"You jay-bird, you behave entirely too much as if you were my
grandfather. As I was saying, Agatha told me all about your uncle and
Virginia," Patricia hurried on. "And how she ran away afterwards, and
hid in the woods for three days, and came to your father's plantation,
and how your father bought her, and how her son was born, and how her
son was lynched--"
"Now, really, Patricia! Surely there are other matters which may be more
profitably discussed."
"Of course. Now, for instance, why is the King of Hearts the only one
that hasn't a moustache?" Patricia peeped to see what cards lay beneath
that monarch, and upon reflection moved the King of Spades into the
vacant space. She was a devotee of solitaire and invariably cheated at
it.
She went on, absently: "But don't you see? That colored boy was your own
first cousin, and he was killed for doing exactly what his father had
done. Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of
flubdub and laid him out in state when he died--and they poured kerosene
upon the son and burned him alive. And I believe Virginia thinks that
wasn't fair."
"What do you mean?"
"I honestly believe Virginia hates the Musgraves. She is only a negro,
of course, but then she was a mother once--Oh, yes! all I need is a
black eight--" Patricia demanded, "Now look at your brother Hector--the
awfully dissipated one that died of an overdose of opiates. When it
happened wasn't Virginia taking care of him?"
"Of course. She is an invaluable nurse."
"And nobody else was here when Agatha went out into the rain. Now, what
if she had just let Agatha go, without trying to stop her? It would have
been perfectly simple. So is this. All I have to do is to take them off
now."
Colonel Musgrave negligently returned to his perusal of the afternoon
paper. "You are suggesting--if you will overlook my frankness--the most
deplorable sort of nonsense, Patricia."
"I know exactly how Balaam felt," she said, irrelevantly, and fell to
shuffling the cards. "You don't, and you won't, understand that Virginia
is a human being. In any event, I wish you would get rid of her."
"I couldn't decently do that," said Rudolph Musgrave, with careful
patience. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many years of
faithful service. Nothing more strikingly attests the folly of freeing
the negro than the unwillingness of the better class of slaves to leave
their former owners--"
"Now you are going to quote a paragraph or so from your Gracious Era. As
if I hadn't read everything you ever wrote! You are a fearful humbug in
some ways, Rudolph."
"And you are a red-headed rattlepate, madam. But seriously, Patricia,
you who were reared in the North are strangely unwilling to concede that
we of the South are after all best qualified to deal with the Negro
Problem. We know the negro as you cannot ever know him."
"You! Oh, God ha' mercy on us!" mocked Patricia. "There wasn't any Negro
Problem hereabouts, you beautiful idiot, so long as there were any
negroes. Why, to-day there is hardly one full-blooded negro in
Lichfield. There are only a thousand or so of mulattoes who share the
blood of people like your Uncle Edward. And for the most part they take
after their white kin, unfortunately. And there you have the Lichfield
Negro Problem in a nutshell. It is a venerable one and fully set forth
in the Bible. You needn't attempt to argue with me, because you are a
ninnyhammer, and I am a second Nestor. The Holy Scriptures are perfectly
explicit as to what happens to the heads of the children and their teeth
too."
"I wish you wouldn't jest about such matters--"
"Because it isn't lady-like? But, Rudolph, you know perfectly well that
I am not a lady."
"My dear!" he cried, in horror that was real, "and what on earth have I
said even to suggest--"
"Oh, not a syllable; it isn't at all the sort of thing that your sort
_says_ ... And I am not your sort. I don't know that I altogether wish I
were. But _if_ I were, it would certainly make things easier," Patricia
added sharply.
"My dear--!" he again protested.
"Now, candidly, Rudolph"--relinquishing the game, she fell to shuffling
the cards--"just count up the number of times this month that my--oh,
well! I really don't know what to call it except my deplorable omission
in failing to be born a lady--has seemed to you to yank the very last
rag off the gooseberry-bush?"