Into Colonel Musgrave's mental processes during this period it will not
do to pry too closely. The man had his white nights and his battles, in
part with real grief and regret, and in part with sundry emotions which
he took on faith as the emotions he ought to have, and, therefore,
manifestly, suffered under.... "Patricia was my wife, Jack was my
brother," ran his verdict in the outcome; and beyond that he did not
care to go.
For death cowed his thoughts. In the colonel's explicit theology dead
people were straightway conveyed to either one or the other of two
places. He had very certainly never known anybody who in his opinion
merited the torments of his orthodox Gehenna; so that in imagination he
vaguely populated its blazing corridors with Nero and Judas and Caesar
Borgia and Henry VIII, and Spanish Inquisitors and the aboriginal
American Indians--excepting of course his ancestress Pocahontas--and
with Benedict Arnold and all the "carpet-baggers" and suchlike other
eminent practitioners of depravity. For no one whom Rudolph Musgrave
had ever encountered in the flesh had been really and profoundly wicked,
Rudolph Musgrave considered; and so, he always gravely estimated
this-or-that acquaintance, after death, to be "better off, poor
fellow"--as the colonel phrased it, with a tinge of
self-contradiction--even if he actually refrained in fancy from endowing
the deceased with aureate harps and crowns and footgear. In fine, death
cowed the colonel's thoughts; beyond the grave they did not care to
venture, and when confronted with that abyss they decorously balked.
Patricia and Jack were as a matter of course "better off," then--and,
miraculously purged of faults, with all their defects somehow remedied,
the colonel's wife and brother, with Agatha and the colonel's other
interred relatives, were partaking of dignified joys in bright supernal
iridescent realms, which the colonel resignedly looked forward to
entering, on some comfortably remote day or another, and thus rejoining
his transfigured kindred.... Such was the colonel's charitable decision,
in the forming whereof logic was in no way implicated. For religion, as
the colonel would have told you sedately, was not a thing to be reasoned
about. Attempting to do that, you became in Rudolph Musgrave's honest
eyes regrettably flippant.
Meanwhile Cousin Lucy Fentnor was taking care of the colonel and little
Roger. And Lichfield, long before the lettering on Patricia's tombstone
had time to lose its first light dusty gray, had accredited Cousin Lucy
Fentnor with illimitable willingness to become Mrs. Rudolph Musgrave,
upon proper solicitation, although such tittle-tattle is neither here
nor there; for at worst, a widowed, childless and impoverished
second-cousin, discreetly advanced in her forties, was entitled to keep
house for the colonel in his bereavement, as a jointly beneficial
arrangement, without provoking scandal's tongue to more than a jocose
innuendo or two when people met for "auction"--that new-fangled
perplexing variant of bridge, just introduced, wherein you bid on the
suits.... And, besides, Cousin Lucy Fentnor (as befitted any one born an
Allardyce) was to all accounts a notable housekeeper, famed alike for
the perilous glassiness of her hardwood floors, her dexterous management
of servants, her Honiton-braid fancy-work (familiar to every patron of
Lichfield charity bazaars), and her unparalleled calves-foot jelly.
Under Cousin Lucy Fentnor's systematized coddling little Roger grew like
the proverbial ill weed, and the colonel likewise waxed perceptibly in
girth.
Thus it was that accident and a woman's intervention seemed once more to
combine in shielding Rudolph Musgrave from discomfort. And in
consequence it was considered improbable that at this late day the
colonel would do the proper thing by Clarice Pendomer, as, at the first
tidings of Patricia's death, had been authentically rumored among the
imaginative; and, in fact, Lichfield no longer considered that
necessary. The claim of outraged morality against these two had been
thrown out of court, through some unworded social statute of
limitation, as far as Lichfield went. Of course it was interesting to
note that the colonel called at Mrs. Pendomer's rather frequently
nowadays; but, then, Clarice Pendomer had all sorts of callers
now--though not many in skirts--and she played poker with men for money
until unregenerate hours of the night, and was reputed with a wealth of
corroborative detail to have even less discussable sources of income: so
that, indeed, Clarice Pendomer was now rather precariously retained
within the social pale through her initial precaution of having been
born a Bellingham.... But all such tittle-tattle, as has been said, is
quite beside the mark, since with the decadence of Clarice Pendomer this
chronicle has, in the outcome, as scant concern as with the marital
aspirations of Cousin Lucy Fentnor.
And, moreover, the colonel--in colloquial phrase at least--went
everywhere. After the six months of comparative seclusion which decency
exacted of his widowerhood--and thereby afforded him ample leisure to
complete and publish his _Lichfield Legislative Papers prior to
1800_--the colonel, be it repeated, went everywhere; and people found
him no whit the worse company for his black gloves and the somber band
stitched to his coatsleeve. So Lichfield again received him gladly, as
the social triumph of his generation. Handsome and trim and affable, no
imaginable tourist could possibly have divined--for everybody in
Lichfield knew, of course--that Rudolph Musgrave had rounded his
half-century; and he stayed, as ever, invaluable to Lichfield matrons
alike against the entertainment of an "out-of-town" girl, the management
of a cotillon, and the prevention of unpleasant pauses among incongruous
dinner-companies.
But of Anne Charteris he saw very little nowadays. And, indeed, it was
of her own choice that Anne lived apart from Lichfieldian junketings,
contented with her dreams and her pride therein, and her remorseful
tender memories of the things she might have done for Jack and had not
done--lived upon exalted levels nowadays, to which the colonel's more
urbane bereavement did not aspire.