"Harry," said Colonel Musgrave then, "an enormous whale is coming down
the river in precisely two minutes. Perhaps if you were to look through
the palings of that fence you might see him. I don't suppose you would
care to, though?"
And Harry strolled resignedly toward the fence. Harry Pendomer did not
like this funny lady who had hurt, frightened eyes. He did not believe
in the whale, of course, any more than he did in Santa Claus. But like
most children, he patiently accepted the fact that grown people are
unaccountable overlords appointed by some vast _bêtise_, whom, if only
through prudential motives, it is preferable to humor.
V
Colonel Musgrave stood now upon the other side of John Charteris's
grave--just in the spot that was reserved for her own occupancy some
day.
"You are ill, Anne. You are not fit to be out. Go home."
"I had a little boy once," she said. "'But that's all past and gone, and
good times and bad times and all times pass over.' There's an odd simple
music in the sentence, isn't there? Yet I remember it chiefly because I
used to read that book to him and he loved it. And it was my child that
died. Why is this other child so like him?"
"Oh, then, that's it, is it?" said Rudolph Musgrave, as in relief.
"Bless me, I suppose all these little shavers are pretty much alike. I
can only tell Roger from the other boys by his red head. Humanity in the
raw, you know. Still, it is no wonder it gave you a turn. You had much
better go home, however, and not take any foolish risks, and put your
feet in hot water, and rub cologne on your temples, and do all the other
suitable things----"
"I remember now," she continued, without any apparent emotion, and as
though he had not spoken. "When I came into the room you were saying
that the child must be considered. You were both very angry, and I was
alarmed--foolishly alarmed, perhaps. And my--and John Charteris said,
'Let him tell, then'--and you told me--"
"The truth, Anne."
"And he sat quietly by. Oh, if he'd had the grace, the common
manliness--!" She shivered here. "But he never interrupted you. I--I was
not looking at him. I was thinking how vile you were. And when you had
ended, he said, 'My dear, I am sorry you should have been involved in
this. But since you are, I think we can assure Rudolph that both of us
will regard his confidence as sacred.' Then I remembered him, and
thought how noble he was! And all those years that were so happy, hour
by hour, he was letting you--meet his bills!" She seemed to wrench out
the inadequate metaphor.
You could hear the far-off river, now, faint as the sound of boiling
water.
After a few pacings Colonel Musgrave turned upon her. He spoke with a
curious simplicity.
"There isn't any use in lying to you. You wouldn't believe. You would
only go to some one else--some woman probably,--who would jump at the
chance of telling you everything and a deal more. Yes, there are a great
many 'they _do_ say's' floating about. This was the only one that came
near being--serious. The man was very clever.--Oh, he wasn't vulgarly
lecherous. He was simply--Jack Charteris. He always irritated Lichfield,
though, by not taking Lichfield very seriously. You would hear every
by-end of retaliative and sniggered-over mythology, and in your present
state of mind you would believe all of them. I happen to know that a
great many of these stories are not true."
"A great many of these stories," Anne repeated, "aren't true! A great
many aren't! That ought to be consoling, oughtn't it?" She spoke without
a trace of bitterness.
"I express myself very badly. What I really mean, what I am aiming at,
is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to
ask, because I will answer them truthfully. Very few people would. You
see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just
stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second," he added, as
with venom, "that it is only human nature to dislike you."
Anne was not angry. It had come to her, quite as though she were
considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion,
true.
"There is sunlight and fresh air in the street," John Charteris had been
wont to declare, "and there is a culvert at the corner. I think it is a
mistake for us to emphasize the culvert."
So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence. She saw this now.
It did not matter. It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more.
"I've only one question, I think. Why did you do it?" She spoke with
bright amazement in her eyes.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" he seriocomically deplored. "Why, because it was
such a noble thing to do. It was so like the estimable young man in a
play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes
a curtain-call immediately afterwards. In fine, I simply observed to
myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, 'But what a gesture!'" And
he parodied an actor's motion in this rôle.
