Chapter Seventeen.
John Musgrave Sommers was in disgrace. He had been guilty of impertinence to Eliza; worse, he had committed an assault by kicking her maliciously with intent to do bodily harm. Eliza had complained to Mr Musgrave, and had presented his nephew’s conduct in the light of an enormity which she could not overlook until adequate measures had been taken to correct this infantile depravity, and so insure against a repetition of the offence.
Mr Musgrave carried the complaint to his sister and supported her with his presence, if with little else, in her attempt to bring the delinquent to a proper state of repentance. John Musgrave Sommers presented a defiant front and refused with all the obstinate inflexibility of his five years to acknowledge himself in the wrong.
“It was very wicked of you to kick Eliza,” his mother insisted. “When you are in a better frame of mind you will realise that. You must go to her and tell her you are sorry.”
“I’m not sorry,” John returned stoutly, with a watchful eye on his uncle, whose displeasure was manifest and the quality of whose anger John, not being familiar with, was anxious to test before provoking it further with possible unpleasant results to himself.
This positive assertion of an unrepentant spirit nonplussed his elders. Belle looked helplessly at her brother for inspiration; but Mr Musgrave avoided her eye with a care which suggested a cowardly sympathy with the offender if not with the offence. The punishment of children, while he admitted its necessity, was peculiarly distressing to him. Master John Sommers, with a child’s quick intuition, began to realise that he had very little to apprehend from his uncle, but his mother was a different matter; he had had contests with her before and he could not remember ever having come out of them triumphantly.
“John,” she said gravely, and with a gentleness which John did not find reassuring, because his mother was always gentle even before and after she smacked him, “you are not going to be a naughty little boy and grieve mother. You know it is very wrong to be rude to anyone, and it is dreadful to kick. I insist on your telling Eliza you are sorry. You must be sorry.”
“I’m not,” John persisted.
Belle appealed to her brother direct.
“Uncle John, what is to be done with this very naughty little boy?”
Mr Musgrave flushed and looked almost as uncomfortable as though he were being reprimanded for the kicking of Eliza instead of the chubby, unrepentant little sinner before him. He stared at the culprit and frowned.
“Perhaps,” he suggested hopefully, “if you let him run away and think about it he will change his mind.”
“No,” said Belle firmly, having grasped the fact that she would get no help in this quarter; “he has got to change his mind now. If you won’t say you are sorry, John, you will be punished—severely.”
John began to look sulky, but he showed no indication of a proper sense of his own wickedness. He had kicked Eliza deliberately, and had experienced immense satisfaction in the knowledge that he had thereby got a bit of his own back. Eliza was always annoying him and locking him out from the kitchen. He liked the kitchen. Martha gave him cakes when he found his way there; but Eliza baulked him in his purpose whenever she could by closing the door in his face.
“But I’m not sorry,” muttered John obstinately. “And you told me I mustn’t tell stories.”
It occurred to Mr Musgrave that the situation had come to a deadlock. He did not see how his sister would confute this argument. Clearly if John was not sorry he ought not to be compelled to make a false admission. To frighten a child into telling a lie was mistaken discipline.
Whether Mrs Sommers’ diplomacy would have proved equal to coping with the difficulty remained an undetermined point, for at this moment Mr Sommers entered the room, and his wife, manifestly relieved at his opportune arrival, shifted the responsibility of parental authority to his shoulders. Mr Sommers, while he appreciated the enormity of the offence, admitted in his own mind—though he would not have allowed his son to suspect it—extenuating circumstances. Had he been thirty years younger he would probably have acted in a similar manner. Eliza would exasperate any small boy into committing an assault.
“Come here,” said Charlie Sommers. He seated himself in a chair, and drew his son towards him and held him firmly between his knees. “Why did you kick Eliza?”
“Because she’s a disagreeable cat,” replied John.
“It is very rude to call people names,” his father said with a severity he was far from feeling, his opinion coinciding with his son’s. “And it is very rude to your uncle to behave in this way in his house. I expect he will not invite you again. Don’t you know it is very wrong to kick?”
John deliberated this. He knew very well that it was wrong, but he had a strong disinclination towards admitting it. His father waited for an answer.
“Yes,” he acknowledged grudgingly.
“And aren’t you sorry for doing wrong?”
“No,” the culprit replied with less hesitation this time.
“Then I must make you sorry,” said Mr Sommers resolutely. “Do you want me to spank you, John?”
John began to whimper. Of the three adults present John Musgrave was the most unpleasantly affected by his namesake’s tears; familiarity with John junior’s little tricks had hardened his parents’ sensibilities.
“Don’t you think,” said Mr Musgrave uneasily, “that you are—frightening the child?”
Charlie Sommers looked at his brother-in-law with amusement.
“He is less frightened than you are,” he answered. “He is only bent on getting his own way. Ring the bell, Uncle John, for Eliza. John is going to tell her he is sorry.”
“I’m n-not sorry,” blubbered John.
“You will be presently. If you won’t tell Eliza you are sorry for kicking her I am going to spank you.”
