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

I

To those who knew John Charteris only through the medium of the printed page it must have appeared that the novelist was stayed in mid-career by an accident of unrelieved and singular brutality. And truly, thus extinguished by the unfounded jealousy of a madman, the force of Charteris's genius seemed, and seems to-day, as emphasized by that sinister caprice of chance which annihilated it.

But people in Lichfield, after the manner of each prophet's countrymen, had their own point of view. The artist always stood between these people and the artist's handiwork, in part obscuring it.

In any event, it was generally agreed in Lichfield that Anne Charteris's conduct after her husband's death was not all which could be desired. To begin with, she attended the funeral, in black, it was true, but wearing only the lightest of net veils pinned under her chin—"more as if she were going somewhere on the train, you know, than as if she were in genuine bereavement."

"Jack didn't approve of mourning. He said it was a heathen survival."

That was the only explanation she offered.

It seemed inadequate to Lichfield. It was preferable, as good taste went, for a widow to be too overcome to attend her husband's funeral at all. And Mrs. Charteris had not wept once during the church ceremony, and had not even had hysterics during the interment at Cedarwood; and she had capped a scandalous morning's work by remaining with the undertaker and the bricklayers to supervise the closing of John Charteris's grave.

"Why, but of course. It is the last thing I will ever be allowed to do for him," she had said, in innocent surprise. "Why shouldn't I?"

Her air was such that you were both to talk to her about appearances.

"Because she isn't a bit like a widow," as Mrs. Ashmeade pointed out. "Anybody can condole with a widow, and devote two outer sheets to explaining that you realize nothing you can say will be of any comfort to her, and begin at the top of the inside page by telling her how much better off he is to-day—which I have always thought a double-edged assertion when advanced to a man's widow. But you cannot condole with a lantern whose light has been blown out. That is what Anne is."

Mrs. Ashmeade meditated and appeared dissatisfied. "And John Charteris of all people!"

Anne was presently about the Memorial Edition of her husband's collected writings. It was magnificently printed and when marketed achieved a flattering success. Robert Etheridge Townsend was commissioned to write the authorized Life of John Charteris and to arrange the two volumes of Letters.

Anne was considered an authority on literature and art in general, through virtue of reflected glory. And in the interviews she granted various journalists it was noticeable that she no longer referred to "Jack" or to "Mr. Charteris," but to "my husband." To have been his wife was her one claim on estimation. And, for the rest, it is inadequate to love the memory of a martyr. Worship is demanded; and so the wife became the priestess.

II

Into Colonel Musgrave's mental processes during this period it will not do to pry too closely. The man had his white nights and his battles, in part with real grief and regret, and in part with sundry emotions which he took on faith as the emotions he ought to have, and, therefore, manifestly, suffered under…. "Patricia was my wife, Jack was my brother," ran his verdict in the outcome; and beyond that he did not care to go.

For death cowed his thoughts. In the colonel's explicit theology dead people were straightway conveyed to either one or the other of two places. He had very certainly never known anybody who in his opinion merited the torments of his orthodox Gehenna; so that in imagination he vaguely populated its blazing corridors with Nero and Judas and Caesar Borgia and Henry VIII, and Spanish Inquisitors and the aboriginal American Indians—excepting of course his ancestress Pocahontas—and with Benedict Arnold and all the "carpet-baggers" and suchlike other eminent practitioners of depravity. For no one whom Rudolph Musgrave had ever encountered in the flesh had been really and profoundly wicked, Rudolph Musgrave considered; and so, he always gravely estimated this-or-that acquaintance, after death, to be "better off, poor fellow"—as the colonel phrased it, with a tinge of self-contradiction—even if he actually refrained in fancy from endowing the deceased with aureate harps and crowns and footgear. In fine, death cowed the colonel's thoughts; beyond the grave they did not care to venture, and when confronted with that abyss they decorously balked.

Patricia and Jack were as a matter of course "better off," then—and, miraculously purged of faults, with all their defects somehow remedied, the colonel's wife and brother, with Agatha and the colonel's other interred relatives, were partaking of dignified joys in bright supernal iridescent realms, which the colonel resignedly looked forward to entering, on some comfortably remote day or another, and thus rejoining his transfigured kindred…. Such was the colonel's charitable decision, in the forming whereof logic was in no way implicated. For religion, as the colonel would have told you sedately, was not a thing to be reasoned about. Attempting to do that, you became in Rudolph Musgrave's honest eyes regrettably flippant.

