The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck: A Comedy of Limitations by James Branch Cabell (top 20 books to read txt) 📖

Musgrave sat all night beside the body. He had not any strength for anger now, and hardly for grief, Agatha had been his charge; and the fact that he had never plucked up courage to allude to her practises was now an enormity in which he could not quite believe. His cowardice and its fruitage confronted him, and frightened him into a panic frenzy of remorse.

Agatha had been his charge; and he had entrusted the stewardship to Patricia. Between them—that Patricia might have her card-game, that he might sit upon a platform for an hour or two with a half-dozen other pompous fools—they had let Agatha die. There was no mercy in him for Patricia or for himself. He wished Patricia had been a man. Had any man —an emperor or a coal-heaver, it would not have mattered—spoken as Patricia had done within the moment, here, within arm's reach of the poor flesh that had been Agatha's, Rudolph Musgrave would have known his duty. But, according to his code, it was not permitted to be discourteous to a woman….

He caught himself with grotesque meanness wishing that Agatha had been there,—privileged by her sex where he was fettered,—she who was so generous of heart and so fiery of tongue at need; and comprehension that Agatha would never abet or adore him any more smote him anew.

* * * * *

And chance reserved for him more poignant torture. Next day, while Rudolph Musgrave was making out the list of honorary pall-bearers, the postman brought a letter which had been forwarded from Chicago. It was from Agatha, written upon the morning of that day wherein later she had been, as Patricia phrased it, "queer, you know."

He found it wildly droll to puzzle out those "crossed" four sheets of trivialities written in an Italian hand so minute and orderly that the finished page suggested a fly-screen. He had so often remonstrated with Agatha about her penuriousness as concerned stationery.

"Selina Brice & the Rev'd Henry Anstruther, who now has a church in Seattle, have announced their engagement. Stanley Haggage has gone to Alabama to marry Leonora Bright, who moved from here a year ago. They are both as poor as church mice, & I think marriage in such a case an unwise step for anyone. It brings cares & anxieties enough any way, without starting out with poverty to increase and render deeper every trouble…."

Such was the tenor of Agatha's last letter, of the last self-expression of that effigy upstairs who (you could see) knew everything and was not discontent.

Here the dead spoke, omniscient; and told you that Stanley Haggage had gone to Alabama, and that marriage brought new cares and anxieties.

"I cannot laugh," said Rudolph Musgrave, aloud. "I know the jest deserves it. But I cannot laugh, because my upper lip seems to be made of leather and I can't move it. And, besides, I loved Agatha to a degree which only You and I have ever known of. She never understood quite how I loved her. Oh, won't You make her understand just how I loved her? For Agatha is dead, because You wanted her to be dead, and I have never told her how much I loved her, and now I cannot ever tell her how much I loved her. Oh, won't You please show me that You have made her understand? or else have me struck by lightning? or do anything….?"

Nothing was done.

X

And afterward Rudolph Musgrave and his wife met amicably, and without reference to their last talk. Patricia wore black-and-white for some six months, and Colonel Musgrave accepted the compromise tacitly. All passed with perfect smoothness between them; and anyone in Lichfield would have told you that the Musgraves were a model couple.

She called him "Rudolph" now.

"Olaf is such a silly-sounding nickname for two old married people, you know," Patricia estimated.

The colonel negligently said that he supposed it did sound odd.

"Only I don't think Clarice Pendomer would care about coming," he resumed,—for the two were discussing an uncompleted list of the people Patricia was to invite to their first house-party.

"And for heaven's sake, why not? We always have her to everything."

He could not tell her it was because the Charterises were to be among their guests. So he said: "Oh, well—!"

"Mrs. C.B. Pendomer, then"—Patricia wrote the name with a flourish. "Oh, you jay-bird, I'm not jealous. Everybody knows you never had any more morals than a tom-cat on the back fence. It's a lucky thing the boy didn't take after you, isn't it? He doesn't, not a bit. No, Harry Pendomer is the puniest black-haired little wretch, whereas your other son, sir, resembles his mother and is in consequence a ravishingly beautiful person of superlative charm—"

He was staring at her so oddly that she paused. So Patricia was familiar with that old scandal which linked his name with Clarice Pendomer's! He was wondering if Patricia had married him in the belief that she was marrying a man who, appraised by any standards, had acted infamously.

"I was only thinking you had better ask Judge Allardyce, Patricia. You see, he is absolutely certain not to come—"

* * * * *

This year the Musgraves had decided not to spend the spring alone together at Matocton, as they had done the four preceding years.

"It looks so silly," as Patricia pointed out.

And, besides, a house-party is the most economical method,—as she also pointed out, being born a Stapylton—of paying off your social obligations, because you can always ask so many people who, you know, have made other plans, and cannot accept.

* * * * *

"So we will invite Judge Allardyce, of course," said Patricia. "I had forgotten his court met in June. Oh, and Peter Blagden too. It had slipped my mind his uncle was dead…."

