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

true
  To some fair woman's hearing, so that she
  Will listen and think of love, and I of you."

F. Ashcroft Wheeler. Revisions.

I

When the Reliance, the Constitution and the Columbia were holding trial races off Newport to decide which one of these yachts should defend the America's cup; when the tone of the Japanese press as to Russia's actions in Manchuria was beginning to grow ominous; when the Jews of America were drafting a petition to the Czar; and when it was rumored that the health of Pope Leo XIII was commencing to fail:—at this remote time, the Musgraves gave their first house-party.

And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted and admired the apparent unconcern with which John Charteris and Clarice Pendomer encountered at Matocton. And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted with approval the intimacy which was, obviously, flourishing between the little novelist and Patricia.

Also Colonel Musgrave had presently good reason to lament a contretemps, over which he was sulking when Mrs. Pendomer rustled to her seat at the breakfast-table, with a shortness of breath that was partly due to the stairs, and in part attributable to her youthful dress, which fitted a trifle too perfectly.

"Waffles?" said Mrs. Pendomer. "At my age and weight the first is an experiment and the fifth an amiable indiscretion of which I am invariably guilty. Sugar, please." She yawned, and reached a generously-proportioned arm toward the sugar-bowl. "Yes, that will do, Pilkins."

Colonel Musgrave—since the remainder of his house-party had already breakfasted—raised his fine eyes toward the chandelier, and sighed, as Pilkins demurely closed the dining-room door.

Leander Pilkins—butler for a long while now to the Musgraves of Matocton—would here, if space permitted, be the subject of an encomium. Leander Pilkins was in Lichfield considered to be, upon the whole, the handsomest man whom Lichfield had produced; for this quadroon's skin was like old ivory, and his profile would have done credit to an emperor. His terrapin is still spoken of in Lichfield as people in less favored localities speak of the Golden Age, and his mayonnaise (boasts Lichfield) would have compelled an Olympian to plead for a second helping. For the rest, his deportment in all functions of butlership is best described as super-Chesterfieldian; and, indeed, he was generally known to be a byblow of Captain Beverley Musgrave's, who in his day was Lichfield's arbiter as touched the social graces. And so, no more of Pilkins.

Mrs. Pendomer partook of chops. "Is this remorse," she queried, "or a convivially induced requirement for bromides? At this unearthly hour of the morning it is very often difficult to disentangle the two."

"It is neither," said Colonel Musgrave, and almost snappishly.

Followed an interval of silence. "Really," said Mrs. Pendomer, and as with sympathy, "one would think you had at last been confronted with one of your thirty-seven pasts—or is it thirty-eight, Rudolph?"

Colonel Musgrave frowned disapprovingly at her frivolity; he swallowed his coffee, and buttered a superfluous potato. "H'm!" said he; "then you know?"

"I know," sighed she, "that a sleeping past frequently suffers from insomnia."

"And in that case," said he, darkly, "it is not the only sufferer."

Mrs. Pendomer considered the attractions of a third waffle—a mellow blending of autumnal yellows, fringed with a crisp and irresistible brown, that, for the moment, put to flight all dreams and visions of slenderness.

"And Patricia?" she queried, with a mental hiatus.

Colonel Musgrave flushed.

"Patricia," he conceded, with mingled dignity and sadness, "is, after all, still in her twenties——"

"Yes," said Mrs. Pendomer, with a dryness which might mean anything or nothing; "she was only twenty-one when she married you."

"I mean," he explained, with obvious patience, "that at her age she—not unnaturally—takes an immature view of things. Her unspoiled purity," he added, meditatively, "and innocence and general unsophistication are, of course, adorable, but I can admit to thinking that for a journey through life they impress me as excess baggage."

"Patricia," said Mrs. Pendomer, soothingly, "has ideals. And ideals, like a hare-lip or a mission in life, should be pitied rather than condemned, when our friends possess them; especially," she continued, buttering her waffle, "as so many women have them sandwiched between their last attack of measles and their first imported complexion. No one of the three is lasting, Rudolph."

"H'm!" said he.

There was another silence. The colonel desperately felt that matters were not advancing.

"H'm!" said she, with something of interrogation in her voice.

"See here, Clarice, I have known you——"

"You have not!" cried she, very earnestly; "not by five years!"

"Well, say for some time. You are a sensible woman——"

"A man," Mrs. Pendomer lamented, parenthetically, "never suspects a woman of discretion, until she begins to lose her waist."

"—and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact, and finer instincts,—and that sort of thing, you know—to help me out of a deuce of a mess."

Mrs. Pendomer ate on, in an exceedingly noncommittal fashion, as he paused, inquiringly.

"She has been reading some letters," said he, at length; "some letters that I wrote a long time ago."

"In the case of so young a girl," observed Mrs. Pendomer, with perfect comprehension, "I should have undoubtedly recommended a judicious supervision of her reading-matter."

"She was looking through an old escritoire," he explained; "Jack
Charteris had suggested that some of my father's letters—during the
War, you know—. might be of value—"

He paused, for Mrs. Pendomer appeared on the verge of a question.

But she only said, "So it was Mr. Charteris who suggested Patricia's searching the desk. Ah, yes! And then—?"

"And it was years ago—and just the usual sort of thing, though it may have seemed from the letters—Why, I hadn't given the girl a thought," he cried, in virtuous indignation, "until Patricia found the letters—and read them!"

"Naturally," she assented—"yes,—just as I read George's."

The smile with which she accompanied this remark, suggested that both Mr. Pendomer's correspondence and home life were at times of an interesting nature.

