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

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.