The Rivet in Grandfathers Neck | Page 7

own mouth was giving utterance to divers

irrelevant and foolish sounds, which eventually resolved themselves
into the statement he was glad to see her. And immediately afterward
the banality of this remark brought the hot blood to his face and, for the
rest of the day, stung him and teased him, somewhere in the
background of his mind, like an incessant insect.
Glad, indeed!
Before he had finished shaking hands with Patricia Stapylton, it was all
over with the poor man.
"Er--h'm!" quoth he.
"Only," Miss Stapylton was meditating, with puckered brow, "it would
be unseemly for me to call you Rudolph--"
"You impertinent minx!" cried he, in his soul; "I should rather think it
would be!"
"--and Cousin Rudolph sounds exactly like a dried-up little man with
eyeglasses and crows' feet and a gentle nature. I rather thought you
were going to be like that, and I regard it as extremely hospitable of
you not to be. You are more like--like what now?" Miss Stapylton put
her head to one side and considered the contents of her
vocabulary,--"you are like a viking. I shall call you Olaf," she
announced, when she had reached a decision.
This, look you, to the most dignified man in Lichfield,--a person who
had never borne a nickname in his life. You must picture for yourself
how the colonel stood before her, big, sturdy and blond, and glared
down at her, and assured himself that he was very indignant; like
Timanthes, the colonel's biographer prefers to draw a veil before the
countenance to which art is unable to do justice.
Then, "I have no admiration for the Northmen," Rudolph Musgrave
declared, stiffly. "They were a rude and barbarous nation, proverbially
addicted to piracy and intemperance."

"My goodness gracious!" Miss Stapylton observed,--and now, for the
first time, he saw the teeth that were like grains of rice upon a pink rose
petal. Also, he saw dimples. "And does one mean all that by a viking?"
"The vikings," he informed her--and his Library manner had settled
upon him now to the very tips of his fingers--"were pirates. The word is
of Icelandic origin, from vik, the name applied to the small inlets along
the coast in which they concealed their galleys. I may mention that Olaf
was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian
monarch to reign in Norway."
"Dear me!" said Miss Stapylton; "how interesting!"
Then she yawned with deliberate cruelty.
"However," she concluded, "I shall call you Olaf, just the same."
"Er--h'm!" said the colonel.
* * * * *
And this stuttering boor (he reflected) was Colonel Rudolph Musgrave,
confessedly the social triumph of his generation! This imbecile, without
a syllable to say for himself, without a solitary adroit word within
tongue's reach, wherewith to annihilate the hussy, was a Musgrave of
Matocton!
* * * * *
And she did. To her he was "Olaf" from that day forth.
Rudolph Musgrave called her, "You." He was nettled, of course, by her
forwardness--"Olaf," indeed!--yet he found it, somehow, difficult to
bear this fact in mind continuously.
For while it is true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall in
love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily employed
with other matters to have much time to profit by current literature.
Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic. She prefers to

jog along in the old rut, contentedly turning out chromolithographic
sunrises such as they give away at the tea stores, contentedly staging
the most violent and improbable melodramas; and--sturdy old Philistine
that she is--she even now permits her children to fall in love in the most
primitive fashion.
She is not particularly interested in subtleties and soul analyses; she
merely chuckles rather complacently when a pair of eyes are drawn,
somehow, to another pair of eyes, and an indescribable something is
altered somewhere in some untellable fashion, and the world, suddenly,
becomes the most delightful place of residence in all the universe.
Indeed, it is her favorite miracle, this. For at work of this sort the old
Philistine knows that she is an adept; and she has rejoiced in the skill of
her hands, with a sober workmanly joy, since Cain first went a-wooing
in the Land of Nod.
So Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, without understanding what had
happened to him, on a sudden was strangely content with life.
It was at supper--dinner, in Lichfield, when not a formal entertainment,
is eaten at two in the afternoon--that he fell a-speculating as to whether
Her eyes, after all, could be fitly described as purple.
Wasn't there a grayer luminosity about them than he had at first
suspected?--wasn't the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of
sunlight falling upon a wet slate roof?
It was