"H'm!" said he.

There was another silence. The colonel desperately felt that matters were not advancing.

"H'm!" said she, with something of interrogation in her voice.

"See here, Clarice, I have known you——"

"You have not!" cried she, very earnestly; "not by five years!"

"Well, say for some time. You are a sensible woman——"

"A man," Mrs. Pendomer lamented, parenthetically, "never suspects a woman of discretion, until she begins to lose her waist."

"—and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact, and finer instincts,—and that sort of thing, you know—to help me out of a deuce of a mess."

Mrs. Pendomer ate on, in an exceedingly noncommittal fashion, as he paused, inquiringly.

"She has been reading some letters," said he, at length; "some letters that I wrote a long time ago."

"In the case of so young a girl," observed Mrs. Pendomer, with perfect comprehension, "I should have undoubtedly recommended a judicious supervision of her reading-matter."

"She was looking through an old escritoire," he explained; "Jack Charteris had suggested that some of my father's letters—during the War, you know—. might be of value—"

He paused, for Mrs. Pendomer appeared on the verge of a question.

But she only said, "So it was Mr. Charteris who suggested Patricia's searching the desk. Ah, yes! And then—?"

"And it was years ago—and just the usual sort of thing, though it may have seemed from the letters—Why, I hadn't given the girl a thought," he cried, in virtuous indignation, "until Patricia found the letters—and read them!"

"Naturally," she assented—"yes,—just as I read George's."

The smile with which she accompanied this remark, suggested that both Mr. Pendomer's correspondence and home life were at times of an interesting nature.

"I had destroyed the envelopes when she returned them," continued Colonel Musgrave, with morose confusion of persons. "Patricia doesn't even know who the girl was—her name, somehow, was not mentioned."

"'Woman of my heart'—'Dearest girl in all the world,'" quoted Mrs. Pendomer, reminiscently, "and suchlike tender phrases, scattered in with a pepper-cruet, after the rough copy was made in pencil, and dated just 'Wednesday,' or 'Thursday,' of course. Ah, you were always very careful, Rudolph," she sighed; "and now that makes it all the worse, because—as far as all the evidence goes—these letters may have been returned yesterday."

"Why—!" Colonel Musgrave pulled up short, hardly seeing his way clear through the indignant periods on which he had entered. "I declined," said he, somewhat lamely, "to discuss the matter with her, in her present excited and perfectly unreasonable condition."

Mrs. Pendomer's penciled eyebrows rose, and her lips—which were quite as red as there was any necessity for their being—twitched.

"Hysterics?" she asked.

"Worse!" groaned Colonel Musgrave; "patient resignation under unmerited affliction!"

He had picked up a teaspoon, and he carefully balanced it upon his forefinger.

"There were certain phrases in these letters which were, somehow, repeated in certain letters I wrote to Patricia the summer we were engaged, and—not to put too fine a point upon it—she doesn't like it."

Mrs. Pendomer smiled, as though she considered this not improbable; and he continued, with growing embarrassment and indignation:

"She says there must have been others"—Mrs. Pendomer's smile grew reminiscent—"any number of others; that she is only an incident in my life. Er—as you have mentioned, Patricia has certain notions—Northern idiocies about the awfulness of a young fellow's sowing his wild oats, which you and I know perfectly well he is going to do, anyhow, if he is worth his salt. But she doesn't know it, poor little girl. So she won't listen to reason, and she won't come downstairs—which," lamented Rudolph Musgrave, plaintively, "is particularly awkward in a house-party."

He drummed his fingers, for a moment, on the table.

"It is," he summed up, "a combination of Ibsen and hysterics, and of—er, rather declamatory observations concerning there being one law for the man and another for the woman, and Patricia's realization of the mistake we both made—and all that sort of nonsense, you know, exactly as if, I give you my word, she were one of those women who want to vote." The colonel, patently, considered that feminine outrageousness could go no farther. "And she is taking menthol and green tea and mustard plasters and I don't know what all, in bed, prior to—to——"

"Taking leave?" Mrs. Pendomer suggested.

"Er—that was mentioned, I believe," said Colonel Musgrave. "But of course she was only talking."

Mrs. Pendomer looked about her; and, without, the clean-shaven lawns and trim box-hedges were very beautiful in the morning sunlight; within, the same sunlight sparkled over the heavy breakfast service, and gleamed in the high walnut panels of the breakfast-room. She viewed the comfortable appointments about her a little wistfully, for Mrs. Pendomer's purse was not over-full.

"Of course," said she, as in meditation, "there was the money."

"Yes," said Rudolph Musgrave, slowly; "there was the money."

He sprang to his feet, and drew himself erect. Here was a moment he must give its full dramatic value.

"Oh, no, Clarice, my marriage may have been an eminently sensible one, but I love my wife. Oh, believe me, I love her very tenderly, poor little Patricia! I have weathered some forty-seven birthdays; and I have done much as other men do, and all that—there have been flirtations and suchlike, and—er—some women have been kinder to me than I deserved. But I love her; and there has not been a moment since she came into my life I haven't loved her, and been—" he waved his hands now impotently, almost theatrically—"sickened at the thought of the others."

Mrs. Pendomer's foot tapped the floor whilst he spoke. When he had made an ending, she inclined her head toward him.

"Thank you!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Colonel Musgrave bit his lip; and he flushed.

"That," said he, hastily, "was different."

But the difference, whatever may have been its nature, was seemingly a matter of unimportance to Mrs. Pendomer, who was in meditation. She rested her ample chin on a much-bejeweled hand for a moment; and, when Mrs. Pendomer raised her face, her voice was free from affectation.

"You will probably never understand that this particular July day is a crucial point in your life. You will probably remember it, if you remember it at all, simply as that morning when Patricia found some girl-or-another's old letters, and behaved rather unreasonably about them. It was the merest trifle, you will think.... John Charteris understands women better than you do, Rudolph."

"I need not pretend at this late day to be as clever as Jack," the colonel said, in some bewilderment. "But why not more succinctly state that the Escurial is not a dromedary, although there are many flies in France? For what on earth has Jack to do with crucial points and July mornings?"

"Why, I suppose, I only made bold to introduce his name for the sake of an illustration, Rudolph. For the last person in the world to realize, precisely, why any woman did anything is invariably the woman who did it.... Yet there comes in every married woman's existence that time when she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life—as a life which had run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she ever came into that life. A woman never realizes that of her lover, somehow. But to know that your husband, the father of your child, has lived for other women a life in which you had no part, and never can have part!—she realizes that, at one time or another, and—and it sickens her." Mrs. Pendomer smiled as she echoed his phrase, but her eyes were not mirthful.

"Ah, she hungers for those dead years, Rudolph, and, though you devote your whole remaining life to her, nothing can ever make up for them; and she always hates those shadowy women who have stolen them from her. A woman never, at heart, forgives the other women who have loved her husband, even though she cease to care for him herself. For she remembers—ah, you men forget so easily, Rudolph! God had not invented memory when he created Adam; it was kept for the woman."

Then ensued a pause, during which Rudolph Musgrave smiled down upon her, irresolutely; for he abhorred "a scene," as his vernacular phrased it, and to him Clarice's present manner bordered upon both the scenic and the incomprehensible.

"Ah!—you women!" he temporized.

There was a glance from eyes whose luster time and irregular living had conspired to dim.

"Ah!—you men!" Mrs. Pendomer retorted. "And there we have the tragedy of life in a nutshell!"

Silence lasted for a while. The colonel was finding this matutinal talk discomfortably opulent in pauses.

"Rudolph, and has it never occurred to you that in marrying Patricia you swindled her?"

And naturally his eyebrows lifted.

"Because a woman wants love."

"Well, well! and don't I love Patricia?"