"I had destroyed the envelopes when she returned them," continued Colonel Musgrave, with morose confusion of persons. "Patricia doesn't even know who the girl was—her name, somehow, was not mentioned."

"'Woman of my heart'—'Dearest girl in all the world,'" quoted Mrs. Pendomer, reminiscently, "and suchlike tender phrases, scattered in with a pepper-cruet, after the rough copy was made in pencil, and dated just 'Wednesday,' or 'Thursday,' of course. Ah, you were always very careful, Rudolph," she sighed; "and now that makes it all the worse, because—as far as all the evidence goes—these letters may have been returned yesterday."

"Why—!" Colonel Musgrave pulled up short, hardly seeing his way clear through the indignant periods on which he had entered. "I declined," said he, somewhat lamely, "to discuss the matter with her, in her present excited and perfectly unreasonable condition."

Mrs. Pendomer's penciled eyebrows rose, and her lips—which were quite as red as there was any necessity for their being—twitched.

"Hysterics?" she asked.

"Worse!" groaned Colonel Musgrave; "patient resignation under unmerited affliction!"

He had picked up a teaspoon, and he carefully balanced it upon his forefinger.

"There were certain phrases in these letters which were, somehow, repeated in certain letters I wrote to Patricia the summer we were engaged, and—not to put too fine a point upon it—she doesn't like it."

Mrs. Pendomer smiled, as though she considered this not improbable; and he continued, with growing embarrassment and indignation:

"She says there must have been others"—Mrs. Pendomer's smile grew reminiscent—"any number of others; that she is only an incident in my life. Er—as you have mentioned, Patricia has certain notions—Northern idiocies about the awfulness of a young fellow's sowing his wild oats, which you and I know perfectly well he is going to do, anyhow, if he is worth his salt. But she doesn't know it, poor little girl. So she won't listen to reason, and she won't come downstairs—which," lamented Rudolph Musgrave, plaintively, "is particularly awkward in a house-party."

He drummed his fingers, for a moment, on the table.

"It is," he summed up, "a combination of Ibsen and hysterics, and of—er, rather declamatory observations concerning there being one law for the man and another for the woman, and Patricia's realization of the mistake we both made—and all that sort of nonsense, you know, exactly as if, I give you my word, she were one of those women who want to vote." The colonel, patently, considered that feminine outrageousness could go no farther. "And she is taking menthol and green tea and mustard plasters and I don't know what all, in bed, prior to—to——"

"Taking leave?" Mrs. Pendomer suggested.

"Er—that was mentioned, I believe," said Colonel Musgrave. "But of course she was only talking."

Mrs. Pendomer looked about her; and, without, the clean-shaven lawns and trim box-hedges were very beautiful in the morning sunlight; within, the same sunlight sparkled over the heavy breakfast service, and gleamed in the high walnut panels of the breakfast-room. She viewed the comfortable appointments about her a little wistfully, for Mrs. Pendomer's purse was not over-full.

"Of course," said she, as in meditation, "there was the money."

"Yes," said Rudolph Musgrave, slowly; "there was the money."

He sprang to his feet, and drew himself erect. Here was a moment he must give its full dramatic value.

"Oh, no, Clarice, my marriage may have been an eminently sensible one, but I love my wife. Oh, believe me, I love her very tenderly, poor little Patricia! I have weathered some forty-seven birthdays; and I have done much as other men do, and all that—there have been flirtations and suchlike, and—er—some women have been kinder to me than I deserved. But I love her; and there has not been a moment since she came into my life I haven't loved her, and been—" he waved his hands now impotently, almost theatrically—"sickened at the thought of the others."

Mrs. Pendomer's foot tapped the floor whilst he spoke. When he had made an ending, she inclined her head toward him.

"Thank you!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Colonel Musgrave bit his lip; and he flushed.

"That," said he, hastily, "was different."

But the difference, whatever may have been its nature, was seemingly a matter of unimportance to Mrs. Pendomer, who was in meditation. She rested her ample chin on a much-bejeweled hand for a moment; and, when Mrs. Pendomer raised her face, her voice was free from affectation.

"You will probably never understand that this particular July day is a crucial point in your life. You will probably remember it, if you remember it at all, simply as that morning when Patricia found some girl-or-another's old letters, and behaved rather unreasonably about them. It was the merest trifle, you will think…. John Charteris understands women better than you do, Rudolph."

"I need not pretend at this late day to be as clever as Jack," the colonel said, in some bewilderment. "But why not more succinctly state that the Escurial is not a dromedary, although there are many flies in France? For what on earth has Jack to do with crucial points and July mornings?"

"Why, I suppose, I only made bold to introduce his name for the sake of an illustration, Rudolph. For the last person in the world to realize, precisely, why any woman did anything is invariably the woman who did it…. Yet there comes in every married woman's existence that time when she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life—as a life which had run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she ever came into that life. A woman never realizes that of her lover, somehow. But to know that your husband, the father of your child, has lived for other women a life in which you had no part, and never can have part!—she realizes that, at one time or another, and—and it sickens her." Mrs. Pendomer smiled as she echoed his phrase, but her eyes were not mirthful.

"Ah, she hungers for those dead years, Rudolph, and, though you devote your whole remaining life to her, nothing can ever make up for them; and she always hates those shadowy women who have stolen them from her. A woman never, at heart, forgives the other women who have loved her husband, even though she cease to care for him herself. For she remembers—ah, you men forget so easily, Rudolph! God had not invented memory when he created Adam; it was kept for the woman."

Then ensued a pause, during which Rudolph Musgrave smiled down upon her, irresolutely; for he abhorred "a scene," as his vernacular phrased it, and to him Clarice's present manner bordered upon both the scenic and the incomprehensible.