he hid
it, Rudolph. So he purchased my happiness--well, at ugly prices perhaps.
But he purchased it, none the less; and I had it through all those
years. So why shouldn't I--after all--be very grateful to him? And,
besides"--her voice broke--"besides, he was Jack, you know. He belonged
to me. What does it matter what he did? He belonged to me, and I loved
him."

And to the colonel's discomfort Anne began to cry.

"There, there!" he said, "so the real truth is out at last. And tears
don't help very much. It does seem a bit unfair, my dear, I know. But
that is simply because you and I are living in a universe which has
never actually committed itself, under any penalizing bond, to be
entirely candid as to the laws by which it is conducted."

       *       *       *       *       *

But it may be that Rudolph Musgrave voiced quite obsolete views. For he
said this at a very remote period--when the Beef Trust was being
"investigated" in Washington; when an excited Iberian constabulary was
still hunting the anarchists who had attempted to assassinate the young
King and Queen of Spain upon their wedding-day; when the rebuilding of
an earthquake-shattered San Francisco was just beginning to be talked of
as a possibility; and when editorials were mostly devoted to discussion
of what Mr. Bryan would have to say about bi-metallism when he returned
from his foreign tour.

And, besides, it was Rudolph Musgrave's besetting infirmity always to
shrink--under shelter of whatever grandiloquent excuse--from making
changes. One may permissibly estimate this foible to have weighed with
him a little, even now, just as in all things it had always weighed in
Lichfield with all his generation. An old custom is not lightly broken.




PART TEN - IMPRIMIS

  "So let us laugh, lest vain rememberings
  Breed, as of old, some rude bucolic cry
  Of awkward anguishes, of dreams that die
  Without decorum, of Love lacking wings
  Yet striving you-ward in his flounderings
  Eternally,--as now, even when I lie
  As I lie now, who know that you and I
  Exist and heed not lesser happenings.

  "I was. I am. I will be. Eh, no doubt
  For some sufficient cause, I drift, defer,
  Equivocate, dream, hazard, grow more stout,
  Age, am no longer Love's idolater,--
  And yet I could and would not live without
  Your faith that heartens and your doubts which spur."


LIONEL CROCHARD. _Palinodia_.




I


So weeks and months, and presently irrevocable years, passed tranquilly;
and nothing very important seemed to happen nowadays, either for good or
ill; and Rudolph Musgrave was content enough.

True, there befell, and with increasing frequency, periods when one must
lie abed, and be coaxed into taking interminable medicines, and be
ministered unto generally, because one was of a certain age nowadays,
and must be prudent. But even such necessities, these underhanded
indignities of time, had their alleviations. Trained nurses, for
example, were uncommonly well-informed and agreeable young women, when
you came to know them--and quite lady-like, too, for all that in our
topsy-turvy days these girls had to work for their living. Unthinkable
as it seemed, the colonel found that his night-nurse, a Miss Ramsay, was
actually by birth a Ramsay of Blenheim; and for a little the discovery
depressed him. But to be made much of, upon whatever terms, was always
treatment to which the colonel submitted only too docilely. And,
besides, in this queer, comfortable, just half-waking state, the
colonel found one had the drollest dreams, evolving fancies such as were
really a credit to one's imagination....

For instance, one very often imagined that Patricia was more close at
hand nowadays.... No, she was not here in the room, of course, but
outside, in the street, at the corner below, where the letterbox stood.
Yes, she was undoubtedly there, the colonel reflected drowsily. And they
had been so certain her return could only result in unhappiness, and
they were so wise, that whilst she waited for her opportunity Patricia
herself began to be a little uneasy. She had patrolled the block six
times before the chance came.

And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, drowsily pleased by his own
inventiveness, that Patricia was glad this afternoon was so hot that no
one was abroad except the small boy at the corner house, who sat upon
the bottom porch-step, and, as children so often do, appeared intently
to appraise the world at large with an inexplicable air of
disappointment.