Mr Musgrave rang the bell and Eliza answered it in person, looking more sour than usual by reason of her outraged feelings. When her glance fell on Master John Sommers, sulky and unrepentant, but decidedly less confident, she sniffed indignantly and looked with cold disapproval on the assembled group. Mr Musgrave walked away to the window and stood with his back to the room. For the first time since he had engaged her he was not sure that he approved of Eliza, and he had never before felt so irritated with her habit of sniffing.
“I regret to hear that my little boy has been rude to you,” Mr Sommers said. “I have troubled you to come here in order that he shall apologise. Now, John, tell Eliza that you are sorry for being naughty.”
“I’m—”
John felt the sudden tightening of the hand upon his arm, and hesitated. Then he faced Eliza with all the malevolence which a small boy is capable of expressing in his countenance, and muttered ungraciously:
“I’m sorry, because I’ve got to be.”
“Try again,” said Mr Sommers relentlessly; and Eliza sniffed louder, her light eyes on the child’s angry face.
John capitulated before overwhelming odds.
“I’m sorry,” he said more politely, and looked at his foot in preference to Eliza’s hard face, the foot which had committed, the assault.
“I’ve never been accustomed to be treated like that by children,” said Eliza acidly. “Boys are troublesome, I know, but they oughtn’t to be rude. I’m not used to it. I wouldn’t take a place where there were children, especially boys—”
“That will do, Eliza,” observed Mr Musgrave, turning round. “You may go.”
At the curt finality of his tone Eliza withered. For a moment she appeared to be about to break, forth again, but, changing her mind, sniffed herself out of the room and closed the door viciously. Charlie Sommers, still holding his son between his knees, gazed sternly into the small rebellious face.
“You cut away upstairs, John,” he said. “And if ever you kick anyone again I’ll whip you.”
He got up when his son, obeying his instructions with extraordinary alacrity, had made his exit, and faced his brother-in-law with a laugh.
“John,” he said, “I am of the opinion that the punishment was in excess of the fault. How can you endure that sour-faced she-devil in the house? The look of her is enough to put a man off his meals.”
“She is perhaps a little unsympathetic,” John Musgrave allowed, recalling the look in Eliza’s eyes while they had rested on the boy. “But she serves my purpose. In a bachelor establishment a middle-aged woman is more satisfactory than a—a younger person.”
“The single state has its disadvantages,” Charlie Sommers said. “If to employ an Eliza is the penalty for bachelorhood I’d sooner be a Mormon.”
“I really think,” remarked Belle, who during this discussion had been pursuing a train of thought of her own, “that John ought not to be allowed to go to the kinema party this afternoon. He deserves some punishment. A disappointment like that would leave a more lasting impression.”
“Isn’t that,” asked her brother quickly, “being unnecessarily severe? He is a very small sinner, remember.”
“You old dear?” she said, smiling. “You spoil that child. One has to be severe with John; he forgets his sins so readily.”
“So did you when you were his age,” he answered. “As far as my memory serves, you were indulged more than John is; and I don’t think it had a deteriorating effect on your character.”
“That settles it,” Charlie Sommers put in. “John goes to the Hall.”
So John went to the Hall, and in a burst of confidence after the performance confessed to Peggy his wickedness of the morning, for which he expressed still an unrepentant spirit. Peggy carried him for punishment to the mistletoe and kissed him, struggling and resisting, beneath the bough, to Mr Musgrave’s open amusement. He wriggled away from her, and pointing a chubby finger at his uncle commanded her to punish Uncle John too.
“But Uncle John doesn’t merit punishment,” she said, with a bright blush and laughter in her eyes.
“That form of punishment is another special privilege, John,” Mr Musgrave remarked, with his gaze on Peggy’s rosy face.
“It is a special privilege which is any man’s due,” broke in Charlie Sommers, coming up and catching Peggy round the waist and kissing her soundly, “when a girl stands deliberately under the mistletoe.”
Mr Musgrave, who had witnessed this attack with amazement, turned away with a sense of annoyance at his brother-in-law’s bucolic humour. To kiss a woman beneath the mistletoe appeared to him as vulgar as kissing her without that flimsy excuse. He was surprised that Peggy did not show greater resentment at this treatment.
Charlie Sommers and Peggy looked at Mr Musgrave’s retreating back, and then at one another, and smiled.
“You have disgusted Mr Musgrave,” she said.
“I rather suspect him of jealousy,” he replied. “He hadn’t spunk enough or he’d have done the same himself.”
She flushed quickly.
“John would never be guilty of impertinence,” she returned.
“His sins are those of omission,” he retorted. “I think John’s an ass.”
“I think he is an eminently discreet and comfortable person,” she replied. “I should never feel afraid of mistletoe in his presence.”
“It appears to me,” he observed, eyeing the mistletoe above her head, “that you do not show particular trepidation in regard to the plant in anyone’s presence.”
Peggy received this remark in scornful silence. It is not always the case that a woman enjoys the last word.
But later in the afternoon, when John Musgrave was departing and she was wishing him good-bye, standing beneath the identical branch of mistletoe in the big dim hall, she saw his eyes travel to the bough and then to her lips, and she stood looking at him, smiling and ironical. John Musgrave might be an eminently discreet and comfortable person, but he was not without certain human weaknesses.
“The druids regarded it as a sacred plant,” he remarked, feeling constrained to say something on observing her gaze follow his.
