The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck 50 – Cabell · Verses Across
Literature · Fantasy
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck 50Part 7 · Chapter 5
18
Literature · Fantasy
The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck 50
Part 7 · Chapter 5
CabellEnglish
The colonel had not gone far, however, before he paused, thrust both hands into his trousers' pockets, and stared down at the ground for a matter of five minutes.
Musgrave shook his head. "After all," said he, "I can't trust them. Patricia is too erratic and too used to having her own way. Jack will try to break off with her now, of course; but Jack, where women are concerned, is as weak as water. It is not a nice thing to do, but--well! one must fight fire with fire."
Thereupon, he retraced his steps. When he had come to the thin spot in the thicket, Rudolph Musgrave left the path, and entered the shrubbery. There he composedly sat down in the shadow of a small cedar. The sight of his wife upon the beach in converse with Mr. Charteris did not appear to surprise Colonel Musgrave.
Patricia was speaking quickly. She held a bedraggled parasol in one hand. Her husband noted, with a faint thrill of wonder, that, at times, and in a rather unwholesome, elfish way, Patricia was actually beautiful. Her big eyes glowed; they flashed with changing lights as deep waters glitter in the sun; her copper-colored hair seemed luminous, and her cheeks flushed, arbutus-like. The soft, white stuff that gowned her had the look of foam; against the gray sky she seemed a freakish spirit in the act of vanishing. For sky and water were all one lambent gray by this. In the west was a thin smear of orange; but, for the rest, the world was of a uniform and gleaming gray. She and Charteris stood in the heart of a great pearl.
"Ah, believe me," she was saying, "Rudolph isn't an ophthalmic bat. But God keep us all respectable! is Rudolph's notion of a sensible morning-prayer. So he just preferred to see nothing and bleat out edifying axioms. That is one of his favorite tricks. No, it was a comedy for my benefit, I tell you. He will allow a deal for the artistic temperament, no doubt, but he doesn't suppose you fetch along a white-lace parasol when you go to watch a sunset--especially a parasol he gave me last month."
"Indeed," protested Mr. Charteris, "he saw nothing. I was too quick for him."
She shrugged her shoulders. "I saw him looking at it. Accordingly, I paid no attention to what he said. But you--ah, Jack, you were splendid! I suppose we shall have to elope at once now, though?"
Charteris gave her no immediate answer. "I am not quite sure, Patricia, that your husband is not--to a certain extent--in the right. Believe me, he did not know you were about. He approached me in a perfectly sensible manner, and exhibited commendable self-restraint; he has played a difficult part to admiration. I could not have done it better myself. And it is not for us who have been endowed with gifts denied to Rudolph, to reproach him for lacking the finer perceptions and sensibilities of life. Yet, I must admit that, for the time, I was a little hurt by his evident belief that we would allow our feeling for each other--which is rather beyond his comprehension, isn't it, dear?--to be coerced by mercenary considerations."
"Oh, Rudolph is just a jackass-fool, anyway." She was not particularly interested in the subject.
"He can't help that, you know," Charteris reminded her, gently; then, he asked, after a little: "I suppose it is all true?"
"That what is true?"
"About your having no money of your own?" He laughed, but she could see how deeply he had been pained by Musgrave's suspicions. "I ask, because, as your husband has discovered, I am utterly sordid, my lady, and care only for your wealth."
"Ah, how can you expect a man like that to understand--you? Why, Jack, how ridiculous in you to be hurt by what the brute thinks! You're as solemn as an owl, my dear. Yes, it's true enough. My father was not very well pleased with us--and that horrid will--Ah, Jack, Jack, how grotesque, how characteristic it was, his thinking such things would influence you--you, of all men, who scarcely know what money is!"
"It was even more grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking it," Charteris said, sadly. "But what would you have? I am so abominably in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters. It really did. And then, besides--ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, I think, that I would willingly work my fingers to the bone just that I might possess you always. So I had dreamed of love in a cottage--an idyl of blissful poverty, where Cupid contents himself with crusts and kisses, and mocks at the proverbial wolf on the doorstep. And I give you my word that until to-day I had not suspected how blindly selfish I have been! For poor old prosaic Rudolph is in the right, after all. Your delicate, tender beauty must not be dragged down to face the unlovely realities and petty deprivations and squalid makeshifts of such an existence as ours would be. True, I would glory in them--ah, luxury and riches mean little to me, my dear, and I can conceive of no greater happiness than to starve with you. But true love knows how to sacrifice itself. Your husband was right; it would not be fair to you, Patricia."
"You--you are going to leave me?"
