Then, after a little, the girl threw back her head and drew a deep breath, and flashed a tremulous smile at him.
"Ah, yes," said she; "there are better things in life than coronets, aren"t there, Olaf?"
You should have seen how he caught up the word!
"Life!" he cried, with a bitter thrill of speech; "ah, what do I know of life? I am only a recluse, a dreamer, a visionary! You must learn of life from the men who have lived, Patricia. I haven"t ever lived. I have always chosen the coward"s part. I have chosen to shut myself off from the world, to posture in a village all my days, and to consider its trifles as of supreme importance. I have affected to scorn that brave world yonder where a man is proven. And, all the while, I was afraid of it, I think. I was afraid of you before you came."
At the thought of this Rudolph Musgrave laughed as he fell to pacing up and down before her.
"Life!" he cried, again, with a helpless gesture; and then smiled at her, very sadly. ""Didn"t I know there was something better in life than grubbing after musty tribes and customs and folk-songs?"" he quoted.
"Why, what a question to ask of a professional genealogist! Don"t you realize, Patricia, that the very bread I eat is, actually, earned by the achievements of people who have been dead for centuries? and in part, of course, by tickling the vanity of living sn.o.bs? That const.i.tutes a nice trade for an able-bodied person as long as men are paid for emptying garbage-barrels--now, doesn"t it? And yet it is not altogether for the pay"s sake I do it," he added, haltingly. "There really is a fascination about the work. You are really working out a puzzle,--like a fellow solving a chess-problem. It isn"t really work, it is amus.e.m.e.nt. And when you are establishing a royal descent, and tracing back to czars and Plantagenets and Merovingians, and making it all seem perfectly plausible, the thing is sheer impudent, flagrant art, and _you_ are the artist--" He broke off here and shrugged. "No, I could hardly make you understand. It doesn"t matter. It is enough that I have bartered youth and happiness and the very power of living for the privilege of grubbing in old county records."
He paused. It is debatable if he had spoken wisely, or had spoken even in consonance with fact, but his outburst had, at least, the saving grace of sincerity. He was pallid now, shaking in every limb, and in his heart was a dull aching. She seemed so incredibly soft and little and childlike, as she looked up at him with troubled eyes.
"I--I don"t quite understand," she murmured. "It isn"t as if you were an old man, Olaf. It isn"t as if--"
But he had scarcely heard her. "Ah, child, child!" he cried, "why did you come to waken me? I was content in my smug vanities. I was content in my ignorance. I could have gone on contentedly grubbing through my musty, sleepy life here, till death had taken me, if only you had not shown me what life might mean! Ah, child, child, why did you waken me?"
"I?" she breathed; and now the flush of her cheeks had widened, wondrously.
"You! you!" he cried, and gave a wringing motion of his hands, for the self-esteem of a complacent man is not torn away without agony. "Who else but you? I had thought myself brave enough to be silent, but still I must play the coward"s part! That woman I told you of--that woman I loved--was you! Yes, you, you!" he cried, again and again, in a sort of frenzy.
And then, on a sudden, Colonel Musgrave began to laugh.
"It is very ridiculous, isn"t it?" he demanded of her. "Yes, it is very--very funny. Now comes the time to laugh at me! Now comes the time to lift your brows, and to make keen arrows of your eyes, and of your tongue a little red dagger! I have dreamed of this moment many and many a time. So laugh, I say! Laugh, for I have told you that I love you. You are rich, and I am a pauper--you are young, and I am old, remember,--and I love you, who love another man! For the love of G.o.d, laugh at me and have done--laugh! for, as G.o.d lives, it is the bravest jest I have ever known!"
But she came to him, with a wonderful gesture of compa.s.sion, and caught his great, shapely hands in hers.
"I--I knew you cared," she breathed. "I have always known you cared. I would have been an idiot if I hadn"t. But, oh, Olaf, I didn"t know you cared so much. You frighten me, Olaf," she pleaded, and raised a tearful face to his. "I am very fond of you, Olaf dear. Oh, don"t think I am not fond of you." And the girl paused for a breathless moment. "I think I might have married you, Olaf," she said, half-wistfully, "if--if it hadn"t been for one thing."
Rudolph Musgrave smiled now, though he found it a difficult business.
"Yes," he a.s.sented, gravely, "I know, dear. If it were not for the other man--that lucky devil! Yes, he is a very, very lucky devil, child, and he const.i.tutes rather a big "if," doesn"t he?"
Miss Stapylton, too, smiled a little. "No," said she, "that isn"t quite the reason. The real reason is, as I told you yesterday, that I quite fail to see how you can expect any woman to marry you, you jay-bird, if you won"t go to the trouble of asking her to do so."