“Did they? They were rather musty old people, weren’t they?”
“I think,” he returned, “that perhaps I am a little musty too.”
He took her hand and raised it and kissed it—under the mistletoe. There was in his action in doing this something so courtly and respectful, something so much more impressive in its significance than in Charlie Sommers’ careless embrace, that Peggy found, herself blushing warmly, felt her cheeks glow and her eyes grow bright as Mr Musgrave very gently released her hand and stood again erect, tall and unsmiling, while he bade her farewell. She felt like one of the gentlewomen of bygone times who smiled down at her from faded frames on the walls and who would have curtsied sedately in response to this respectful salutation. Peggy had an idea that she ought to curtsey: instead she said gaily:
“I’m so glad you came. It has been a ripping afternoon, hasn’t, it?”
Later, in the solitude of her own room, seated in a low chair before the fire, resting between the kinema entertainment of the afternoon, which had been for the young people of the village, and a similar entertainment to be held the same evening for the older inhabitants, her idle hands lying listlessly over the arms of her chair, a mischievous smile playing about her lips, she pictured the scene again, and Mr Musgrave’s face, and laughed softly. A pleasing light of satisfaction shone in her eyes, the satisfaction which a woman knows when she realises the sense of her own power.
“I believe,” she said, half aloud, which, since there was no one present to overhear her, was immaterial, “that John is falling in love with me.”
The dimple at the corner of her mouth deepened and the laughter in her eyes increased. Peggy was conscious of a feeling of triumph. She liked people to fall in love with her. She experienced a distinct disinclination, however, to fall in love herself. She was a very long way, she believed, from falling in love with fossilised John Musgrave.
Chapter Eighteen.
With the New Year—or, rather, in advance of it—Peggy’s youngest sister arrived at the Hall. Mrs Chadwick had invited the entire family; but the Midland doctor could not leave her practice, and the children of the married niece had inconveniently developed whooping-cough; so Sophy, the architect, had divided her holiday, spending Christmas with her married sister and coming on to the Hall for the finish of the festivities, which included a dance to be held on New Year’s Eve and a round of somewhat dull dinners and similar entertainments wherewith the Chadwicks’ guests sought to make a return of hospitality.
Sophy hated dinner-parties, but she looked forward with considerable enthusiasm to the coming dance. Mrs Chadwick had provided both nieces with dresses for the occasion, and, in order that these independent young women should not feel unduly indebted, she called these her Christmas gifts.
“Aunt Ruby is a brick,” remarked Sophy, as she surveyed herself complacently in the mirror in her sister’s room and wondered what use the gauzy creation would serve when she got back to her plans and her desk. “I look really chic, don’t I?”
“You look sweet,” Peggy said with warm sincerity; and her sister caught her round the waist and drew her to the glass and stood holding her and surveying their double reflections with critical, unenvious eyes.
“I look just a plain young gawk beside you,” she said. “You are pretty, Peggy. You grow prettier every year. Is the masculine breast of Moresby susceptible?—or is Moresby wholly feminine? A bachelor—an eligible bachelor—would be an anomaly in a place like this.”
“There is John,” said Peggy, smiling.
Her sister’s brows lifted ironically.
“John! Has it come to that already? Who is John?”
“We passed him on the road from Rushleigh,” Peggy explained. “The comfortable-looking person in the motor with the fur on his coat.”
Sophy laughed.
“Is that all Moresby can produce?... You poor dear! John looks about as romantic as a city alderman. I can tell you exactly the kind of man he is: he attends church regularly and collects the offertory, and he subscribes handsomely to all the local charities. His opinion carries weight, not because it is really worth anything, but because he is a local institution and because the motor and the fur coat give him an air of prosperous distinction. He stands for usage in Moresby; and usage, coupled with a substantial banking account, gains respect. I shall enter the lists and try to cut you out with John.”
Peggy received this intimation with amusement.
“Your tongue is too sharp,” she said. “John likes womenly women.”
“Heavens!” ejaculated Sophy, with a curious little twist of the lips. “I hope he is prepared to match his ideal’s womanliness with a corresponding manliness. That is a point these fastidious people are apt to overlook.” She scrutinised her sister with a wicked little smile and touched the becoming dimple at the corner of Peggy’s mouth with the tip of a long, well-shaped finger. “I believe you are cultivating the quality,” she said.
“What quality?”
“Womanliness, my innocent,” Sophy retorted, and laughed again. “Don’t do it, my Pegtop. It is not womanly to tamper with a fastidious middle-aged heart.”
“John wouldn’t consider it womanly of us to be discussing him in this manner,” Peggy returned.
“And I’m equally convinced he wouldn’t consider it womanly of you to take liberties with his Christian name,” said Sophy. “I think it will be a good day for John when Aunt Ruby takes you abroad in the spring. By the way, isn’t John Mrs Sommers’ brother? Yes! Well, she is all right. He can’t be such an absolute bore, after all.”
