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

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.