IV

And this is how it came about:

Patricia Vartrey (a second cousin once removed of Colonel Rudolph

Musgrave's), as the older inhabitants of Lichfield will volubly attest,

was always a person who did peculiar things. The list of her

eccentricities is far too lengthy here to be enumerated; but she began

it by being born with red hair--Titian reds and auburns were

undiscovered euphemisms in those days--and, in Lichfield, this is not

regarded as precisely a lady-like thing to do; and she ended it, as far

as Lichfield was concerned, by eloping with what Lichfield in its horror

could only describe, with conscious inadequacy, as "a quite unheard-of

person."

Indisputably the man was well-to-do already; and from this nightmarish

topsy-turvidom of Reconstruction the fellow visibly was plucking wealth.

Also young Stapylton was well enough to look at, too, as Lichfield

flurriedly conceded.

But it was equally undeniable that he had made his money through a

series of commercial speculations distinguished both by shiftiness and

daring, and that the man himself had been until the War a wholly

negligible "poor white" person,--an overseer, indeed, for "Wild Will"

Musgrave, Colonel Musgrave's father, who was of course the same

Lieutenant-Colonel William Sebastian Musgrave, C.S.A., that met his

death at Gettysburg.

This upstart married Patricia Vartrey, for all the chatter and

whispering, and carried her away from Lichfield, as yet a little dubious

as to what recognition, if any, should be accorded the existence of the

Stapyltons. And afterward (from a notoriously untruthful North, indeed)

came rumors that he was rapidly becoming wealthy; and of Patricia

Vartrey's death at her daughter's birth; and of the infant's health and

strength and beauty, and of her lavish upbringing,--a Frenchwoman,

Lichfield whispered, with absolutely nothing to do but attend upon the

child.

And then, little by little, a new generation sprang up, and, little by

little, the interest these rumors waked became more lax; and it was

brought about, at last, by the insidious transitions of time, that

Patricia Vartrey was forgotten in Lichfield. Only a few among the older

men remembered her; some of them yet treasured, as these fogies so often

do, a stray fan or an odd glove; and in bycorners of sundry

time-toughened hearts there lurked the memory of a laughing word or of a

glance or of some such casual bounty, that Patricia Vartrey had accorded

these hearts' owners when the world was young.

But Agatha Musgrave, likewise, remembered the orphan cousin who had

been reared with her. She had loved Patricia Vartrey; and, in due time,

she wrote to Patricia's daughter,--in stately, antiquated phrases that

astonished the recipient not a little,--and the girl had answered. The

correspondence flourished. And it was not long before Miss Musgrave had

induced her young cousin to visit Lichfield.

Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, be it understood, knew nothing of all this

until the girl was actually on her way. And now, she was to arrive that

afternoon, to domicile herself in his quiet house for two long

weeks--this utter stranger, look you!--and upset his comfort, ask him

silly questions, expect him to talk to her, and at the end of her visit,

possibly, present him with some outlandish gimcrack made of cardboard

and pink ribbons, in which she would expect him to keep his papers. The

Langham girl did that.

* * * * *

It is honesty's part to give you the man no better than he was.

Lichfield at large had pampered him; many women had loved him; and above

all, Miss Agatha had spoiled him. After fifteen years of being the pivot

about which the economy of a household revolves, after fifteen years of

being the inevitable person whose approval must be secured before any

domestic alteration, however trivial, may be considered, no mortal man

may hope to remain a paragon of unselfishness.

Colonel Musgrave joyed in the society of women. But he classed

them--say, with the croquettes adorned with pink paper frills which were

then invariably served at the suppers of the Lichfield German Club,--as

acceptable enough, upon a conscious holiday, but wholly incongruous with

the slippered ease of home. When you had an inclination for feminine

society, you shaved and changed your clothes and thought up an impromptu

or so against emergency, and went forth to seek it. That was natural;

but to have a petticoated young person infesting your house, hourly, was

as preposterous as ice-cream soda at breakfast.

The metaphor set him off at a tangent. He wondered if this Patricia

person could not (tactfully) be induced to take her bath after

breakfast, as Agatha did? after he had his? Why, confound the girl, he

was not responsible for there being only one bathroom in the house! It

was necessary for him to have his bath and be at the Library by nine

o'clock. This interloper must be made to understand as much.

The colonel reached the Library undecided as to whether Miss Stapylton

had better breakfast in her room, or if it would be entirely proper for

her to come to the table in one of those fluffy lace-trimmed garments

such as Agatha affected at the day's beginning?

The question was a nice one. It was not as though servants were willing

to be bothered with carrying trays to people's rooms; he knew what

Agatha had to say upon that subject. It was not as though he were the

chit's first cousin, either. He almost wished himself in the decline of

life, and free to treat the girl paternally.

And so he fretted all that afternoon.

* * * * *

Then, too, he reflected that it would be very awkward if Agatha should

be unwell while this Patricia person was in the house. Agatha in her

normal state was of course the kindliest and cheeriest gentlewoman in

the universe, but any physical illness appeared to transform her nature

disastrously. She had her "attacks," she "felt badly" very often

nowadays, poor dear; and how was a Patricia person to be expected to

make allowances for the fact that at such times poor Agatha was

unavoidably a little cross and pessimistic?

V

Yet Colonel Musgrave strolled into his garden, later, with a tolerable

affectation of unconcern. Women, after all, he assured himself, were

necessary for the perpetuation of the species; and, resolving for the

future to view these weakly, big-hipped and slope-shouldered makeshifts

of Nature's with larger tolerance, he cocked his hat at a

devil-may-carish angle, and strode up the walk, whistling jauntily and

having, it must be confessed, to the unprejudiced observer very much the

air of a sheep in wolf's clothing.