"I dare say that you think you do. Only you have played at loving so long you are really unable to love anybody as a girl has every right to be loved in her twenties. Yes, Rudolph, you are being rather subtly punished for the good times you have had. And, after all, the saddest punishment is something that happens in us, not something which happens to us."

"I wish you wouldn't laugh, Clarice——"

"I wish I didn't have to. For I would get far more comfort out of crying, and I don't dare to, because of my complexion. It comes in a round pasteboard box nowadays, you know, Rudolph, with French mendacities all over the top—and my eyebrows come in a fat crayon, and the healthful glow of my lips comes in a little porcelain tub."

Mrs. Pendomer was playing with a teaspoon now, and a smile hovered about the aforementioned lips.

"And yet, do you remember, Rudolph," said she, "that evening at Assequin, when I wore a blue gown, and they were playing Fleurs d'Amour, and—you said—?"

"Yes"—there was an effective little catch in his voice—"you were a wonderful girl, Clarice—'my sunshine girl,' I used to call you. And blue was always your color; it went with your eyes so exactly. And those big sleeves they wore then—those tell-tale, crushable sleeves!—they suited your slender youthfulness so perfectly! Ah, I remember it as though it were yesterday!"

Mrs. Pendomer majestically rose to her feet.

"It was pink! And it was at the Whitebrier you said—what you said! And—and you don't deserve anything but what you are getting," she concluded, grimly.

"I—it was so long ago," Rudolph Musgrave apologized, with mingled discomfort and vagueness.

"Yes," she conceded, rather sadly; "it was so long—oh, very long ago! For we were young then, and we believed in things, and—and Jack Charteris had not taken a fancy to me—" She sighed and drummed her fingers on the table. "But women have always helped and shielded you, haven't they, Rudolph? And now I am going to help you too, for you have shown me the way. You don't deserve it in the least, but I'll do it."



II

Thus it shortly came about that Mrs. Pendomer mounted, in meditative mood, to Mrs. Musgrave's rooms; and that Mrs. Pendomer, recovering her breath, entered, without knocking, into a gloom where cologne and menthol and the odor of warm rubber contended for mastery. For Patricia had decided that she was very ill indeed, and was sobbing softly in bed.

Very calmly, Mrs. Pendomer opened a window, letting in a flood of fresh air and sunshine; very calmly, she drew a chair—a substantial arm-chair—to the bedside, and, very calmly, she began:

"My dear, Rudolph has told me of this ridiculous affair, and—oh, you equally ridiculous girl!"

She removed, with deft fingers, a damp and clinging bandage from about Patricia's head, and patted the back of Patricia's hand, placidly. Patricia was by this time sitting erect in bed, and her coppery hair was thick about her face, which was colorless; and, altogether, she was very rigid and very indignant and very pretty, and very, very young.

"How dare he tell you—or anybody else!" she cried.

"We are such old friends, remember," Mrs. Pendomer pleaded, and rearranged the pillows, soothingly, about her hostess; "and I want to talk to you quietly and sensibly."

Patricia sank back among the pillows, and inhaled the fresh air, which, in spite of herself, she found agreeable. "I—somehow, I don't feel very sensible," she murmured, half sulky and half shame-faced.

Mrs. Pendomer hesitated for a moment, and then plunged into the heart of things. "You are a woman, dear," she said, gently, "though heaven knows it must have been only yesterday you were playing about the nursery—and one of the facts we women must face, eventually, is that man is a polygamous animal. It is unfortunate, perhaps, but it is true. Civilization may veneer the fact, but nothing will ever override it, not even in these new horseless carriages. A man may give his wife the best that is in him—his love, his trust, his life's work—but it is only the best there is left. We give our hearts; men dole out theirs, as people feed bread to birds, with a crumb for everyone. His wife has the remnant. And the best we women can do is to remember we are credibly informed that half a loaf is preferable to no bread at all."

Her face sobered, and she added, pensively: "We might contrive a better universe, we sister women, but this is not permitted us. So we must take it as it is."

Patricia stirred, as talking died away. "I don't believe it," said she; and she added, with emphasis: "And, anyhow, I hate that nasty trollop!"

"Ah, but you do believe it." Mrs. Pendomer's voice was insistent. "You knew it years before you went into long frocks. That knowledge is, I suppose, a legacy from our mothers."

Patricia frowned, petulantly, and then burst into choking sobs. "Oh!" she cried, "it's damnable! Some other woman has had what I can never have. And I wanted it so!—that first love that means everything—the love he gave her when I was only a messy little girl, with pig-tails and too many hands and feet! Oh, that—that hell-cat! She's had everything!"

There was an interval, during which Mrs. Pendomer smiled crookedly, and Patricia continued to sob, although at lengthening intervals. Then, Mrs. Pendomer lifted the packet of letters lying on the bed, and cleared her throat.

"H'm!" said she; "so this is what caused all the trouble? You don't mind?"

And, considering silence as equivalent to acquiescence, she drew out a letter at hazard, and read aloud:

"'Just a line, woman of all the world, to tell you ... but what have I to tell you, after all? Only the old, old message, so often told that it seems scarcely worth while to bother the postman about it. Just three words that innumerable dead lips have whispered, while life was yet good and old people were unreasonable and skies were blue—three words that our unborn children's children will whisper to one another when we too have gone to help the grasses in their growing or to nourish the victorious, swaying hosts of some field of daffodils. Just three words—that is my message to you, my lady.... Ah, it is weary waiting for a sight of your dear face through these long days that are so much alike and all so empty and colorless! My heart grows hungry as I think of your great, green eyes and of the mouth that is like a little wound. I want you so, O dearest girl in all the world! I want you.... Ah, time travels very slowly that brings you back to me, and, meanwhile, I can but dream of you and send you impotent scrawls that only vex me with their futility. For my desire of you—'

"The remainder," said Mrs. Pendomer, clearing her throat once more, "appears to consist of insanity and heretical sentiments, in about equal proportions, all written at the top of a boy's breaking voice. It isn't Colonel Musgrave's voice—quite—is it?"

During the reading, Patricia, leaning on one elbow, had regarded her companion with wide eyes and flushed cheeks. "Now, you see!" she cried indignantly; "he loved her! He was simply crazy about her."

"Why, yes." Mrs. Pendomer replaced the letter, carefully, almost caressingly, among its companions. "My dear, it was years ago. I think time has by this wreaked a vengeance far more bitter than you could ever plan on the woman who, after all, never thought to wrong you. For the bitterest of all bitter things to a woman—to some women, at least—is to grow old."

She sighed, and her well-manicured fingers fretted for a moment with the counterpane.

"Ah, who will write the tragedy of us women who were 'famous Southern beauties' once? We were queens of men while our youth lasted, and diarists still prattle charmingly concerning us. But nothing was expected of us save to be beautiful and to condescend to be made much of, and that is our tragedy. For very few things, my dear, are more pitiable than the middle-age of the pitiful butterfly woman, whose mind cannot—cannot, because of its very nature—reach to anything higher! Middle-age strips her of everything—the admiration, the flattery, the shallow merriment—all the little things that her little mind longs for—and other women take her place, in spite of her futile, pitiful efforts to remain young. And the world goes on as before, and there is a whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she is old—ah, so old!—under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a note of earnestness in her voice.

"Such a woman," said Patricia, with distinctness, "deserves no pity."

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer conceded, drily, "she doesn't get it. Probably, because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist sloth and gluttony—the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a pleasing or heroic figure."

Mrs. Pendomer paused for a breathing-space, and smiled, though not very pleasantly.

