The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck Part 35

"That you belong to Jack in spite of everything?" the colonel said.

"Why, but of course! I might have known that Jack would never have allowed any simple incidental happening such as his death to cause his missing a possible trick."

Anne would have comforted Rudolph Musgrave; but, to her discomfiture, the colonel was grinning, however ruefully.

"I was thinking," he stated, "of the only time that I ever, to my knowledge, talked face to face with the devil. It is rather odd how obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers; and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device of introducing a refrain--so that the idlest remarks of as much as three years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!...

However, were it within my power, I would evoke Amaimon straightway now to come up yonder, through your hearthrug, and to answer me quite honestly if I did not tell him on the beach at Matocton that this, precisely this, would be the outcome of your knowing everything!"

"I told you that I couldn't, quite, _explain_----" Anne said.

"Eh, but I can, my dear," he informed her. "The explanation is that Lichfield bore us, shaped us, and made us what we are. We may not enjoy a monopoly of the virtues here in Lichfield, but there is one trait at least which the children of Lichfield share in common. We are loyal. We give but once; and when we give, we give all that we have; and when we have once given it, neither common-sense, nor a concourse of expostulating seraphim, nor anything else in the universe, can induce us to believe that a retraction, or even a qualification, of the gift would be quite worthy of us."

"But that--that's foolish. Why, it's unreasonable," Anne pointed out.

"Of course it is. And that is why I am proud of Lichfield. And that is why you are to-day Jack's wife and always will be just Jack's wife--and why to-day I am Patricia's husband--and why Lichfield to-day is Lichfield. There is something braver in life than to be just reasonable, thank G.o.d! And so, we keep the faith, my dear, however obsolete we find fidelity to be. We keep to the old faith--we of Lichfield, who have given hostages to the past. We remember even now that we gave freely in an old time, and did not haggle.... And so, we are proud--yes! we are consumedly proud, and we know that we have earned the right to be proud."

A little later Colonel Musgrave said:

"And yet--it takes a monstrous while to dispose of our universe's subtleties. I have loved you my whole life long, as accurately as we can phrase these matters. There is no--no _reasonable_ reason why you should not marry me now; and you would marry me if I pressed it. And I do not press it. Perhaps it all comes of our both having been reared in Lichfield. Perhaps that is why I, too, have been 'thinking it over.' You see," he added, with a smile, "the rivet in grandfather's neck is not lightly to be ignored, after all. No, you do not know what I am talking about, my dear. And--well, anyhow, I belong to Patricia. Upon the whole, I am glad that I belong to Patricia; for Patricia and what Patricia meant to me was the one vital thing in a certain person's rather hand-to-mouth existence--oh, yes, in spite of everything! I know it now.

Anne Charteris," the colonel cried, "I wouldn't marry you or any other woman breathing, even though you were to kneel and implore me upon the knees of a centipede. For I belong to Patricia; and the rivet stays unbroken, after all."

"Oh, and am I being very foolish again?" Anne asked. "For I have been remembering that when--when Jack was not quite truthful about some things, you know,--the truth he hid was always one which would have hurt me. And I like to believe that was, at least in part, the reason he hid it, Rudolph. So he purchased my happiness--well, at ugly prices perhaps.

But he purchased it, none the less; and I had it through all those years. So why shouldn't I--after all--be very grateful to him? And, besides"--her voice broke--"besides, he was Jack, you know. He belonged to me. What does it matter what he did? He belonged to me, and I loved him."

And to the colonel's discomfort Anne began to cry.

"There, there!" he said, "so the real truth is out at last. And tears don't help very much. It does seem a bit unfair, my dear, I know. But that is simply because you and I are living in a universe which has never actually committed itself, under any penalizing bond, to be entirely candid as to the laws by which it is conducted."