Meanwhile Cousin Lucy Fentnor was taking care of the colonel and little Roger. And Lichfield, long before the lettering on Patricia's tombstone had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave, upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial arrangement, without provoking scandal's tongue to more than a jocose innuendo or two when people met for "auction"—that new-fangled perplexing variant of bridge, just introduced, wherein you bid on the suits…. And, besides, Cousin Lucy Fentnor (as befitted any one born an Allardyce) was to all accounts a notable housekeeper, famed alike for the perilous glassiness of her hardwood floors, her dexterous management of servants, her Honiton-braid fancy-work (familiar to every patron of Lichfield charity bazaars), and her unparalleled calves-foot jelly. Under Cousin Lucy Fentnor's systematized coddling little Roger grew like the proverbial ill weed, and the colonel likewise waxed perceptibly in girth.

Thus it was that accident and a woman's intervention seemed once more to combine in shielding Rudolph Musgrave from discomfort. And in consequence it was considered improbable that at this late day the colonel would do the proper thing by Clarice Pendomer, as, at the first tidings of Patricia's death, had been authentically rumored among the imaginative; and, in fact, Lichfield no longer considered that necessary. The claim of outraged morality against these two had been thrown out of court, through some unworded social statute of limitation, as far as Lichfield went. Of course it was interesting to note that the colonel called at Mrs. Pendomer's rather frequently nowadays; but, then, Clarice Pendomer had all sorts of callers now—though not many in skirts—and she played poker with men for money until unregenerate hours of the night, and was reputed with a wealth of corroborative detail to have even less discussable sources of income: so that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been born a Bellingham…. But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital aspirations of Cousin Lucy Fentnor.

And, moreover, the colonel—in colloquial phrase at least—went everywhere. After the six months of comparative seclusion which decency exacted of his widowerhood—and thereby afforded him ample leisure to complete and publish his Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to 1800—the colonel, be it repeated, went everywhere; and people found him no whit the worse company for his black gloves and the somber band stitched to his coatsleeve. So Lichfield again received him gladly, as the social triumph of his generation. Handsome and trim and affable, no imaginable tourist could possibly have divined—for everybody in Lichfield knew, of course—that Rudolph Musgrave had rounded his half-century; and he stayed, as ever, invaluable to Lichfield matrons alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town" girl, the management of a cotillon, and the prevention of unpleasant pauses among incongruous dinner-companies.

But of Anne Charteris he saw very little nowadays. And, indeed, it was of her own choice that Anne lived apart from Lichfieldian junketings, contented with her dreams and her pride therein, and her remorseful tender memories of the things she might have done for Jack and had not done—lived upon exalted levels nowadays, to which the colonel's more urbane bereavement did not aspire.

III

"Charteris" was engraved in large, raised letters upon the granite coping over which Anne stepped to enter the trim burial-plot wherein her dead lay.

The place to-day is one of the "points of interest" in Cedarwood. Tourists, passing through Lichfield, visit it as inevitably as they do the graves of the Presidents, the Southern generals and the many other famous people which the old cemetery contains; and the negro hackmen of Lichfield are already profuse in inaccurate information concerning its occupant. In a phrase, the post card which pictures "E 9436—Grave of John Charteris" is among the seven similar misinterpretations of localities most frequently demanded in Lichfieldian drugstores and news-stands.

Her victoria had paused a trifle farther up the hill, where two big sycamores overhung the roadway. She came into the place alone, walking quickly, for she was unwarrantably flustered by her late encounter. And when she found, of all people, Rudolph Musgrave standing by her husband's grave, as in a sort of puzzled and yet reverent meditation, she was, and somehow as half-guiltily, assuring herself there was no possible reason for the repugnance—nay, the rage,—which a mere glimpse of trudging, painted and flamboyant Clarice Pendomer had kindled. Yet it must be recorded that Anne had always detested Clarice.

Now Anne spoke, as the phrase runs, before she thought. "She came with you!"

