The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck: A Comedy of Limitations, James Branch Cabell [that summer book .TXT] 📗

"I wish—" she began, slowly. "Oh, but, you know, it was positively criminal negligence not to have included a dozen fairies among my sponsors."

"I too have desiderated this sensible precaution," said Charteris, and laughed his utter comprehension. "But, after all," he said, and snapped his fingers gaily, "we still have twenty-four hours, Patricia! Let us forget the crudities of life, and say foolish things to each other. For I am pastorally inclined this morning, Patricia; I wish to lie at your feet and pipe amorous ditties upon an oaten reed. Have you such an article about you, Patricia?"

He drew a key-ring from his pocket, and pondered over it.

"Or would you prefer that I whistle into the opening of this door-key, to the effect that we must gather our rose-buds while we may, for Time is still a-flying, fa-la, and that a drear old age, not to mention our spouses, will soon descend upon us, fa-la-di-leero? A door-key is not Arcadian, Patricia, but it makes a very creditable noise."

"Don't be foolish, mon ami!" she protested, with an indulgent smile.
"I am unhappy."

"Unhappy that I have chanced to fall in love with you, Patricia? It is an accident which might befall any really intelligent person."

She shrugged her shoulders, ruefully.

"I have done wrong to let you talk to me as you have done of late.
I—oh, Jack, I am afraid!"

Mr. Charteris meditated. Somewhere in a neighboring thicket a bird trilled out his song—a contented, half-hushed song that called his mate to witness how infinitely blest above all other birds was he. Mr. Charteris heard him to the end, and languidly made as to applaud; then Mr. Charteris raised his eyebrows.

"Of your husband, Patricia?" he queried.

"I—Rudolph doesn't bother about me nowadays sufficiently to—notice anything."

Mr. Charteris smiled. "Of my wife, Patricia?"

"Good gracious, no! I have not the least doubt you will explain matters satisfactorily to your wife, for I have always heard that practise makes perfect."

Mr. Charteris laughed—a low and very musical laugh.

"Of me, then, Patricia?"

"I—I think it is rather of myself I am afraid. Oh, I hate you when you smile like that! You have evil eyes, Jack! Stop it! Quit hounding me with your illicit fascinations." The hand she had raised in threatening fashion fell back into her lap, and she shrugged her shoulders once more. "My nerves are somewhat upset by the approaching prospect of connubial felicity, I suppose. Really, though, mon ami, your conceit is appalling."

Charteris gave vent to a chuckle, and raised the door-key to his lips.

"When you are quite through your histrionic efforts," he suggested, apologetically, "I will proceed with my amorous pipings. Really, Patricia, one might fancy you the heroine of a society drama, working up the sympathies of the audience before taking to evil ways. Surely, you are not about to leave your dear, good, patient husband, Patricia? Heroines only do that on dark and stormy nights, and in an opera toilette; wearing her best gown seems always to affect a heroine in that way."

Mr. Charteris, at this point, dropped the key-ring, and drew nearer to her; his voice sank to a pleading cadence.

"We are in Arcadia, Patricia; virtue and vice are contraband in this charming country, and must be left at the frontier. Let us be adorably foolish and happy, my lady, and forget for a little the evil days that approach. Can you not fancy this to be Arcadia, Patricia?—it requires the merest trifle of imagination. Listen very carefully, and you will hear the hoofs of fauns rustling among the fallen leaves; they are watching us, Patricia, from behind every tree-bole. They think you a dryad—the queen of all the dryads, with the most glorious eyes and hair and the most tempting lips in all the forest. After a little, shaggy, big-thewed ventripotent Pan will grow jealous, and ravish you away from me, as he stole Syrinx from her lover. You are very beautiful, Patricia; you are quite incredibly beautiful. I adore you, Patricia. Would you mind if I held your hand? It is a foolish thing to do, but it is preëminently Arcadian."

She heard him with downcast eyes; and her cheeks flushed a pink color that was agreeable to contemplation.

"Do—do you really care for me, Jack?" she asked, softly; then cried, "No, no, you needn't answer—because, of course, you worship me madly, unboundedly, distractedly. They all do, but you do it more convincingly. You have been taking lessons at night-school, I dare say, at all sorts of murky institutions. And, Jack, really, cross my heart, I always stopped the others when they talked this way. I tried to stop you, too. You know I did?"

She raised her lashes, a trifle uncertainly, and withdrew her hand from his, a trifle slowly. "It is wrong—all horribly wrong. I wonder at myself, I can't understand how in the world I can be such a fool about you. I must not be alone with you again. I must tell my husband—everything," she concluded, and manifestly not meaning a word of what she said.

"By all means," assented Mr. Charteris, readily. "Let's tell my wife, too. It will make things so very interesting."

"Rudolph would be terribly unhappy," she reflected.

"He would probably never smile again," said Mr. Charteris. "And my wife—oh, it would upset Anne, quite frightfully! It is our altruistic, nay, our bounden duty to save them from such misery."

"I—I don't know what to do!" she wailed.

"The obvious course," said he, after reflection, "is to shake off the bonds of matrimony, without further delay. So let's elope, Patricia."

Patricia, who was really unhappy, took refuge in flippancy, and laughed.

"I make it a rule," said she, "never to elope on Fridays. Besides, now I think of it, there is, Rudolph—Ah, Rudolph doesn't care a button's worth about me, I know. The funny part is that he doesn't know it. He has simply assumed he is devoted to me, because all respectable people are devoted to their wives. I can assure you, mon ami, he would be a veritable Othello, if there were any scandal, and would infinitely prefer the bolster to the divorce-court. He would have us followed and torn apart by wild policemen."

