It may be remembered that Lichfield had asked long ago, "But who, pray,
are the Stapyltons?" It was characteristic of Colonel Musgrave that he
went about answering the question without delay. The Stapletons--for
"Stapylton" was a happy innovation of Roger Stapylton's dead wife--the
colonel knew to have been farmers in Brummell County, and Brummell
Courthouse is within an hour's ride, by rail, of Lichfield.
So he set about his labor of love.
And in it he excelled himself. The records of Brummell date back to 1750
and are voluminous; but Rudolph Musgrave did not overlook an item in any
Will Book, or in any Orders of the Court, that pertained, however
remotely, to the Stapletons. Then he renewed his labors at the
courthouse of the older county from which Brummell was formed in 1750,
and through many fragmentary, evil-odored and unindexed volumes
indefatigably pursued the family's fortune back to the immigration of
its American progenitor in 1619,--and, by the happiest fatality, upon
the same _Bona Nova_ which enabled the first American Musgrave to grace
the Colony of Virginia with his presence. It could no longer be said
that the wife of a Musgrave of Matocton lacked an authentic and
tolerably ancient pedigree.
The colonel made a book of his Stapyltonian researches which he
vaingloriously proclaimed to be the stupidest reading within the ample
field of uninteresting printed English. Patricia was allowed to see no
word of it until the first ten copies had come from the printer's, very
splendid in green "art-vellum" and stamped with the Stapylton
coat-of-arms in gold.
She read the book. "It is perfectly superb," was her verdict. "It is as
dear as remembered kisses after death and as sweet as a plaintiff in a
breach-of-promise suit. Only I would have preferred it served with a few
kings and dukes for parsley. The Stapletons don't seem to have been
anything but perfectly respectable mediocrities."
The colonel smiled. At the bottom of his heart he shared Patricia's
regret that the Stapylton pedigree was unadorned by a potentate, because
nobody can stay unimpressed by a popular superstition, however crass the
thing may be. But for all this, an appraisal of himself and his own
achievements profusely showed high lineage is not invariably a guarantee
of excellence; and so he smiled and said:
"There are two ends to every stick. It was the Stapletons and others of
their sort, rather than any soft-handed Musgraves, who converted a
wilderness, a little by a little, into the America of to-day. The task
was tediously achieved, and without ostentation; and always the ship had
its resplendent figure-head, as always it had its hidden, nay! grimy,
engines, which propelled the ship. And, however direfully America may
differ from Utopia, to have assisted in the making of America is no mean
distinction. We Musgraves and our peers, I sometimes think, may possibly
have been just gaudy autumn leaves which happened to lie in the path of
a high wind. And to cut a gallant figure in such circumstances does not
necessarily prove the performer to be a _rara avis_, even though he
rides the whirlwind quite as splendidly as any bird existent."
Patricia fluttered, and as lightly and irresponsibly as a wren might
have done, perched on his knee.
"No! there is really something in heredity, after all. Now, you are a
Musgrave in every vein of you. It always seems like a sort of flippancy
for you to appear in public without a stock and a tarnished gilt frame
with most of the gilt knocked off and a catalogue-number tucked in the
corner." Patricia spoke without any regard for punctuation. "And I am so
unlike you. I am only a Stapylton. I do hope you don't mind my being
merely a Stapylton, Olaf, because if only I wasn't too modest to even
think of alluding to the circumstance, I would try to tell you about the
tiniest fraction of how much a certain ravishingly beautiful
half-strainer loves you, Olaf, and the consequences would be
deplorable."
"My dear----" he began.
"Ouch!" said Patricia; "you are tickling me. You don't shave half as
often as you used to, do you? No, nowadays you think you have me safe
and don't have to bother about being attractive. If I had a music-box I
could put your face into it and play all sorts of tunes, only I prefer
to look at it. You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever. And
besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the
House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my
father's side, too, doesn't it, Olaf?"