And he answered, as from the depths of an uncalled-for comprehension which was distinctly irritating:

"Yes. And Harry, too, for that matter. Only our talk got somehow to be not quite the sort it would be salutary for him to take an interest in. So we told Harry to walk on slowly to the gate, and be sure not to do any number of things he would never have thought of if we hadn't suggested them. You know how people are with children——"

"Harry is—her boy?" Anne, being vexed, had almost added—"and yours?"

"Oh——! Say the fons et origo of the Pendomer divorce case, poor little chap. Yes, Harry is her boy."

Anne said, and again, as she perceived within the moment, a thought too expeditiously: "I wish you wouldn't bring them here, Colonel Musgrave."

Indeed, it seemed to her flat desecration that Musgrave should have brought his former mistress into this hallowed plot of ground. She did not mind—illogically, perhaps—his bringing the child.

"Eh——? Oh, yes," said Colonel Musgrave. He was sensibly nettled. "You wish 'Colonel Musgrave' wouldn't bring them here. But then, you see, we had been to Patricia's grave. And we remembered how Jack stood by us both when—when things bade fair to be even more unpleasant for Clarice and myself than they actually were. You shouldn't, I think, grudge even such moral reprobates the privilege of being properly appreciative of what he did for both of us. Besides, you always come on Saturdays, you know. We couldn't very well anticipate that you would be here this afternoon."

So he had been at pains to spy upon her! Anne phrased it thus in her soul, being irritated, and crisply answered:

"I am leaving Lichfield to-morrow. I had meant this to be my farewell to them until October."

Colonel Musgrave had glanced toward the little headstone, with its rather lengthy epitaph, which marked the resting-place of this woman's only child; and then to the tall shaft whereon was engraved just "John Charteris." The latter inscription was very characteristic of her view-point, he reflected; and yet reasonable, too; as one might mention a Hector or a Goethe, say, without being at pains to disclaim allusion to the minor sharers of either name.

"Yes," he said. "Well, I shall not intrude."

"No—wait," she dissented.

Her voice was altered now, for there had come into it a marvelous gentleness.

And Colonel Musgrave remained motionless. The whole world was motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him.

Sunset was at hand. On one side was the high wooden fence which showed the boundary of Cedarwood, and through its palings and above it, was visible the broad, shallow river, comfortably colored, for the most part, like café au lait, but flecked with many patches of foam and flat iron-colored rocks and innumerable islets, some no bigger than a billiard-table, but with even the tiniest boasting a tree or two. On the other—westward—was a mounting vista of close-shaven turf, and many copings, like magnified geometrical problems, and a host of stunted growing things—with the staid verdancy of evergreens predominant—and a multitude of candid shafts and slabs and crosses and dwarfed lambs and meditant angels.

Some of these thronged memorials were tinged with violet, and others were a-glitter like silver, just as the ordered trees shaded them or no from the low sun. The disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly knew, was very anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the whole, a kindly wisdom.

She was considering the change in him. Anne was recollecting that Colonel Musgrave had somewhat pointedly avoided her since her widowhood.

He seemed almost a stranger nowadays.

And she could not recognize in the man any resemblance to the boy whom she remembered—so long ago—excepting just his womanish mouth, which was as in the old time very full and red and sensitive. And, illogically enough, both this great change in him and this one feature that had never changed annoyed her equally.

She was also worried by his odd tone of flippancy. It jarred, it vaguely—for the phrase has no equivalent—"rubbed her the wrong way." Here at a martyr's tomb it was hideously out-of-place, and yet she did not see her way clear to rebuke. So she remained silent.

But Rudolph Musgrave was uncanny in some respects. For he said within the moment, "I am not a bit like John Charteris, am I?"

"No," she answered, quietly. It had been her actual thought.

Anne stayed a tiny while quite motionless. Her eyes saw nothing physical. It was the attitude, Colonel Musgrave reflected, of one who listens to a far-off music and, incommunicably, you knew that the music was of a martial sort. She was all in black, of course, very slim and pure and beautiful. The great cluster of red roses, loosely held, was like blood against the somber gown.