"It is, doubtless," said she, "a sight for gods—and quite certainly for men—to laugh at, this silly woman striving to regain a vanished frugality of waist. Yes, I suppose it is amusing—but it is also pitiful. And it is more pitiful still if she has ever loved a man in the unreasoning way these shallow women sometimes do. Men age so slowly; the men a girl first knows are young long after she has reached middle-age—yes, they go on dancing cotillions and talking nonsense in the garden, long after she has taken to common-sense shoes. And the man is still young—and he cares for some other woman, who is young and has all that she has lost—and it seems so unfair!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Patricia regarded her for a moment. The purple eyes were alert, their glance was hard. "You seem to know all about this woman," Patricia began, in a level voice. "I have heard, of course, what everyone in Lichfield whispers about you and Rudolph. I have even teased Rudolph about it, but until to-day I had believed it was a lie."

"It is often a mistake to indulge in uncommon opinions," said Mrs. Pendomer. "You get more fun and interest out of it, I don't deny, but the bill, my dear, is unconscionable."

"So! you confess it!"

"My dear, and who am I to stand aside like a coward and see you make a mountain of this boy-and-girl affair—an affair which Rudolph and I had practically forgotten—oh, years ago!—until to-day? Why—why, you can't be jealous of me!" Mrs. Pendomer concluded, half-mockingly.

Patricia regarded her with deliberation.

In the windy sunlight, Mrs. Pendomer was a well-preserved woman, but, unmistakably, preserved; moreover, there was a great deal of her, and her nose was in need of a judicious application of powder, of which there was a superfluity behind her ears. Was this the siren Patricia had dreaded? Patricia clearly perceived that, whatever had been her husband's relations with this woman, he had been manifestly entrapped into the imbroglio—a victim to Mrs. Pendomer's inordinate love of attention, which was, indeed, tolerably notorious; and Patricia's anger against Rudolph Musgrave gave way to a rather contemptuous pity and a half-maternal remorse for not having taken better care of him.

"No," answered Mrs. Pendomer, to her unspoken thought; "no woman could be seriously jealous of me. Yes, I dare say, I am passee and vain and frivolous and—harmless. But," she added, meditatively, "you hate me, just the same."

"My dear Mrs. Pendomer——" Patricia began, with cool courtesy; then hesitated. "Yes," she conceded; "I dare say, it is unreasonable—but I do hate you like the very old Nick."

"Why, then," spoke Mrs. Pendomer, with cheerfulness, "everything is as it should be." She rose and smiled. "I am sorry to say I must be leaving Matocton to-day; the Ullwethers are very pressing, and I really don't know how to get out of paying them a visit——"

"So sorry to lose you," cooed Patricia; "but, of course, you know best. I believe some very good people are visiting the Ullwethers nowadays?" She extended the letters, blandly. "May I restore your property?" she queried, with utmost gentleness.

"Thanks!" Clarice Pendomer took them, and kissed her hostess, not without tenderness, on the brow. "My dear, be kind to Rudolph. He—he is rather an attractive man, you know,—and other women are kind to him. We of Lichfield have always said that he and Jack Charteris were the most dangerous men that even Lichfield has ever produced——"

"Why, do people really find Mr. Charteris particularly attractive?" Patricia demanded, so quickly and so innocently that Mrs. Pendomer could not deny herself the glance of a charlatan who applauds his fellow's legerdemain.

And Patricia colored.

"Oh, well—! You know how Lichfield gossips," said Mrs. Pendomer.



III

Colonel Musgrave had smoked a preposterous number of unsatisfying cigarettes on the big front porch of Matocton whilst Mrs. Pendomer was absent on her mission; and on her return, flushed and triumphant, he rose in eloquent silence.

"I've done it, Rudolph," said Mrs. Pendomer.

"Done what?" he queried, blankly.

"Restored what my incomprehensible lawyers call the status quo; achieved peace with honor; carried off the spoils of war; and—in short—arranged everything," answered Mrs. Pendomer, and sank into a rustic chair, which creaked admonishingly. "And all," she added, bringing a fan into play, "without a single falsehood. I am not to blame if Patricia has jumped at the conclusion that these letters were written to me."

"My word!" said Rudolph Musgrave, "your methods of restoring domestic peace to a distracted household are, to say the least, original!" He seated himself, and lighted another cigarette.

"Oh, well, Patricia is not deaf, you know, and she has lived in Lichfield quite a while." Mrs. Pendomer said abruptly, "I have half a mind to tell you some of the things I know about Aline Van Orden."

"Please don't," said Colonel Musgrave, "for I would inevitably beard you on my own porch and smite you to the door-mat. And I am hardly young enough for such adventures."

"And poor Aline is dead! And the rest of us are middle-aged now, Rudolph, and we go in to dinner with the veterans who call us 'Madam,' and we are prominent in charitable enterprises.... But there was a time when we were not exactly hideous in appearance, and men did many mad things for our sakes, and we never lose the memory of that time. Pleasant memories are among the many privileges of women. Yes," added Mrs. Pendomer, meditatively, "we derive much the same pleasure from them a cripple does from rearranging the athletic medals he once won, or a starving man from thinking of the many excellent dinners he has eaten; but we can't and we wouldn't part with them, nevertheless."

Rudolph Musgrave, however, had not honored her with much attention, and was puzzling over the more or less incomprehensible situation; and, perceiving this, she ran on, after a little:

"Oh, it worked—it worked beautifully! You see, she would always have been very jealous of that other woman; but with me it is different. She has always known that scandalous story about you and me. And she has always known me as I am—a frivolous and—say, corpulent, for it is a more dignified word—and generally unattractive chaperon; and she can't think of me as ever having been anything else. Young people never really believe in their elders' youth, Rudolph; at heart, they think we came into the world with crow's-feet and pepper-and-salt hair, all complete. So, she is only sorry for you now—rather as a mother would be for a naughty child; as for me, she isn't jealous—but," sighed Mrs. Pendomer, "she isn't over-fond of me."

Colonel Musgrave rose to his feet. "It isn't fair," said he; "the letters were distinctly compromising. It isn't fair you should shoulder the blame for a woman who was nothing to you. It isn't fair you should be placed in such a false position."

"What matter?" pleaded Mrs. Pendomer. "The letters are mine to burn, if I choose. I have read one of them, by the way, and it is almost word for word a letter you wrote me a good twenty years ago. And you re-hashed it for Patricia's benefit too, it seems! You ought to get a mimeograph. Oh, very well! It doesn't matter now, for Patricia will say nothing—or not at least to you," she added.

"Still——" he began.

"Ah, Rudolph, if I want to do a foolish thing, why won't you let me? What else is a woman for? They are always doing foolish things. I have known a woman to throw a man over, because she had seen him without a collar; and I have known another actually to marry a man, because she happened to be in love with him. I have known a woman to go on wearing pink organdie after she has passed forty, and I have known a woman to go on caring for a man who, she knew, wasn't worth caring for, long after he had forgotten. We are not brave and sensible, like you men. So why not let me be foolish, if I want to be?"

"If," said Colonel Musgrave in some perplexity, "I understand one word of this farrago, I will be—qualified in various ways."

"But you don't have to understand," she pleaded.

"You mean—?" he asked.

"I mean that I was always fond of Aline, anyhow."

"Nonsense!" And he was conscious, with vexation, that he had undeniably flushed.

"I mean, then, I am a woman, and I understand. Everything is as near what it should be as is possible while Patricia is seeing so much of—we will call it the artistic temperament." Mrs. Pendomer shrugged. "But if I went on in that line you would believe I was jealous. And heaven knows I am not the least bit so—with the unavoidable qualification that, being a woman, I can't help rising superior to common-sense."

He said, "You mean Jack Charteris—? But what on earth has he to do with these letters?"

