Chapter Five.
Mrs Chadwick’s purpose in coming to Moresby was not concerned only, or even chiefly, with the interior decoration of the Hall, which was kept, as far as the squire’s means permitted, in very good order both inside and out. There was a certain amount of work to be done, and Mrs Chadwick purposed having a voice in this, as in other things; but her presence was more concerned with the home farm than with the palatial residence she intended to occupy. The home farm came within the range of her scheme for the development of women’s energies.
For several generations this farm had been worked on conservative lines by tenants who from father to son had succeeded to the place in unbroken succession, after the manner, indeed, of the family at the Hall. Though merely tenants, they had looked upon the farm as their rightful inheritance, quite as if it had been entailed property of their own. That anyone should seek to dispossess them would never have occurred to them in the light of possibility. But the present fanner was a bad tenant, and the farm was going to ruin. With the expiration of his lease had come the order for his eviction.
Mrs Chadwick, in taking the Hall, had stipulated for the right to find her own tenant for the farm. In the end she became the tenant, with full power to do what she liked with the property, providing always that what she did was for the improvement of the farm, and was first of all submitted to the squire for his approval. She had submitted so many schemes to him already that the worthy man, like John Musgrave, had felt his breath taken away; and in order to avoid any further shocks he had applied her to his lawyer, and gone abroad for an indefinite time to escape the worry of these matters. Change was not agreeable to him; but he was not so unwise as to object to the improvement of his estate, and the expenditure of other people’s money upon it.
The lawyer, grasping the main point that Mrs Chadwick intended laying out money on the property, and had plenty of it to disburse, was satisfied to give her a free hand. Provided only that she increased the working value of the farm, he saw no reason against her pulling down all the old buildings and erecting new ones on improved models, and enlarging and improving the dwelling-house. Everything was to be brought up to date. There could be no objection, the lawyer considered, to that. He was not averse to change when it had a sound financial basis; and Mrs Chadwick’s ideas occurred to him as practical. He was not quite so positive that her intention to work the farm principally with female labour would prove satisfactory. But that was her affair. If she liked to run risks of that nature she could afford the whim.
With the passing of the days, with the coming and going of architects and builders, and other persons the nature of whose occupation remained a mystery to John Musgrave, Mrs Chadwick’s host became more and more bewildered, more distinctly opposed to this feverish feminine energy—to this unfeminine encroachment on what he had always considered was the business of his sex. What, he wondered, was Mr Chadwick thinking about to allow his wife to interview these people, and settle without reference to his wishes all the details of the home which was, after all, to be paid for by cheques which he, presumably, would sign?
John Musgrave could not have brought himself to remind any woman of her duty as a wife; but he did in many ways allow Mrs Chadwick to see that he viewed her proceedings with amazement, and with a sort of well-controlled disapproval. His attitude only amused her. In the process of attempting to modernise Mr Musgrave, she took a pleasure occasionally in shocking him.
“Does Mr Chadwick usually leave the conduct of his affairs entirely in your hands?” he asked her once.
“His affairs!” she repeated, with an uplift of her arched brows. “Oh, you mean ‘our’ affairs. Will knows these things interest me; they only bore him. He is a lazy man, except in the matter of organisation; he’s splendid at that. Generally, I suggest a certain scheme and he develops it. He has a genius for developing.”
That certainly was true of Mr Chadwick. In most of his successful undertakings his wife had originated the idea, and he had developed it; hers was the quick, and his the thorough, brain. Quite voluntarily he ceded her a full share for the credit of the enormous fortune he had amassed; and he was lazily interested in her talent for spending it, and quite sincerely in sympathy with many of her schemes for the improvement of the conditions of her sex, with which was closely associated the improved conditions of the race.
It is a surprising, and would be a gratifying, fact, were it not for a feeling that it ought to be the other way about, that men are usually more ready to help a woman in her fight for the good of her sex than persons of the sex she is working for. Men shake off prejudices more readily than women, because their training and mode of life gives them a broader outlook. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. The narrow-minded man is, if more rare, considerably more contracted in his outlook than even the narrow-minded woman.
John Musgrave’s view was certainly contracted; but Mrs Chadwick, in her sanguine moments, entertained the belief that the restricted line of his horizon was due to the accident of circumstances, rather than to a natural deficiency in breadth, and held hopes of a possible development of his view. She did not tell him this; but she confided her belief to Mrs Sommers, who was as sceptical of John’s development as she was of the profitable results of Mrs Chadwick’s enterprises.
