The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck Part 24

"Oh, yes, yes!--I remember perfectly! One of the most beautiful evenings I ever saw. I remember it quite distinctly. I talked--I--and what, in the Lord's name, did I talk about, Polly?"

"Ah, men forget! A woman never forgets when she is really friends with a man. I know now you were telling me about Anne Charteris, for you have been in love with her all your life, Rudolph, in your own particular half-hearted and dawdling fas.h.i.+on. Perhaps that is why you have had so many affairs. You plainly found the run of women so unimportant that it put every woman on her pride to prove she was different. Yes, I remember. But that night I thought you were trying to make love to me, and I was disappointed in you, and--yes, rather pleased. Women are all vain and perfectly inconsistent. But then, girl-children always take after their fathers."

Mrs. Ashmeade rose from her chair. Her fan shut with a snap.

"You were a dear boy, Rudolph, when I first knew you--and what I liked was that you never made love to me. Of all the boys I have known and helped to form, you were the only sensible one--the only one who never presumed. That was rather clever of you, Rudolph. It would have been ridiculous, for even arithmetically I am older than you.

"Wouldn't it have been ridiculous, Rudolph?" she demanded, suddenly.

"Not in the least," Musgrave protested, in courteous wise. "You--why, Polly, you were a wonderfully handsome woman. Any boy----"

"Oh, yes!--I was. I'm not now, am I, Rudolph?" Mrs. Ashmeade threw back her head and laughed naturally. "Ah, dear boy that was, it is unfair, isn't it, for an old woman to seize upon you in this fas.h.i.+on, and insist on your making love to her? But I will let you off. You don't have to do it."

She caught her skirts in her left hand, preparatory to going, and her right hand rested lightly on his arm. She spoke in a rather peculiar voice.

"Yes," she said, "the boy was a very, very dear boy, and I want the man to be equally brave and--sensible."

Musgrave stared after her. "I wonder--I wonder--? Oh, no, that couldn't be," he said, and wearily.

"There must be some preposterous situations that don't come about."

And afterward he strolled across the lawn, where the locusts were shrilling, as if in a stubborn prediction of something which was inevitable, and he meditated upon a great number of things. There were a host of fleecy little clouds in the sky. He looked up at them, interrogatively.

And then he smiled and shook his head.

"Yet I don't know," said he; "for I am coming to the conclusion that the world is run on an extremely humorous basis."

And oddly enough, it was at the same moment that Patricia--in Lichfield--reached the same conclusion.

PART SEVEN - YOKED

"We are as time moulds us, lacking wherewithal To shape out n.o.bler fortunes or contend Against all-patient Fates, who may not mend The allotted pattern of things temporal Or alter it a jot or e'er let fall A single st.i.tch thereof, until at last The web and its drear weavers be overcast And predetermined darkness swallow all.

"They have ordained for us a time to sing, A time to love, a time wherein to tire Of all spent songs and kisses; caroling Such elegies as buried dreams require, Love now departs, and leaves us s.h.i.+vering Beside the embers of a burned-out fire."

PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. _Egeria Answers._

I

The doctor's waiting-room smelt strongly of antiseptics. That was Patricia's predominating thought as she wandered aimlessly about the apartment. She fingered its dusty furniture. She remembered afterward the steel-engraving of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, with General Lee explaining some evidently important matter to those attentive and unhumanly stiff politicians; and she remembered, too, how in depicting one statesman, who unavoidably sat with his back to the spectator, the artist had exceeded anatomical possibilities in order to obtain a recognizable full-faced portrait. Yet at the time this picture had not roused her conscious attention.

She went presently to the long table austerely decorated with two rows of magazines, each partly covered by its neighbor, just as s.h.i.+ngles are placed. The arrangement irritated her unreasonably. She wanted to disarrange these dog-eared pamphlets, to throw them on the floor, to destroy them. She wondered how many other miserable people had tried to read these hateful books while they waited in this abominable room.

She started when the door of the consultation-room opened. The doctor was patting the silk glove of a hara.s.sed-looking woman in black as he escorted her to the outer door, and was a.s.suring her that everything was going very well indeed, and that she was not to worry, and so on.

And presently he spoke with Patricia, for a long while, quite levelly, of matters which it is not suitable to record. Discreet man that he was, Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment at the time of little Roger's birth.

She was dividedly conscious of a desire to laugh and of the notion that she must remain outwardly serious, because though this horrible Pemberton man was talking abject nonsense, she would presently be having him as a dinner-guest.

But what if he were not talking nonsense? The possibility, considered, roused a sensation of falling through infinity.

"Yes, yes," Patricia civilly a.s.sented. "These young doctors have taken this out of me, and that out of me, as you might take the works out of a watch. And it has done no good; and they were mistaken in their first diagnoses, because what they took for true osteomalacia was only---- Would you mind telling me again? Oh, yes; I had only a pseudo-osteomalacic rhachitic pelvis, to begin with. To think of anybody's being mistaken about a simple little trouble like that! And I suppose I was just born with it, like my mother and all those other luckless women with Musgrave blood in them?"

"Fehling and Schliephake at least consider this variety of pelvic anomaly to be congenital in the majority of cases. But, without going into the question of heredity at all, I think it only, fair to tell you, Mrs. Musgrave----" And Pemberton went on talking.

Neither of the two showed any emotion.

The doctor went on talking. Patricia did not listen. The man was talking, she comprehended, but to her his words seemed blurred and indistinguishable. "Like a talking-machine when it isn't wound up enough," she decided.

Subconsciously Patricia was thinking, "You have two big beads of perspiration on your nose, and if I were to allude to the fact you would very probably die of embarra.s.sment."

Aloud Patricia said: "You mean, then, that, to cap it all, a functional disorder of my heart has become organic, so that I would inevitably die under another operation? or even at a sudden shock? And that particular operation is now the solitary chance of saving my life! The dilemma is neat, isn't it? How G.o.d must laugh at the jokes He contrives," said Patricia. "I wish that I could laugh. And I will. I don't care whether you think me a reprobate or not, Dr. Pemberton, I want a good stiff drink of whiskey--the Musgrave size."

He gave it to her.

II

Patricia had as yet an hour to spend in Lichfield before her train left.

She pa.s.sed it in the garden of her own home, where she had first seen Rudolph Musgrave and he had fought with Pevensey. All that seemed very long ago.

The dahlia leaves, she noticed, were edged with yellow. She must look to it that the place was more frequently watered; and that the bulbs were dug up in September. Next year she meant to set the dahlias thinly, like a hedge....

"Oh, yes, I meant to. Only I won't be alive next year," she recollected.

She went about the garden to see if Ned had weeded out the wild-pea vines--a pest which had invaded the trim place lately. Only a few of the intruders remained, burnt-out and withered as they are annually by the mid-summer sun. There would be no more fight until next April.

"Oh, and I have prayed to You, I have always tried to do what You wanted, and I never asked You to let me be born locked up in a good-for-nothing Musgrave body! And You won't even let me see a wild-pea vine again! That isn't much to ask, I think. But You won't let me do it. You really do have rather funny notions about Your jokes."

She began to laugh.

"Oh, very well!" Patricia said aloud. "It is none of my affair that You elect to run Your world on an extremely humorous basis."

She was at Matocton in good time for luncheon.