"I don't mean any proper names at all. I simply mean you are not to undo my work. It would only signify trouble and dissatisfaction and giving up all this"—she waved her hand lightly toward the lawns of Matocton,—"and it would mean our giving you up, for, you know, you haven't any money of your own, Rudolph. Ah, Rudolph, we can't give you up! We need you to lead our Lichfield germans, and to tell us naughty little stories, and keep us amused. So please be sensible, Rudolph."

"Permit me to point out I firmly believe that silence is the perfectest herald of joy," observed Colonel Musgrave. "Only I do not understand why you should have dragged John Charteris's name into this ludicrous affair——"

"You really do not understand——?"

But Colonel Musgrave's handsome face declared very plainly that he did not.

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer reflected, "I dare say it is best, upon the whole, you shouldn't. And now you must excuse me, for I am leaving for the Ullwethers' to-day, and I shan't ever be invited to Matocton again, and I must tell my maid to pack up. She is a little fool and it will break her heart to be leaving Pilkins. All human beings are tediously alike. But, allowing ample time for her to dispose of my best lingerie and of her unavoidable lamentations, I ought to make the six-forty-five. I have noticed that one usually does—somehow," said Mrs. Pendomer, and seemed to smack of allegories.

And yet it may have been because she knew—as who knew better?—something of that mischief's nature which was now afoot.



IV

The colonel burned the malefic letters that afternoon. Indeed, the episode set him to ransacking the desk in which Patricia had found them—a desk which, as you have heard, was heaped with the miscellaneous correspondence of the colonel's father dating back a half-century and more. Much curious matter the colonel discovered there, for "Wild Will" Musgrave's had been a full-blooded career. And over one packet of letters, in particular, the colonel sat for a long while with an unwontedly troubled face.



PART SIX - BYWAYS

"Cry Kismet! and take heart. Eros is gone, Nor may we follow to that loftier air Olympians breathe. Take heart, and enter where A lighter Love, vine-crowned, laughs i' the sun, Oblivious of tangled webs ill-spun By ancient wearied weavers, for it may be His guidance leads to lovers of such as we And hearts so credulous as to be won.

"Cry Kismet! Put away vain memories Of all old sorrows and of all old joys, And learn that life is never quite amiss So long as unreflective girls and boys Remember that young lips were meant to kiss, And hold that laughter is a seemly noise."

PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. Egeria Answers.



I

Patricia sat in the great maple-grove that stands behind Matocton, and pondered over a note from her husband, who was in Lichfield superintending the appearance of the July number of the Lichfield Historical Association's Quarterly Magazine. Mr. Charteris lay at her feet, glancing rapidly over a lengthy letter, which was from his wife, in Richmond.

The morning mail was just in, and Patricia had despatched Charteris for her letters, on the plea that the woods were too beautiful to leave, and that Matocton, in the unsettled state which marks the end of the week in a house-party, was intolerable.

She, undoubtedly, was partial to the grove, having spent the last ten mornings there. Mr. Charteris had overrated her modest literary abilities so far as to ask her advice in certain details of his new book, which was to appear in the autumn, and they had found a vernal solitude, besides being extremely picturesque, to be conducive to the forming of really matured opinions. Moreover, she was assured that none of the members of the house-party would misunderstand her motives; people were so much less censorious in the country; there was something in the pastoral purity of Nature, seen face to face, which brought out one's noblest instincts, and put an end to all horrid gossip and scandal-mongering.

Didn't Mrs. Barry-Smith think so? And what was her real opinion of that rumor about the Hardresses, and was the woman as bad as people said she was? Thus had Patricia spoken in the privacy of her chamber, at that hour when ladies do up their hair for the night, and discourse of mysteries. It is at this time they are said to babble out their hearts to one another; and so, beyond doubt, this must have been the real state of the case.

As Patricia admitted, she had given up bridge and taken to literature only during the past year. She might more honestly have said within the last two weeks. In any event, she now conversed of authors with a fitful persistence like that of an ill-regulated machine. Her comments were delightfully frank and original, as she had an unusually good memory. Of two books she was apt to prefer the one with the wider margin, and she was becoming sufficiently familiar with a number of poets to quote them inaccurately.

We have all seen John Charteris's portraits, and most of us have read his books—or at least, the volume entitled In Old Lichfield, which caused the Lichfield Courier-Herald to apostrophize its author as a "Child of Genius! whose ardent soul has sounded the mysteries of life, whose inner vision sweeps over ever widening fields of thought, and whose chiseled phrases continue patriotically to perpetuate the beauty of Lichfield's past." But for present purposes it is sufficient to say that this jewelsmith of words was slight and dark and hook-nosed, and that his hair was thin, and that he was not ill-favored. It may be of interest to his admirers—a growing cult—to add that his reason for wearing a mustache in a period of clean-shaven faces was that, without it, his mouth was not pleasant to look upon.

"Heigho!" Patricia said, at length, with a little laugh; "it is very strange that both of our encumbrances should arrive on the same day!"

"It is unfortunate," Mr. Charteris admitted, lazily; "but the blessed state of matrimony is liable to these mishaps. Let us be thankful that my wife's whim to visit her aunt has given us, at least, two perfect, golden weeks. Husbands are like bad pennies; and wives resemble the cat whose adventures have been commemorated by one of our really popular poets. They always come back."

Patricia communed with herself, and to Charteris seemed, as she sat in the chequered sunlight, far more desirable than a married woman has any right to be.

"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 preeminently 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.



II

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 chatelaine, 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 man's hand.

"Dear Rudolph," she said, as simply as though they had parted yesterday, "it's awfully good to see you again."

Colonel Musgrave cleared his throat, and sat down beside her.

A moment later Colonel Musgrave cleared his throat once more.

Then Mrs. Charteris laughed. It was a pleasant laugh—a clear, rippling carol of clean mirth that sparkled in her eyes, and dimpled in her wholesome cheeks.

"So! do you find it very, very awkward?"

"Awkward!" he cried. Their glances met in a flash of comprehension which seemed to purge the air. Musgrave was not in the least self-conscious now. He laughed, and lifted an admonitory forefinger.

"Oh, good Cynara," he said, "I am not what I was. And so I cannot do it, my dear—I really cannot possibly live up to the requirements of being a Buried Past. In a proper story-book or play, I would have to come back from New Zealand or the Transvaal, all covered with glory and epaulets, and have found you in the last throes of consumption: instead, you have fattened, Anne, which a Buried Past never does, and which shows a sad lack of appreciation for my feelings. And I—ah, my dear, I must confess that my hair is growing gray, and that my life has not been entirely empty without you, and that I ate and enjoyed two mutton-chops at luncheon, though I knew I should see you to-day. I am afraid we are neither of us up to heroics, Anne. So let's be sensible and comfy, my dear."

"You brute!" she cried—not looking irreparably angry, yet not without a real touch of vexation; "don't you know that every woman cherishes the picture of her former lovers sitting alone in the twilight, and growing lackadaisical over undying memories and faded letters? And you—you approach me, after I don't dare to think how many years, as calmly as if I were an old schoolmate of your mother's, and attempt to talk to me about mutton-chops! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Rudolph Musgrave. You might, at least, have started a little at seeing me, and have clasped your hand to your heart, and have said, 'You, you!' or something of the sort. I had every right to expect it."

Mrs. Charteris pouted, and then trifled for a moment with the pages of her book.

"And—and I want to tell you that I am sorry for the way I spoke to you—that night," she swiftly said. Anne did not look at him. "Women don't understand things that are perfectly simple to men, I suppose—I mean—that is, Jack said—"

"That you ought to apologize? It was very like him"—and Colonel Musgrave smiled to think how like John Charteris it was. "Jack is quite wonderful," he observed.

She looked up, saying impulsively, "Rudolph, you don't know how happy he makes me."