But it may be that Rudolph Musgrave voiced quite obsolete views. For he said this at a very remote period--when the Beef Trust was being "investigated" in Washington; when an excited Iberian constabulary was still hunting the anarchists who had attempted to a.s.sa.s.sinate the young King and Queen of Spain upon their wedding-day; when the rebuilding of an earthquake-shattered San Francisco was just beginning to be talked of as a possibility; and when editorials were mostly devoted to discussion of what Mr. Bryan would have to say about bi-metallism when he returned from his foreign tour.

And, besides, it was Rudolph Musgrave's besetting infirmity always to shrink--under shelter of whatever grandiloquent excuse--from making changes. One may permissibly estimate this foible to have weighed with him a little, even now, just as in all things it had always weighed in Lichfield with all his generation. An old custom is not lightly broken.

PART TEN - IMPRIMIS

"So let us laugh, lest vain rememberings Breed, as of old, some rude bucolic cry Of awkward anguishes, of dreams that die Without decorum, of Love lacking wings Yet striving you-ward in his flounderings Eternally,--as now, even when I lie As I lie now, who know that you and I Exist and heed not lesser happenings.

"I was. I am. I will be. Eh, no doubt For some sufficient cause, I drift, defer, Equivocate, dream, hazard, grow more stout, Age, am no longer Love's idolater,-- And yet I could and would not live without Your faith that heartens and your doubts which spur."

LIONEL CROCHARD. _Palinodia_.

I

So weeks and months, and presently irrevocable years, pa.s.sed tranquilly; and nothing very important seemed to happen nowadays, either for good or ill; and Rudolph Musgrave was content enough.

True, there befell, and with increasing frequency, periods when one must lie abed, and be coaxed into taking interminable medicines, and be ministered unto generally, because one was of a certain age nowadays, and must be prudent. But even such necessities, these underhanded indignities of time, had their alleviations. Trained nurses, for example, were uncommonly well-informed and agreeable young women, when you came to know them--and quite lady-like, too, for all that in our topsy-turvy days these girls had to work for their living. Unthinkable as it seemed, the colonel found that his night-nurse, a Miss Ramsay, was actually by birth a Ramsay of Blenheim; and for a little the discovery depressed him. But to be made much of, upon whatever terms, was always treatment to which the colonel submitted only too docilely. And, besides, in this queer, comfortable, just half-waking state, the colonel found one had the drollest dreams, evolving fancies such as were really a credit to one's imagination....

For instance, one very often imagined that Patricia was more close at hand nowadays.... No, she was not here in the room, of course, but outside, in the street, at the corner below, where the letterbox stood.

Yes, she was undoubtedly there, the colonel reflected drowsily. And they had been so certain her return could only result in unhappiness, and they were so wise, that whilst she waited for her opportunity Patricia herself began to be a little uneasy. She had patrolled the block six times before the chance came.

And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, drowsily pleased by his own inventiveness, that Patricia was glad this afternoon was so hot that no one was abroad except the small boy at the corner house, who sat upon the bottom porch-step, and, as children so often do, appeared intently to appraise the world at large with an inexplicable air of disappointment.

"Now think how Rudolph would feel,"--the colonel whimsically played at reading Patricia's reflection--"if I were to be arrested as a suspicious character--that's what the newspapers always call them, I think--on his very doorstep! And he must have been home a half-hour ago at least, because I know it's after five. But the side-gate's latched, and I can't ring the door-bell--if only because it would be too ridiculous to have to ask the maid to tell Colonel Musgrave his wife wanted to see him.

Besides, I don't know the new house-girl. I wish now we hadn't let old Mary go, even though she was so undependable about thorough-cleaning."

And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia was tired of pacing before the row of houses, each so like the other, and compared herself to Gulliver astray upon a Brobdingnagian bookshelf which held a "library set" of some huge author. She had lost interest, too, in the new house upon the other side.

"If things were different I would have to call on them. But as it is, I am spared that bother at least," said Patricia, just as if being dead did not change people at all.

