So it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave that Patricia came actually into the
room that had been hers....
A canary was singing there, very sweet and shrill and as in defiant joy.
Its trilling seemed to fill the room. In the brief pauses of his song
the old clock, from which Rudolph had removed the pendulum on the night
of Agatha's death would interpose an obstinate slow ticking; and
immediately the clock-noise would be drowned in melody. Otherwise the
room was silent.
In the alcove stood the bed which had been Patricia's. Intent upon its
occupant were three persons, with their backs turned to her. One
Patricia could easily divine to be a doctor; he was twiddling a
hypodermic syringe between his fingers, and the set of his shoulders was
that of acquiescence. Profiles of the others she saw: one a passive
nurse in uniform, who was patiently chafing the right hand of the bed's
occupant; the other a lean-featured red-haired stranger, who sat
crouched in his chair and held the dying man's left hand.
For in the bed, supported by many pillows, and facing Patricia, was a
dying man. He was very old, having thick tumbled hair which, like his
two-weeks' beard, was uniformly white. His eyelids drooped a trifle, so
that he seemed to meditate concerning something ineffably remote and
serious, yet not, upon the whole, unsatisfactory. You saw and heard the
intake of each breath, so painfully drawn, and expelled with manifest
relief, as if the man were very tired of breathing. Yet the bedclothes
heaved with his vain efforts just to keep on breathing. And sometimes
his parted lips would twitch curiously.... Rudolph Musgrave, too, could
see all this quite plainly, in the mirror over the mantel.
The doctor spoke. "Yes--it's the end, Professor Musgrave," he said. For
this lean-featured red-haired stranger to whom the doctor spoke, a
pedagogue to his finger-tips, had once been Patricia's dearly-purchased,
chubby baby Roger.
And Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He knew Patricia was there; but
that fact no longer seemed either very strange or even unnatural; and
besides, it was against some law for him to look at her until Patricia
had called him.... Meanwhile, just opposite, above the mirror, and
facing him, was the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave. This
picture had now hung there for a great many years. The boy still smiled
at you in undiminished raillery, even though he smiled ambiguously, and
with a sort of humorous sadness in his eyes. Once, very long ago--when
the picture hung downstairs--some one had said that Gerald Musgrave's
life was barren. The dying man could not now recollect, quite, who that
person was.
Rudolph Musgrave stayed motionless. He comprehended that he was dying.
The greatest of all changes was at hand; and he, who had always shrunk
from making changes, was now content enough.... Indeed, with Rudolph
Musgrave living had always been a vaguely dissatisfactory business, a
hand-to-mouth proceeding which he had scrambled through, as he saw now,
without any worthy aim or even any intelligible purpose. He had nothing
very heinous with which to reproach himself; but upon the other side, he
had most certainly nothing of which to be particularly proud.
So this was all that living came to! You heard of other people being
rapt by splendid sins and splendid virtues, and you anticipated that
to-morrow some such majestic energy would transfigure your own living,
and change everything: but the great adventure never arrived, somehow;
and the days were frittered away piecemeal, what with eating your
dinner, and taking a wholesome walk, and checking up your bank account,
and dovetailing scraps of parish registers and land-patents and county
records into an irrefutable pedigree, and seeing that your clothes were
pressed, and looking over the newspapers--and what with other
infinitesimal avocations, each one innocent, none of any particular
importance, and each consuming an irrevocable moment of the allotted
time--until at last you found that living had not, necessarily, any
climax at all.... And Patricia would call him presently.
Once, very long ago, some one had said that the most pathetic tragedy in
life was to get nothing in particular out of it. The dying man could not
now recollect, quite, who that person was.
He wondered, vaguely, what might have been the outcome if Rudolph
Musgrave had whole-heartedly sought, not waited for, the great
adventure; if Rudolph Musgrave had put--however irrationally--more
energy and less second-thought into living; if Rudolph Musgrave had not
been contented to be just a Musgrave of Matocton.... Well, it was too
late now. He viewed his whole life now, in epitome, and much as you may
see at night the hackneyed vista from your window leap to incisiveness
under the lash of lightning. No, the life of Rudolph Musgrave had never
risen to the plane of dignity, not even to that of seeming to Rudolph
Musgrave a connected and really important transaction on Rudolph
Musgrave's part. Yet Lichfield, none the better for Rudolph Musgrave's
having lived, was none the worse, thank heaven! And there were younger
men in Lichfield--men who did not mean to fail as Rudolph Musgrave and
his fellows all had failed.... Eh, yes, what was the toast that Rudolph
Musgrave drank, so long ago, to the new Lichfield which these younger
men were making?
"To this new South, that has not any longer need of me or of my kind.
"To this new South! She does not gaze unwillingly, nor too complacently,
upon old years, and dares concede that but with loss of manliness may
any man encroach upon the heritage of a dog or of a trotting-horse, and
consider the exploits of an ancestor to guarantee an innate and personal
excellence.
"For to her all former glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with
her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain
speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of
that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with augmenting
strokes."
Yes, that was it. And it was true. Yet Rudolph Musgrave's life on earth
was ending now--the only life that he would ever have on earth--and it
had never risen to the plane of seeming even to Rudolph Musgrave a
really important transaction on Rudolph Musgrave's part....
Then Patricia spoke. Low and very low she called to Olaf, and the dim,
wistful eyes of Rudolph Musgrave lifted, and gazed full upon her
standing there, and were no longer wistful. And the man made as though
to rise, and could not, and his face was very glad.
For in the dying man had awakened the pulses of an old, strange,
half-forgotten magic, and all his old delight in the girl who had shared
in and had provoked this ancient wonder-working, together with a quite
new consciousness of the inseparability of Patricia's foibles from his
existence; so that he was incuriously aware of his imbecility in not
having known always that Patricia must come back some day, not as a
glorious, unfamiliar angel, but unaltered.
"I am glad you haven't changed.... Why, but of course! Nothing would
have counted if you had changed--not even for the better, Patricia. For
you and what you meant to me were real. That only was real--that we, not
being demigods, but being just what we were, once climbed together very
high, where we could glimpse the stars--and nothing else can ever be of
any importance. What we inherited was too much for us, was it not, my
dear? And now it is not formidable any longer. Oh, but I loved you very
greatly, Patricia! And now at last, my dear, I seem to understand--as in
that old, old time when you and I were glad together----"
But he did not say this aloud, for it seemed to him that he stood in a
cool, pleasant garden, and that Patricia came toward him through the
long shadows of sunset. The lacy folds and furbelows and
semi-transparencies that clothed her were now tinged with gold and now,
as a hedge or a flower bed screened her from the level rays, were
softened into multitudinous graduations of grays and mauves and violets.
They did not speak. But in her eyes he found compassion and such
tenderness as awed him; and then, as a light is puffed out, they were
the eyes of a friendly stranger. He understood, for an instant, that of
necessity it was decreed time must turn back and everything, even
Rudolph Musgrave, be just as it had been when he first saw Patricia. For
they had made nothing of their lives; and so, they must begin all over
again.
"_Failure is not permitted_" he was saying....
"_You're Cousin Rudolph, aren't you?_" she asked....
And Rudolph Musgrave knew he had forgotten something of vast import, but
what this knowledge had pertained to he no longer knew. Then Rudolph
Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about his heart,
that her hair was like the reflection of a sunset in rippling
waters--only many times more beautiful, of course--and that her mouth
was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and that her
eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.