"Heartless woman, and would you tempt me to end the tragedy of my life with a Shakesperian fifth act of poisonings and assassination? I spurn you, temptress. For, after all, it was an unpleasantly long while ago we went mad for each other," Musgrave announced, and he smiled. "I fancy that the boy and girl we knew of are as dead now as Nebuchadnezzar. 'Marian's married, and I sit here alive and merry at'—well, not at forty year, unluckily—"

"If you continue in that heartless strain, I shall go into the house," Mrs. Charteris protested.

Her indignation was exaggerated, but it was not altogether feigned; women cannot quite pardon a rejected suitor who marries and is content. They wish him all imaginable happiness and prosperity, of course; and they are honestly interested in his welfare; but it seems unexpectedly callous in him. And besides his wife is so perfectly commonplace.

Mrs. Charteris, therefore, added, with emphasis: "I am really disgracefully happy."

"Glad to hear it," said Musgrave, placidly. "So am I."

"Oh, Rudolph, Rudolph, you are hopeless!" she sighed. "And you used to make such a nice lover!"

Mrs. Charteris looked out over the river, which was like melting gold, and for a moment was silent.

"I was frightfully in love with you, Rudolph," she said, as half in wonder. "After—after that horrible time when my parents forced us to behave rationally, I wept—oh, I must have wept deluges! I firmly intended to pine away to an early grave. And that second time I liked you too, but then—there was Jack, you see."

"H'm!" said Colonel Musgrave; "yes, I see."

"I want you to continue to be friends with Jack," she went on, and her face lighted up, and her voice grew tender. "He has the artistic temperament, and naturally that makes him sensitive, and a trifle irritable at times. It takes so little to upset him, you see, for he feels so acutely what he calls the discords of life. I think most men are jealous of his talents; so they call him selfish and finicky and conceited. He isn't really, you know. Only, he can't help feeling a little superior to the majority of men, and his artistic temperament leads him to magnify the lesser mishaps of life—such as the steak being overdone, or missing a train. Oh, really, a thing like that worries him as much as the loss of a fortune, or a death in the family, would upset anyone else. Jack says there are no such things as trifles in a harmonious and well-proportioned life, and I suppose that's true to men of genius. Of course, I am rather a Philistine, and I grate on him at times—that is, I used to, but he says I have improved wonderfully. And so we are ridiculously happy, Jack and I."

Musgrave cast about vainly for an appropriate speech. Then he compromised with his conscience, and said: "Your husband is a very clever man."

"Isn't he?" She had flushed for pleasure at hearing him praised. Oh, yes, Anne loved Jack Charteris! There was no questioning that; it was written in her face, was vibrant in her voice as she spoke of him.

"Now, really, Rudolph, aren't his books wonderful? I don't appreciate them, of course, for I'm not clever, but I know you do. I don't see why men think him selfish. I know better. You have to live with Jack to really appreciate him. And every day I discover some new side of his character that makes him dearer to me. He's so clever—and so noble. Why, I remember—Well, before Jack made his first hit with Astaroth's Lackey, he lived with his sister. They hadn't any money, and, of course, Jack couldn't be expected to take a clerkship or anything like that, because business details make his head ache, poor boy. So, his sister taught school, and he lived with her. They were very happy—his sister simply adores him, and I am positively jealous of her sometimes—but, unfortunately, the bank in which she kept her money failed one day. I remember it was just before he asked me to marry him, and told me, in his dear, laughing manner, that he hadn't a penny in the world, and that we would have to live on bread and cheese and kisses. Of course, I had a plenty for us both, though, so we weren't really in danger of being reduced to that. Well, I wanted to make his sister an allowance. But Jack pointed out, with considerable reason, that one person could live very comfortably on an income that had formerly supported two. He said it wasn't right I should be burdened with the support of his family. Jack was so sensitive, you see, lest people might think he was making a mercenary marriage, and that his sister was profiting by it. Now, I call that one of the noblest things I ever heard of, for he is devotedly attached to his sister, and, naturally, it is a great grief to him to see her compelled to work for a living. His last book was dedicated to her, and the dedication is one of the most tender and pathetic things I ever read."

Musgrave was hardly conscious of what she was saying. She was not particularly intelligent, this handsome, cheery woman, but her voice, and the richness and sweetness of it, and the vitality of her laugh, contented his soul.

Anne was different; the knowledge came again to him quite simply that Anne was different, and in the nature of things must always be a little different from all other people—even Patricia Musgrave. He had no desire to tell Anne Charteris of this, no idea that it would affect in any way the tenor of his life. He merely accepted the fact that she was, after all, Anne Willoughby, and that her dear presence seemed, somehow, to strengthen and cheer and comfort and content beyond the reach of expression.

Yet Musgrave recognized her lack of cleverness, and liked and admired her none the less. A vision of Patricia arose—a vision of a dainty, shallow, Dresden-china face with a surprising quantity of vivid hair about it. Patricia was beautiful; and Patricia was clever, in her pinchbeck way. But Rudolph Musgrave doubted very much if her mocking eyes now ever softened into that brooding, sacred tenderness he had seen in Anne's eyes; and he likewise questioned if a hurried, happy thrill ran through Patricia's voice when Patricia spoke of her husband.

"You have unquestionably married an unusual man," Musgrave said. "I—by Jove, you know, I fancy my wife finds him almost as attractive as you do."

"Ah, Rudolph, I can't fancy anyone whom—whom you loved caring for anyone else. Don't I remember, sir, how irresistible you can be when you choose?"

Anne laughed, and raised plump hands to heaven.

"Really, though, women pursue him to a perfectly indecent extent. I have to watch over him carefully; not that I distrust him, of course, for—dear Jack!—he is so devoted to me, and cares so little for other women, that Joseph would seem in comparison only a depraved roue. But the women—why, Rudolph, there was an Italian countess at Rome—the impudent minx!—who actually made me believe—However, Jack explained all that, after I had made both a spectacle and a nuisance of myself, and he had behaved so nobly in the entire affair that for days afterwards I was positively limp with repentance. Then in Paris that flighty Mrs. Hardress—but he explained that, too. Some women are shameless, Rudolph," Mrs. Charteris concluded, and sighed her pity for them.

"Utterly so," Musgrave assented, gravely.

He was feeling a thought uncomfortable. To him the place had grown portentous. The sun was low, and the long shadows of the trees were black on the dim lawn. People were assembling for supper, and passing to and fro under low-hanging branches; and the gaily-colored gowns of the women glimmered through a faint blue haze like that with which Boucher and Watteau and Fragonard loved to veil, and thereby to make wistful, somehow, the antics of those fine parroquet-like manikins who figure in their fetes galantes.

Inside the house, someone was playing an unpleasant sort of air on the piano—an air which was quite needlessly creepy and haunting and insistent. It all seemed like a grim bit out of a play. The tenderness and pride that shone in Anne's eyes as she boasted of her happiness troubled Rudolph Musgrave. He had a perfectly unreasonable desire to carry her away, by force, if necessary, and to protect her from clever people, and to buy things for her.

"So, I am an old, old married woman now, and—and I think in some ways I suit Jack better than a more brilliant person might. I am glad your wife has taken a fancy to him. And I want you to profit by her example. Jack says she is one of the most attractive women he ever met. He asked me to-day why I didn't do my hair like hers. She must make you very happy, Rudolph?"

"My wife," Colonel Musgrave said, "is in my partial opinion, a very clever and very beautiful woman."

"Yes; cleverness and beauty are sufficient to make any man happy, I suppose," Anne hazarded. "Jack says, though—Are cleverness and beauty the main things in life, Rudolph?"

"Undoubtedly," he protested.