"At worst," he was reflecting, "I can make love to her. They, as a rule,

take kindlily enough to that; and in the exercise of hospitality a host

must go to all lengths to divert his guests. Failure is not

permitted...."

Then She came to him.

She came to him across the trim, cool lawn, leisurely, yet with a

resilient tread that attested the vigor of her slim young body. She was

all in white, diaphanous, ethereal, quite incredibly incredible; but as

she passed through the long shadows of the garden--fire-new, from the

heart of the sunset, Rudolph Musgrave would have sworn to you,--the lacy

folds and furbelows and semi-transparencies that clothed her were now

tinged with gold, and now, as a hedge or flower-bed screened her from

the horizontal rays, were softened into multitudinous graduations of

grays and mauves and violets.

"Failure is not permitted," he was repeating in his soul....

"You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?" she asked. "How perfectly

entrancing! You see until to-day I always thought that if I had been

offered the choice between having cousins or appendicitis I would have

preferred to be operated on."

And Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about

his heart, that her hair was really like the reflection of a sunset in

rippling waters,--only many times more beautiful, of course,--and that

her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and

that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.

Then he observed that his own mouth was giving utterance to divers

irrelevant and foolish sounds, which eventually resolved themselves into

the statement he was glad to see her. And immediately afterward the

banality of this remark brought the hot blood to his face and, for the

rest of the day, stung him and teased him, somewhere in the background

of his mind, like an incessant insect.

Glad, indeed!

Before he had finished shaking hands with Patricia Stapylton, it was

all over with the poor man.

"Er--h'm!" quoth he.

"Only," Miss Stapylton was meditating, with puckered brow, "it would be

unseemly for me to call you Rudolph--"

"You impertinent minx!" cried he, in his soul; "I should rather think it

would be!"

"--and Cousin Rudolph sounds exactly like a dried-up little man with

eyeglasses and crows' feet and a gentle nature. I rather thought you

were going to be like that, and I regard it as extremely hospitable of

you not to be. You are more like--like what now?" Miss Stapylton put her

head to one side and considered the contents of her vocabulary,--"you

are like a viking. I shall call you Olaf," she announced, when she had

reached a decision.

This, look you, to the most dignified man in Lichfield,--a person who

had never borne a nickname in his life. You must picture for yourself

how the colonel stood before her, big, sturdy and blond, and glared down

at her, and assured himself that he was very indignant; like Timanthes,

the colonel's biographer prefers to draw a veil before the countenance

to which art is unable to do justice.

Then, "I have no admiration for the Northmen," Rudolph Musgrave

declared, stiffly. "They were a rude and barbarous nation, proverbially

addicted to piracy and intemperance."

"My goodness gracious!" Miss Stapylton observed,--and now, for the

first time, he saw the teeth that were like grains of rice upon a pink

rose petal. Also, he saw dimples. "And does one mean all that by a

viking?"

"The vikings," he informed her--and his Library manner had settled upon

him now to the very tips of his fingers--"were pirates. The word is of

Icelandic origin, from _vik_, the name applied to the small inlets along

the coast in which they concealed their galleys. I may mention that Olaf

was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian

monarch to reign in Norway."

"Dear me!" said Miss Stapylton; "how interesting!"

Then she yawned with deliberate cruelty.

"However," she concluded, "I shall call you Olaf, just the same."

"Er--h'm!" said the colonel.

* * * * *

And this stuttering boor (he reflected) was Colonel Rudolph Musgrave,

confessedly the social triumph of his generation! This imbecile, without

a syllable to say for himself, without a solitary adroit word within

tongue's reach, wherewith to annihilate the hussy, was a Musgrave of

Matocton!

* * * * *

And she did. To her he was "Olaf" from that day forth.

Rudolph Musgrave called her, "You." He was nettled, of course, by her

forwardness--"Olaf," indeed!--yet he found it, somehow, difficult to

bear this fact in mind continuously.

For while it is true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall

in love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily

employed with other matters to have much time to profit by current

literature. Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic.

She prefers to jog along in the old rut, contentedly turning out

chromolithographic sunrises such as they give away at the tea stores,

contentedly staging the most violent and improbable melodramas;

and--sturdy old Philistine that she is--she even now permits her

children to fall in love in the most primitive fashion.

She is not particularly interested in subtleties and soul analyses; she

merely chuckles rather complacently when a pair of eyes are drawn,

somehow, to another pair of eyes, and an indescribable something is

altered somewhere in some untellable fashion, and the world, suddenly,

becomes the most delightful place of residence in all the universe.

Indeed, it is her favorite miracle, this. For at work of this sort the

old Philistine knows that she is an adept; and she has rejoiced in the

skill of her hands, with a sober workmanly joy, since Cain first went

a-wooing in the Land of Nod.

So Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, without understanding what had happened to

him, on a sudden was strangely content with life.

It was at supper--dinner, in Lichfield, when not a formal

entertainment, is eaten at two in the afternoon--that he fell

a-speculating as to whether Her eyes, after all, could be fitly

described as purple.

Wasn't there a grayer luminosity about them than he had at first

suspected?--wasn't the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of

sunlight falling upon a wet slate roof?

It was a delicate question, an affair of nuances, of almost

imperceptible graduations; and in debating a matter of such nicety, a

man must necessarily lay aside all petty irritation, such as being

nettled by an irrational nickname, and approach the question with

unbiased mind.

He did. And when, at last, he had come warily to the verge of decision,

Miss Musgrave in all innocence announced that they would excuse him if

he wished to get back to his work.

He discovered that, somehow, the three had finished supper; and,

somehow, he presently discovered himself in his study, where eight

o'clock had found him every evening for the last ten years, when he was

not about his social diversions. An old custom, you will observe, is not

lightly broken.