Then a colored woman, trim and frillily-capped, came out of the watched house. She bore some eight or nine letters in one hand, and fanned herself with them in a leisurely flat-footed progress to the mailbox at the lower corner.

"She looks capable," was Patricia's grudging commentary, in slipping through the doorway into the twilight of the hall. "But it isn't safe to leave the front-door open like this. One never knows--No, I can tell by the look of her she's the sort that can't be induced to sleep on the lot, and takes mysterious bundles home at night."

II

And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, now in the full flow of this droll dream, that Patricia resentfully noted her front-hall had been "meddled with." This much alone might Patricia observe in a swift transit to the parlor.

She waited there until the maid returned; and registered to the woman's credit the discreet soft closing of the front-door and afterward the well-nigh inaudible swish of the rear door of the dining-room as the maid went back into the kitchen.

"In any event," Patricia largely conceded, "she probably doesn't clash the knives and forks in the pantry after supper, like she was hostile armaments with any number of cutla.s.ses apiece. I remember Rudolph simply couldn't stand it when we had Ethel."

So much was satisfactory. Only--her parlor was so altered!

There was--to give you just her instantaneous first impression--so little in it. Broad s.p.a.ces of plain color showed everywhere; and Patricia's ideal of what a parlor should be, as befitted the chatelaine of a fine home in Lichfield, had always been the tangled elegancies of the front show-window of a Woman's Exchange for Fancy Work. The room had even been repapered--odiously, as she considered; and the shiny floor of it boasted just three inefficient rugs, like dingy rafts upon a sea of very strong coffee.

Patricia looked in vain for her grandiose plush-covered chairs, her immaculate "tidies," and the proud yellow lambrequin, embroidered in high relief with white gardenias, which had formerly adorned the mantelpiece. The heart of her hungered for her unforgotten and unforgettable "watered-silk" papering wherein white roses bloomed exuberantly against a yellow background--which deplorably faded if you did not keep the window-shades down, she remembered--and she wanted back her white thick comfortable carpet which hid the floor completely, so that everywhere you trod upon the buxomest of stalwart yellow roses, each bunch of which was lavishly tied with wind-blown ribbons.

Then, too, her cherished spinning-wheel, at least two hundred and fifty years old, which had looked so pretty after she had gilded it and added a knot of pink sa.r.s.enet, was departed; and gone as well was the mirror-topped table, with its array of china swan and frogs and water-lilies artistically grouped about its speckless surface. Even her prized engraving of "Michael Angelo Buonarotti"--contentedly regarding his just finished Moses, while a pope tiptoed into the room through a side-door--had been removed, with all its splendors of red-plush and intricate gilt-framing.

Just here and there, in fine, like a familiar face in a crowd, she could discover some one of her more sedately-colored "parlor ornaments"; and the whole history of it--its donor or else its price, the gestures of the shopman, even what sort of weather it was when she and Rudolph found "exactly what I've been looking for" in the shop-window, and the Stapyltonian, haggling over the price with which Patricia had bargained--such unimportant details as these now vividly awakened in recollection.... In fine, this room was not her parlor at all, and in it Patricia was lonely.... Yes, yes, she would be nowadays, the colonel reflected, for he himself had never been in thorough sympathy with all the changes made by Roger's self-a.s.sured young wife.

Thus it was with the first floor of the house, through which Patricia strayed with uniform discomfort. This place was home no longer.

Thus it was with the first floor of the house. Everywhere the equipments were strange, or at best arranged not quite as Patricia would have placed them. Yet they had not any look of being recently purchased. Even that hideous stair-carpet was a little worn, she noted, as noiselessly she mounted to the second story.

The house was perfectly quiet, save for a tiny shrill continuance of melody that somehow seemed only to pierce the silence, not to dispel it.

Rudolph--of all things!--had in her absence acquired a canary. And everybody knew what an interminable nuisance a canary was.