"Now, that," she said, judicially, "shows the difference in men. Jack says a man loves a woman, not for her beauty or any other quality she possesses, but just because she is the woman he loves and can't help loving."

"Ah! I dare say that is the usual reason. Yes," said Colonel Musgrave,—"because she is the woman he loves and cannot help loving!"

Anne clapped her hands. "Ah, so I have penetrated your indifference at last, sir!"

Impulsively, she laid her hand upon his arm, and spoke with earnestness. "Dear Rudolph, I am so glad you've found the woman you can really love. Jack says there is only one possible woman in the world for each man, and that only in a month of Sundays does he find her."

"Yes." said Musgrave. He had risen, and was looking down in friendly fashion into her honest, lovely eyes. "Yes, there is only one possible woman. And—yes, I think I found her, Anne, some years ago."



III

Thus it befell that all passed smoothly with Rudolph Musgrave and Anne Charteris, with whom he was not in the least in love any longer (he reflected), although in the nature of things she must always seem to him a little different from all other people.

And it befell, too, that the following noon—this day being a Sunday, warm, clear, and somnolent—Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave sat upon the lawn before Matocton, and little Roger Musgrave was with them. In fact, these two had been high-handedly press-ganged by this small despot to serve against an enemy then harassing his majesty's equanimity and by him, revilingly, designated as Nothing-to-do.

And so Anne made for Roger—as she had learned to do for her dead son—in addition to a respectable navy of paper boats, a vast number of "boxes" and "Nantucket sinks" and "picture frames" and "footballs." She had used up the greater part of a magazine before the imp grew tired of her novel accomplishments.

For as he invidiously observed, "I can make them for myself now, most as good as you, only I always tear the bottom of the boat when you pull it out, and my sinks are kind of wobbly. And besides, I've made up a story just like your husband gets money for doing. And if I had a quarter I would buy that green and yellow snake in the toy-store window and wiggle it at people and scare them into fits."

"Sonnikins," said Colonel Musgrave, "suppose you tell us the story, and then we will see if it is really worth a quarter, and try to save you from this unblushing mendicancy."

"Well, God bless Father and Mother and little cousins—Oh, no, that's what I say at night." Roger's voice now altered, assuming shrill singsong cadences. His pensive gravity would have appeared excessive if manifested by the Great Sphinx. "What I meant to say was that once upon a time when the Battle of Gettysburg was going on and houses were being robbed and burned, and my dear grandfather was being shot through the heart, a certain house, where the richest man in town lived, was having feast and merriment, never dreaming of any harm, or thinking of their little child Rachel, who was on the front porch watching the battle and screaming with joy at every man that fell dead. One dark-faced man was struck with a bullet and was hurt. He saw the child laughing at him and his heart was full of revenge. So that night, when all had gone to bed, the old dark-faced man went softly in the house and got the little girl and set the house on fire. And he carried her out in the mountains, and is that worth a quarter?"

"Good heavens, no!" said Anne. "How dare you leave us in such harrowing suspense?"

"Well, a whole lot more happened, because all the while Rachel was asleep. When she woke up, she did not know where under the sun she was. So she walked along for about an hour and came to a little village, and after a few minutes she came to a large rock, and guess who she met? She met her father, and when he saw her he hugged her so hard that when he got through she did not have any breath left in her. And they walked along, and after a while they came to the wood, and it was now about six o'clock, and it was very dark, and just then nine robbers jumped out from behind the trees, and they took a pistol and shot Rachel's father, and the child fainted. Her papa was dead, so she dug a hole and buried him, and went right back home. And of course that was all, and if I had that snake, I wouldn't try to scare you with it, father, anyhow."

So Colonel Musgrave gave his son a well-earned coin, as the colonel considered, and it having been decreed, "Now, father, you tell a story," obediently read aloud from a fat red-covered book. The tale was of the colonel's selecting, and it dealt with a shepherdess and a chimney-sweep.

"And so," the colonel perorated, "the little china people remained together, and were thankful for the rivet in grandfather's neck, and continued to love each other until they were broken to pieces—And the tale is a parable, my son. You will find that out some day. I wish you didn't have to."

"But is that all, father?"

"You will find it rather more than enough, sonnikins, when you begin to interpret. Yes, that is all. Only you are to remember always that they climbed to the very top of the chimney, where they could see the stars, before they decided to go back and live upon the parlor table under the brand-new looking-glass. For the stars are disconcertingly unconcerned when you have climbed to them, and so altogether unimpressed by your achievement that it is the nature of all china people to slink home again, precisely as your Rachel did—and as Mrs. Charteris will assure you."

"I?" said Anne. "Now, honestly, Rudolph, I was thinking you ought not to let him sit upon the grass, because he really has a cold. And if I were you, I would give him a good dose of castor-oil to-night. Some people give it in lemon-juice, I know, but I found with my boy that peppermint is rather less disagreeable. And you could easily send somebody over to the store at the station——"

Anne broke off short. "Was I being inadequate again? I am sorry, but with children you never know what a cold may lead to, and I really do not believe it good for him to sit in this damp grass."

"Sonnikins," said Rudolph Musgrave, "you had better climb up into my lap, before you and I are Podsnapped from the universe by the only embodiment of common-sense just now within our reach."

He patted the boy's head and latterly resumed: "I am afraid of you, Anne. Whenever I am imagining vain things or stitching romantic possibilities, like embroideries, about the fabric of my past, I always find the real you in my path, as undeniable as a gas-bill. I don't believe you ever dare to think, because there is no telling what it might lead to. You are simply unassailably armored by the courage of other people's convictions."

Her candid eyes met his over the boy's bright head. "And what in the world are you talking about?"

"I am lamenting. I am rending the air and beating my breast on account of your obstinate preference for being always in the right. I do wish you would endeavor to impersonate a human being a trifle more convincingly——"

But the great gong, booming out for luncheon, interrupted him at this point, and Colonel Musgrave was never permitted to finish his complaint against Anne's unimaginativeness.



IV

On that same Sunday morning, while Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave contended with little Roger's boredom on the lawn before Matocton, Patricia and Charteris met by accident on the seventh terrace of the gardens. Patricia had mentioned casually at the breakfast-table that she intended to spend the forenoon on this terrace unsabbatically making notes for a paper on "The Symbolism of Dante," which she was to read before the Lichfield Woman's Club in October; but Mr. Charteris had not overheard her.

He was seated on the front porch, working out a somewhat difficult point in his new book, when it had first occurred to him that this particular terrace would be an inspiring and appropriate place in which to think the matter over, undisturbed, he said. And it was impossible he should have known that anyone was there, as the seventh terrace happens to be the only one that, being planted with beech-trees, is completely screened from observation. From the house, you cannot see anything that happens there.

It was a curious accident, though. It really seemed, now that Patricia had put an ending to their meetings in the maple-grove, Fate was conspiring to bring them together.

However, as Mr. Charteris pointed out, there could be no possible objection to this conspiracy, since they had decided that their friendship was to be of a purely platonic nature. It was a severe trial to him, he confessed, to be forced to put aside certain dreams he had had of the future—mad dreams, perhaps, but such as had seemed very dear and very plausible to his impractical artistic temperament.

Still, it heartened him to hope that their friendship—since it was to be no more—might prove a survival, or rather a veritable renaissance, of the beautiful old Greek spirit in such matters. And, though the blind chance that mismanaged the world had chained them to uncongenial, though certainly well-meaning, persons, this was no logical reason why he and Patricia should be deprived of the pleasures of intellectual intercourse. Their souls were too closely akin.

For Mr. Charteris admitted that his soul was Grecian to the core, and out of place and puzzled and very lonely in a sordid, bustling world; and he assured Patricia—she did not object if he called her Patricia?—that her own soul possessed all the beauty and purity and calm of an Aphrodite sculptured by Phidias. It was such a soul as Horace might have loved, as Theocritus might have hymned in glad Greek song. Patricia flushed, and dissented somewhat.