The widow of John Charteris, in fine, was a very different person from that Anne Willoughby whom Rudolph Musgrave had loved so long and long ago. This woman had tasted of tonic sorrows unknown to Rudolph Musgrave, and had got consolation too, somehow, in far half-credible uplands unvisited by him. But, he knew, she lived, and was so exquisite, mainly by virtue of that delusion which he, of all men, had preserved; Anne Charteris was of his creation, his masterpiece; and viewing her, he was aware of great reverence and joy.

Anne was happy. It was for that he had played.

But aloud, "I am envious," Rudolph Musgrave declared. "He is the single solitary man I ever knew whose widow was contented to be simply his relict for ever and ever, amen. For you will always be just the woman John Charteris loved, won't you? Yes, if you lived to be thirty-seven years older than Methuselah, and every genius and potentate in the world should come a-wooing in the meantime, it never would occur to you that you could possibly be anything, even to an insane person, except his relict. And he has been dead now all of three whole years! So I am envious, just as we ordinary mortals can't help being of you both; and—may I say it?—I am glad."

IV

They were standing thus when a boy of ten or eleven came unhurriedly into the "section." He assumed possession of Colonel Musgrave's hand as though the action were a matter of course.

"I got lost, Colonel Musgrave," the child composedly announced. "I walked ever so far, and the gate wasn't where we left it. And the roads kept turning and twisting so, it seemed I'd never get anywhere. I don't like being lost when it's getting dark and there's so many dead people 'round, do you?"

The colonel was moved to disapproval. "Young man, I suppose your poor deserted mother is looking for you everywhere, and has probably torn out every solitary strand of hair she possesses by this time."

"I reckon she is," the boy assented. The topic did not appear to be in his eyes of preëminent importance.

Then Anne Charteris said, "Harry," and her voice was such that Rudolph Musgrave wheeled with amazement in his face.

The boy had gone to her complaisantly, and she stood now with one hand on either of his shoulders, regarding him. Her lips were parted, but they did not move at all.

"You are Mrs. Pendomer's boy, aren't you?" said Anne Charteris, in a while. She had some difficulty in articulation.

"Yes'm," Harry assented, "and we come here 'most every Wednesday, and, please, ma'am, you're hurtin' me."

"I didn't mean to—dear," the woman added, painfully. "Don't interfere with me, Rudolph Musgrave! Your mother must be very fond of you, Harry. I had a little boy once. I was fond of him. He would have been eleven years old last February."

"Please, ma'am, I wasn't eleven till April, and I ain't tall for my age, but Tubby Parsons says——"

The woman gave an odd, unhuman sound. "Not until April!"

"Harry," said Colonel Musgrave then, "an enormous whale is coming down the river in precisely two minutes. Perhaps if you were to look through the palings of that fence you might see him. I don't suppose you would care to, though?"

And Harry strolled resignedly toward the fence. Harry Pendomer did not like this funny lady who had hurt, frightened eyes. He did not believe in the whale, of course, any more than he did in Santa Claus. But like most children, he patiently accepted the fact that grown people are unaccountable overlords appointed by some vast bêtise, whom, if only through prudential motives, it is preferable to humor.

V

Colonel Musgrave stood now upon the other side of John Charteris's grave—just in the spot that was reserved for her own occupancy some day.

"You are ill, Anne. You are not fit to be out. Go home."

"I had a little boy once," she said. "'But that's all past and gone, and good times and bad times and all times pass over.' There's an odd simple music in the sentence, isn't there? Yet I remember it chiefly because I used to read that book to him and he loved it. And it was my child that died. Why is this other child so like him?"

"Oh, then, that's it, is it?" said Rudolph Musgrave, as in relief. "Bless me, I suppose all these little shavers are pretty much alike. I can only tell Roger from the other boys by his red head. Humanity in the raw, you know. Still, it is no wonder it gave you a turn. You had much better go home, however, and not take any foolish risks, and put your feet in hot water, and rub cologne on your temples, and do all the other suitable things——"

"I remember now," she continued, without any apparent emotion, and as though he had not spoken. "When I came into the room you were saying that the child must be considered. You were both very angry, and I was alarmed—foolishly alarmed, perhaps. And my—and John Charteris said, 'Let him tell, then'—and you told me—"

"The truth, Anne."

