When those then famous warriors, Colonel Gaynor and Captain Green, were
obstinately fighting extradition in Quebec; when in Washington the
Senate was wording a suitable resolution wherewith to congratulate Cuba
upon that island's brand-new independence; and when Messieurs
Fitzsimmons and Jeffries were making amicable arrangements in San
Francisco to fight for the world's championship:--at this remote time,
in Chicago (on the same day, indeed, that in this very city Mr. S.E.
Gross was legally declared the author of a play called Cyrano de
Bergerac), the Sons of the Colonial Governors opened their tenth
biennial convention. You may depend upon it that Colonel Rudolph
Musgrave represented the Lichfield chapter.
It was two days later the telegram arrived. It read:
_Agatha very ill come to me roger in perfect health._
PATRICIA.
He noted how with Stapyltonian thrift Patricia telegraphed ten words
precisely....
And when he had reached home, late in the evening, the colonel, not
having taken his bunch of keys with him, laid down his dress-suit case
on the dark porch, and reached out one hand to the door-bell. He found
it muffled with some flimsy, gritty fabric. He did not ring.
Upon the porch was a rustic bench. He sat upon it for a quarter of an
hour--precisely where he had first talked with Agatha about Patricia's
first coming to Lichfield.... Once the door of a house across the street
was opened, with a widening gush of amber light wherein he saw three
women fitting wraps about them. One of them was adjusting a lace scarf
above her hair.
"No, we're not a _bit_ afraid--Just around the corner, you know--_Such_
a pleasant evening----" Their voices carried far in the still night.
Rudolph Musgrave was not thinking of anything. Presently he went around
through the side entrance, and thus came into the kitchen, where the old
mulattress, Virginia, was sitting alone. The room was very hot.... In
Agatha's time supper would have been cooked upon the gas-range in the
cellar, he reflected.... Virginia had risen and made as though to take
his dress-suit case, her pleasant yellow face as imperturbable as an
idol's.
"No--don't bother, Virginia," said Colonel Musgrave.
He met Patricia in the dining-room, on her way to the kitchen. She had
not chosen--as even the most sensible of us will instinctively decline
to do--to vex the quiet of a house wherein death was by ringing a bell.
Holding his hand in hers, fondling it as she talked, Patricia told how
three nights before Miss Agatha had been "queer, you know," at supper.
Patricia had not liked to leave her, but it was the night of the Woman's
Club's second Whist Tournament. And Virginia had promised to watch Miss
Agatha. And, anyhow, Miss Agatha had gone to bed before Patricia left
the house, and _anybody_ would have thought she was going to sleep all
night. And, in fine, Patricia's return at a drizzling half-past eleven
had found Miss Agatha sitting in the garden, in her night-dress only,
weeping over fancied grievances--and Virginia asleep in the kitchen. And
Agatha had died that afternoon of pneumonia.
Even in the last half-stupor she was asking always when would Rudolph
come? Patricia told him....
Rudolph Musgrave did not say anything. Without any apparent emotion he
put Patricia aside, much as he did the dress-suit case which he had
forgotten to lay down until Patricia had ended her recital.
He went upstairs--to the front room, Patricia's bedroom. Patricia
followed him.
Agatha's body lay upon the bed, with a sheet over all. The undertaker's
skill had arranged everything with smug and horrible tranquillity.
Rudolph Musgrave remembered he was forty-six years old; and when in all
these years had there been a moment when Agatha--the real Agatha--had
not known that what he had done was self-evidently correct, because
otherwise Rudolph would not have done it?
"I trust you enjoyed your whist-game, Patricia."
"Well, I couldn't help it. I'm not running a sanitarium. I wasn't
responsible for her eternal drinking."
The words skipped out of either mouth like gleeful little devils.
Then both were afraid, and both were as icily tranquil as the thing upon
the bed. You could not hear anything except the clock upon the mantel.
Colonel Musgrave went to the mantel, opened the clock, and with an odd
deliberation removed the pendulum from its hook. Followed one metallic
gasp, as of indignation, and then silence.
He spoke, still staring at the clock, his back turned to Patricia. "You
must be utterly worn out. You had better go to bed."
He shifted by the fraction of an inch the old-fashioned "hand-colored"
daguerreotype of his father in Confederate uniform. "Please don't wear
that black dress again. It is no cause for mourning that we are rid of
an encumbrance."
Behind him, very far away, it seemed, he heard Patricia wailing,
"Olaf----!"
Colonel Musgrave turned without any haste. "Please go," he said, and
appeared to plead with her. "You must be frightfully tired. I am sorry
that I was not here. I seem always to evade my responsibilities,
somehow--"
Then he began to laugh. "It _is_ rather amusing, after all. Agatha was
the most noble person I have ever known. The--this habit of hers to
which you have alluded was not a part of her. And I loved Agatha. And I
suppose loving is not altogether dependent upon logic. In any event, I
loved Agatha. And when I came back to her I had come home,
somehow--wherever she might be at the time. That has been true, oh, ever
since I can remember--"
He touched the dead hand now. "Please go!" he said, and he did not look
toward Patricia. "For Agatha loved me better than she did God, you know.
The curse was born in her. She had to pay for what those dead,
soft-handed Musgraves did. That is why her hands are so cold now. She
had to pay for the privilege of being a Musgrave, you see. But then we
cannot always pick and choose as to what we prefer to be."
"Oh, yes, of course, it is all my fault. Everything is my fault. But God
knows what would have become of you and your Agatha if it hadn't been
for me. Oh! oh!" Patricia wailed. "I was a child and I hadn't any better
sense, and I married you, and you've been living off my money ever
since! There hasn't been a Christmas present or a funeral wreath bought
in this house since I came into it I didn't pick out and pay for out of
my own pocket. And all the thanks I get for it is this perpetual
fault-finding, and I wish I was dead like this poor saint here. She
spent her life slaving for you. And what thanks did she get for it? Oh,
you ought to go down on your knees, Rudolph Musgrave--!"
"Please leave," he said.
"I will leave when I feel like it, and not a single minute before, and
you might just as well understand as much. You _have_ been living off my
money. Oh, you needn't go to the trouble of lying. And she did too. And
she hated me, she always hated me, because I had been fool enough to
marry you, and she carried on like a lunatic more than half the time,
and I always pretended not to notice it, and this is my reward for
trying to behave like a lady."
Patricia tossed her head. "Yes, and you needn't look at me as if I were
some sort of a bug you hadn't ever seen before and didn't approve of,
because I've seen you try that high-and-mighty trick too often for it to
work with me."
Patricia stood now beneath the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave.
She had insisted, long ago, that it be hung in her own bedroom--"because
it was through that beautiful boy we first got really acquainted, Olaf."
The boy smiles at you from the canvas, smiles ambiguously, as the
colonel now noted.
"I think you had better go," said Colonel Musgrave. "Please go,
Patricia, before I murder you."
She saw that he was speaking in perfect earnest.