Mr. Charteris meditated for a moment.

"Rudolph, as you are perfectly aware, would simply deplore the terribly lax modern notions in regard to marriage and talk to newspaper reporters about this much—" he measured it between thumb and forefinger —"concerning the beauty and chivalry of the South. He would do nothing more. I question if Rudolph Musgrave would ever in any circumstances be capable of decisive action."

"Ah, don't make fun of Rudolph!" she cried, quickly. "Rudolph can't help it if he is conscientious and in consequence rather depressing to live with. And for all that he so often plays the jackass-fool about women, like Grandma Pendomer, he is a man, Jack—a well-meaning, clean and dunderheaded man! You aren't; you are puny and frivolous, and you sneer too much, and you are making a fool of me, and—and that's why I like you, I suppose. Oh, I wish I were good! I have always tried to be good, and there doesn't seem to be a hatpin in the world that makes a halo sit comfortably. Now, Jack, you know I've tried to be good! I've never let you kiss me, and I've never let you hold my hand—until to-day— and—and——"

Patricia paused, and laughed.

"But we were talking of Rudolph," she said, with a touch of weariness. "Rudolph has all the virtues that a woman most admires until she attempts to live in the same house with them."

"I thank you," said Mr. Charteris, "for the high opinion you entertain of my moral character." He bestowed a reproachful sigh upon her, and continued: "At any rate, Rudolph Musgrave has been an unusually lucky man—the luckiest that I know of."

Patricia had risen as if to go. She turned her big purple eyes on him for a moment.

"You—you think so?" she queried, hesitatingly.

Afterward she spread out her hands in a helpless gesture, and laughed for no apparent reason, and sat down again.

"Why?" said Patricia.

It took Charteris fully an hour to point out all the reasons.

Patricia told him very frankly that she considered him to be talking nonsense, but she seemed quite willing to listen.

Sunset was approaching on the following afternoon when Rudolph Musgrave, fresh from Lichfield,—whither, as has been recorded, the bringing out of the July number of the Lichfield Historical Associations Quarterly Magazine had called him,—came out on the front porch at Matocton. He had arrived on the afternoon train, about an hour previously, in time to superintend little Roger's customary evening transactions with an astounding quantity of bread and milk; and, Roger abed, his father, having dressed at once for supper, found himself ready for that meal somewhat in advance of the rest of the house-party.

Indeed, only one of them was visible at this moment—a woman, who was reading on a rustic bench some distance from the house, and whose back was turned to him. The poise of her head, however, was not unfamiliar; also, it is not everyone who has hair that is like a nimbus of thrice-polished gold.

Colonel Musgrave threw back his shoulders, and drew a deep breath. Subsequently, with a fine air of unconcern, he inspected the view from the porch, which was, in fact, quite worthy of his attention. Interesting things have happened at Matocton—many events that have been preserved in the local mythology, not always to the credit of the old Musgraves, and a few which have slipped into a modest niche in history. It was, perhaps, on these that Colonel Musgrave pondered so intently.

Once the farthingaled and red-heeled gentry came in sluggish barges to Matocton, and the broad river on which the estate faces was thick with bellying sails; since the days of railroads, one approaches the mansion through the maple-grove in the rear, and enters ignominiously by the back-door.

The house stands on a considerable elevation. The main portion, with its hipped roof and mullioned windows, is very old, but the two wings that stretch to the east and west are comparatively modern, and date back little over a century. Time has mellowed them into harmony with the major part of the house, and the kindly Virginia creeper has done its utmost to conceal the fact that they are constructed of plebeian bricks which were baked in this country; but Matocton was Matocton long before these wings were built, and a mere affair of yesterday, such as the Revolution, antedates them. They were not standing when Tarleton paid his famous visit to Matocton.

In the main hall, you may still see the stairs up which he rode on horseback, and the slashes which his saber hacked upon the hand-rail.

To the front of the mansion lies a close-shaven lawn, dotted with sundry oaks and maples; and thence, the formal gardens descend in six broad terraces. There is when summer reigns no lovelier spot than this bright medley of squares and stars and triangles and circles—all Euclid in flowerage—which glow with multitudinous colors where the sun strikes. You will find no new flowers at Matocton, though. Here are verbenas, poppies, lavender and marigolds, sweet-william, hollyhocks and columbine, phlox, and larkspur, and meadowsweet, and heart's-ease, just as they were when Thomasine Musgrave, Matocton's first châtelaine, was wont to tend them; and of all floral parvenus the gardens are innocent. Box-hedges mark the walkways.

The seventh terrace was, until lately, uncultivated, the trees having been cleared away to afford pasturage. It is now closely planted with beeches, none of great size, and extends to a tangled thicket of fieldpines and cedar and sassafras and blackberry bushes, which again masks a drop of some ten feet to the river.

The beach here is narrow; at high tide, it is rarely more than fifteen feet in breadth, and is in many places completely submerged. Past this, the river lapses into the horizon line without a break, save on an extraordinarily clear day when Bigelow's Island may be seen as a dim smudge upon the west.

All these things, Rudolph Musgrave regarded with curiously deep interest for one who had seen them so many times before. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he sauntered forward across the lawn. He had planned several appropriate speeches, but, when it came to the point of giving them utterance, he merely held out his hand in an awkward fashion, and said:

"Anne!"

She looked up from her reading.

She did this with two red-brown eyes that had no apparent limits to their depth. Her hand was soft; it seemed quite lost in the broad palm of a