← catalogue

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

by James Branch Cabell · English · Gutenberg #10041 · 439,317 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck: A Comedy of Limitations
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

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

Author: James Branch Cabell


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10041]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10041

Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER'S NECK: A COMEDY OF LIMITATIONS ***

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

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/10041