"Yes; and I pray that I may be strong enough to relinquish you forever, because your welfare is more dear to me than my own happiness. No, I do not pretend that this is easy to do. But when my misery is earned by serving you I prize my misery." Charteris tried to smile. "What would you have? I love you," he said, simply.
"Ah, my dear!" she cried.
Musgrave's heart was sick within him as he heard the same notes in her voice that echoed in Anne's voice when she spoke of her husband. This was a new Patricia; her speech was low and gentle now, and her eyes held a light Rudolph Musgrave had not seen there for a long while.
"Ah, my dear, you are the noblest man I have ever known; I wish we women could be like men. But, oh, Jack, Jack, don't be quixotic! I can't give you up, my dear--that would never be for my good. Think how unhappy I have been all these years; think how Rudolph is starving my soul! I want to be free, Jack; I want to live my own life,--for at least a month or so--"
Patricia shivered here. "But none of us is sure of living for a month. You've shown me a glimpse of what life might be; don't let me sink back into the old, humdrum existence from a foolish sense of honor! I tell you, I should go mad! I mean to have my fling while I can get it. And I mean to have it with you, Jack--just you! I don't fear poverty. You could write some more wonderful books. I could work, too, Jack dear. I--I could teach music--or take in washing--or something, anyway. Lots of women support themselves, you know. Oh, Jack, we would be so happy! Don't be honorable and brave and disagreeable, Jack dear!"
For a moment Charteris was silent. The nostrils of his beak-like nose widened a little, and a curious look came into his face. He discovered something in the sand that interested him.
"After all," he demanded, slowly, "is it necessary--to go away--to be happy?"
"I don't understand." Her hand lifted from his arm; then quick remorse smote her, and it fluttered back, confidingly.
Charteris rose to his feet. "It is, doubtless, a very spectacular and very stirring performance to cast your cap over the wind-mill in the face of the world; but, after all, is it not a bit foolish, Patricia? Lots of people manage these things--more quietly."
"Oh, Jack!" Patricia's face turned red, then white, and stiffened in a sort of sick terror. She was a frightened Columbine in stone. "I thought you cared for me--really, not--that way."
Patricia rose and spoke with composure. "I think I'll go back to the house, Mr. Charteris. It's a bit chilly here. You needn't bother to come."
Then Mr. Charteris laughed--a choking, sobbing laugh. He raised his hands impotently toward heaven. "And to think," he cried, "to think that a man may love a woman with his whole heart--with all that is best and noblest in him--and she understand him so little!"
"I do not think I have misunderstood you," Patricia said, in a crisp voice. "Your proposition was very explicit. I--am sorry. I thought I had found one thing in the world which I would regret to leave--"
"And you really believed that I could sully the great love I bear you by stooping to--that! You really believed that I would sacrifice to you my home life, my honor, my prospects--all that a man can give--without testing the quality of your love! You did not know that I spoke to try you--you actually did not know! Eh, but yours is a light nature, Patricia! I do not reproach you, for you are only as your narrow Philistine life has made you. Yet I had hoped better things of you, Patricia. But you, who pretend to care for me, have leaped at your first opportunity to pain me--and, if it be any comfort to you, I confess you have pained me beyond words." And he sank down on the log, and buried his face in his hands.
She came to him--it was pitiable to see how she came to him, laughing and sobbing all in one breath--and knelt humbly by his side, and raised a grieved, shamed, penitent face to his.
"Forgive me!" she wailed; "oh, forgive me!"
"You have pained me beyond words, Patricia," he repeated. He was not angry--only sorrowful and very much hurt.
"Ah, Jack! dear Jack, forgive me!"
Mr. Charteris sighed. "But, of course, I forgive you, Patricia," he said. "I cannot help it, though, that I am foolishly sensitive where you are concerned. And I had hoped you knew as much."
She was happy now. "Dear boy," she murmured, "don't you see it's just these constant proofs of the greatness and the wonderfulness of your love--Really, though, Jack, wasn't it too horrid of me to misunderstand you so? Are you quite sure you're forgiven me entirely--without any nasty little reservations?"
Mr. Charteris was quite sure. His face was still sad, but it was benevolent.
"Don't you see," she went on, "that it's just these things that make me care for you so much, and feel sure as eggs is eggs we will be happy? Ah, Jack, we will be so utterly happy that I am almost afraid to think of it!" Patricia wiped away the last tear, and laughed, and added, in a matter-of-fact fashion: "There's a train at six-five in the morning; we can leave by that, before anyone is up."
Charteris started. "Your husband loves you," he said, in gentle reproof. "And quite candidly, you know, Rudolph is worth ten of me."
