“A great many of these stories,” Anne repeated, “aren’t true! A great many aren’t! That ought to be consoling, oughtn’t it?” She spoke without a trace of bitterness.
“I express myself very badly. What I really mean, what I am aiming at, is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to ask, because I will answer them truthfully. Very few people would. You see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second,” he added, as with venom, “that it is only human nature to dislike you.”
Anne was not angry. It had come to her, quite as though she were considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion, true.
“There is sunlight and fresh air in the street,” John Charteris had been wont to declare, “and there is a culvert at the corner. I think it is a mistake for us to emphasize the culvert.”
So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence. She saw this now. It did not matter. It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more.
“I’ve only one question, I think. Why did you do it?” She spoke with bright amazement in her eyes.
“Oh, my dear, my dear!” he seriocomically deplored. “Why, because it was such a noble thing to do. It was so like the estimable young man in a play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes a curtain-call immediately afterwards. In fine, I simply observed to myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, ‘But what a gesture!'” And he parodied an actor’s motion in this role.
She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity. Anne did not understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth. And so,
“You haven’t _any_ sense of humor,” he lamented. “You used to have a deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates. Well, it was because it helped him a little. Oh, I am being truthful now. I had some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I never did. I ought to have, perhaps. But I didn’t.”
“My friend, you are being almost truthful. But I want the truth entire.”
“It isn’t polite to disbelieve people,” he reproved her; “or at the very least, according to the best books on etiquette, you ought not to do it audibly. Would you mind if I smoked? I could be more veracious then. There is something in tobacco that makes frankness a matter of course. I thank you.”
He produced an amber holder, fitted a cigarette into it, and presently inhaled twice. He said, with a curt voice:
“The reason, naturally, was you. You may remember certain things that happened just before John Charteris came and took you. Oh, that is precisely what he did! You are rather a narrow-minded woman now, in consequence–or in my humble opinion, at least–and deplorably superior. It pleased the man to have in his house–if you will overlook my venturing into metaphor,–one cool room very sparsely furnished where he could come when the mood seized him. He took the raw material from me, wherewith to build that room, because he wanted that room. I acquiesced, because I had not the skill wherewith to fight him.”
Anne understood him now, as with a great drench of surprise. And fear was what she felt in chief when she saw for just this moment as though it had lightened, the man’s face transfigured, and tender, and strange to her.
“I tried to buy your happiness, to–yes, just to keep you blind indefinitely. Had the price been heavier, I would have paid it the more gladly. Fate has played a sorry trick. _You_ would never have seen through him. My dear, I have wanted very often to shake you,” he said.
And she knew, in a glorious terror, that she desired him to shake her, and as she had never desired anything else in life.
“Oh, well, I am just a common, ordinary, garden-sort of fool. The Musgraves always are, in one fashion or another,” he sulkily concluded. And now the demigod was merely Rudolph Musgrave again, and she was not afraid any longer, but only inexpressibly fordone.
“Isn’t that like a woman?” he presently demanded of the June heavens. “To drag something out of a man with inflexibility, monomania and moral grappling-irons, and _then_ not like it! Oh, very well! I am disgusted by your sex’s axiomatic variability. I shall take Harry to his fond mamma at once.”
She did not say anything. A certain new discovery obsessed her like a piece of piercing music.
Then Rudolph Musgrave gave the tiniest of gestures downward. “And I have told you this, in chief, because we two remember him. He wanted you. He took you. You are his. You will always be. He gave you just a fragment of himself. That fragment was worth more than everything I had to offer.”
Anne very carefully arranged her roses on the ivy-covered grave. “I do not know–meanwhile, I give these to our master. And my real widowhood begins to-day.”
And as she rose he looked at her across the colorful mound, and smiled, half as with embarrassment. A lie, he thought, might ameliorate the situation, and he bravely hazarded a prodigious one. “Is it necessary to tell you that Jack loved you? And that the others never really counted?”
