The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck 26 – Cabell · Verses Across
Literature · Fantasy
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck 26Part 4 · Chapter 3
18
Literature · Fantasy
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck 26
Part 4 · Chapter 3
CabellEnglish
Meanwhile the two originators of so much Lichfieldian diversion were not unhappy.
But indeed it were irreverent even to try to express the happiness of their earlier married life ...
They were an ill-matched couple in so many ways that no long-headed person could conceivably have anticipated--in the outcome--more than decorous tolerance of each other. For apart from the disparity in age and tastes and rearing, there was always the fact to be weighed that in marrying the only child of a wealthy man Rudolph Musgrave was making what Lichfield called "an eminently sensible match"--than which, as Lichfield knew, there is no more infallible recipe for discord.
In this case the axiom seemed, after the manner of all general rules, to bulwark itself with an exception. Colonel Musgrave continued to emanate an air of contentment which fell perilously short of fatuity; and that Patricia was honestly fond of him was evident to the most impecunious of Lichfield's bachelors.
True, curtains had been lifted, a little by a little. Patricia could hardly have told you at what exact moment it was that she discovered Miss Agatha--who continued of course to live with them--was a dipsomaniac. Very certainly Rudolph Musgrave was not Patricia's informant; it is doubtful if the colonel ever conceded his sister's infirmity in his most private meditations; so that Patricia found the cause of Miss Agatha's "attacks" to be an open secret of which everyone in the house seemed aware and of which by tacit agreement nobody ever spoke. It bewildered Patricia, at first, to find that as concerned Lichfield at large any over-indulgence in alcohol by a member of the Musgrave family was satisfactorily accounted for by the matter-of-course statement that the Musgraves usually "drank,"--just as the Allardyces notoriously perpetuated the taint of insanity, and the Townsends were proverbially unable "to let women alone," and the Vartreys were deplorably prone to dabble in literature. These things had been for a long while just as they were to-day; and therefore (Lichfield estimated) they must be reasonable.
Then, too, Patricia would have preferred to have been rid of the old mulatto woman Virginia, because it was through Virginia that Miss Agatha furtively procured intoxicants. But Rudolph Musgrave would not consider Virginia's leaving. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many years of faithful service" was the formula with which he dismissed the suggestion ... Afterward Patricia learned from Miss Agatha of the wrong that had been done Virginia by Olaf's uncle, Senator Edward Musgrave, the noted ante-bellum orator, and understood that Olaf--without, of course, conceding it to himself, because that was Olaf's way--was trying to make reparation. Patricia respected the sentiment, and continued to fret under its manifestation.
Miss Agatha also told Patricia of how the son of Virginia and Senator Musgrave had come to a disastrous end--"lynched in Texas, I believe, only it may not have been Texas. And indeed when I come to think of it, I don't believe it was, because I know we first heard of it on a Monday, and Virginia couldn't do the washing that week and I had to send it out. And for the usual crime, of course. It simply shows you how much better off the darkies were before the War," Miss Agatha said.
Patricia refrained from comment, not being willing to consider the deduction strained. For love is a contagious infection; and loving Rudolph Musgrave so much, Patricia must perforce love any person whom he loved as conscientiously as she would have strangled any person with whom he had flirted.
And yet, to Patricia, it was beginning to seem that Patricia Musgrave was not living, altogether, in that Lichfield which John Charteris has made immortal--"that nursery of Free Principles" (according to the Lichfield Courier-Herald) "wherein so many statesmen, lieutenants-general and orators were trained to further the faith of their fathers, to thrill the listening senates, draft constitutions, and bruise the paws of the British lion."