"And he sat quietly by. Oh, if he'd had the grace, the common manliness—!" She shivered here. "But he never interrupted you. I—I was not looking at him. I was thinking how vile you were. And when you had ended, he said, 'My dear, I am sorry you should have been involved in this. But since you are, I think we can assure Rudolph that both of us will regard his confidence as sacred.' Then I remembered him, and thought how noble he was! And all those years that were so happy, hour by hour, he was letting you—meet his bills!" She seemed to wrench out the inadequate metaphor.

You could hear the far-off river, now, faint as the sound of boiling water.

After a few pacings Colonel Musgrave turned upon her. He spoke with a curious simplicity.

"There isn't any use in lying to you. You wouldn't believe. You would only go to some one else—some woman probably,—who would jump at the chance of telling you everything and a deal more. Yes, there are a great many 'they do say's' floating about. This was the only one that came near being—serious. The man was very clever.—Oh, he wasn't vulgarly lecherous. He was simply—Jack Charteris. He always irritated Lichfield, though, by not taking Lichfield very seriously. You would hear every by-end of retaliative and sniggered-over mythology, and in your present state of mind you would believe all of them. I happen to know that a great many of these stories are not true."

"A great many of these stories," Anne repeated, "aren't true! A great many aren't! That ought to be consoling, oughtn't it?" She spoke without a trace of bitterness.

"I express myself very badly. What I really mean, what I am aiming at, is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to ask, because I will answer them truthfully. Very few people would. You see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second," he added, as with venom, "that it is only human nature to dislike you."

Anne was not angry. It had come to her, quite as though she were considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion, true.

"There is sunlight and fresh air in the street," John Charteris had been wont to declare, "and there is a culvert at the corner. I think it is a mistake for us to emphasize the culvert."

So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence. She saw this now.

It did not matter. It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more.

"I've only one question, I think. Why did you do it?" She spoke with bright amazement in her eyes.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he seriocomically deplored. "Why, because it was such a noble thing to do. It was so like the estimable young man in a play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes a curtain-call immediately afterwards. In fine, I simply observed to myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, 'But what a gesture!'" And he parodied an actor's motion in this rôle.

She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity. Anne did not understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth. And so,

"You haven't any sense of humor," he lamented. "You used to have a deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates. Well, it was because it helped him a little. Oh, I am being truthful now. I had some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I never did. I ought to have, perhaps. But I didn't."

"My friend, you are being almost truthful. But I want the truth entire."

"It isn't polite to disbelieve people," he reproved her; "or at the very least, according to the best books on etiquette, you ought not to do it audibly. Would you mind if I smoked? I could be more veracious then. There is something in tobacco that makes frankness a matter of course. I thank you."

He produced an amber holder, fitted a cigarette into it, and presently inhaled twice. He said, with a curt voice:

"The reason, naturally, was you. You may remember certain things that happened just before John Charteris came and took you. Oh, that is precisely what he did! You are rather a narrow-minded woman now, in consequence—or in my humble opinion, at least—and deplorably superior. It pleased the man to have in his house—if you will overlook my venturing into metaphor,—one cool room very sparsely furnished where he could come when the mood seized him. He took the raw material from me, wherewith to build that room, because he wanted that room. I acquiesced, because I had not the skill wherewith to fight him."

Anne understood him now, as with a great drench of surprise. And fear was what she felt in chief when she saw for just this moment as though it had lightened, the man's face transfigured, and tender, and strange to her.

"I tried to buy your happiness, to—yes, just to keep you blind indefinitely. Had the price been heavier, I would have paid it the more gladly. Fate has played a sorry trick. You would never have seen through him. My dear, I have wanted very often to shake you," he said.

And she knew, in a glorious terror, that she desired him to shake her, and as she had never desired anything else in life.

"Oh, well, I am just a common, ordinary, garden-sort of fool. The Musgraves always are, in one fashion or another," he sulkily concluded.

And now the demigod was merely Rudolph Musgrave again, and she was not afraid any longer, but only inexpressibly fordone.

"Isn't that like a woman?" he presently demanded of the June heavens. "To drag something out of a man with inflexibility, monomania and moral grappling-irons, and then not like it! Oh, very well! I am disgusted by your sex's axiomatic variability. I shall take Harry to his fond mamma at once."