One thing Sophy discovered during the New Year’s Eve ball, which was that if Moresby could not produce any young men, Rushleigh could; that one of these was well-favoured and agreeable; that, moreover, he was very unmistakably in love with her sister. It was significant in Sophy’s opinion, that her sister, while speaking of John with such ready flippancy, had refrained from mentioning Doctor Fairbridge altogether. Clearly such unnatural reserve on Peggy’s side did not originate from a lack of interest; no girl, Sophy’s experience assured her, lacks interest in a good-looking man who favours her with a generous share of that same quality. The conclusion she arrived at, therefore, was that Peggy, being pleasantly embarrassed by his devotion, was desirous of appearing unconscious of it.
Peggy introduced Doctor Fairbridge to her sister; and Sophy danced with him several times, and found him extremely entertaining. He was, and she knew it, exerting himself to create a good impression, which amiability, though not disinterested, pleased Sophy. She ranged herself promptly on his side, prepared to champion him whole-heartedly in his bid for her sister’s favour. John Musgrave she refused to consider in the light of a possible rival.
Mr Musgrave did not care about dancing, but he sat through one of the intervals beside Sophy in the warmth of the great fire in the hall and asked her several astonished questions relative to her work, and showed surprise when she informed him that she had drawn up some of the plans for the reconstruction of the home farm-buildings. He did not, she perceived, take either herself or her work quite seriously; but that did not trouble Sophy.
“It is such an amazing profession for a young lady,” he remarked gravely.
“Why?” inquired Sophy.
“It seems so to me,” he replied, unable, he found, to explain further. “These new ideas appear to me fantastic. It’s a reversion of things. Women’s sphere should be the home.”
“Well,” said Sophy, smiling, “that’s where my sphere lies mainly. I plan homes—for other people. It isn’t a new idea really. Abroad, you know, the women build the home—the blacks, I mean. Aunt Ruby says the women make all those jolly ill-constructed huts; they cut the poles, and do everything. I’d like to go out and teach them how to construct them properly, with some idea of ventilation other than a doorway.” She laughed cheerfully, and held a daintily-gloved hand to the flames. “Wouldn’t it be awful if we had to sit here with the door open to let the smoke escape?”
Mr Musgrave looked round the beautiful old hall, looked at the several couples seated on the broad oak staircase, looked into his companion’s young, fresh, smiling face, and smiled too.
“It would be unpleasantly draughty,” he allowed.
She lifted her white shoulders expressively.
“I like modern comfort,” she said. “I love everything beautiful and solid and good. I admire this house, and I admire Moresby. It is picturesque. But I wouldn’t care to live here.”
“No? Why?” he asked.
“I don’t enjoy vegetating. I should turn into a cabbage if I had to remain here. It’s the same with Peggy. We are all alike that way; we must have change.”
“Ah!” he said. “That is a sign of the times, too.”
For some reason or other he seemed ill-pleased with her last remark, though he could not have explained why a desire for change in a young lady whom he met for the first time should disturb him. Perhaps it was less the expression of Sophy’s own inclination than that reference to a similar taste on her sister’s part which vexed him; or it may have been that he resented the general tone of her remarks about the desirability of Moresby as a permanent dwelling-place. He had lived most of his life in Moresby, and he felt no nearer in kin to the vegetable world now than in the days of his more fervid youth.
“It is natural that the present generation should be representative of the times,” observed Sophy cheerfully. “I wouldn’t wish to be an anachronism.”
She laughed gaily at the perplexed gravity of his face. Her sister’s opinion, expressed earlier in the evening, to the effect that John would not like her because of the sharpness of her tongue, occurred to her as surprisingly astute. John certainly did not like her. Possibly he cherished antipathy towards most things which he failed to understand.
Mr Musgrave had never met such an astounding young woman before. By comparison, Peggy Annersley appeared a very simple and gracious contrast. He was getting perilously near to thinking of Peggy as womanly; and yet when he first met Peggy that flattering adjective was the last he would have applied as fittingly describing her. He had almost forgotten the abominable overalls. He certainly was not thinking of them when presently Peggy flitted up to them, a distractingly pleasing sight in blue, with blush roses at her breast. The roses had been made in Paris, but Mr Musgrave did not detect their artificiality. Peggy dexterously exchanged her own partner for her sister’s escort, and sat down beside Mr Musgrave on the big oak seat.
“I’m tired,” she said, and played absently with her fan, making the remark as though she considered some explanation of this rescue of her bored young sister necessary. Sophy’s idea of enjoyment was not, she knew, consistent with sitting out when she might be dancing; and the band, hired for the occasion from Rushleigh, was playing a two-step.
She did not look tired when she made this admission. But Mr Musgrave was not observant, and he considered it becoming in a woman to confess to fatigue. Also the substitution of companions was entirely agreeable to him. Peggy was undeniably the more charming of the two sisters.
“Don’t you dance?” she asked presently.
“These new dances are unfamiliar,” he replied. “I used to waltz years ago; but, save for an occasional square dance, I have not engaged in the exercise for so long that I expect I have forgotten the steps. I like to look on.”
He was not, however, indulging his liking; there was no view of the dancing from where they sat. The couples on the staircase had melted away with the first strains of the music, find Peggy and John Musgrave had the old hall to themselves.
“I don’t care about looking on,” said Peggy. “I like to take part, or get away from it altogether. It’s nice sitting here; it’s restful.”
