And at this period Colonel Musgrave noted3 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 intimacy4 which was, obviously, flourishing between the little novelist and Patricia.
Also Colonel Musgrave had presently good reason to lament5 a contretemps, over which he was sulking when Mrs. Pendomer rustled6 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 perfectly7.
"Waffles?" said Mrs. Pendomer. "At my age and weight the first is an experiment and the fifth an amiable8 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 demurely10 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 encomium11. 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 terrapin12 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 helping14. 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 arbiter15 as touched the social graces. And so, no more of Pilkins.
Mrs. Pendomer partook of chops. "Is this remorse," she queried16, "or a convivially17 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 interval18 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 disapprovingly19 at her frivolity20; he swallowed his coffee, and buttered a superfluous21 potato. "H'm!" said he; "then you know?"
"And in that case," said he, darkly, "it is not the only sufferer."
Mrs. Pendomer considered the attractions of a third waffle—a mellow23 blending of autumnal yellows, fringed with a crisp and irresistible24 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 mingled25 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 immature26 view of things. Her unspoiled purity," he added, meditatively27, "and innocence28 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, soothingly29, "has ideals. And ideals, like a hare-lip or a mission in life, should be pitied rather than condemned30, when our friends possess them; especially," she continued, buttering her waffle, "as so many women have them sandwiched between their last attack of measles31 and their first imported complexion32. No one of the three is lasting33, Rudolph."
"H'm!" said he.
There was another silence. The colonel desperately34 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 lamented35, parenthetically, "never suspects a woman of discretion9, until she begins to lose her waist."
"—and I am sure that I can rely upon your womanly tact36, 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 undoubtedly37 recommended a judicious38 supervision39 of her reading-matter."
Charteris had suggested that some of my father's letters—during the
War, you know—. might be of value—"
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 virtuous42 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 morose43 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, scattered44 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 lamely45, "to discuss the matter with her, in her present excited and perfectly unreasonable46 condition."
Mrs. Pendomer's penciled eyebrows47 rose, and her lips—which were quite as red as there was any necessity for their being—twitched.
"Hysterics?" she asked.
"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 embarrassment51 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 idiocies52 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, plaintively53, "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 realization54 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 outrageousness55 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 walnut56 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 meditation57, "there was the money."
"Yes," said Rudolph Musgrave, slowly; "there was the money."
He sprang to his feet, and drew himself erect58. Here was a moment he must give its full dramatic value.
"Oh, no, Clarice, my marriage may have been an eminently59 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 spoke13. 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 unreasonably60 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 succinctly61 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, precisely62, 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 gamut63 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, irresolutely64; for he abhorred65 "a scene," as his vernacular66 phrased it, and to him Clarice's present manner bordered upon both the scenic67 and the incomprehensible.
"Ah!—you women!" he temporized68.
"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 porcelain72 tub."
"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 majestically74 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 discomfort71 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."
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1
ominous
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| adj.不祥的，不吉的，预兆的，预示的 | |
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rumored
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| adj.传说的，谣传的v.传闻( rumor的过去式和过去分词 )；[古]名誉；咕哝；[古]喧嚷 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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lament
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| n.悲叹，悔恨，恸哭；v.哀悼，悔恨，悲叹 | |
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rustled
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| v.发出沙沙的声音( rustle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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7
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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discretion
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| n.谨慎；随意处理 | |
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demurely
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| adv.装成端庄地，认真地 | |
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encomium
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| n.赞颂；颂词 | |
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terrapin
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| n.泥龟；鳖 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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arbiter
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| n.仲裁人，公断人 | |
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queried
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| v.质疑，对…表示疑问( query的过去式和过去分词 )；询问 | |
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convivially
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| adv.欢乐地，愉悦地 | |
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interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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disapprovingly
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| adv.不以为然地，不赞成地，非难地 | |
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frivolity
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| n.轻松的乐事，兴高采烈；轻浮的举止 | |
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superfluous
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| adj.过多的，过剩的，多余的 | |
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insomnia
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| n.失眠，失眠症 | |
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mellow
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| adj.柔和的；熟透的；v.变柔和；(使)成熟 | |
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irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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immature
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| adj.未成熟的，发育未全的，未充分发展的 | |
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27
meditatively
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| adv.冥想地 | |
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innocence
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| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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soothingly
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| adv.抚慰地，安慰地；镇痛地 | |
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30
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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measles
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| n.麻疹，风疹，包虫病，痧子 | |
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complexion
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| n.肤色；情况，局面；气质，性格 | |
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lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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lamented
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| adj.被哀悼的，令人遗憾的v.（为…）哀悼，痛哭，悲伤( lament的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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tact
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| n.机敏，圆滑，得体 | |
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undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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judicious
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| adj.明智的，明断的，能作出明智决定的 | |
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supervision
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| n.监督，管理 | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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virtuous
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| adj.有品德的，善良的，贞洁的，有效力的 | |
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morose
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| adj.脾气坏的，不高兴的 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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lamely
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| 一瘸一拐地，不完全地 | |
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unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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groaned
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| v.呻吟( groan的过去式和过去分词 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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49
teaspoon
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| n.茶匙 | |
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forefinger
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| n.食指 | |
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embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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idiocies
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| n.极度的愚蠢( idiocy的名词复数 )；愚蠢的行为；白痴状态 | |
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53
plaintively
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| adv.悲哀地，哀怨地 | |
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54
realization
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| n.实现；认识到，深刻了解 | |
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55
outrageousness
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| n. 残暴 蛮横 | |
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walnut
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| n.胡桃，胡桃木，胡桃色，茶色 | |
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meditation
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| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
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58
erect
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| n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的 | |
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eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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60
unreasonably
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| adv. 不合理地 | |
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61
succinctly
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| adv.简洁地；简洁地，简便地 | |
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62
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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63
gamut
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| n.全音阶，(一领域的)全部知识 | |
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64
irresolutely
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| adv.优柔寡断地 | |
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65
abhorred
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| v.憎恶( abhor的过去式和过去分词 )；（厌恶地）回避；拒绝；淘汰 | |
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66
vernacular
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| adj.地方的，用地方语写成的；n.白话；行话；本国语；动植物的俗名 | |
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67
scenic
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| adj.自然景色的，景色优美的 | |
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68
temporized
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| v.敷衍( temporize的过去式和过去分词 )；拖延；顺应时势；暂时同意 | |
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69
luster
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| n.光辉；光泽，光亮；荣誉 | |
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70
conspired
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| 密谋( conspire的过去式和过去分词 )； 搞阴谋； （事件等）巧合； 共同导致 | |
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71
discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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72
porcelain
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| n.瓷；adj.瓷的，瓷制的 | |
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73
hovered
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| 鸟( hover的过去式和过去分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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74
majestically
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| 雄伟地； 庄重地； 威严地； 崇高地 | |
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