The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck. A Comedy of Limitations

'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.'