"Frankly, mon ami," she said, "you are far too attractive for your company to be quite safe. You are such an adept in the nameless little attentions that women love—so profuse with lesser sugar-plums of speech and action—that after two weeks one's husband is really necessary as an antidote. Sugar-plums are good, but, like all palatable things, unwholesome. So I shall prescribe Rudolph's company for myself, to ward off an attack of moral indigestion. I am very glad he has come back—really glad," she added, conscientiously. "Poor old Rudolph! what between his interminable antiquities and those demented sections of the alphabet—What are those things, mon ami, that are always going up and down in Wall Street?"

"Elevators?" Mr. Charteris suggested.

"Oh, you jay-bird! I mean those N.P.'s and N.Y.C.'s and those other letters that are always having flurries and panics and passed dividends. They keep him incredibly busy."

And she sighed, tolerantly. Patricia had come within the last two weeks to believe that she was neglected, if not positively ill-treated, by her husband; and she had no earthly objection to Mr. Charteris thinking likewise. Her face expressed patient resignation now, as they walked under the close-matted foliage of the beech-trees, which made a pleasant, sun-flecked gloom about them.

Patricia removed her hat—the morning really was rather close—and paused where a sunbeam fell upon her copper-colored hair, and glorified her wistful countenance. She sighed once more, and added a finishing touch to the portrait of a femme incomprise.

"Pray, don't think, mon ami," she said very earnestly, "that I am blaming Rudolph! I suppose no wife can ever hope to have any part in her husband's inner life."

"Not in her own husband's, of course," said Charteris, cryptically.

"No, for while a woman gives her heart all at once, men crumble theirs away, as one feeds bread to birds—a crumb to this woman, a crumb to that—and such a little crumb, sometimes! And his wife gets what is left over."

"Pray, where did you read that?" said Charteris.

"I didn't read it anywhere. It was simply a thought that came to me," Patricia lied, gently. "But don't let's try to be clever. Cleverness is always a tax, but before luncheon it is an extortion. Personally, it makes me feel as if I had attended a welsh-rabbit supper the night before. Your wife must be very patient."

"My wife," cried Charteris, in turn resolved to screen an unappreciative mate, "is the most dear and most kind-hearted among the Philistines. And yet, at times, I grant you—"

"Oh, but, of course!" Patricia said impatiently. "I don't for a moment question that your wife is an angel."

"And why?" His eyebrows lifted, and he smiled.

"Why, wasn't it an angel," Patricia queried, all impishness now, "who kept the first man and woman out of paradise?"

"If—if I thought you meant that——!" he cried; and then he shrugged his shoulders. "My wife's virtues merit a better husband than Fate has accorded her. Anne is the best woman I have ever known."

Patricia was not unnaturally irritated. After all, one does not take the trouble to meet a man accidentally in a plantation of young beech-trees in order to hear him discourse of his wife's good qualities; and besides, Mr. Charteris was speaking in a disagreeably solemn manner, rather as if he fancied himself in a cathedral.

Therefore Patricia cast down her eyes again, and said:

"Men of genius are so rarely understood by their wives."

"We will waive the question of genius." Mr. Charteris laughed heartily, but he had flushed with pleasure.

"I suppose," he continued, pacing up and down with cat-like fervor, "that matrimony is always more or less of a compromise—like two convicts chained together trying to catch each other's gait. After a while, they succeed to a certain extent; the chain is still heavy, of course, but it does not gall them as poignantly as it used to do. And I fear the artistic temperament is not suited to marriage; its capacity for suffering is too great."

Mr. Charteris caught his breath in shuddering fashion, and he paused before Patricia. After a moment he grasped her by both wrists.

"We are chained fast enough, my lady," he cried, bitterly, "and our sentence is for life! There are green fields yonder, but our allotted place is here in the prison-yard. There is laughter yonder in the fields, and the scent of wild flowers floats in to us at times when we are weary, and the whispering trees sway their branches over the prison-wall, and their fruit is good to look on, and they hang within reach—ah, we might reach them very easily! But this is forbidden fruit, my lady; and it is not included in our wholesome prison-fare. And so don't think of it! We have been happy, you and I, for a little. We might—don't think of it! Don't dare think of it! Go back and help your husband drag his chain; it galls him as sorely as it does you. It galls us all. It is the heaviest chain was ever forged; but we do not dare shake it off!"

"I—oh, Jack, Jack, don't you dare to talk to me like that! We must be brave. We must be sensible." Patricia, regardless of her skirts, sat down upon the ground, and produced a pocket-handkerchief. "I—oh, what do you mean by making me so unhappy?" she demanded, indignantly.

"Ah, Patricia," he murmured, as he knelt beside her, "how can you hope to have a man ever talk to you in a sane fashion? You shouldn't have such eyes, Patricia! They are purple and fathomless like the ocean, and when a man looks into them too long his sanity grows weak, and sinks and drowns in their cool depths, and the man must babble out his foolish heart to you. Oh, but indeed, you shouldn't have such eyes, Patricia! They are dangerous, and to ask anybody to believe in their splendor is an insult to his intelligence, and besides, they are much too bright to wear in the morning. They are bad form, Patricia."

"We must be sensible," she babbled. "Your wife is here; my husband is here. And we—we aren't children or madmen, Jack dear. So we really must be sensible, I suppose. Oh, Jack," she cried, upon a sudden; "this isn't honorable!"

"Why, no! Poor little Anne!"

Mr. Charteris's eyes grew tender for a moment, because his wife, in a fashion, was dear to him. Then he laughed, very musically.

"And how can a man remember honor, Patricia, when the choice lies between honor and you? You shouldn't have such hair, Patricia! It is a net spun out of the raw stuff of fire and blood and of portentous sunsets; and its tendrils have curled around what little honor I ever boasted, and they hold it fast, Patricia. It is dishonorable to love you, but I cannot think of that when I am with you and hear you speak. And when I am not with you, just to remember that dear voice is enough to set my pulses beating faster. Oh, Patricia, you shouldn't have such a voice!"

Charteris broke off in speech. "'Scuse me for interruptin'," the old mulattress Virginia was saying, "but Mis' Pilkins sen' me say lunch raydy, Miss Patrisy."

Virginia seemed to notice nothing out-of-the-way. Having delivered her message, she went away quietly, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an idol's. But Patricia shivered.

"She frightens me, mon ami. Yes, that old woman always gives me gooseflesh, and I don't know why—because she is as deaf as a post—and I simply can't get rid of her. She is a sort of symbol—she, and how many others, I wonder!... Oh, well, let's hurry."

So Mr. Charteris was never permitted to finish his complaint against Patricia's voice.

It was absolutely imperative they should be on time for luncheon; for, as Patricia pointed out, the majority of people are censorious and lose no opportunity for saying nasty things. They are even capable of sneering at a purely platonic friendship which is attempting to preserve the beautiful old Greek spirit.

* * * * *

She was chattering either of her plans for the autumn, or of Dante and the discovery of his missing cantos, or else of how abominably Bob Townsend had treated Rosalind Jemmett, and they had almost reached the upper terrace—little Roger, indeed, his red head blazing in the sunlight, was already sidling by shy instalments toward them—when Patricia moaned inconsequently and for no ascertainable cause fainted.

It was the first time for four years she had been guilty of such an indiscretion, she was shortly afterward explaining to various members of the Musgraves' house-party. It was the heat, no doubt. But since everybody insisted upon it, she would very willingly toast them in another bumper of aromatic spirits of ammonia.