He rejoiced to see that Anne believed him. “No,” she assented, “no, not with him. Oddly enough, I am proud of that, even now. But–don’t you see?–I never loved him. I was just his priestess–the priestess of a stucco god! Otherwise, I would know it wasn’t his fault, but altogether that of–the others.”
He grimaced and gave a bantering flirt of his head. He said, with quizzing eyes:
“Would it do any good to quote Lombroso, and Maudsley, and Gall, and Krafft-Ebing, and Flechsig, and so on? and to tell you that the excessive use of one brain faculty must necessarily cause a lack of nutriment to all the other brain-cells? It would be rather up-to-date. There is a deal I could tell you also as to what poisonous blood he inherited; but to do this I have not the right.” And then Rudolph Musgrave said in all sincerity: “‘A wild, impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling in the heart of it.'”
She had put aside alike the drolling and the palliative suggestion, like flimsy veils. “I think it wouldn’t do any good whatever. When growing things are broken by the whirlwind, they don’t, as a rule, discuss the theory of air-currents as a consolation. Men such as he was take what they desire. It isn’t fair–to us others. But it’s true, for all that–“
Their eyes met warily; and for no reason which they shared in common they smiled together.
“Poor little Lady of Shalott,” said Rudolph Musgrave, “the mirror is cracked from side to side, isn’t it? I am sorry. For life is not so easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it are so childishly simple–and implacable. And one of these laws seems to be that in our little planet, might makes right–“
He stayed to puff his cigarette.
“Oh, Rudolph dear, don’t–don’t be just a merry-Andrew!” she cried impulsively, before he had time to continue, which she perceived he meant to do, as if it did not matter.
And he took her full meaning, quite as he had been used in the old times to discourse upon a half-sentence. “I am afraid I am that, rather,” he said, reflectively. “But then Clarice and I could hardly have weathered scandal except by making ourselves particularly agreeable to everybody. And somehow I got into the habit of making people laugh. It isn’t very difficult. I am rather an adept at telling stories which just graze impropriety, for instance. You know, they call me the social triumph of my generation. And people are glad to see me because I am ‘so awfully funny’ and ‘simply killing’ and so on. And I suppose it tells in the long run–like the dyer’s hand, you know.”
“It does tell.” Anne was thinking it would always tell. And that, too, would be John Charteris’s handiwork.
Ensued a silence. Rudolph Musgrave was painstakingly intent upon his cigarette. A nestward-plunging bird called to his mate impatiently. Then Anne shook her head impatiently.
“Come, while I’m thinking, I will drive you back to Lichfield.”
“Oh, no; that wouldn’t do at all,” he said, with absolute decision. “No, you see I have to return the boy. And I can’t quite imagine your carriage waiting at the doors of ‘that Mrs. Pendomer.'”
“Oh,” Anne fleetingly thought, “_he_ would have understood.” But aloud she only said: “And do you think I hate her any longer? Yes, it is true I hated her until to-day, and now I’m just sincerely sorry for her. For she and I–and you and even the child yonder–and all that any of us is to-day–are just so many relics of John Charteris. Yet he has done with us–at last!”
She said this with an inhalation of the breath; but she did not look at him.
“Take care!” he said, with an unreasonable harshness. “For I forewarn you I am imagining vain things.”
“I’m not afraid, somehow.” But Anne did not look at him.
He saw as with a rending shock how like the widow of John Charteris was to Anne Willoughby; and unforgotten pulses, very strange and irrational and dear, perplexed him sorely. He debated, and flung aside the cigarette as an out-moded detail of his hobbling part.
“You say I did a noble thing for you. I tried to. But quixotism has its price. To-day I am not quite the man who did that thing. John Charteris has set his imprint too deep upon us. We served his pleasure. We are not any longer the boy and girl who loved each other.”
She waited in the rising twilight with a yet averted face. The world was motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him. And the disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly knew, was very anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the whole, a kindly wisdom.
So that, “My dear, my dear!” he swiftly said: “I don’t think I can word just what my feeling is for you. Always my view of the world has been that you existed, and that some other people existed–as accessories–“
Then he was silent for a heart-beat, appraising her. His hands lifted toward her and fell within the moment, as if it were in impotence.