"Now think how Rudolph would feel,"--the colonel whimsically played at
reading Patricia's reflection--"if I were to be arrested as a suspicious
character--that's what the newspapers always call them, I think--on his
very doorstep! And he must have been home a half-hour ago at least,
because I know it's after five. But the side-gate's latched, and I can't
ring the door-bell--if only because it would be too ridiculous to have
to ask the maid to tell Colonel Musgrave his wife wanted to see him.
Besides, I don't know the new house-girl. I wish now we hadn't let old
Mary go, even though she was so undependable about thorough-cleaning."

And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia was tired of pacing
before the row of houses, each so like the other, and compared herself
to Gulliver astray upon a Brobdingnagian bookshelf which held a "library
set" of some huge author. She had lost interest, too, in the new house
upon the other side.

"If things were different I would have to call on them. But as it is, I
am spared that bother at least," said Patricia, just as if being dead
did not change people at all.

Then a colored woman, trim and frillily-capped, came out of the watched
house. She bore some eight or nine letters in one hand, and fanned
herself with them in a leisurely flat-footed progress to the mailbox at
the lower corner.

"She looks capable," was Patricia's grudging commentary, in slipping
through the doorway into the twilight of the hall. "But it isn't safe to
leave the front-door open like this. One never knows--No, I can tell by
the look of her she's the sort that can't be induced to sleep on the
lot, and takes mysterious bundles home at night."




II


And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, now in the full flow of this droll
dream, that Patricia resentfully noted her front-hall had been "meddled
with." This much alone might Patricia observe in a swift transit to the
parlor.

She waited there until the maid returned; and registered to the woman's
credit the discreet soft closing of the front-door and afterward the
well-nigh inaudible swish of the rear door of the dining-room as the
maid went back into the kitchen.

"In any event," Patricia largely conceded, "she probably doesn't clash
the knives and forks in the pantry after supper, like she was hostile
armaments with any number of cutlasses apiece. I remember Rudolph simply
couldn't stand it when we had Ethel."

So much was satisfactory. Only--her parlor was so altered!

There was--to give you just her instantaneous first impression--so
little in it. Broad spaces of plain color showed everywhere; and
Patricia's ideal of what a parlor should be, as befitted the châtelaine
of a fine home in Lichfield, had always been the tangled elegancies of
the front show-window of a Woman's Exchange for Fancy Work. The room had
even been repapered--odiously, as she considered; and the shiny floor of
it boasted just three inefficient rugs, like dingy rafts upon a sea of
very strong coffee.

Patricia looked in vain for her grandiose plush-covered chairs, her
immaculate "tidies," and the proud yellow lambrequin, embroidered in
high relief with white gardenias, which had formerly adorned the
mantelpiece. The heart of her hungered for her unforgotten and
unforgettable "watered-silk" papering wherein white roses bloomed
exuberantly against a yellow background--which deplorably faded if you
did not keep the window-shades down, she remembered--and she wanted back
her white thick comfortable carpet which hid the floor completely, so
that everywhere you trod upon the buxomest of stalwart yellow roses,
each bunch of which was lavishly tied with wind-blown ribbons.

Then, too, her cherished spinning-wheel, at least two hundred and fifty
years old, which had looked so pretty after she had gilded it and added
a knot of pink sarsenet, was departed; and gone as well was the
mirror-topped table, with its array of china swan and frogs and
water-lilies artistically grouped about its speckless surface. Even her
prized engraving of "Michael Angelo Buonarotti"--contentedly regarding
his just finished Moses, while a pope tiptoed into the room through a
side-door--had been removed, with all its splendors of red-plush and
intricate gilt-framing.

Just here and there, in fine, like a familiar face in a crowd, she could
discover some one of her more sedately-colored "parlor ornaments"; and
the whole history of it--its donor or else its price, the gestures of
the shopman, even what sort of weather it was when she and Rudolph found
"exactly what I've been looking for" in the shop-window, and the
Stapyltonian, haggling over the price with which Patricia had
bargained--such unimportant details as these now vividly awakened in
recollection.... In fine, this room was not her parlor at all, and in it
Patricia was lonely.... Yes, yes, she would be nowadays, the colonel
reflected, for he himself had never been in thorough sympathy with all
the changes made by Roger's self-assured young wife.