She did not say anything. A certain new discovery obsessed her like a piece of piercing music.

Then Rudolph Musgrave gave the tiniest of gestures downward. "And I have told you this, in chief, because we two remember him. He wanted you. He took you. You are his. You will always be. He gave you just a fragment of himself. That fragment was worth more than everything I had to offer."

Anne very carefully arranged her roses on the ivy-covered grave. "I do not know—meanwhile, I give these to our master. And my real widowhood begins to-day."

And as she rose he looked at her across the colorful mound, and smiled, half as with embarrassment. A lie, he thought, might ameliorate the situation, and he bravely hazarded a prodigious one. "Is it necessary to tell you that Jack loved you? And that the others never really counted?"

He rejoiced to see that Anne believed him. "No," she assented, "no, not with him. Oddly enough, I am proud of that, even now. But—don't you see?—I never loved him. I was just his priestess—the priestess of a stucco god! Otherwise, I would know it wasn't his fault, but altogether that of—the others."

He grimaced and gave a bantering flirt of his head. He said, with quizzing eyes:

"Would it do any good to quote Lombroso, and Maudsley, and Gall, and Krafft-Ebing, and Flechsig, and so on? and to tell you that the excessive use of one brain faculty must necessarily cause a lack of nutriment to all the other brain-cells? It would be rather up-to-date. There is a deal I could tell you also as to what poisonous blood he inherited; but to do this I have not the right." And then Rudolph Musgrave said in all sincerity: "'A wild, impetuous whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly melody dwelling in the heart of it.'"

She had put aside alike the drolling and the palliative suggestion, like flimsy veils. "I think it wouldn't do any good whatever. When growing things are broken by the whirlwind, they don't, as a rule, discuss the theory of air-currents as a consolation. Men such as he was take what they desire. It isn't fair—to us others. But it's true, for all that—"

Their eyes met warily; and for no reason which they shared in common they smiled together.

"Poor little Lady of Shalott," said Rudolph Musgrave, "the mirror is cracked from side to side, isn't it? I am sorry. For life is not so easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it are so childishly simple—and implacable. And one of these laws seems to be that in our little planet, might makes right—"

He stayed to puff his cigarette.

"Oh, Rudolph dear, don't—don't be just a merry-Andrew!" she cried impulsively, before he had time to continue, which she perceived he meant to do, as if it did not matter.

And he took her full meaning, quite as he had been used in the old times to discourse upon a half-sentence. "I am afraid I am that, rather," he said, reflectively. "But then Clarice and I could hardly have weathered scandal except by making ourselves particularly agreeable to everybody. And somehow I got into the habit of making people laugh. It isn't very difficult. I am rather an adept at telling stories which just graze impropriety, for instance. You know, they call me the social triumph of my generation. And people are glad to see me because I am 'so awfully funny' and 'simply killing' and so on. And I suppose it tells in the long run—like the dyer's hand, you know."

"It does tell." Anne was thinking it would always tell. And that, too, would be John Charteris's handiwork.

Ensued a silence. Rudolph Musgrave was painstakingly intent upon his cigarette. A nestward-plunging bird called to his mate impatiently. Then Anne shook her head impatiently.

"Come, while I'm thinking, I will drive you back to Lichfield."

"Oh, no; that wouldn't do at all," he said, with absolute decision. "No, you see I have to return the boy. And I can't quite imagine your carriage waiting at the doors of 'that Mrs. Pendomer.'"

"Oh," Anne fleetingly thought, "he would have understood." But aloud she only said: "And do you think I hate her any longer? Yes, it is true I hated her until to-day, and now I'm just sincerely sorry for her. For she and I—and you and even the child yonder—and all that any of us is to-day—are just so many relics of John Charteris. Yet he has done with us—at last!"

She said this with an inhalation of the breath; but she did not look at him.

"Take care!" he said, with an unreasonable harshness. "For I forewarn you I am imagining vain things."

"I'm not afraid, somehow." But Anne did not look at him.

He saw as with a rending shock how like the widow of John Charteris was to Anne Willoughby; and unforgotten pulses, very strange and irrational and dear, perplexed him sorely. He debated, and flung aside the cigarette as an out-moded detail of his hobbling part.