Anne spoke at last, and the sweet voice of her was very glad and proud and confident.
“My friend, remember that I have not thanked you. You have done the most foolish and–the manliest thing I ever knew a man to do, just for my sake. And I have accepted it as if it were a matter of course. And I shall always do so. Because it was your right to do this very brave and foolish thing for me. I know you joyed in doing it. Rudolph … you cannot understand how glad I am you joyed in doing it.”
Their eyes met. It is not possible to tell you all they were aware of through that moment, because it is a knowledge so rarely apprehended, and even then for such a little while, that no man who has sensed it can remember afterward aught save the splendor and perfection of it.
* * * * *
And yet Anne looked back once. There was just the tall, stark shaft, and on it “John Charteris.” The thing was ominous and vast, all colored like wet gravel, save where the sunlight tipped it with clean silver very high above their reach.
“Come,” she quickly said to Rudolph Musgrave; “come, for I am afraid.”
VI
And are we then to leave them with glad faces turned to that new day wherein, above the ashes of old errors and follies and mischances and miseries, they were to raise the structure of such a happiness as earth rarely witnesses? Would it not be, instead, a grateful task more fully to depicture how Rudolph Musgrave’s love of Anne won finally to its reward, and these two shared the evening of their lives in tranquil service of unswerving love come to its own at last?
Undoubtedly, since the espousal of one’s first love–by oneself–is a phenomenon rarely encountered outside of popular fiction, it would be a very gratifying task to record that Anne and Rudolph Musgrave were married that autumn; that subsequently Lichfield was astounded by the fervor of their life-long bliss; that Colonel and (the second) Mrs. Musgrave were universally respected, in a word, and their dinner-parties were always prominently chronicled by the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_; and that Anne took excellent care of little Roger, and that she and her second husband proved eminently suited to each other.
But, as a matter of fact, not one of these things ever happened….
“I have been thinking it over,” Anne deplored. “Oh, Rudolph dear, I perfectly realize you are the best and noblest man I ever knew. And I have always loved you very much, my dear; that is why I could never abide poor Mrs. Pendomer. And yet–it is a feeling I simply can’t explain—-“
“That you belong to Jack in spite of everything?” the colonel said. “Why, but of course! I might have known that Jack would never have allowed any simple incidental happening such as his death to cause his missing a possible trick.”
Anne would have comforted Rudolph Musgrave; but, to her discomfiture, the colonel was grinning, however ruefully.
“I was thinking,” he stated, “of the only time that I ever, to my knowledge, talked face to face with the devil. It is rather odd how obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers; and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device of introducing a refrain–so that the idlest remarks of as much as three years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!… However, were it within my power, I would evoke Amaimon straightway now to come up yonder, through your hearthrug, and to answer me quite honestly if I did not tell him on the beach at Matocton that this, precisely this, would be the outcome of your knowing everything!”
“I told you that I couldn’t, quite, _explain_—-” Anne said.
“Eh, but I can, my dear,” he informed her. “The explanation is that Lichfield bore us, shaped us, and made us what we are. We may not enjoy a monopoly of the virtues here in Lichfield, but there is one trait at least which the children of Lichfield share in common. We are loyal. We give but once; and when we give, we give all that we have; and when we have once given it, neither common-sense, nor a concourse of expostulating seraphim, nor anything else in the universe, can induce us to believe that a retraction, or even a qualification, of the gift would be quite worthy of us.”
“But that–that’s foolish. Why, it’s unreasonable,” Anne pointed out.
“Of course it is. And that is why I am proud of Lichfield. And that is why you are to-day Jack’s wife and always will be just Jack’s wife–and why to-day I am Patricia’s husband–and why Lichfield to-day is Lichfield. There is something braver in life than to be just reasonable, thank God! And so, we keep the faith, my dear, however obsolete we find fidelity to be. We keep to the old faith–we of Lichfield, who have given hostages to the past. We remember even now that we gave freely in an old time, and did not haggle…. And so, we are proud–yes! we are consumedly proud, and we know that we have earned the right to be proud.”