She lifted the little decorated programme hanging from her fan and studied it, wrinkling her pretty brows over the undecipherable initials which defaced its page.
“I don’t believe you have asked me for a single dance,” she said, the faintest trace of reproach perceptible in her voice.
Before this attack Mr Musgrave experienced some embarrassment. The rebuke in its directness was tantamount to an accusation of negligence; in its suggestion of an invitation it implied a compliment. John Musgrave was as much discomfited by the one as by the other.
“I—I didn’t wish to trespass on your good nature to that extent,” he replied.
“Isn’t that just a little unkind?” hazarded Peggy, with a smile which brought the dimple into play.
Mr Musgrave fell to studying the dimple while Peggy studied her card, and became so intent in this pleasing form of research that he omitted to answer her question. Presently he took the card from her.
“Is it filled?” he inquired.
“There’s one blank—a square, towards the end,” replied Peggy demurely, not thinking it necessary to tell him with what difficulty she had preserved that blank space in her programme.
“I can’t dance,” he said, reddening. “I’ve forgotten how. It wouldn’t be fair to spoil your enjoyment. So many people would be grateful for the privilege of dancing it with you.”
Peggy shook her head.
“I do not feel like gratifying them,” she said.
Very gravely and deliberately Mr Musgrave took hold of the tiny pencil hanging by its slender cord from the card, and, pencil in one large gloved hand and programme in the other, looked searchingly into the grey eyes that met his steadfast scrutiny with a kindly smile.
“Does that,” he asked, “convey a gracious permission to me to write my name against the blank?”
“Not—unless to do so would be equally agreeable to you,” Peggy answered.
Mr Musgrave did not immediately remove his gaze from hers. So long, indeed, did he continue looking at her that Peggy felt her cheeks grow warm beneath his earnest eyes. Then he transferred his attention from her face to the card he held, and wrote his name clearly, “John Musgrave,” in the single blank space thereon.
“Thank you,” he said, and returned her programme to her with a courteous bow.
Peggy, experiencing a timid embarrassment in having so easily gained her point, felt curiously inadequate to making any suitable reply. She took the card from him with nervous fingers and let it fall into her lap, and sat gazing into the fire abstractedly, concealing in this concentration on the flames the tiny gleam of triumph that lighted the grey eyes. The thought, shaping its f mutely in her mind in inelegant phraseology, was, in effect, that Moresby would sit up when it saw John treading a measure with herself. Had Mr Musgrave divined that thought it is safe to predict that he would never have led pretty Peggy Annersley out on the ballroom floor.
Chapter Nineteen.
Moresby did “sit up” when Mr Musgrave took the floor with Peggy.
His conduct in doing so was all the more remarkable inasmuch as he had not partnered anyone else during the evening.
Miss Simpson, seated against the wall, neglected save by the vicar, who sought to entertain her conversationally since he did not dance, saw him with amazed indignation take his place with Peggy in one of the sets on the floor. She could not discredit her own senses or she would have done so, but she was firmly convinced that the reason for his being there was governed less by inclination than by the designs of his partner, in which surmise she was not wholly incorrect. John Musgrave would assuredly never have faced such an ordeal but for the persuasive witchery of a certain fascinating dimple at the corner of a pretty mouth. He was as hopelessly out of his element as a damaged war-vessel in dry dock. Indeed, if one could imagine a war-vessel competing in a regatta against a number of racing yachts, one would have some idea of the utter incongruity of Mr John Musgrave forming one of the double-sided square dance, and going bewilderedly and lumberingly through the intricate mazes of the different figures, guided with unflagging watchfulness by his attentive partner.
Fair hands reached out for his direction, bright eyes watched his hesitation good-naturedly, and their owners obligingly pulled and pushed and guided him to his positions, entering with such zest into the business of keeping him to time that it could not be said he spoilt their pleasure in the dance, however little enjoyment he derived from it himself. Also, it was the one set in the room that was danced with punctilious observance of the regular figures; to have taken the liberties which modern interpretation encourages with the time-honoured dance would have been unthinkable with Mr Musgrave’s serious presence, his courtly bows, his painstaking and conscientious performance dominating the set. If the other men found it slow they resigned themselves to the inevitable; their partners at least appeared very well amused.
“You see,” Mr Musgrave said to Peggy, his breathing laboured, as he paused beside her at the finish of the grand chain, “I have forgotten how to dance.”
“You dance beautifully,” Peggy assured him, smiling up into his serious face. “The different figures are a little puzzling to remember. I am enjoying this immensely.”
“Are you?” he said, in some surprise. “It is very kind of you to say so.”
A regard for truth prevented Mr Musgrave from echoing her sentiments: to sacrifice sincerity in an effort to be courteous was not Mr Musgrave’s way; but the knowledge that he was giving her pleasure atoned in a measure for his own lack of enjoyment. That his actions were exciting comment, that heads were turned to watch him, that those in the room who were not dancing were more interested in himself than in the other dancers, was not remarked by him. Mr Musgrave was sufficiently modest to remain unconscious of the attention he received. The dance was to him an ordeal of the utmost gravity, because of his stupidity and his fear of spoiling others’ pleasure in it; it was not, however, a humiliating ordeal, as it might have been to a vainer man. In his absorbed attention he missed the smiles and the glances and the whispered comments; missed Miss Simpson’s flushed displeasure, and the vicar’s amazed and smiling observation of his old friend’s surprising energy; missed, too, his sister’s bright glance of quickened interest, and his brother-in-law’s amused grin.
