True, curtains had been lifted, a little by a little. Patricia could hardly have told you at what exact moment it was that she discovered Miss Agatha—who continued of course to live with them—was a dipsomaniac. Very certainly Rudolph Musgrave was not Patricia's informant; it is doubtful if the colonel ever conceded his sister's infirmity in his most private meditations; so that Patricia found the cause of Miss Agatha's 'attacks' to be an open secret of which everyone in the house seemed aware and of which by tacit agreement nobody ever spoke. It bewildered Patricia, at first, to find that as concerned Lichfield at large any over-indulgence in alcohol by a member of the Musgrave family was satisfactorily accounted for by the matter-of-course statement that the Musgraves usually 'drank,'—just as the Allardyces notoriously perpetuated the taint of insanity, and the Townsends were proverbially unable 'to let women alone,' and the Vartreys were deplorably prone to dabble in literature. These things had been for a long while just as they were to-day; and therefore (Lichfield estimated) they must be reasonable.
Then, too, Patricia would have preferred to have been rid of the old mulatto woman Virginia, because it was through Virginia that Miss Agatha furtively procured intoxicants. But Rudolph Musgrave would not consider Virginia's leaving. 'Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many years of faithful service' was the formula with which he dismissed the suggestion … Afterward Patricia learned from Miss Agatha of the wrong that had been done Virginia by Olaf's uncle, Senator Edward Musgrave, the noted ante-bellum orator, and understood that Olaf—without, of course, conceding it to himself, because that was Olaf's way—was trying to make reparation. Patricia respected the sentiment, and continued to fret under its manifestation.
Miss Agatha also told Patricia of how the son of Virginia and Senator Musgrave had come to a disastrous end—'lynched in Texas, I believe, only it may not have been Texas. And indeed when I come to think of it, I don't believe it was, because I know we first heard of it on a Monday, and Virginia couldn't do the washing that week and I had to send it out. And for the usual crime, of course. It simply shows you how much better off the darkies were before the War,' Miss Agatha said.
Patricia refrained from comment, not being willing to consider the deduction strained. For love is a contagious infection; and loving Rudolph Musgrave so much, Patricia must perforce love any person whom he loved as conscientiously as she would have strangled any person with whom he had flirted.
And yet, to Patricia, it was beginning to seem that Patricia Musgrave was not living, altogether, in that Lichfield which John Charteris has made immortal—'that nursery of Free Principles' (according to the
IV
It may be remembered that Lichfield had asked long ago, 'But who, pray, are the Stapyltons?' It was characteristic of Colonel Musgrave that he went about answering the question without delay. The Stapletons—for 'Stapylton' was a happy innovation of Roger Stapylton's dead wife—the colonel knew to have been farmers in Brummell County, and Brummell Courthouse is within an hour's ride, by rail, of Lichfield.
So he set about his labor of love.
And in it he excelled himself. The records of Brummell date back to 1750 and are voluminous; but Rudolph Musgrave did not overlook an item in any Will Book, or in any Orders of the Court, that pertained, however remotely, to the Stapletons. Then he renewed his labors at the courthouse of the older county from which Brummell was formed in 1750, and through many fragmentary, evil-odored and unindexed volumes indefatigably pursued the family's fortune back to the immigration of its American progenitor in 1619,—and, by the happiest fatality, upon the same
The colonel made a book of his Stapyltonian researches which he vaingloriously proclaimed to be the stupidest reading within the ample field of uninteresting printed English. Patricia was allowed to see no word of it until the first ten copies had come from the printer's, very splendid in green 'art-vellum' and stamped with the Stapylton coat-of-arms in gold.
She read the book. 'It is perfectly superb,' was her verdict. 'It is as dear as remembered kisses after death and as sweet as a plaintiff in a breach-of-promise suit. Only I would have preferred it served with a few kings and dukes for parsley. The Stapletons don't seem to have been anything but perfectly respectable mediocrities.'
The colonel smiled. At the bottom of his heart he shared Patricia's regret that the Stapylton pedigree was unadorned by a potentate, because nobody can stay unimpressed by a popular superstition, however crass the thing may be. But for all this, an appraisal of himself and his own achievements profusely showed high lineage is not invariably a guarantee of excellence; and so he smiled and said:
'There are two ends to every stick. It was the Stapletons and others of their sort, rather than any soft- handed Musgraves, who converted a wilderness, a little by a little, into the America of to-day. The task was tediously achieved, and without ostentation; and always the ship had its resplendent figure-head, as always it had its hidden, nay! grimy, engines, which propelled the ship. And, however direfully America may differ from Utopia, to have assisted in the making of America is no mean distinction. We Musgraves and our peers, I sometimes think, may possibly have been just gaudy autumn leaves which happened to lie in the path of a high wind. And to cut a gallant figure in such circumstances does not necessarily prove the performer to be a
Patricia fluttered, and as lightly and irresponsibly as a wren might have done, perched on his knee.
'No! there is really something in heredity, after all. Now, you are a Musgrave in every vein of you. It always seems like a sort of flippancy for you to appear in public without a stock and a tarnished gilt frame with most of the gilt knocked off and a catalogue-number tucked in the corner.' Patricia spoke without any regard for punctuation. 'And I am so unlike you. I am only a Stapylton. I do hope you don't mind my being merely a Stapylton, Olaf, because if only I wasn't too modest to even think of alluding to the circumstance, I would try to tell you about the tiniest fraction of how much a certain ravishingly beautiful half-strainer loves you, Olaf, and the consequences would be deplorable.'
'My dear——' he began.
'Ouch!' said Patricia; 'you are tickling me. You don't shave half as often as you used to, do you? No, nowadays you think you have me safe and don't have to bother about being attractive. If I had a music-box I could put your face into it and play all sorts of tunes, only I prefer to look at it. You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever. And besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my father's side, too, doesn't it, Olaf?'
The colonel laughed. 'Madam Vanity!' said he, 'I repeat that to be descended of a line of czars or from a house of emperors is, at the worst, an empty braggartism, or, at best—upon the plea of heredity—a handy palliation for iniquity; and to be descended of sturdy and honest and clean-blooded folk is beyond doubt preferable, since upon quite similar grounds it entitles one to hope that even now, 'when their generation is gone, when their play is over, when their panorama is withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world,' there may yet survive of them 'some few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.''
Patricia—with eyes widened in admiration at his rhetoric,—had turned an enticing shade of pink.
'I am glad of that,' she said.
She snuggled so close he could not see her face now. She was to all appearances attempting to twist the top-button from his coat.
'I am very glad that it entitles one to hope—about the children—Because—'
The colonel lifted her a little from him. He did not say anything. But he was regarding her half in wonder and one-half in worship.
She, too, was silent. Presently she nodded.
He kissed her as one does a very holy relic.
It was a moment to look back upon always. There was no period in Rudolph Musgrave's life when he could