Mrs Chadwick told John Musgrave something else, which she deemed of greater importance even than the development of his mind, something which so scandalised Mr Musgrave as to render him speechless, amazed at her audacity, her want of delicacy; and too utterly dumbfounded to defend himself. She informed him, quite seriously, and without any effort to conceal her meaning, that he was not doing his duty by the State.
She had been in Moresby a week when she made this astounding attack, and the occasion which she chose for making it was one morning when she was returning with her host from an inspection of the village school, which, in a moment of weakness, he had suggested might interest her.
The school did interest her; but the sight of John Musgrave surrounded in the infants’ classroom with a number of greedy, unabashed babies, who felt in his pockets for sweets with a confidence that suggested familiarity with the practice, interested her far more. On the homeward walk she informed him that patronising other people’s babies, while undoubtedly commendable, was not his business in life; that he was not a good citizen, because, from purely selfish motives, he was neglecting his most important duty to the State.
John Musgrave was so embarrassed, and so annoyed, that during the rest of the walk, which fortunately was not of long duration, he could not utter a word. He turned in at his own gate in a seriously displeased frame of mind; and Mrs Chadwick, feeling guilty but unrepentant, preceded him up the path with the wickedest of little smiles playing about her lips.
“Thank you so much, Mr Musgrave,” she said, as they parted in the hall, “for a really enjoyable morning.”
Then she went upstairs to her room, and later she recounted for Belle’s edification the result of her visit to the school.
Mrs Sommers was amused; but she experienced a slight compassion for her brother, who would feel, she realised, as startled at a woman approaching a man on such a subject as he would be averse to the subject itself. People in Moresby left the laws of life alone.
John Musgrave was, as a matter of fact, deeply disgusted. He resented, not only the indelicacy, but the impertinence of this interference with the individual. He summarised the proceeding as a display of bad taste. Nevertheless the idea, once presented to him, was not easily dislodged from his brain. Somehow he had never considered the individual in responsible relationship to the State. The suggestion was new to him, and highly disturbing. He had up to the present considered himself in the light of a very good citizen, an example to other men who disregarded their duties to the borough in which they resided, and gave neither in money nor service to local affairs. He was respected in Moresby as a useful as well as a generous resident. It would have been difficult to fill his place if he left it; he could not conceive anyone filling it satisfactorily. And now he was told that all that counted for nothing, or at least for very little, since he was neglecting the principal duty of all. No wonder that Mr Musgrave was annoyed; that he looked upon Mrs Chadwick as highly objectionable, and resented her presence in his house.
“You are a very daring woman,” commented Mrs Sommers. “Although I have grown up with John I would never have ventured to say such a thing as that.”
“Possibly,” returned Mrs Chadwick calmly, “if I had been brought up with John I would not have adventured either. Familiarity with a person’s prejudices makes one diffident. I am not laying myself out to please Mr Musgrave, but to modernise him, as you suggested. When he is sufficiently modernised I mean to marry him.”
“You will need to obtain a divorce first,” retorted Mrs Sommers, laughing. “And I am sure John would not consider that respectable.”
“You have a mischievous habit of misrepresenting things. You know perfectly well that I am satisfied with my lot in life. I am going to find him a wife.”
“Oh?” said Mrs Sommers. She looked thoughtful. “I think you will have in that a more difficult task than in bringing him up to date.”
“We shall see,” returned Mrs Chadwick, and her tone was confident. “I think myself that lack of opportunity has bred the disinclination. No man is born a bachelor. The state, which is a misfit, results from his circumstances.”
“It isn’t due to lack of opportunity in John’s case,” Belle asserted. “The women who have run after him!...”
“Yes,” said Mrs Chadwick. She was thinking of Miss Simpson. “But that sort of woman doesn’t count, my dear.”
The successful married woman has, as a rule, a very good idea of the kind of women men like. The successful married woman is never the vain woman. The vain woman always imagines that the type she represents is the type men admire; usually she is at fault. Mrs Chadwick was not a vain woman. She knew very well that all men are not drawn towards the same type of woman. Some men prefer looks; others mental qualities; and, by an odd inconsistency in human nature, the perfectly simple-souled and self-disciplined man inclines naturally toward the woman endowed with the captivating wickedness of her sex. There is a big distinction between captivating wickedness and vice. No man, whether he be good or bad in principle, admires vice in the mothers of the race.