A little later Colonel Musgrave said:
“And yet–it takes a monstrous while to dispose of our universe’s subtleties. I have loved you my whole life long, as accurately as we can phrase these matters. There is no–no _reasonable_ reason why you should not marry me now; and you would marry me if I pressed it. And I do not press it. Perhaps it all comes of our both having been reared in Lichfield. Perhaps that is why I, too, have been ‘thinking it over.’ You see,” he added, with a smile, “the rivet in grandfather’s neck is not lightly to be ignored, after all. No, you do not know what I am talking about, my dear. And–well, anyhow, I belong to Patricia. Upon the whole, I am glad that I belong to Patricia; for Patricia and what Patricia meant to me was the one vital thing in a certain person’s rather hand-to-mouth existence–oh, yes, in spite of everything! I know it now. Anne Charteris,” the colonel cried, “I wouldn’t marry you or any other woman breathing, even though you were to kneel and implore me upon the knees of a centipede. For I belong to Patricia; and the rivet stays unbroken, after all.”
“Oh, and am I being very foolish again?” Anne asked. “For I have been remembering that when–when Jack was not quite truthful about some things, you know,–the truth he hid was always one which would have hurt me. And I like to believe that was, at least in part, the reason he hid it, Rudolph. So he purchased my happiness–well, at ugly prices perhaps. But he purchased it, none the less; and I had it through all those years. So why shouldn’t I–after all–be very grateful to him? And, besides”–her voice broke–“besides, he was Jack, you know. He belonged to me. What does it matter what he did? He belonged to me, and I loved him.”
And to the colonel’s discomfort Anne began to cry.
“There, there!” he said, “so the real truth is out at last. And tears don’t help very much. It does seem a bit unfair, my dear, I know. But that is simply because you and I are living in a universe which has never actually committed itself, under any penalizing bond, to be entirely candid as to the laws by which it is conducted.”
* * * * *
But it may be that Rudolph Musgrave voiced quite obsolete views. For he said this at a very remote period–when the Beef Trust was being “investigated” in Washington; when an excited Iberian constabulary was still hunting the anarchists who had attempted to assassinate the young King and Queen of Spain upon their wedding-day; when the rebuilding of an earthquake-shattered San Francisco was just beginning to be talked of as a possibility; and when editorials were mostly devoted to discussion of what Mr. Bryan would have to say about bi-metallism when he returned from his foreign tour.
And, besides, it was Rudolph Musgrave’s besetting infirmity always to shrink–under shelter of whatever grandiloquent excuse–from making changes. One may permissibly estimate this foible to have weighed with him a little, even now, just as in all things it had always weighed in Lichfield with all his generation. An old custom is not lightly broken.
PART TEN – IMPRIMIS
“So let us laugh, lest vain rememberings Breed, as of old, some rude bucolic cry Of awkward anguishes, of dreams that die Without decorum, of Love lacking wings
Yet striving you-ward in his flounderings Eternally,–as now, even when I lie
As I lie now, who know that you and I Exist and heed not lesser happenings.
“I was. I am. I will be. Eh, no doubt For some sufficient cause, I drift, defer, Equivocate, dream, hazard, grow more stout, Age, am no longer Love’s idolater,–
And yet I could and would not live without Your faith that heartens and your doubts which spur.”
LIONEL CROCHARD. _Palinodia_.
I
So weeks and months, and presently irrevocable years, passed tranquilly; and nothing very important seemed to happen nowadays, either for good or ill; and Rudolph Musgrave was content enough.
True, there befell, and with increasing frequency, periods when one must lie abed, and be coaxed into taking interminable medicines, and be ministered unto generally, because one was of a certain age nowadays, and must be prudent. But even such necessities, these underhanded indignities of time, had their alleviations. Trained nurses, for example, were uncommonly well-informed and agreeable young women, when you came to know them–and quite lady-like, too, for all that in our topsy-turvy days these girls had to work for their living. Unthinkable as it seemed, the colonel found that his night-nurse, a Miss Ramsay, was actually by birth a Ramsay of Blenheim; and for a little the discovery depressed him. But to be made much of, upon whatever terms, was always treatment to which the colonel submitted only too docilely. And, besides, in this queer, comfortable, just half-waking state, the colonel found one had the drollest dreams, evolving fancies such as were really a credit to one’s imagination….