Thus it was with the first floor of the house, through which Patricia
strayed with uniform discomfort. This place was home no longer.

Thus it was with the first floor of the house. Everywhere the equipments
were strange, or at best arranged not quite as Patricia would have
placed them. Yet they had not any look of being recently purchased. Even
that hideous stair-carpet was a little worn, she noted, as noiselessly
she mounted to the second story.

The house was perfectly quiet, save for a tiny shrill continuance of
melody that somehow seemed only to pierce the silence, not to dispel it.
Rudolph--of all things!--had in her absence acquired a canary. And
everybody knew what an interminable nuisance a canary was.

She entered the front room. It had been her bedroom ever since her
marriage. She remembered this as with a gush of defiant joy.




III


So it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia came actually into the
room that had been hers....

A canary was singing there, very sweet and shrill and as in defiant joy.
Its trilling seemed to fill the room. In the brief pauses of his song
the old clock, from which Rudolph had removed the pendulum on the night
of Agatha's death would interpose an obstinate slow ticking; and
immediately the clock-noise would be drowned in melody. Otherwise the
room was silent.

In the alcove stood the bed which had been Patricia's. Intent upon its
occupant were three persons, with their backs turned to her. One
Patricia could easily divine to be a doctor; he was twiddling a
hypodermic syringe between his fingers, and the set of his shoulders was
that of acquiescence. Profiles of the others she saw: one a passive
nurse in uniform, who was patiently chafing the right hand of the bed's
occupant; the other a lean-featured red-haired stranger, who sat
crouched in his chair and held the dying man's left hand.

For in the bed, supported by many pillows, and facing Patricia, was a
dying man. He was very old, having thick tumbled hair which, like his
two-weeks' beard, was uniformly white. His eyelids drooped a trifle, so
that he seemed to meditate concerning something ineffably remote and
serious, yet not, upon the whole, unsatisfactory. You saw and heard the
intake of each breath, so painfully drawn, and expelled with manifest
relief, as if the man were very tired of breathing. Yet the bedclothes
heaved with his vain efforts just to keep on breathing. And sometimes
his parted lips would twitch curiously.... Rudolph Musgrave, too, could
see all this quite plainly, in the mirror over the mantel.

The doctor spoke. "Yes--it's the end, Professor Musgrave," he said. For
this lean-featured red-haired stranger to whom the doctor spoke, a
pedagogue to his finger-tips, had once been Patricia's dearly-purchased,
chubby baby Roger.

And Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He knew Patricia was there; but
that fact no longer seemed either very strange or even unnatural; and
besides, it was against some law for him to look at her until Patricia
had called him.... Meanwhile, just opposite, above the mirror, and
facing him, was the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave. This
picture had now hung there for a great many years. The boy still smiled
at you in undiminished raillery, even though he smiled ambiguously, and
with a sort of humorous sadness in his eyes. Once, very long ago--when
the picture hung downstairs--some one had said that Gerald Musgrave's
life was barren. The dying man could not now recollect, quite, who that
person was.

Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He comprehended that he was dying.
The greatest of all changes was at hand; and he, who had always shrunk
from making changes, was now content enough.... Indeed, with Rudolph
Musgrave living had always been a vaguely dissatisfactory business, a
hand-to-mouth proceeding which he had scrambled through, as he saw now,
without any worthy aim or even any intelligible purpose. He had nothing
very heinous with which to reproach himself; but upon the other side, he
had most certainly nothing of which to be particularly proud.

So this was all that living came to! You heard of other people being
rapt by splendid sins and splendid virtues, and you anticipated that
to-morrow some such majestic energy would transfigure your own living,
and change everything: but the great adventure never arrived, somehow;
and the days were frittered away piecemeal, what with eating your
dinner, and taking a wholesome walk, and checking up your bank account,
and dovetailing scraps of parish registers and land-patents and county
records into an irrefutable pedigree, and seeing that your clothes were
pressed, and looking over the newspapers--and what with other
infinitesimal avocations, each one innocent, none of any particular
importance, and each consuming an irrevocable moment of the allotted
time--until at last you found that living had not, necessarily, any
climax at all.... And Patricia would call him presently.