She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity. Anne did not
understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth. And so,
"You haven't _any_ sense of humor," he lamented. "You used to have a
deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and
diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates. Well, it
was because it helped him a little. Oh, I am being truthful now. I had
some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I
never did. I ought to have, perhaps. But I didn't."
"My friend, you are being almost truthful. But I want the truth entire."
"It isn't polite to disbelieve people," he reproved her; "or at the very
least, according to the best books on etiquette, you ought not to do it
audibly. Would you mind if I smoked? I could be more veracious then.
There is something in tobacco that makes frankness a matter of course. I
thank you."
He produced an amber holder, fitted a cigarette into it, and presently
inhaled twice. He said, with a curt voice:
"The reason, naturally, was you. You may remember certain things that
happened just before John Charteris came and took you. Oh, that is
precisely what he did! You are rather a narrow-minded woman now, in
consequence--or in my humble opinion, at least--and deplorably superior.
It pleased the man to have in his house--if you will overlook my
venturing into metaphor,--one cool room very sparsely furnished where he
could come when the mood seized him. He took the raw material from me,
wherewith to build that room, because he wanted that room. I acquiesced,
because I had not the skill wherewith to fight him."
Anne understood him now, as with a great drench of surprise. And fear
was what she felt in chief when she saw for just this moment as though
it had lightened, the man's face transfigured, and tender, and strange
to her.
"I tried to buy your happiness, to--yes, just to keep you blind
indefinitely. Had the price been heavier, I would have paid it the more
gladly. Fate has played a sorry trick. _You_ would never have seen
through him. My dear, I have wanted very often to shake you," he said.
And she knew, in a glorious terror, that she desired him to shake her,
and as she had never desired anything else in life.
"Oh, well, I am just a common, ordinary, garden-sort of fool. The
Musgraves always are, in one fashion or another," he sulkily concluded.
And now the demigod was merely Rudolph Musgrave again, and she was not
afraid any longer, but only inexpressibly fordone.
"Isn't that like a woman?" he presently demanded of the June heavens.
"To drag something out of a man with inflexibility, monomania and moral
grappling-irons, and _then_ not like it! Oh, very well! I am disgusted
by your sex's axiomatic variability. I shall take Harry to his fond
mamma at once."
She did not say anything. A certain new discovery obsessed her like a
piece of piercing music.
Then Rudolph Musgrave gave the tiniest of gestures downward. "And I have
told you this, in chief, because we two remember him. He wanted you. He
took you. You are his. You will always be. He gave you just a fragment
of himself. That fragment was worth more than everything I had to
offer."
Anne very carefully arranged her roses on the ivy-covered grave. "I do
not know--meanwhile, I give these to our master. And my real widowhood
begins to-day."
And as she rose he looked at her across the colorful mound, and smiled,
half as with embarrassment. A lie, he thought, might ameliorate the
situation, and he bravely hazarded a prodigious one. "Is it necessary to
tell you that Jack loved you? And that the others never really counted?"
He rejoiced to see that Anne believed him. "No," she assented, "no, not
with him. Oddly enough, I am proud of that, even now. But--don't you
see?--I never loved him. I was just his priestess--the priestess of a
stucco god! Otherwise, I would know it wasn't his fault, but altogether
that of--the others."
He grimaced and gave a bantering flirt of his head. He said, with
quizzing eyes:
"Would it do any good to quote Lombroso, and Maudsley, and Gall, and
Krafft-Ebing, and Flechsig, and so on? and to tell you that the
excessive use of one brain faculty must necessarily cause a lack of
nutriment to all the other brain-cells? It would be rather up-to-date.
There is a deal I could tell you also as to what poisonous blood he
inherited; but to do this I have not the right." And then Rudolph
Musgrave said in all sincerity: "'A wild, impetuous whirlwind of passion
and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly _melody_ dwelling in
the heart of it.'"
She had put aside alike the drolling and the palliative suggestion, like
flimsy veils. "I think it wouldn't do any good whatever. When growing
things are broken by the whirlwind, they don't, as a rule, discuss the
theory of air-currents as a consolation. Men such as he was take what
they desire. It isn't fair--to us others. But it's true, for all that--"
Their eyes met warily; and for no reason which they shared in common
they smiled together.