For instance, one very often imagined that Patricia was more close at hand nowadays…. No, she was not here in the room, of course, but outside, in the street, at the corner below, where the letterbox stood. Yes, she was undoubtedly there, the colonel reflected drowsily. And they had been so certain her return could only result in unhappiness, and they were so wise, that whilst she waited for her opportunity Patricia herself began to be a little uneasy. She had patrolled the block six times before the chance came.
And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, drowsily pleased by his own inventiveness, that Patricia was glad this afternoon was so hot that no one was abroad except the small boy at the corner house, who sat upon the bottom porch-step, and, as children so often do, appeared intently to appraise the world at large with an inexplicable air of disappointment.
“Now think how Rudolph would feel,”–the colonel whimsically played at reading Patricia’s reflection–“if I were to be arrested as a suspicious character–that’s what the newspapers always call them, I think–on his very doorstep! And he must have been home a half-hour ago at least, because I know it’s after five. But the side-gate’s latched, and I can’t ring the door-bell–if only because it would be too ridiculous to have to ask the maid to tell Colonel Musgrave his wife wanted to see him. Besides, I don’t know the new house-girl. I wish now we hadn’t let old Mary go, even though she was so undependable about thorough-cleaning.”
And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia was tired of pacing before the row of houses, each so like the other, and compared herself to Gulliver astray upon a Brobdingnagian bookshelf which held a “library set” of some huge author. She had lost interest, too, in the new house upon the other side.
“If things were different I would have to call on them. But as it is, I am spared that bother at least,” said Patricia, just as if being dead did not change people at all.
Then a colored woman, trim and frillily-capped, came out of the watched house. She bore some eight or nine letters in one hand, and fanned herself with them in a leisurely flat-footed progress to the mailbox at the lower corner.
“She looks capable,” was Patricia’s grudging commentary, in slipping through the doorway into the twilight of the hall. “But it isn’t safe to leave the front-door open like this. One never knows–No, I can tell by the look of her she’s the sort that can’t be induced to sleep on the lot, and takes mysterious bundles home at night.”
II
And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, now in the full flow of this droll dream, that Patricia resentfully noted her front-hall had been “meddled with.” This much alone might Patricia observe in a swift transit to the parlor.
She waited there until the maid returned; and registered to the woman’s credit the discreet soft closing of the front-door and afterward the well-nigh inaudible swish of the rear door of the dining-room as the maid went back into the kitchen.
“In any event,” Patricia largely conceded, “she probably doesn’t clash the knives and forks in the pantry after supper, like she was hostile armaments with any number of cutlasses apiece. I remember Rudolph simply couldn’t stand it when we had Ethel.”
So much was satisfactory. Only–her parlor was so altered!
There was–to give you just her instantaneous first impression–so little in it. Broad spaces of plain color showed everywhere; and Patricia’s ideal of what a parlor should be, as befitted the 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 sarsenet, was departed; and gone as well was the mirror-topped table, with its array of china swan and frogs and water-lilies artistically grouped about its speckless surface. Even her prized engraving of “Michael Angelo Buonarotti”–contentedly regarding his just finished Moses, while a pope tiptoed into the room through a side-door–had been removed, with all its splendors of red-plush and intricate gilt-framing.
Just here and there, in fine, like a familiar face in a crowd, she could discover some one of her more sedately-colored “parlor ornaments”; and the whole history of it–its donor or else its price, the gestures of the shopman, even what sort of weather it was when she and Rudolph found “exactly what I’ve been looking for” in the shop-window, and the Stapyltonian, haggling over the price with which Patricia had bargained–such unimportant details as these now vividly awakened in recollection…. In fine, this room was not her parlor at all, and in it Patricia was lonely…. Yes, yes, she would be nowadays, the colonel reflected, for he himself had never been in thorough sympathy with all the changes made by Roger’s self-assured young wife.
