now that, chafing under his indebtedness in the affair of Mrs. Pendomer, Charteris would most naturally retaliate by making love to his benefactor's wife, because the colonel also knew John Charteris. And for the rest, it was useless to struggle against a Fate that planned such preposterous and elaborate jokes; one might more rationally depend on Fate to work out some both ludicrous and horrible solution, he reflected, remembering a little packet of letters hidden in his desk.
Nevertheless, he paused after a while, and laughed, with a tolerable affectation of mirth.
'I say—I—and what in heaven's name, Polly, prompted you to bring me this choice specimen of a mare's- nest?'
'Because I am fond of you, I suppose. Isn't one always privileged to be disagreeable to one's friends? We have been friends a long while, you know.'
Mrs. Ashmeade was looking out over the river now, but she seemed to see a great way, a very great way, beyond its glaring waters, and to be rather uncertain as to whether what she beheld there was of a humorous or pathetic nature.
'Rudolph, do you remember that evening—the first summer that I knew you—at Fortress Monroe, when we sat upon the pier so frightfully late, and the moon rose out of the bay, and made a great, solid-looking, silver path that led straight over the rim of the world, and you talked to me about—about what, now?'
'Oh, yes, yes!—I remember perfectly! One of the most beautiful evenings I ever saw. I remember it quite distinctly. I talked—I—and what, in the Lord's name, did I talk about, Polly?'
'Ah, men forget! A woman never forgets when she is really friends with a man. I know now you were telling me about Anne Charteris, for you have been in love with her all your life, Rudolph, in your own particular half- hearted and dawdling fashion. Perhaps that is why you have had so many affairs. You plainly found the run of women so unimportant that it put every woman on her pride to prove she was different. Yes, I remember. But that night I thought you were trying to make love to me, and I was disappointed in you, and—yes, rather pleased. Women are all vain and perfectly inconsistent. But then, girl-children always take after their fathers.'
Mrs. Ashmeade rose from her chair. Her fan shut with a snap.
'You were a dear boy, Rudolph, when I first knew you—and what I liked was that you never made love to me. Of all the boys I have known and helped to form, you were the only sensible one—the only one who never presumed. That was rather clever of you, Rudolph. It would have been ridiculous, for even arithmetically I am older than you.
'Wouldn't it have been ridiculous, Rudolph?' she demanded, suddenly.
'Not in the least,' Musgrave protested, in courteous wise. 'You—why, Polly, you were a wonderfully handsome woman. Any boy——'
'Oh, yes!—I was. I'm not now, am I, Rudolph?' Mrs. Ashmeade threw back her head and laughed naturally. 'Ah, dear boy that was, it is unfair, isn't it, for an old woman to seize upon you in this fashion, and insist on your making love to her? But I will let you off. You don't have to do it.'
She caught her skirts in her left hand, preparatory to going, and her right hand rested lightly on his arm. She spoke in a rather peculiar voice.
'Yes,' she said, 'the boy was a very, very dear boy, and I want the man to be equally brave and— sensible.'
Musgrave stared after her. 'I wonder—I wonder—? Oh, no, that couldn't be,' he said, and wearily.
'There must be some preposterous situations that don't come about.'
And afterward he strolled across the lawn, where the locusts were shrilling, as if in a stubborn prediction of something which was inevitable, and he meditated upon a great number of things. There were a host of fleecy little clouds in the sky. He looked up at them, interrogatively.
And then he smiled and shook his head.
'Yet I don't know,' said he; 'for I am coming to the conclusion that the world is run on an extremely humorous basis.'
And oddly enough, it was at the same moment that Patricia—in Lichfield—reached the same conclusion.
PART SEVEN - YOKED
I
The doctor's waiting-room smelt strongly of antiseptics. That was Patricia's predominating thought as she wandered aimlessly about the apartment. She fingered its dusty furniture. She remembered afterward the steel- engraving of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, with General Lee explaining some evidently important matter to those attentive and unhumanly stiff politicians; and she remembered, too, how in depicting one statesman, who unavoidably sat with his back to the spectator, the artist had exceeded anatomical possibilities in order to obtain a recognizable full-faced portrait. Yet at the time this picture had not roused her conscious attention.
She went presently to the long table austerely decorated with two rows of magazines, each partly covered by its neighbor, just as shingles are placed. The arrangement irritated her unreasonably. She wanted to disarrange these dog-eared pamphlets, to throw them on the floor, to destroy them. She wondered how many other miserable people had tried to read these hateful books while they waited in this abominable room.
She started when the door of the consultation-room opened. The doctor was patting the silk glove of a harassed-looking woman in black as he escorted her to the outer door, and was assuring her that everything was going very well indeed, and that she was not to worry, and so on.
And presently he spoke with Patricia, for a long while, quite levelly, of matters which it is not suitable to record. Discreet man that he was, Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke concerning malformation and functional weaknesses