“Coelebs?” murmured the vicar under his breath, and caught Belle’s eye and smiled at her.
Later he made his way to her, when the room cleared of the dancers and Peggy and her partner disappeared with the stream drifting towards the hall and the conservatory, and other convenient places fitted up for sitting out. Their eyes met in a glance of sympathetic understanding; then Belle linked a hand within his arm and suggested a retreat into the conservatory.
“Is your faith in the power of your sex increasing at all?” he asked, as, having led her to a secluded corner, he seated himself near her, and leaned back in a low chair with an air of thorough enjoyment.
“Ah!” she said, her face turned towards his, amused and retrospective. “You remember that conversation.”
“You did not believe, when you challenged Mrs Chadwick, that she would succeed to the extent we have witnessed to-night,” he said.
Belle became suddenly grave.
“Would you ascribe the success altogether to Mrs Chadwick?” she asked.
“Well, perhaps not,” he allowed. “It is a vicarious triumph. But the success is unquestionable. I experienced in watching John a return of my own youth.”
“I wish,” Belle remarked with some irrelevance, “that she was a little older.”
“Why?” asked the vicar, divining her reason even while putting the question. The wish found an echo in his own thoughts, and had its origin in the same grave doubt.
“I don’t think a girl like Peggy will fall in love with John,” she said.
“The mere fact that John danced with her does not prove that he is in any immediate danger of falling in love with her,” he returned. “I don’t suppose such an idea ever entered his head.”
Belle laughed.
“I don’t suppose it did,” she agreed. “But I think she has the power to inspire the emotion in him. It would be regrettable if she succeeded in doing that without intending it.”
“It would,” he allowed, and was silent for a space, recognising the inability of John’s friends to safeguard him against the danger if Miss Peggy Annersley chose to work in opposition to them. “She seems,” he suggested hopefully, “to be quite kind and sincere.”
“She is an incorrigible little flirt,” Belle replied, smiling at his rather obvious attempt to reassure her. “I know her a good deal better than you do.”
“All good women, I understand,” he returned, recalling his wife’s remarks on the same subject, “flirt, given the opportunity. Since you mention the propensity in connection with her, I have reason to believe she flirts with Robert. He has a poor opinion of her courage and a great idea of her amiability.”
“I can forgive her for flirting with Robert,” said Belle; “he is such a quaint old dear. But... John!”
“I refuse,” said the vicar with gentle firmness, “to entertain any unworthy thought of her in that connection. She has probably succeeded in discovering in John what you and I have failed in discovering—the vein of youthfulness he has concealed so successfully all these years. Forty is the prime of life. It will not surprise me in the least if John proves himself to be more youthful than Miss Annersley.”
“She is only twenty-eight,” said Belle.
“John is younger than that in experience,” he replied. “I am beginning to believe that at heart he is still a boy. No man who was not a boy at heart could have concentrated so much energy and earnest endeavour upon an exercise at once unfamiliar and distasteful. A boy will do what he dislikes doing if he recognises that the doing is expected of him; a man studies in preference his inclination. You cannot urge that John’s inclination tends, towards dancing.”
“No,” she answered. “But I can dispute your point, because plainly John’s inclination tends towards pleasing Peggy.”
“Well, yes,” the vicar conceded. “I begin to believe you are right.”
If he entertained the smallest doubt on that head, the doubt would have been dispelled could he have looked at the moment upon the picture of Mr Musgrave seated with his late partner in a retired spot, screened from the curious by tall palms and other pot-plants, to which retreat Peggy had led him, as she led only her favoured partners, at the finish of the dance. Mr Musgrave sat forward in his seat, fingering one of the blush roses which had fallen from Peggy’s dress when she left the ballroom. A clumsy movement of his own towards the finish of the dance had been responsible for the damage, as he was well aware. He had picked up the rose when it fell, and he was now smoothing and touching its petals as he held it lightly between his fingers, as once he had smoothed and touched, and idly played with and destroyed, a glove which she had dropped.
“I fear,” he said, “I am in fault for the detachment of this. You will begin to think me a very clumsy person.”
“Those little accidents happen so often when one is dancing,” she replied. “It is of no consequence.”
“It could, perhaps,” he suggested, “be sewn on again.”
“I don’t think it is worth bothering about,” she answered. “Besides, it is broken off at the head. Never mind the rose; it isn’t a real one. I hope you weren’t horribly bored at dancing with me? I believe you only danced because—”
She paused. Mr Musgrave, still fingering the silken petals of the rose, looked up inquiringly.
“Why do you think I danced?” he asked.
“Because I asked you to,” she answered, smiling.
He smiled too.
“No,” he contradicted. “The idea certainly arose from your suggestion. I doubt whether I should have the courage to inflict myself on anyone as a dance partner without that encouragement. But I had another reason.”