The colonel laughed. "Madam Vanity!" said he, "I repeat that to be
descended of a line of czars or from a house of emperors is, at the
worst, an empty braggartism, or, at best--upon the plea of heredity--a
handy palliation for iniquity; and to be descended of sturdy and honest
and clean-blooded folk is beyond doubt preferable, since upon quite
similar grounds it entitles one to hope that even now, 'when their
generation is gone, when their play is over, when their panorama is
withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world,' there may yet survive
of them 'some few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have
retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.'"
Patricia--with eyes widened in admiration at his rhetoric,--had turned
an enticing shade of pink.
"I am glad of that," she said.
She snuggled so close he could not see her face now. She was to all
appearances attempting to twist the top-button from his coat.
"I am very glad that it entitles one to hope--about the
children--Because--"
The colonel lifted her a little from him. He did not say anything. But
he was regarding her half in wonder and one-half in worship.
She, too, was silent. Presently she nodded.
He kissed her as one does a very holy relic.
It was a moment to look back upon always. There was no period in Rudolph
Musgrave's life when he could not look back upon this instant and exult
because it had been his.
* * * * *
Only, Patricia found out afterward, with an inexplicable disappointment,
that her husband had not been talking extempore, but was freely quoting
his "Compiler's Foreword" just as it figured in the printed book.
One judges this posturing, so inevitable of detection, to have been as
significant of much in Rudolph Musgrave as was the fact of its belated
discovery characteristic of Patricia.
Yet she had read this book about her family from purely normal motives:
first, to make certain how old her various cousins were; secondly, to
gloat over any traces of distinction such as her ancestry afforded;
thirdly, to note with what exaggerated importance the text seemed to
accredit those relatives she did not esteem, and mentally to annotate
each page with unprintable events "which _everybody_ knew about"; and
fourthly, to reflect, as with a gush of steadily augmenting love, how
dear and how unpractical it was of Olaf to have concocted these
date-bristling pages--so staunch and blind in his misguided gratitude
toward those otherwise uninteresting people who had rendered possible
the existence of a Patricia.
V
Matters went badly with Patricia in the ensuing months. Her mother's
blood told here, as Colonel Musgrave saw with disquietude. He knew the
women of his race had by ordinary been unfit for childbearing; indeed,
the daughters of this famous house had long, in a grim routine,
perished, just as Patricia's mother had done, in their first maternal
essay. There were many hideous histories the colonel could have told you
of, unmeet to be set down, and he was familiar with this talk of pelvic
anomalies which were congenital. But he had never thought of Patricia,
till this, as being his kinswoman, and in part a Musgrave.
And even now the Stapylton blood that was in her pulled Patricia through
long weeks of anguish. Surgeons dealt with her very horribly in a famed
Northern hospital, whither she had been removed. By her obdurate
request--and secretly, to his own preference, since it was never in his
power to meet discomfort willingly--Colonel Musgrave had remained in
Lichfield. Patricia knew that officious people would tell him her life
could be saved only by the destruction of an unborn boy.
She never questioned her child would be a boy. She knew that Olaf wanted
a boy.
"Oh, even more than he does me, daddy. And so he mustn't know, you see,
until it is all over. Because Olaf is such an ill-informed person that
he really believes he prefers me."
"Pat," her father inconsequently said, "I'm proud of you! And--and, by
God, if I _want_ to cry, I guess I am old enough to know my own mind!
And I'll help you in this if you'll only promise not to die in spite of
what these damn' doctors say, because you're _mine_, Pat, and so you
realize a bargain is a bargain."
"Yes--I am really yours, daddy. It is just my crazy body that is a
Musgrave," Patricia explained. "The real me is an unfortunate Stapylton
who has somehow got locked up in the wrong house. It is not a desirable
residence, you know, daddy. No modern improvements, for instance. But I
have to live in it!... Still, I have not the least intention of dying,
and I solemnly promise that I won't."
So these two hoodwinked Rudolph Musgrave, and brought it about by
subterfuge that his child was born. At most he vaguely understood that
Patricia was having rather a hard time of it, and steadfastly drugged
this knowledge by the performance of trivialities. He was eating a
cucumber sandwich at the moment young Roger Musgrave came into the
world, and by that action very nearly accomplished Patricia's death.