"Poor little Lady of Shalott," said Rudolph Musgrave, "the mirror is
cracked from side to side, isn't it? I am sorry. For life is not so
easily disposed of. And there is only life to look at now, and life is a
bewilderingly complex business, you will find, because the laws of it
are so childishly simple--and implacable. And one of these laws seems to
be that in our little planet, might makes right--"
He stayed to puff his cigarette.
"Oh, Rudolph dear, don't--don't be just a merry-Andrew!" she cried
impulsively, before he had time to continue, which she perceived he
meant to do, as if it did not matter.
And he took her full meaning, quite as he had been used in the old times
to discourse upon a half-sentence. "I am afraid I am that, rather," he
said, reflectively. "But then Clarice and I could hardly have weathered
scandal except by making ourselves particularly agreeable to everybody.
And somehow I got into the habit of making people laugh. It isn't very
difficult. I am rather an adept at telling stories which just graze
impropriety, for instance. You know, they call me the social triumph of
my generation. And people are glad to see me because I am 'so awfully
funny' and 'simply killing' and so on. And I suppose it tells in the
long run--like the dyer's hand, you know."
"It does tell." Anne was thinking it would always tell. And that, too,
would be John Charteris's handiwork.
Ensued a silence. Rudolph Musgrave was painstakingly intent upon his
cigarette. A nestward-plunging bird called to his mate impatiently.
Then Anne shook her head impatiently.
"Come, while I'm thinking, I will drive you back to Lichfield."
"Oh, no; that wouldn't do at all," he said, with absolute decision. "No,
you see I have to return the boy. And I can't quite imagine your
carriage waiting at the doors of 'that Mrs. Pendomer.'"
"Oh," Anne fleetingly thought, "_he_ would have understood." But aloud
she only said: "And do you think I hate her any longer? Yes, it is true
I hated her until to-day, and now I'm just sincerely sorry for her. For
she and I--and you and even the child yonder--and all that any of us is
to-day--are just so many relics of John Charteris. Yet he has done with
us--at last!"
She said this with an inhalation of the breath; but she did not look at
him.
"Take care!" he said, with an unreasonable harshness. "For I forewarn
you I am imagining vain things."
"I'm not afraid, somehow." But Anne did not look at him.
He saw as with a rending shock how like the widow of John Charteris was
to Anne Willoughby; and unforgotten pulses, very strange and irrational
and dear, perplexed him sorely. He debated, and flung aside the
cigarette as an out-moded detail of his hobbling part.
"You say I did a noble thing for you. I tried to. But quixotism has its
price. To-day I am not quite the man who did that thing. John Charteris
has set his imprint too deep upon us. We served his pleasure. We are not
any longer the boy and girl who loved each other."
She waited in the rising twilight with a yet averted face. The world was
motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him. And the
disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly knew, was very
anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the whole, a kindly
wisdom.
So that, "My dear, my dear!" he swiftly said: "I don't think I can word
just what my feeling is for you. Always my view of the world has been
that you existed, and that some other people existed--as accessories--"
Then he was silent for a heart-beat, appraising her. His hands lifted
toward her and fell within the moment, as if it were in impotence.
Anne spoke at last, and the sweet voice of her was very glad and proud
and confident.
"My friend, remember that I have not thanked you. You have done the most
foolish and--the manliest thing I ever knew a man to do, just for my
sake. And I have accepted it as if it were a matter of course. And I
shall always do so. Because it was your right to do this very brave and
foolish thing for me. I know you joyed in doing it. Rudolph ... you
cannot understand how glad I am you joyed in doing it."
Their eyes met. It is not possible to tell you all they were aware of
through that moment, because it is a knowledge so rarely apprehended,
and even then for such a little while, that no man who has sensed it can
remember afterward aught save the splendor and perfection of it.
* * * * *
And yet Anne looked back once. There was just the tall, stark shaft, and
on it "John Charteris." The thing was ominous and vast, all colored like
wet gravel, save where the sunlight tipped it with clean silver very
high above their reach.
"Come," she quickly said to Rudolph Musgrave; "come, for I am afraid."