“Tell me,” she said softly, and looked at him with so demure an expression, and then looked away again even more demurely, so that had the vicar chanced upon this tableau also he would assuredly have applied to her the term he had once made use of to his wife in speaking of her; he would have called her a little baggage. But the vicar was not there to see, and John Musgrave rather liked the demure expression. He had an altogether different term for it, which was “womanly.”
“If it interests you to know,” he said, “I had in remembrance the occasion when I declined to oblige you in the matter of the tableaux. I did not desire to appear ungracious a second time.”
“Then,” said Peggy, in a low voice, and still without looking at him, “you danced to please me.”
“You have stated my reason correctly this time,” John Musgrave answered quietly. “I wanted to please you.”
He rose as the sound of the music broke upon their ears, and offered her his arm.
“And now I am going to please myself,” he said, “and watch you dancing this.”
When he led her back to the ballroom and delivered her to her partner he became aware as he stood for a moment alone at the entrance to the crowded room that he still held the silken rose in his hand. He looked at it in some perplexity. Mr Musgrave was a man of tidy habits; to drop the rose upon the floor was not a tidy habit; it would, moreover, be in the way, and it would certainly get crushed. He slipped it instead into his pocket. Clearly in the circumstances that was the best thing to do with it. The present difficulty of the disposal of the rose being thus overcome, Mr Musgrave dismissed from his mind the embarrassment of its further disposal and turned his attention to the agreeable occupation of observing the graceful evolutions of the various couples on the floor; and if his eyes followed one figure more particularly, other eyes were doing the same, so that it could not be said of him that he was in any way peculiar in his preference for watching the prettiest and most graceful dancer in the room.
Chapter Twenty.
When Peggy Annersley got out of her ball-dress in the early hours of that New Year’s morning she slipped on a comfortable dressing-gown and sat down before the fire and lighted a cigarette, while she awaited the arrival of her sister, whose room adjoined hers, and who, on separating outside the bedroom door, had stated her intention of joining her to talk over the evening before going to bed. Peggy was very agreeable to talk over anything. She was not in the least sleepy, and only pleasantly tired. Excitement with her acted as a nerve-tonic, and the night had not been without its excitements.
Sophy entering in a similarly comfortable deshabille, and approaching the hearth, hairbrush in hand, surprised her sister looking contemplatively into the flames and smiling at her thoughts. She was wondering—and it was this speculation which brought the smile to her lips—what John had done with her rose. She had made some search for it after he had left and had failed to discover it. It crossed her mind that perhaps John made a practice of collecting such souvenirs.
“You look,” said Sophy, as she stood for a moment and scrutinised the smiling face, “wicked. A lifelong acquaintance with your facial expressions leads me to conclude that you are indulging in a review of your conquests. Vanity will be your undoing, Peg o’ my heart.”
“Sit down,” said Peggy, “and have a cigarette.”
Sophy took a cigarette, but she did not immediately light it. She put her slippered feet on the fender and continued her study of her sister’s face. Seen in the flicker of the firelight, with the brown curls falling about her shoulders, Peggy made a charming picture. She looked so surprisingly young and so full of the joy of life. But she was not young, Sophy reflected. In a few years she would be thirty, and after thirty a woman loses her youth.
“I like Doctor Fairbridge,” Sophy remarked, with an abruptness that caused the smile to fade, though the challenge did not, she observed, produce any other effect.
“So do I,” agreed Peggy.
“He is in love with you,” said Sophy.
“He thinks he is,” Peggy corrected. “I expect he often finds himself in that condition.”
“That’s hedging, Peggy. He isn’t half bad. You might do worse.”
“I might. I daresay I shall,” returned Peggy unmoved.
“You’ll die an old maid, my Pegtop; men are none too plentiful.”
“I can even contemplate that condition undismayed,” Peggy replied calmly. “The unmarried woman is the best off, if she would only recognise it. Marriage is—”
She paused, at a loss for a fitting definition, and during the pause Sophy lighted her cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully and looked into the fire.
“Marriage isn’t the heaven many people think, I know,” she allowed; “but it—settles one.”
“It settles two as a rule,” Peggy retorted flippantly.
She wrinkled her brows and stared into the fire likewise, and was silent awhile.
“I have never heard you so eloquent on marriage before,” she said presently. “I don’t believe, as a matter of fact, I have heard you discuss the subject until now. Are you contemplating it?”
Sophy laughed consciously.
“There’s some one,” she confided, and hesitated, aware of her sister’s quickened interest. “But he’s poor,” she added hastily. “He’s an architect too. One day, perhaps...”
“One day, of course,” Peggy returned softly, and got up and kissed the young, earnest face.
“I’m so glad, dear. I want to hear all about him.”
“Another time,” said Sophy, smiling. “I am a little shy of talking about him yet. But he is a dear.”
“I am sure he is, or you wouldn’t care for him.”
Peggy stood in front of the fire with her back to it, and regarded her sister critically. She regretted that Sophy’s romance had not sooner revealed itself. Assuredly, if their aunt had known of it, the dear would have been included in the Hall party.
“And so we have the reason for your newly-awakened interest in the affairs of the heart of less fortunate folk,” she remarked presently. “That’s rather nice of you, Sophy. Most people when they have ‘settled’ themselves don’t care a flick of the fingers about the settlement of the world in general.”