"Bah, I tell you, that was a comedy for my benefit," she protested, and began to laugh. Patricia was unutterably happy now, because she, and not John Charteris, had been in the wrong. "Poor Rudolph!--he has such a smug horror of the divorce-court that he would even go so far as to pretend to be in love with his own wife in order to keep out of it. Really, Jack, both our better-halves are horribly commonplace and they will be much better off without us."
"You forget that Rudolph has my word of honor," said Mr. Charteris, in indignation.
And that instant, with one of his baffling changes of mood, he began to laugh. "Really, though, Patricia, you are very pretty. You are April embodied in sweet flesh; your soul is just a wisp of April cloud, and your life an April day, half sun that only seems to warm, and half tempest that only plays at ferocity; but you are very pretty. That is why I am thinking, light-headedly, it would be a fine and past doubt an agreeable exploit to give up everything for such a woman, and am complacently comparing myself to Antony at Actium. I am thinking it would be an interesting episode in one's Life and Letters. You see, my dear, I honestly believe the world revolves around John Charteris--although of course I would never admit that to you if I thought for a moment you would take me seriously."
Then presently, sighing, he was grave again. "But, no! Rudolph has my word of honor," Mr. Charteris repeated, and with unconcealed regret.
"Ah, does that matter?" she cried. "Does anything matter, except that we love each other? I tell you I have given the best part of my life to that man, but I mean to make the most of what is left. He has had my youth, my love--there was a time, you know, when I actually fancied I cared for him--and he has only made me unhappy. I hate him, I loathe him, I detest him, I despise him! I never intend to speak to him again--oh, yes, I shall have to at supper, I suppose, but that doesn't count. And I tell you I mean to be happy in the only way that's possible. Everyone has a right to do that. A woman has an especial right to take her share of happiness in any way she can, because her hour of it is so short. Sometimes--sometimes the woman knows how short it is and it almost frightens her.... But at best, a woman can be really happy through love alone, Jack dear, and it's only when we are young and good to look at that men care for us; after that, there is nothing left but to take to either religion or hand-embroidery, so what does it matter, after all? Yes, they all grow tired after a while. Jack, I am only a vain and frivolous person of superlative charm, but I love you very much, my dear, and I solemnly swear to commit suicide the moment my first wrinkle arrives. You shall never grow tired of me, my dear."
She laughed to think how true this was.
She hurried on: "Jack, kneel down at once, and swear that you are perfectly sore with loving me, as that ridiculous person says in Dickens, and whose name I never could remember. Oh, I forgot--Dickens caricatures nature, doesn't he, and isn't read by really cultured people? You will have to educate me up to your level, Jack, and I warn you in advance you will not have time to do it. Yes, I am quite aware that I am talking nonsense, and am on the verge of hysterics, thank you, but I rather like it. It is because I am going to have you all to myself for whatever future there is, and the thought makes me quite drunk. Will you kindly ring for the patrol-wagon, Jack? Jack, are you quite sure you love me? Are you perfectly certain you never loved any one else half so much? No, don't answer me, for I intend to do all the talking for both of us for the future! I shall tyrannize over you frightfully, and you will like it. All I ask in return is that you will be a good boy--by which I mean a naughty boy--and do solemnly swear, promise and affirm that you will meet me at the side-door at half-past five in the morning, with a portmanteau and the intention of never going back to your wife. You swear it? Thank you so much! Now, I think I would like to cry for a few minutes, and, after that, we will go back to the house, before supper is over and my eyes are perfectly crimson."
In fact, Mr. Charteris had consented. Patricia was irresistible as she pleaded and mocked and scolded and coaxed and laughed and cried, all in one bewildering breath. Her plan was simple; it was to slip out of Matocton at dawn, and walk to the near-by station. There they would take the train, and snap their fingers at convention. The scheme sounded preposterous in outline, but she demonstrated its practicability in performance. And Mr. Charteris consented.
Rudolph Musgrave sat in the shadow of the cedar with fierce and confused emotions whirling in his soul. He certainly had never thought of this contingency.
PART EIGHT - HARVEST
"Time was I coveted the woes they rued
Whose love commemorates them,--I that meant
To get like grace of love then!--and intent
To win as they had done love's plenitude,
Rapture and havoc, vauntingly I sued
That love like theirs might make a toy of me,
At will caressed, at will (if publicly)
Demolished, as Love found or found not good.
"To-day I am no longer overbrave.
I have a fever,--I that always knew
This hour was certain!--and am too weak to rave,
Too tired to seek (as later I must do)
Tried remedies--time, manhood and the grave--
To drug, abate and banish love of you."
ALLEN ROSSITER. A Fragment.