"Just look at that, Rudolph! you've spilt it all over your coat sleeve. I do wish you would try to be a little less clumsy. Oh, well, I'm spruce as a new penny now. So let's all go to luncheon."



V

Patricia had not been in perfect health for a long while. It seemed to her, in retrospect, that ever since the agonies of little Roger's birth she had been the victim of what she described as "a sort of all-overishness." Then, too, as has been previously recorded, Patricia had been operated upon by surgeons, and more than once....

"Good Lord!" as she herself declared, "it has reached the point that when I see a turkey coming to the dinner-table to be carved I can't help treating it as an ingenue."

Yet for the last four years she had never fainted, until this. It disquieted her. Then, too, awoke faint pricking memories of certain symptoms ... which she had not talked about ...

Now they alarmed her; and in consequence she took the next morning's train to Lichfield.



VI

Mrs. Ashmeade, who has been previously quoted, now comes into the story. She is only an episode. Still, her intervention led to peculiar results—results, curiously enough, in which she was not in the least concerned. She simply comes into the story for a moment, and then goes out of it; but her part is an important one.

She is like the watchman who announces the coming of Agamemnon; Clytemnestra sharpens her ax at the news, and the fatal bath is prepared for the anax andron. The tragedy moves on; the house of Atreus falls, and the wrath of implacable gods bellows across the heavens; meanwhile, the watchman has gone home to have tea with his family, and we hear no more of him. There are any number of morals to this.

Mrs. Ashmeade comes into the story on the day Patricia went to Lichfield, and some weeks after John Charteris's arrival at Matocton. Since then, affairs had progressed in a not unnatural sequence. Mr. Charteris, as we have seen, attributed it to Fate; and, assuredly, there must be a special providence of some kind that presides over country houses—a freakish and whimsical providence, which hugely rejoices in confounding one's sense of time and direction.

Through its agency, people unaccountably lose their way in the simplest walks, and turn up late and embarrassed for luncheon. At the end of the evening, it brings any number of couples blinking out of the dark, with no idea the clock was striking more than half-past nine.

And it delights in sending one into the garden—in search of roses or dahlias or upas-trees or something of the sort, of course—and thereby causing one to encounter the most unlikely people, and really, quite the last person one would have thought of meeting, as all frequenters of house-party junketings will assure you. And thus is this special house-party providence responsible for a great number of marriages, and, it may be, for a large percentage of the divorce cases; for, if you desire very heartily to see anything of another member of a house-party, this lax-minded and easy-going providence will somehow always bring the event about in a specious manner, and without any apparent thought of the consequences.

And the Musgraves' house-party was no exception.

Mrs. Ashmeade, for reasons of her own, took daily note of this. The others were largely engrossed by their own affairs; they did not seriously concern themselves about the doings of their fellow-guests. And, besides, if John Charteris manifestly sought the company of Patricia Musgrave, her husband did not appear to be exorbitantly dissatisfied or angry or even lonely; and, be this as it might, the fact remained that Celia Reindan was at this time more than a little interested in Teddy Anstruther; and Felix Kennaston was undeniably very attentive to Kathleen Saumarez; and Tom Gelwix was quite certainly devoting the major part of his existence to sitting upon the beach with Rosalind Jemmett.

For, in Lichfield at all events, everyone's house has at least a pane or so of glass in it; and, if indiscriminate stone-throwing were ever to become the fashion, there is really no telling what damage might ensue. And so had Mrs. Ashmeade been a younger woman—had time and an adoring husband not rendered her as immune to an insanity a deux as any of us may hope to be upon this side of saintship or senility—why, Mrs. Ashmeade would most probably have remained passive, and Mrs. Ashmeade would never have come into this story at all.

As it was, she approached Rudolph Musgrave with a fixed purpose this morning as he smoked an after-breakfast cigarette on the front porch of Matocton. And,

"Rudolph," said Mrs. Ashmeade, "are you blind?"

"You mean—?" he asked, and he broke off, for he had really no conception of what she meant.

And Mrs. Ashmeade said, "I mean Patricia and Charteris. Did you think I was by any chance referring to the man in the moon and the Queen of Sheba?"

If ever amazement showed in a man's eyes, it shone now in Rudolph Musgrave's. After a little, the pupils widened in a sort of terror. So this was what Clarice Pendomer had been hinting at.

"Nonsense!" he cried. "Why—why, it is utter, preposterous, Bedlamite nonsense!" He caught his breath in wonder at the notion of such a jest, remembering a little packet of letters hidden in his desk. "It—oh, no, Fate hasn't quite so fine a sense of humor as that. The thing is incredible!" Musgrave laughed, and flushed. "I mean——"

"I don't think you need tell me what you mean," said Mrs. Ashmeade. She sat down in a large rocking-chair, and fanned herself, for the day was warm. "Of course, it is officious and presumptuous and disagreeable of me to meddle. I don't mind your thinking that. But Rudolph, don't make the mistake of thinking that Fate ever misses a chance of humiliating us by showing how poor are our imaginations. The gipsy never does. She is a posturing mountebank, who thrives by astounding humanity."

Mrs. Ashmeade paused, and her eyes were full of memories, and very wise.

"I am only a looker-on at the tragic farce that is being played here," she continued, after a little, "but lookers-on, you know, see most of the game. They are not playing fairly with you, Rudolph. When people set about an infringement of the Decalogue they owe it to their self-respect to treat with Heaven as a formidable antagonist. To mark the cards is not enough. They are not playing fairly, my dear, and you ought to know it."

He walked up and down the porch once or twice, with his hands behind him; then he stopped before Mrs. Ashmeade, and smiled down at her. Without, many locusts shrilled monotonously.

"No, I do not think you are officious or meddling or anything of the sort, I think you are one of the best and kindest-hearted women in the world. But—bless your motherly soul, Polly! the thing is utterly preposterous. Of course, Patricia is young, and likes attention, and it pleases her to have men admire her. That, Polly, is perfectly natural. Why, you wouldn't expect her to sit around under the trees, and read poetry with her own husband, would you? We have been married far too long for that, Patricia and I. She thinks me rather prosy and stupid at times, poor girl, because—well, because, in point of fact, I am. But, at the bottom of her heart—Oh, it's preposterous! We are the best friends in the world, I tell you! It is simply that she and Jack have a great deal in common—"

"You don't understand John Charteris. I do," said Mrs. Ashmeade, placidly. "Charteris is simply a baby with a vocabulary. His moral standpoint is entirely that of infancy. It would be ludicrous to describe him as selfish, because he is selfishness incarnate. I sometimes believe it is the only characteristic the man possesses. He reaches out his hand and takes whatever he wants, just as a baby would, quite simply, and as a matter of course. He wants your wife now, and he is reaching out his hand to take her. He probably isn't conscious of doing anything especially wrong; he is always so plausible in whatever he does that he ends by deceiving himself, I suppose. For he is always plausible. It is worse than useless to argue any matter with him, because he invariably ends by making you feel as if you had been caught stealing a hat. The only argument that would get the better of John Charteris is knocking him down, just as spanking is the only argument which ever gets the better of a baby. Yes, he is very like a baby—thoroughly selfish and thoroughly dependent on other people; only, he is a clever baby who exaggerates his own helplessness in order to appeal to women. He has a taste for women. And women naturally like him, for he impresses them as an irresponsible child astray in an artful and designing world. They want to protect him. Even I do, at times. It is really maternal, you know; we would infinitely prefer for him to be soft and little, so that we could pick him up, and cuddle him. But as it is, he is dangerous. He believes whatever he tells himself, you see."

Her voice died away, and Mrs. Ashmeade fanned herself in the fashion addicted by perturbed women who, nevertheless, mean to have their say out—slowly and impersonally, and quite as if she was fanning some one else through motives of charity.