Patricia had not been well since little Roger’s
birth.
It was a peaked and shrewish Patricia, rather than
Rudolph Musgrave, who fought out the long and obstinate
battle with Roger Stapylton.
She was jealous at the bottom of her heart. She
would not have anyone, not even her father, be too
fond of what was preeminently hers; the world at large,
including Rudolph Musgrave, was at liberty to adore
her boy, as was perfectly natural, but not to meddle:
and in fine, Patricia was both hysterical and vixenish
whenever a giving up of the Library work was suggested.
The old man did not quarrel with her. And with
Roger Stapylton’s loneliness in these days,
and the long thoughts it bred, we have nothing here
to do. But when he died, stricken without warning,
some five years after Patricia’s marriage, his
will was discovered to bequeath practically his entire
fortune to little Roger Musgrave when the child should
come of age; and to Rudolph Musgrave, as Patricia’s
husband, what was a reasonable income when judged
by Lichfield’s unexacting standards rather than
by Patricia’s anticipations. In a word,
Patricia found that she and the colonel could for
the future count upon a little more than half of the
income she had previously been allowed by Roger Stapylton.
“It isn’t fair!” she said.
“It’s monstrous! And all because you
were so obstinate about your picayune Library!”
“Patricia—” he began.
“Oh, I tell you it’s absurd, Olaf!
The money logically ought to have been left to me.
And here I will have to come to you for every penny
of my money. And Heaven knows I have had
to scrimp enough to support us all on what I used
to have—Olaf,” Patricia said, in another
voice, “Olaf! why, what is it, dear?”
“I was reflecting,” said Colonel Musgrave,
“that, as you justly observe, both Agatha and
I have been practically indebted to you for our support
these past five years—”
It must be enregistered, not to the man’s credit,
but rather as a simple fact, that it was never within
Colonel Musgrave’s power to forget the incident
immediately recorded.
He forgave; when Patricia wept, seeing how leaden-colored
his handsome face had turned, he forgave as promptly
and as freely as he was learning to pardon the telling
of a serviceable lie, or the perpetration of an occasional
barbarism in speech, by Patricia. For he, a Musgrave
of Matocton, had married a Stapylton; he had begun
to comprehend that their standards were different,
and that some daily conflict between these standards
was inevitable.
And besides, as it has been veraciously observed,
the truth of an insult is the barb which prevents
its retraction. Patricia spoke the truth:
Rudolph Musgrave and all those rationally reliant upon
Rudolph Musgrave for support, had lived for some five
years upon the money which they owed to Patricia.
He saw about him other scions of old families who
accepted such circumstances blithely: but, he
said, he was a Musgrave of Matocton; and, he reflected,
in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed is necessarily
very unhappy.