"You say I did a noble thing for you. I tried to. But quixotism has its price. To-day I am not quite the man who did that thing. John Charteris has set his imprint too deep upon us. We served his pleasure. We are not any longer the boy and girl who loved each other."

She waited in the rising twilight with a yet averted face. The world was motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him. And the disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly knew, was very anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the whole, a kindly wisdom.

So that, "My dear, my dear!" he swiftly said: "I don't think I can word just what my feeling is for you. Always my view of the world has been that you existed, and that some other people existed—as accessories—"

Then he was silent for a heart-beat, appraising her. His hands lifted toward her and fell within the moment, as if it were in impotence.

Anne spoke at last, and the sweet voice of her was very glad and proud and confident.

"My friend, remember that I have not thanked you. You have done the most foolish and—the manliest thing I ever knew a man to do, just for my sake. And I have accepted it as if it were a matter of course. And I shall always do so. Because it was your right to do this very brave and foolish thing for me. I know you joyed in doing it. Rudolph … you cannot understand how glad I am you joyed in doing it."

Their eyes met. It is not possible to tell you all they were aware of through that moment, because it is a knowledge so rarely apprehended, and even then for such a little while, that no man who has sensed it can remember afterward aught save the splendor and perfection of it.

And yet Anne looked back once. There was just the tall, stark shaft, and on it "John Charteris." The thing was ominous and vast, all colored like wet gravel, save where the sunlight tipped it with clean silver very high above their reach.

"Come," she quickly said to Rudolph Musgrave; "come, for I am afraid."

VI

And are we then to leave them with glad faces turned to that new day wherein, above the ashes of old errors and follies and mischances and miseries, they were to raise the structure of such a happiness as earth rarely witnesses? Would it not be, instead, a grateful task more fully to depicture how Rudolph Musgrave's love of Anne won finally to its reward, and these two shared the evening of their lives in tranquil service of unswerving love come to its own at last?

Undoubtedly, since the espousal of one's first love—by oneself—is a phenomenon rarely encountered outside of popular fiction, it would be a very gratifying task to record that Anne and Rudolph Musgrave were married that autumn; that subsequently Lichfield was astounded by the fervor of their life-long bliss; that Colonel and (the second) Mrs. Musgrave were universally respected, in a word, and their dinner-parties were always prominently chronicled by the Lichfield Courier-Herald; and that Anne took excellent care of little Roger, and that she and her second husband proved eminently suited to each other.

But, as a matter of fact, not one of these things ever happened….

"I have been thinking it over," Anne deplored. "Oh, Rudolph dear, I perfectly realize you are the best and noblest man I ever knew. And I have always loved you very much, my dear; that is why I could never abide poor Mrs. Pendomer. And yet—it is a feeling I simply can't explain——"

"That you belong to Jack in spite of everything?" the colonel said. "Why, but of course! I might have known that Jack would never have allowed any simple incidental happening such as his death to cause his missing a possible trick."

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

"I was thinking," he stated, "of the only time that I ever, to my knowledge, talked face to face with the devil. It is rather odd how obstinately life clings to the most hackneyed trick of ballad-makers; and still naively pretends to enrich her productions by the stale device of introducing a refrain—so that the idlest remarks of as much as three years ago keep cropping up as the actual gist of the present!… However, were it within my power, I would evoke Amaimon straightway now to come up yonder, through your hearthrug, and to answer me quite honestly if I did not tell him on the beach at Matocton that this, precisely this, would be the outcome of your knowing everything!"

"I told you that I couldn't, quite, explain——" Anne said.

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

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

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

A little later Colonel Musgrave said:

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

"Oh, and am I being very foolish again?" Anne asked. "For I have been remembering that when—when Jack was not quite truthful about some things, you know,—the truth he hid was always one which would have hurt me. And I like to believe that was, at least in part, the reason he hid it, Rudolph. So he purchased my happiness—well, at ugly prices perhaps. But he purchased it, none the less; and I had it through all those years. So why shouldn't I—after all—be very grateful to him? And, besides"—her voice broke—"besides, he was Jack, you know. He belonged to me. What does it matter what he did? He belonged to me, and I loved him."

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

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

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

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