"I learned this morning Mrs. Haggage was to lecture in Louisville on the sixteenth. She was reading up in the Library, you see—"

"Rudolph, you are the lodestar of my existence. I will ask her to come on the fourteenth and spend a week. I never could abide the hag, but she has such a—There! I've made a big blot right in the middle of 'darling,' and spoiled a perfectly good sheet of paper!… You'd better mail it at once, though, because the evening-paper may have something in it about her lecture."

XI

Rudolph—"

"Why—er—yes, dear?"

This was after supper, and Patricia was playing solitaire. Her husband was reading the paper.

"Agatha told me all about Virginia, you know—"

Here Colonel Musgrave frowned. "It is not a pleasant topic."

"You jay-bird, you behave entirely too much as if you were my grandfather. As I was saying, Agatha told me all about your uncle and Virginia," Patricia hurried on. "And how she ran away afterwards, and hid in the woods for three days, and came to your father's plantation, and how your father bought her, and how her son was born, and how her son was lynched—"

"Now, really, Patricia! Surely there are other matters which may be more profitably discussed."

"Of course. Now, for instance, why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?" Patricia peeped to see what cards lay beneath that monarch, and upon reflection moved the King of Spades into the vacant space. She was a devotee of solitaire and invariably cheated at it.

She went on, absently: "But don't you see? That colored boy was your own first cousin, and he was killed for doing exactly what his father had done. Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of flubdub and laid him out in state when he died—and they poured kerosene upon the son and burned him alive. And I believe Virginia thinks that wasn't fair."

"What do you mean?"

"I honestly believe Virginia hates the Musgraves. She is only a negro, of course, but then she was a mother once—Oh, yes! all I need is a black eight—" Patricia demanded, "Now look at your brother Hector—the awfully dissipated one that died of an overdose of opiates. When it happened wasn't Virginia taking care of him?"

"Of course. She is an invaluable nurse."

"And nobody else was here when Agatha went out into the rain. Now, what if she had just let Agatha go, without trying to stop her? It would have been perfectly simple. So is this. All I have to do is to take them off now."

Colonel Musgrave negligently returned to his perusal of the afternoon paper. "You are suggesting—if you will overlook my frankness—the most deplorable sort of nonsense, Patricia."

"I know exactly how Balaam felt," she said, irrelevantly, and fell to shuffling the cards. "You don't, and you won't, understand that Virginia is a human being. In any event, I wish you would get rid of her."

"I couldn't decently do that," said Rudolph Musgrave, with careful patience. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many years of faithful service. Nothing more strikingly attests the folly of freeing the negro than the unwillingness of the better class of slaves to leave their former owners—"

"Now you are going to quote a paragraph or so from your Gracious Era. As if I hadn't read everything you ever wrote! You are a fearful humbug in some ways, Rudolph."

"And you are a red-headed rattlepate, madam. But seriously, Patricia, you who were reared in the North are strangely unwilling to concede that we of the South are after all best qualified to deal with the Negro Problem. We know the negro as you cannot ever know him."

"You! Oh, God ha' mercy on us!" mocked Patricia. "There wasn't any Negro Problem hereabouts, you beautiful idiot, so long as there were any negroes. Why, to-day there is hardly one full-blooded negro in Lichfield. There are only a thousand or so of mulattoes who share the blood of people like your Uncle Edward. And for the most part they take after their white kin, unfortunately. And there you have the Lichfield Negro Problem in a nutshell. It is a venerable one and fully set forth in the Bible. You needn't attempt to argue with me, because you are a ninnyhammer, and I am a second Nestor. The Holy Scriptures are perfectly explicit as to what happens to the heads of the children and their teeth too."

"I wish you wouldn't jest about such matters—"

"Because it isn't lady-like? But, Rudolph, you know perfectly well that
I am not a lady."

"My dear!" he cried, in horror that was real, "and what on earth have I said even to suggest—"

"Oh, not a syllable; it isn't at all the sort of thing that your sort says … And I am not your sort. I don't know that I altogether wish I were. But if I were, it would certainly make things easier," Patricia added sharply.

"My dear—!" he again protested.

"Now, candidly, Rudolph"—relinquishing the game, she fell to shuffling the cards—"just count up the number of times this month that my—oh, well! I really don't know what to call it except my deplorable omission in failing to be born a lady—has seemed to you to yank the very last rag off the gooseberry-bush?"

He scoffed. "What nonsense! Although, of course, Patricia—"

She nodded, mischief in her brightly-colored tiny face. "Yes, that is just your attitude, you beautiful idiot."

"—although, of course—now, quite honestly, Patricia, I have occasionally wished that you would not speak of sacred and—er, physical and sociological matters in exactly the tone in which—well! in which you sometimes do speak of them. It may sound old-fashioned, but I have always believed that decency is quite as important in mental affairs as it is in physical ones, and that as a consequence, a gentlewoman should always clothe her thoughts with at least the same care she accords her body. Oh, don't misunderstand me! Of course it doesn't do any harm, my dear, between us. But outside—you see, for people to know that you think about such things must necessarily give them a false opinion