Thus it was with the first floor of the house, through which Patricia strayed with uniform discomfort. This place was home no longer.
Thus it was with the first floor of the house. Everywhere the equipments were strange, or at best arranged not quite as Patricia would have placed them. Yet they had not any look of being recently purchased. Even that hideous stair-carpet was a little worn, she noted, as noiselessly she mounted to the second story.
The house was perfectly quiet, save for a tiny shrill continuance of melody that somehow seemed only to pierce the silence, not to dispel it. Rudolph–of all things!–had in her absence acquired a canary. And everybody knew what an interminable nuisance a canary was.
She entered the front room. It had been her bedroom ever since her marriage. She remembered this as with a gush of defiant joy.
III
So it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia came actually into the room that had been hers….
A canary was singing there, very sweet and shrill and as in defiant joy. Its trilling seemed to fill the room. In the brief pauses of his song the old clock, from which Rudolph had removed the pendulum on the night of Agatha’s death would interpose an obstinate slow ticking; and immediately the clock-noise would be drowned in melody. Otherwise the room was silent.
In the alcove stood the bed which had been Patricia’s. Intent upon its occupant were three persons, with their backs turned to her. One Patricia could easily divine to be a doctor; he was twiddling a hypodermic syringe between his fingers, and the set of his shoulders was that of acquiescence. Profiles of the others she saw: one a passive nurse in uniform, who was patiently chafing the right hand of the bed’s occupant; the other a lean-featured red-haired stranger, who sat crouched in his chair and held the dying man’s left hand.
For in the bed, supported by many pillows, and facing Patricia, was a dying man. He was very old, having thick tumbled hair which, like his two-weeks’ beard, was uniformly white. His eyelids drooped a trifle, so that he seemed to meditate concerning something ineffably remote and serious, yet not, upon the whole, unsatisfactory. You saw and heard the intake of each breath, so painfully drawn, and expelled with manifest relief, as if the man were very tired of breathing. Yet the bedclothes heaved with his vain efforts just to keep on breathing. And sometimes his parted lips would twitch curiously…. Rudolph Musgrave, too, could see all this quite plainly, in the mirror over the mantel.
The doctor spoke. “Yes–it’s the end, Professor Musgrave,” he said. For this lean-featured red-haired stranger to whom the doctor spoke, a pedagogue to his finger-tips, had once been Patricia’s dearly-purchased, chubby baby Roger.
And Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He knew Patricia was there; but that fact no longer seemed either very strange or even unnatural; and besides, it was against some law for him to look at her until Patricia had called him…. Meanwhile, just opposite, above the mirror, and facing him, was the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave. This picture had now hung there for a great many years. The boy still smiled at you in undiminished raillery, even though he smiled ambiguously, and with a sort of humorous sadness in his eyes. Once, very long ago–when the picture hung downstairs–some one had said that Gerald Musgrave’s life was barren. The dying man could not now recollect, quite, who that person was.
Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He comprehended that he was dying. The greatest of all changes was at hand; and he, who had always shrunk from making changes, was now content enough…. Indeed, with Rudolph Musgrave living had always been a vaguely dissatisfactory business, a hand-to-mouth proceeding which he had scrambled through, as he saw now, without any worthy aim or even any intelligible purpose. He had nothing very heinous with which to reproach himself; but upon the other side, he had most certainly nothing of which to be particularly proud.
So this was all that living came to! You heard of other people being rapt by splendid sins and splendid virtues, and you anticipated that to-morrow some such majestic energy would transfigure your own living, and change everything: but the great adventure never arrived, somehow; and the days were frittered away piecemeal, what with eating your dinner, and taking a wholesome walk, and checking up your bank account, and dovetailing scraps of parish registers and land-patents and county records into an irrefutable pedigree, and seeing that your clothes were pressed, and looking over the newspapers–and what with other infinitesimal avocations, each one innocent, none of any particular importance, and each consuming an irrevocable moment of the allotted time–until at last you found that living had not, necessarily, any climax at all…. And Patricia would call him presently.