Once, very long ago, some one had said that the most pathetic tragedy in
life was to get nothing in particular out of it. The dying man could not
now recollect, quite, who that person was.

He wondered, vaguely, what might have been the outcome if Rudolph
Musgrave had whole-heartedly sought, not waited for, the great
adventure; if Rudolph Musgrave had put--however irrationally--more
energy and less second-thought into living; if Rudolph Musgrave had not
been contented to be just a Musgrave of Matocton.... Well, it was too
late now. He viewed his whole life now, in epitome, and much as you may
see at night the hackneyed vista from your window leap to incisiveness
under the lash of lightning. No, the life of Rudolph Musgrave had never
risen to the plane of dignity, not even to that of seeming to Rudolph
Musgrave a connected and really important transaction on Rudolph
Musgrave's part. Yet Lichfield, none the better for Rudolph Musgrave's
having lived, was none the worse, thank heaven! And there were younger
men in Lichfield--men who did not mean to fail as Rudolph Musgrave and
his fellows all had failed.... Eh, yes, what was the toast that Rudolph
Musgrave drank, so long ago, to the new Lichfield which these younger
men were making?

"To this new South, that has not any longer need of me or of my kind.

"To this new South! She does not gaze unwillingly, nor too complacently,
upon old years, and dares concede that but with loss of manliness may
any man encroach upon the heritage of a dog or of a trotting-horse, and
consider the exploits of an ancestor to guarantee an innate and personal
excellence.

"For to her all former glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with
her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain
speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of
that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with augmenting
strokes."

Yes, that was it. And it was true. Yet Rudolph Musgrave's life on earth
was ending now--the only life that he would ever have on earth--and it
had never risen to the plane of seeming even to Rudolph Musgrave a
really important transaction on Rudolph Musgrave's part....

Then Patricia spoke. Low and very low she called to Olaf, and the dim,
wistful eyes of Rudolph Musgrave lifted, and gazed full upon her
standing there, and were no longer wistful. And the man made as though
to rise, and could not, and his face was very glad.

For in the dying man had awakened the pulses of an old, strange,
half-forgotten magic, and all his old delight in the girl who had shared
in and had provoked this ancient wonder-working, together with a quite
new consciousness of the inseparability of Patricia's foibles from his
existence; so that he was incuriously aware of his imbecility in not
having known always that Patricia must come back some day, not as a
glorious, unfamiliar angel, but unaltered.

"I am glad you haven't changed.... Why, but of course! Nothing would
have counted if you had changed--not even for the better, Patricia. For
you and what you meant to me were real. That only was real--that we, not
being demigods, but being just what we were, once climbed together very
high, where we could glimpse the stars--and nothing else can ever be of
any importance. What we inherited was too much for us, was it not, my
dear? And now it is not formidable any longer. Oh, but I loved you very
greatly, Patricia! And now at last, my dear, I seem to understand--as in
that old, old time when you and I were glad together----"

But he did not say this aloud, for it seemed to him that he stood in a
cool, pleasant garden, and that Patricia came toward him through the
long shadows of sunset. The lacy folds and furbelows and
semi-transparencies that clothed her were now tinged with gold and now,
as a hedge or a flower bed screened her from the level rays, were
softened into multitudinous graduations of grays and mauves and violets.

They did not speak. But in her eyes he found compassion and such
tenderness as awed him; and then, as a light is puffed out, they were
the eyes of a friendly stranger. He understood, for an instant, that of
necessity it was decreed time must turn back and everything, even
Rudolph Musgrave, be just as it had been when he first saw Patricia. For
they had made nothing of their lives; and so, they must begin all over
again.

"_Failure is not permitted_" he was saying....

"_You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?_" she asked....

And Rudolph Musgrave knew he had forgotten something of vast import, but
what this knowledge had pertained to he no longer knew. Then Rudolph
Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about his heart,
that her hair was like the reflection of a sunset in rippling
waters--only many times more beautiful, of course--and that her mouth
was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her
eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.


THE END





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