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

To those who knew John Charteris only through the medium of the printed page it must have appeared that the novelist was stayed in mid-career by an accident of unrelieved and singular brutality. And truly, thus extinguished by the unfounded jealousy of a madman, the force of Charteris's genius seemed, and seems to-day, as emphasized by that sinister caprice of chance which annihilated it.

But people in Lichfield, after the manner of each prophet's countrymen, had their own point of view. The artist always stood between these people and the artist's handiwork, in part obscuring it.

In any event, it was generally agreed in Lichfield that Anne Charteris's conduct after her husband's death was not all which could be desired. To begin with, she attended the funeral, in black, it was true, but wearing only the lightest of net veils pinned under her chin—'more as if she were going somewhere on the train, you know, than as if she were in genuine bereavement.'

'Jack didn't approve of mourning. He said it was a heathen survival.' 

That was the only explanation she offered. 

It seemed inadequate to Lichfield. It was preferable, as good taste went, for a widow to be too overcome to attend her husband's funeral at all. And Mrs. Charteris had not wept once during the church ceremony, and had not even had hysterics during the interment at Cedarwood; and she had capped a scandalous morning's work by remaining with the undertaker and the bricklayers to supervise the closing of John Charteris's grave.

'Why, but of course. It is the last thing I will ever be allowed to do for him,' she had said, in innocent surprise. 'Why shouldn't I?'

Her air was such that you were both to talk to her about appearances.

'Because she isn't a bit like a widow,' as Mrs. Ashmeade pointed out. 'Anybody can condole with a widow, and devote two outer sheets to explaining that you realize nothing you can say will be of any comfort to her, and begin at the top of the inside page by telling her how much better off he is to-day—which I have always thought a double-edged assertion when advanced to a man's widow. But you cannot condole with a lantern whose light has been blown out. That is what Anne is.'

Mrs. Ashmeade meditated and appeared dissatisfied. 'And John Charteris of all people!'

Anne was presently about the Memorial Edition of her husband's collected writings. It was magnificently printed and when marketed achieved a flattering success. Robert Etheridge Townsend was commissioned to write the authorized Life of John Charteris and to arrange the two volumes of Letters.

Anne was considered an authority on literature and art in general, through virtue of reflected glory. And in the interviews she granted various journalists it was noticeable that she no longer referred to 'Jack' or to 'Mr. Charteris,' but to 'my husband.' To have been his wife was her one claim on estimation. And, for the rest, it is inadequate to love the memory of a martyr. Worship is demanded; and so the wife became the priestess.

II

Into Colonel Musgrave's mental processes during this period it will not do to pry too closely. The man had his white nights and his battles, in part with real grief and regret, and in part with sundry emotions which he took on faith as the emotions he ought to have, and, therefore, manifestly, suffered under…. 'Patricia was my wife, Jack was my brother,' ran his verdict in the outcome; and beyond that he did not care to go.

For death cowed his thoughts. In the colonel's explicit theology dead people were straightway conveyed to either one or the other of two places. He had very certainly never known anybody who in his opinion merited the torments of his orthodox Gehenna; so that in imagination he vaguely populated its blazing corridors with Nero and Judas and Caesar Borgia and Henry VIII, and Spanish Inquisitors and the aboriginal American Indians—excepting of course his ancestress Pocahontas—and with Benedict Arnold and all the 'carpet-baggers' and suchlike other eminent practitioners of depravity. For no one whom Rudolph Musgrave had ever encountered in the flesh had been really and profoundly wicked, Rudolph Musgrave considered; and so, he always gravely estimated this-or-that acquaintance, after death, to be 'better off, poor fellow'—as the colonel phrased it, with a tinge of self- contradiction—even if he actually refrained in fancy from endowing the deceased with aureate harps and crowns and footgear. In fine, death cowed the colonel's thoughts; beyond the grave they did not care to venture, and when confronted with that abyss they decorously balked.

Patricia and Jack were as a matter of course 'better off,' then—and, miraculously purged of faults, with all their defects somehow remedied, the colonel's wife and brother, with Agatha and the colonel's other interred relatives, were partaking of dignified joys in bright supernal iridescent realms, which the colonel resignedly looked forward to entering, on some comfortably remote day or another, and thus rejoining his transfigured kindred…. Such was the colonel's charitable decision, in the forming whereof logic was in no way implicated. For religion, as the colonel would have told you sedately, was not a thing to be reasoned about. Attempting to do that, you became in Rudolph Musgrave's honest eyes regrettably flippant.

Meanwhile Cousin Lucy Fentnor was taking care of the colonel and little Roger. And Lichfield, long before the lettering on Patricia's tombstone had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave, upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial arrangement, without provoking scandal's tongue to more than a jocose innuendo or two when people met for 'auction'—that new-fangled perplexing variant of bridge, just introduced, wherein you bid on the suits…. And, besides, Cousin Lucy Fentnor (as befitted any one born an Allardyce) was to all accounts a notable housekeeper, famed alike for the perilous glassiness of her hardwood floors, her dexterous management of servants, her Honiton-braid fancy-work (familiar to every patron of Lichfield charity bazaars), and her unparalleled calves-foot jelly. Under Cousin Lucy Fentnor's systematized coddling little Roger grew like the proverbial ill weed, and the colonel likewise waxed perceptibly in girth.

Thus it was that accident and a woman's intervention seemed once more to combine in shielding Rudolph Musgrave from discomfort. And in consequence it was considered improbable that at this late day the colonel would do the proper thing by Clarice Pendomer, as, at the first tidings of Patricia's death, had been authentically rumored among the imaginative; and, in fact, Lichfield no longer considered that necessary. The claim of outraged morality against these two had been thrown out of court, through some unworded social statute of limitation, as far as Lichfield went. Of course it was interesting to note that the colonel called at Mrs. Pendomer's rather frequently nowadays; but, then, Clarice Pendomer had all sorts of callers now—though not many in skirts—and she played poker with men for money until unregenerate hours of the night, and was reputed with a wealth of corroborative detail to have even less discussable sources of income: so that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been born a Bellingham…. But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital aspirations of Cousin Lucy Fentnor.

And, moreover, the colonel—in colloquial phrase at least—went everywhere. After the six months of comparative seclusion which decency exacted of his widowerhood—and thereby afforded him ample leisure to complete and publish his Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to 1800—the colonel, be it repeated, went everywhere; and people found him no whit the worse company for his black gloves and the somber band stitched to his coatsleeve. So Lichfield again received him gladly, as the social triumph of his generation. Handsome and trim and affable, no imaginable tourist could possibly have divined—for everybody in Lichfield knew, of course—that Rudolph Musgrave had rounded his half-century; and he stayed, as ever, invaluable to Lichfield matrons alike against the entertainment of an 'out-of-town' girl, the management of a cotillon, and the prevention of unpleasant pauses among incongruous dinner-companies.

But of Anne Charteris he saw very little nowadays. And, indeed, it was of her own choice that Anne lived apart from Lichfieldian junketings, contented with her dreams and her pride therein, and her remorseful tender memories of the things she might have done for Jack and had not done—lived upon exalted levels nowadays, to which the colonel's more urbane bereavement did not aspire.