"It is in many ways made plain to us
That love must grow like any common thing,
Root, bud, and leaf, ere ripe for garnering
The mellow fruitage front us; even thus
Must Helena encounter Theseus
Ere Paris come, and every century
Spawn divers queens who die with Antony
But live a great while first with Julius.
"Thus I have spoken the prologue of a play
Wherein I have no part, and laugh, and sit
Contented in the wings, whilst you portray
An amorous maid with gestures that befit
This lovely rôle,--as who knows better, pray,
Than I that helped you in rehearsing it?"
Horace Symonds. _Civic Voluntaries_.
I
When the Presidential campaign was at its height; when in various
sections of the United States "the boy orator of La Platte" was making
invidious remarks concerning the Republican Party, and in Canton (Ohio)
Mr. M.A. Hanna was cheerfully expressing his confidence as to the
outcome of it all; when the Czar and the Czarina were visiting President
Faure in Paris "amid unparalleled enthusiasm"; and when semi-educated
people were appraising, with a glibness possible to ignorance only, the
literary achievements of William Morris and George du Maurier, who had
just died:--at this remote time, Roger Stapylton returned to Lichfield.
For in that particular October Patricia's father, an accommodating
physician having declared old Roger Stapylton's health to necessitate a
Southern sojourn, leased the Bellingham mansion in Lichfield. It
happened that, by rare good luck, Tom Bellingham--of the Bellinghams of
Assequin, not the Bellinghams of Bellemeade, who indeed immigrated after
the War of 1812 and have never been regarded as securely established
from a social standpoint,--was at this time in pecuniary difficulties on
account of having signed another person's name to a cheque.
Roger Stapylton refurnished the house in the extreme degree of
Lichfieldian elegance. Colonel Musgrave was his mentor throughout the
process; and the oldest families of Lichfield very shortly sat at table
with the former overseer, and not at all unwillingly, since his dinners
were excellent and an infatuated Rudolph Musgrave--an axiom now in
planning any list of guests,--was very shortly to marry the man's
daughter.
In fact, the matter had been settled; and Colonel Musgrave had received
from Roger Stapylton an exuberantly granted charter of courtship.
This befell, indeed, upon a red letter day in Roger Stapylton's life.
The banker was in business matters wonderfully shrewd, as divers
transactions, since the signing of that half-forgotten contract whereby
he was to furnish a certain number of mules for the Confederate service,
strikingly attested: but he had rarely been out of the country wherein
his mother bore him; and where another nabob might have dreamed of an
earl, or even have soared aspiringly in imagination toward a
marchioness-ship for his only child, old Stapylton retained unshaken
faith in the dust-gathering creed of his youth.
He had tolerated Pevensey, had indeed been prepared to purchase him much
as he would have ordered any other expensive trinket or knickknack which
Patricia desired. But he had never viewed the match with enthusiasm.
Now, though, old Stapylton exulted. His daughter--half a Vartrey
already--would become by marriage a Musgrave of Matocton, no less. Pat's
carriage would roll up and down the oak-shaded avenue from which he had
so often stepped aside with an uncovered head, while gentlemen and
ladies cantered by; and it would be Pat's children that would play about
the corridors of the old house at whose doors he had lived so
long,--those awe-inspiring corridors, which he had very rarely entered,
except on Christmas Day and other recognized festivities, when, dressed
to the nines, the overseer and his uneasy mother were by immemorial
custom made free of the mansion, with every slave upon the big
plantation.
"They were good days, sir," he chuckled. "Heh, we'll stick to the old
customs. We'll give a dinner and announce it at dessert, just as your
honored grandfather did your Aunt Constantia's betrothal--"
For about the Musgraves of Matocton there could be no question. It was
the old man's delight to induce Rudolph Musgrave to talk concerning his
ancestors; and Stapylton soon had their history at his finger-tips. He
could have correctly blazoned every tincture in their armorial bearings
and have explained the origin of every rampant, counter-changed or
couchant beast upon the shield.
He knew it was the _Bona Nova_ in the November of 1619,--for the first
Musgrave had settled in Virginia, prior to his removal to
Lichfield,--which had the honor of transporting the forebear of this
family into America. Stapylton could have told you offhand which scions
of the race had represented this or that particular county in the House
of Burgesses, and even for what years; which three of them were
Governors, and which of them had served as officers of the State Line in
the Revolution; and, in fine, was more than satisfied to have his
daughter play Penelophon to Colonel Musgrave's debonair mature Cophetua.
In a word, Roger Stapylton had acquiesced to the transferal of his
daughter's affections with the peculiar equanimity of a properly reared
American parent. He merely stipulated that, since his business affairs
prevented an indefinite stay in Lichfield, Colonel Musgrave should
presently remove to New York City, where the older man held ready for
him a purely ornamental and remunerative position with the Insurance
Company of which Roger Stapylton was president.
But upon this point Rudolph Musgrave was obdurate.
He had voiced, and with sincerity, as you may remember, his desire to be
proven upon a larger stage than Lichfield afforded. Yet the sincerity
was bred of an emotion it did not survive. To-day, unconsciously,
Rudolph Musgrave was reflecting that he was used to living in Lichfield,
and would appear to disadvantage in a new surrounding, and very probably
would not be half so comfortable.
Aloud he said, in firm belief that he spoke truthfully: "I cannot
conscientiously give up the Library, sir. I realize the work may not
seem important in your eyes. Indeed, in anybody's eyes it must seem an
inadequate outcome of a man's whole life. But it unfortunately happens
to be the only kind of work I am capable of doing. And--if you will
pardon me, sir,--I do not think it would be honest for me to accept this
generous salary and give nothing in return."
But here Patricia broke in.
Patricia agreed with Colonel Musgrave in every particular. Indeed, had
Colonel Musgrave proclaimed his intention of setting up in life as an
assassin, Patricia would readily have asserted homicide to be the most
praiseworthy of vocations. As it was, she devoted no little volubility
and emphasis and eulogy to the importance of a genealogist in the
eternal scheme of things; and gave her father candidly to understand
that an inability to appreciate this fact was necessarily indicative of
a deplorably low order of intelligence.
Musgrave was to remember--long afterward--how glorious and dear this
brightly-colored, mettlesome and tiny woman had seemed to him in the
second display of temper he witnessed in Patricia. It was a revelation
of an additional and as yet unsuspected adorability.
Her father, though, said: "Pat, I've suspected for a long time it was
foolish of me to have a red-haired daughter." Thus he capitulated,--and
with an ineffable air of routine.
Colonel Musgrave was, in a decorous fashion, the happiest of living
persons.