And, this time, Miss Stapylton did not go into the house.
VII
When they went in to supper, they had planned to tell Miss Agatha of their earth-staggering secret at once. But the colonel comprehended, at the first glimpse of his sister, that the opportunity would be ill-chosen.
The meal was an awkward half-hour. Miss Agatha, from the head of the table, did very little talking, save occasionally to evince views of life that were both lachrymose and pugnacious. And the lovers talked with desperate cheerfulness, so that there might be no outbreak so long as Pilkins--preeminently ceremonious among butlers, and as yet inclined to scoff at the notion that the Musgraves of Matocton were not divinely entrusted to his guardianship,--was in the room.
Coming so close upon the heels of his high hour, this contretemps of Agatha"s having one of her "attacks," seemed more to Rudolph Musgrave than a man need rationally bear with equanimity. Perhaps it was a trifle stiffly that he said he did not care for any raspberries.
His sister burst into tears.
"That"s all the thanks I get. I slave my life out, and what thanks do I get for it? I never have any pleasure, I never put my foot out of the house except to go to market,--and what thanks do I get for it? That"s what I want you to tell me with the first raspberries of the season.
That"s what I want! Oh, I don"t wonder you can"t look me in the eye. And I wish I was dead! that"s what I wish!"
Colonel Musgrave did not turn at once toward Patricia, when his sister had stumbled, weeping, from the dining-room.
"I--I am so sorry, Olaf," said a remote and tiny voice.
Then he touched her hand with his finger-tips, ever so lightly. "You must not worry about it, dear. I daresay I was unpardonably brusque. And Agatha"s health is not good, so that she is a trifle irritable at times.
Why, good Lord, we have these little set-to"s ever so often, and never give them a thought afterwards. That is one of the many things the future Mrs. Musgrave will have to get accustomed to, eh? Or does that appalling prospect frighten you too much?"
And Patricia brazenly confessed that it did not. She also made a face at him, and accused Rudolph Musgrave of trying to crawl out of marrying her, which proceeding led to frivolities unnecessary to record, but found delectable by the partic.i.p.ants.
VIII
Colonel Musgrave was alone. He had lifted his emptied coffee-cup and he swished the lees gently to and fro. He was curiously intent upon these lees, considered them in the light of a symbol....
Then a comfortable, pleasant-faced mulattress came to clear the supper-table. Virginia they called her. Virginia had been nurse in turn to all the children of Rudolph Musgrave"s parents; and to the end of her life she appeared to regard the emanc.i.p.ation of the South"s negroes as an irrelevant vagary of certain "low-down" and probably "ornery" Yankees --as an, in short, quite eminently "tacky" proceeding which very certainly in no way affected her vested right to tyrannize over the Musgrave household.
"Virginia," said Colonel Musgrave, "don"t forget to make up a fire in the kitchen-stove before you go to bed. And please fill the kettle before you go upstairs, and leave it on the stove. Miss Agatha is not well to-night."
"Yaas, suh. I unnerstan", suh," Virginia said, sedately.
Virginia filled her tray, and went away quietly, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an idol"s.
PART THREE - TERTIUS
"It is in many ways made plain to us That love must grow like any common thing, Root, bud, and leaf, ere ripe for garnering The mellow fruitage front us; even thus Must Helena encounter Theseus Ere Paris come, and every century Sp.a.w.n divers queens who die with Antony But live a great while first with Julius.
"Thus I have spoken the prologue of a play Wherein I have no part, and laugh, and sit Contented in the wings, whilst you portray An amorous maid with gestures that befit This lovely role,--as who knows better, pray, Than I that helped you in rehearsing it?"
Horace Symonds. _Civic Voluntaries_.
I
When the Presidential campaign was at its height; when in various sections of the United States "the boy orator of La Platte" was making invidious remarks concerning the Republican Party, and in Canton (Ohio) Mr. M.A. Hanna was cheerfully expressing his confidence as to the outcome of it all; when the Czar and the Czarina were visiting President Faure in Paris "amid unparalleled enthusiasm"; and when semi-educated people were appraising, with a glibness possible to ignorance only, the literary achievements of William Morris and George du Maurier, who had just died:--at this remote time, Roger Stapylton returned to Lichfield.
For in that particular October Patricia"s father, an accommodating physician having declared old Roger Stapylton"s health to necessitate a Southern sojourn, leased the Bellingham mansion in Lichfield. It happened that, by rare good luck, Tom Bellingham--of the Bellinghams of a.s.sequin, 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.