Long after Miss Stapylton had left him, the colonel sat alone in his
study, idle now, and musing vaguely. There were no more addenda
concerning the descendants of Captain Thomas Osborne that night.
At last, the colonel rose and threw open a window, and stood looking
into the moonlit garden. The world bathed in a mist of blue and silver.
There was a breeze that brought him sweet, warm odors from the garden,
together with a blurred shrilling of crickets and the conspiratorial
conference of young leaves.
"Of course, it is tremendously fine and--and nice, if you like it," he
said, with a faint chuckle. "I wonder, now, if I do like it?"
He was strangely moved. He seemed, somehow, to survey Rudolph Musgrave
and all his doings with complete and unconcerned aloofness. The man's
life, seen in its true proportions, dwindled into the merest flicker of
a match; he had such a little while to live, this Rudolph Musgrave! And
he spent the serious hours of this brief time writing notes and charts
and pamphlets that perhaps some hundred men in all the universe might
care to read--pamphlets no better and no more accurate than hundreds of
other men were writing at that very moment.
No, the capacity for originative and enduring work was not in him; and
this incessant compilation of dreary footnotes, this incessant rummaging
among the bones of the dead--did it, after all, mean more to this
Rudolph Musgrave than one full, vivid hour of life in that militant
world yonder, where men fought for other and more tangible prizes than
the mention of one's name in a genealogical journal?
He could not have told you. In his heart, he knew that a thorough digest
of the Wills and Orders of the Orphans' Court of any county must always
rank as a useful and creditable performance; but, from without, the
sounds and odors of Spring were calling to him, luring him, wringing his
very heart, bidding him come forth into the open and crack a jest or two
before he died, and stare at the girls a little before the match had
flickered out.
* * * * *
At this time he heard a moaning noise. The colonel gave a shrug, sighed,
and ascended to his sister's bedroom. He knew that Agatha must be ill;
and that there is no more efficient quietus to wildish meditations than
the heating of hot-water bottles and the administration of hypnotics he
had long ago discovered.