“I don’t suppose I feel especially concerned about the world in general myself,” replied Sophy. “You can scarcely class yourself in that category.”
“Oh, it’s I?” said Peggy, smiling ironically. “I thought it was Doctor Fairbridge you were particularly interested in.”
“He is nice,” Sophy insisted.
“Is he? He didn’t happen to tell you, I suppose, as he did me when we first met, with an air of weary resignation to the obligation of his profession, that he had to marry because unmarried medical men were at a disadvantage?”
Sophy looked amused.
“I don’t think if he had I should have placed undue importance on that,” she replied.
“Perhaps not, since you have no intention to assist him in his difficulty. But imagine what a complacent reflection it will be for his wife when she realises that she owes the honour of the bestowal of his name upon her to the accident which made him a doctor, and to the super-sensitiveness of the feminine portion of his practice.”
“And because of that unfortunate remark of his,” Sophy observed with an air of reproach, “you intend to snub him badly one day.”
“Snubbing,” Peggy returned, “is a wholesome corrective for conceited men.”
“I don’t think he is nearly so conceited,” Sophy contended, “as the pompous person you delight in encouraging to make a fool of himself.”
It was significant that although no mention was made of Mr Musgrave’s name, although her sister’s description was so little accurate as to be, in Peggy’s opinion, a libel, she nevertheless had no difficulty in recognising to whom Sophy thus unflatteringly alluded. For a moment she did not answer, having no answer ready, which was unusual. She met Sophy’s steadfast eye with a slightly deprecating look, as though she acknowledged reluctantly the justice of the rebuke to herself contained in the other’s speech. Then she laughed. There was a quality of mischief in the satisfied ring of the laugh, a captivating infectiousness in its quiet enjoyment. Sophy laughed with her.
“It’s too bad of you, Peggy,” she protested.
“You have not, for all your shrewdness,” observed Peggy deliberately, “gauged Mr Musgrave’s character correctly. He couldn’t make a fool of himself, because he has no foolish impulses. He is the antithesis of a conceited person. He is a simple, kindly soul, with a number of false ideas of life, and a few ready-made beliefs which he is too conservative to correct or individualise. Aunt Ruby is bent on modernising him; but to modernise John Musgrave would be like pulling down a Norman tower and reconstructing on its foundation a factory-chimney of red brick. I prefer Norman towers myself, though they may have less commercial value.”
“You don’t mean,” said Sophy, opening her eyes very wide, “that you like John Musgrave?”
“As for that,” returned Peggy provokingly, “he is, I think, a very likeable person. I believe,” she added, with another quiet laugh, “that he entertains a similar opinion of me.”
“Does he know you smoke?” inquired Sophy with sarcasm.
“He does. He has attempted unsuccessfully to check the habit.”
Sophy appeared to find this amusing. Her merriment had the effect of making Peggy serious again.
“I think being in love is transforming you into a sentimental goose,” she remarked with some severity. “It is plain that you consider every one must be suffering from the same, idiotic complaint. It will be a relief when you are married. That is the surest cure for sentiment that has been discovered up to the present.”
Sophy threw the end of her cigarette in the fire and started to brush her hair.
“On the next occasion when I visit the Hall,” she observed maliciously, “I anticipate there will be no smoking allowed in your bedroom.”
“It is a vile practice in anyone’s bedroom,” Peggy returned amiably.
“Besides,” added Sophy with a laugh, “it is so unwomanly.”
Mr Musgrave also was engaging in his after-dance reflections as he prepared for bed in a room in which there burned no comforting fire. He had taken the rose from his pocket on removing his dress-coat because his man when he brushed the coat in the morning was very likely to go through his pockets, and Mr Musgrave had no wish for him to discover anything so altogether foreign to a gentleman’s effects in his possession. He placed the rose on his dressing-table, and was so embarrassed at the sight of this incongruous object among his hair-brushes, and other manly accessories of the toilet, that he was unable to proceed with his undressing for staring at the thing. Odd how disconcerting a trifle such as an artificial rose can become adrift from its natural environment. Seen in the front of Peggy’s dress the effect had been simply pleasing; seen in his own bedroom the flimsy thing of dyed silk became a symbol—a significant, sentient thing, inexplicably and closely associated with its late wearer. It was as though in looking at it he looked at Peggy Annersley; looked at her as in a mirror, darkly, from which her smiling face, looked back at him.
Perplexed and immeasurably disconcerted, he stared about him, searching for some safe place in which to secrete the thing. Finally he took it up, unlocked a drawer in a writing-table before the window, and hurriedly, and with a guilty sense of acting in a manner unusual, if not absolutely foolish, he thrust the rose out of sight in the farthest corner of the drawer, where it came in contact with another frivolous feminine article; to which article also, besides its natural scent of kid, clung the same subtle, elusive fragrance of violets which clung about the silken petals of the rose; which clung, as a matter of fact, about everything that Peggy wore.
Mr Musgrave shut the drawer hurriedly and locked it, and threw the bunch of keys on the dressing-table where he could not fail to see them when dressing in the morning, and be reminded by the sight of them to transfer them to his pocket. The drawer in the writing-table was the repository for the few and very innocent secrets which John Musgrave jealously guarded from all eyes but his own.