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

how the telling of a smutty jest or the insistence upon a manifestly superfluous glass of wine had purchased from some properly tickled magnate a much desiderated 'tip.'

And presently these tips misled him. So the colonel borrowed from 'Patricia's account.' 

And on this occasion he guessed correctly.

And then he stumbled upon such a chance for reinvestment as does not often arrive. And so he borrowed a trifle more in common justice to Patricia….

VIII

When those then famous warriors, Colonel Gaynor and Captain Green, were obstinately fighting extradition in Quebec; when in Washington the Senate was wording a suitable resolution wherewith to congratulate Cuba upon that island's brand-new independence; and when Messieurs Fitzsimmons and Jeffries were making amicable arrangements in San Francisco to fight for the world's championship:—at this remote time, in Chicago (on the same day, indeed, that in this very city Mr. S.E. Gross was legally declared the author of a play called Cyrano de Bergerac), the Sons of the Colonial Governors opened their tenth biennial convention. You may depend upon it that Colonel Rudolph Musgrave represented the Lichfield chapter.

It was two days later the telegram arrived. It read:

  Agatha very ill come to me roger in perfect health. 

  PATRICIA.

He noted how with Stapyltonian thrift Patricia telegraphed ten words precisely….

And when he had reached home, late in the evening, the colonel, not having taken his bunch of keys with him, laid down his dress-suit case on the dark porch, and reached out one hand to the door-bell. He found it muffled with some flimsy, gritty fabric. He did not ring.

Upon the porch was a rustic bench. He sat upon it for a quarter of an hour—precisely where he had first talked with Agatha about Patricia's first coming to Lichfield…. Once the door of a house across the street was opened, with a widening gush of amber light wherein he saw three women fitting wraps about them. One of them was adjusting a lace scarf above her hair.

'No, we're not a bit afraid—Just around the corner, you know— Such a pleasant evening——' Their voices carried far in the still night.

Rudolph Musgrave was not thinking of anything. Presently he went around through the side entrance, and thus came into the kitchen, where the old mulattress, Virginia, was sitting alone. The room was very hot…. In Agatha's time supper would have been cooked upon the gas-range in the cellar, he reflected…. Virginia had risen and made as though to take his dress-suit case, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an idol's.

'No—don't bother, Virginia,' said Colonel Musgrave.

He met Patricia in the dining-room, on her way to the kitchen. She had not chosen—as even the most sensible of us will instinctively decline to do—to vex the quiet of a house wherein death was by ringing a bell.

Holding his hand in hers, fondling it as she talked, Patricia told how three nights before Miss Agatha had been 'queer, you know,' at supper. Patricia had not liked to leave her, but it was the night of the Woman's Club's second Whist Tournament. And Virginia had promised to watch Miss Agatha. And, anyhow, Miss Agatha had gone to bed before Patricia left the house, and anybody would have thought she was going to sleep all night. And, in fine, Patricia's return at a drizzling half-past eleven had found Miss Agatha sitting in the garden, in her night-dress only, weeping over fancied grievances—and Virginia asleep in the kitchen. And Agatha had died that afternoon of pneumonia.

Even in the last half-stupor she was asking always when would Rudolph come? Patricia told him….

Rudolph Musgrave did not say anything. Without any apparent emotion he put Patricia aside, much as he did the dress-suit case which he had forgotten to lay down until Patricia had ended her recital.

He went upstairs—to the front room, Patricia's bedroom. Patricia followed him.

Agatha's body lay upon the bed, with a sheet over all. The undertaker's skill had arranged everything with smug and horrible tranquillity.

Rudolph Musgrave remembered he was forty-six years old; and when in all these years had there been a moment when Agatha—the real Agatha—had not known that what he had done was self-evidently correct, because otherwise Rudolph would not have done it?

'I trust you enjoyed your whist-game, Patricia.'

'Well, I couldn't help it. I'm not running a sanitarium. I wasn't responsible for her eternal drinking.'

The words skipped out of either mouth like gleeful little devils.

Then both were afraid, and both were as icily tranquil as the thing upon the bed. You could not hear anything except the clock upon the mantel. Colonel Musgrave went to the mantel, opened the clock, and with an odd deliberation removed the pendulum from its hook. Followed one metallic gasp, as of indignation, and then silence.

He spoke, still staring at the clock, his back turned to Patricia. 'You must be utterly worn out. You had better go to bed.'

He shifted by the fraction of an inch the old-fashioned 'hand-colored' daguerreotype of his father in Confederate uniform. 'Please don't wear that black dress again. It is no cause for mourning that we are rid of an encumbrance.'

Behind him, very far away, it seemed, he heard Patricia wailing, 'Olaf——!' 

Colonel Musgrave turned without any haste. 'Please go,' he said, and appeared to plead with her. 'You must be frightfully tired. I am sorry that I was not here. I seem always to evade my responsibilities, somehow—'

Then he began to laugh. 'It is rather amusing, after all. Agatha was the most noble person I have ever known. The—this habit of hers to which you have alluded was not a part of her. And I loved Agatha. And I suppose loving is not altogether dependent upon logic. In any event, I loved Agatha. And when I came back to her I had come home, somehow—wherever she might be at the time. That has been true, oh, ever since I can remember—'

He touched the dead hand now. 'Please go!' he said, and he did not look toward Patricia. 'For Agatha loved me better than she did God, you know. The curse was born in her. She had to pay for what those dead, soft-handed Musgraves did. That is why her hands are so cold now. She had to pay for the privilege of being a Musgrave, you see. But then we cannot always pick and choose as to what we prefer to be.'

'Oh, yes, of course, it is all my fault. Everything is my fault. But God knows what would have become of you and your Agatha if it hadn't been for me. Oh! oh!' Patricia wailed. 'I was a child and I hadn't any better sense, and I married you, and you've been living off my money ever since! There hasn't been a Christmas present or a funeral wreath bought in this house since I came into it I didn't pick out and pay for out of my own pocket. And all the thanks I get for it is this perpetual fault-finding, and I wish I was dead like this poor saint here. She spent her life slaving for you. And what thanks did she get for it? Oh, you ought to go down on your knees, Rudolph Musgrave —!'

'Please leave,' he said.

'I will leave when I feel like it, and not a single minute before, and you might just as well understand as much. You have been living off my money. Oh, you needn't go to the trouble of lying. And she did too. And she hated me, she always hated me, because I had been fool enough to marry you, and she carried on like a lunatic more than half the time, and I always pretended not to notice it, and this is my reward for trying to behave like a lady.'

Patricia tossed her head. 'Yes, and you needn't look at me as if I were some sort of a bug you hadn't ever seen before and didn't approve of, because I've seen you try that high-and-mighty trick too often for it to work with me.'

Patricia stood now beneath the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave. She had insisted, long ago, that it be hung in her own bedroom—'because it was through that beautiful boy we first got really acquainted, Olaf.' The boy smiles at you from the canvas, smiles ambiguously, as the colonel now noted.

'I think you had better go,' said Colonel Musgrave. 'Please go, Patricia, before I murder you.'