"I am contented by remembrances--
Dreams of dead passions, wraiths of vanished times,
Fragments of vows, and by-ends of old rhymes--
Flotsam and jetsam tumbling in the seas
Whereon, long since, put forth our argosies
Which, bent on traffic in the Isles of Love,
Lie foundered somewhere in some firth thereof,
Encradled by eternal silences."
"Thus, having come to naked bankruptcy,
Let us part friends, as thrifty tradesmen do
When common ventures fail, for it may be
These battered oaths and rhymes may yet ring 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.
"Ah!--you women!" he temporized.
There was a glance from eyes whose luster time and irregular living had
conspired to dim.
"Ah!--you men!" Mrs. Pendomer retorted. "And there we have the tragedy
of life in a nutshell!"
Silence lasted for a while. The colonel was finding this matutinal talk
discomfortably opulent in pauses.
"Rudolph, and has it never occurred to you that in marrying Patricia you
swindled her?"
And naturally his eyebrows lifted.
"Because a woman wants love."
"Well, well! and don't I love Patricia?"
"I dare say that you think you do. Only you have played at loving so
long you are really unable to love anybody as a girl has every right to
be loved in her twenties. Yes, Rudolph, you are being rather subtly
punished for the good times you have had. And, after all, the saddest
punishment is something that happens in us, not something which happens
to us."
"I wish you wouldn't laugh, Clarice----"
"I wish I didn't have to. For I would get far more comfort out of
crying, and I don't dare to, because of my complexion. It comes in a
round pasteboard box nowadays, you know, Rudolph, with French
mendacities all over the top--and my eyebrows come in a fat crayon, and
the healthful glow of my lips comes in a little porcelain tub."
Mrs. Pendomer was playing with a teaspoon now, and a smile hovered about
the aforementioned lips.
"And yet, do you remember, Rudolph," said she, "that evening at
Assequin, when I wore a blue gown, and they were playing _Fleurs
d'Amour_, and--you said--?"
"Yes"--there was an effective little catch in his voice--"you were a
wonderful girl, Clarice--'my sunshine girl,' I used to call you. And
blue was always your color; it went with your eyes so exactly. And those
big sleeves they wore then--those tell-tale, crushable sleeves!--they
suited your slender youthfulness so perfectly! Ah, I remember it as
though it were yesterday!"
Mrs. Pendomer majestically rose to her feet.
"It was pink! And it was at the Whitebrier you said--what you said!
And--and you don't deserve anything but what you are getting," she
concluded, grimly.
"I--it was so long ago," Rudolph Musgrave apologized, with mingled
discomfort and vagueness.
"Yes," she conceded, rather sadly; "it was so long--oh, very long ago!
For we were young then, and we believed in things, and--and Jack
Charteris had not taken a fancy to me--" She sighed and drummed her
fingers on the table. "But women have always helped and shielded you,
haven't they, Rudolph? And now I am going to help you too, for you have
shown me the way. You don't deserve it in the least, but I'll do it."