Once, very long ago, some one had said that the most pathetic tragedy in life was to get nothing in particular out of it. The dying man could not now recollect, quite, who that person was.
He wondered, vaguely, what might have been the outcome if Rudolph Musgrave had whole-heartedly sought, not waited for, the great adventure; if Rudolph Musgrave had put–however irrationally–more energy and less second-thought into living; if Rudolph Musgrave had not been contented to be just a Musgrave of Matocton…. Well, it was too late now. He viewed his whole life now, in epitome, and much as you may see at night the hackneyed vista from your window leap to incisiveness under the lash of lightning. No, the life of Rudolph Musgrave had never risen to the plane of dignity, not even to that of seeming to Rudolph Musgrave a connected and really important transaction on Rudolph Musgrave’s part. Yet Lichfield, none the better for Rudolph Musgrave’s having lived, was none the worse, thank heaven! And there were younger men in Lichfield–men who did not mean to fail as Rudolph Musgrave and his fellows all had failed…. Eh, yes, what was the toast that Rudolph Musgrave drank, so long ago, to the new Lichfield which these younger men were making?
“To this new South, that has not any longer need of me or of my kind.
“To this new South! She does not gaze unwillingly, nor too complacently, upon old years, and dares concede that but with loss of manliness may any man encroach upon the heritage of a dog or of a trotting-horse, and consider the exploits of an ancestor to guarantee an innate and personal excellence.
“For to her all former glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with augmenting strokes.”
Yes, that was it. And it was true. Yet Rudolph Musgrave’s life on earth was ending now–the only life that he would ever have on earth–and it had never risen to the plane of seeming even to Rudolph Musgrave a really important transaction on Rudolph Musgrave’s part….
Then Patricia spoke. Low and very low she called to Olaf, and the dim, wistful eyes of Rudolph Musgrave lifted, and gazed full upon her standing there, and were no longer wistful. And the man made as though to rise, and could not, and his face was very glad.
For in the dying man had awakened the pulses of an old, strange, half-forgotten magic, and all his old delight in the girl who had shared in and had provoked this ancient wonder-working, together with a quite new consciousness of the inseparability of Patricia’s foibles from his existence; so that he was incuriously aware of his imbecility in not having known always that Patricia must come back some day, not as a glorious, unfamiliar angel, but unaltered.
“I am glad you haven’t changed…. Why, but of course! Nothing would have counted if you had changed–not even for the better, Patricia. For you and what you meant to me were real. That only was real–that we, not being demigods, but being just what we were, once climbed together very high, where we could glimpse the stars–and nothing else can ever be of any importance. What we inherited was too much for us, was it not, my dear? And now it is not formidable any longer. Oh, but I loved you very greatly, Patricia! And now at last, my dear, I seem to understand–as in that old, old time when you and I were glad together—-“
But he did not say this aloud, for it seemed to him that he stood in a cool, pleasant garden, and that Patricia came toward him through the long shadows of sunset. The lacy folds and furbelows and semi-transparencies that clothed her were now tinged with gold and now, as a hedge or a flower bed screened her from the level rays, were softened into multitudinous graduations of grays and mauves and violets.
They did not speak. But in her eyes he found compassion and such tenderness as awed him; and then, as a light is puffed out, they were the eyes of a friendly stranger. He understood, for an instant, that of necessity it was decreed time must turn back and everything, even Rudolph Musgrave, be just as it had been when he first saw Patricia. For they had made nothing of their lives; and so, they must begin all over again.
“_Failure is not permitted_” he was saying….
“_You’re Cousin Rudolph, aren’t you?_” she asked….
And Rudolph Musgrave knew he had forgotten something of vast import, but what this knowledge had pertained to he no longer knew. Then Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about his heart, that her hair was like the reflection of a sunset in rippling waters–only many times more beautiful, of course–and that her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.
THE END