Since Mr Musgrave reckoned in the category of the simple, self-disciplined soul, plainly the woman for him must have a spice of wickedness in her. Mrs Chadwick may have been mistaken in her deduction, but at least she believed in it firmly.
Had John Musgrave had any idea of what floated through her busy brain while she smilingly confided to him some of her plans for the improvement of Moresby, he would have been horrified. Marriage was the one subject of all others he considered it indelicate to dwell upon. If people married they did it for some good reason; to contemplate the step impartially with, no adequate motive for so serious an undertaking was to him unthinkable. Had he ever reflected upon it, and attempted a portrait of the lady he might have honoured with his preference, it certainly would not have been a woman with any latent wickedness in her. John Musgrave’s ideal, had he been called upon to embody an ideal, would have revealed the picture of a calm-faced woman of unemotional temperament, who would always have said and done the correct thing, would have adorned his home, and revered himself, and would have been in every sense of the word womanly.
Mrs Chadwick could have told him that such a woman did not exist outside a man’s imagination. She would not have done so, of course. She believed in encouraging masculine fallacies when they were harmless; to attempt discouragement was to invite defeat. Opposition is the least effective form of argument. A clever woman seldom makes the mistake of forcing her ideas; and Mrs Chadwick was undoubtedly clever.
“Anything can be accomplished through suggestion,” she had been heard to assert. “Suggestion, plant it where you will, is a seed which never fails to germinate.”
Chapter Six.
Miss Simpson contemplated her appearance by the aid of the long mirror in her wardrobe with an eye sharply critical as that of the vainest of her sisters, whose concern for outward things she held generally in contempt. But a visit to the house of a bachelor in regard to whom one entertains matrimonial intentions excuses, as anyone will acknowledge, a greater attentiveness to detail than usual.
The result of her inspection was on the whole satisfactory. The effect of her severely tailored costume and small, unassertive hat was neat in the extreme, so neat, indeed, that Mrs Chadwick, when she beheld it, felt a womanly compassion for the wearer; she preferred to see a woman daintily gowned. But Mrs Chadwick’s taste was not Moresby’s.
One lock of Miss Simpson’s tightly braided hair betrayed a rebellious tendency to escape the hairpins and stray pleasingly over her brow. This could not be permitted. The aid of additional pins was requisitioned, and the unruly lock was brought into subjection, and tucked out of sight beneath the unrelenting brim of the eminently decorous hat.
Woman’s hair never seems to achieve a definite recognition in the scheme of its wearer. Some women regard their hair as an adornment, which it is, and take trouble that other people shall recognise its claim as an asset in feminine decorativeness; with other women it would seem that the human head suffers this objectionable growth only because nature insists upon it as an essential part of her design. They brush it back from the face in strained disapproval, and further abuse it by screwing it into as tight a ball as circumstances permit. No frivolous abandon is allowed; pins, and even pomade, are resorted to, until what is undoubtedly beautiful in itself is rendered sufficiently unbecoming to soothe the most fastidiously decorous mind.
Miss Simpson belonged to this latter category. By instinct Miss Simpson was modest to the verge of prudery. But as, in the inconsistency of human nature, a good person is often streaked with evil, and an evil person possesses a strain of goodness, so Miss Simpson, despite her prudery, had a touch of the softer sentiments which no woman should be without. This weakness led to the cherishing of a romantic passion for Mr Musgrave, which so far overcame her natural decorum as to drive her to open pursuit of the object of her middle-aged affections. From anyone else a written proposal to a man would have appealed to her in the light of an offence against every womanly tradition; but in her own case circumstances allowed for the forsaking of her principles, even demanded this sacrifice of her. Plainly John Musgrave would have liked to propose; but he was a shy man. His gentlemanly refusal of her offer was, she recognised, prompted by this same shyness, and not at all from disinclination towards a life-partnership with herself. Eventually she trusted this not unmanly shyness would be conquered so far as to give him the courage to open the courtship which she felt he was always on the verge of beginning.
Proof that he enjoyed her companionship was forthcoming in the fact that he adhered to the practice of seeking it publicly. If he did not enjoy her companionship he would assuredly retire from the committee of school management, and other local matters in which they were jointly interested. Every one knows that interests in common form a substantial basis for mutual regard; and John Musgrave and Miss Simpson had a common bond in their insatiable love for busying themselves in parish affairs. They considered themselves—it is not an uncommon conceit—indispensable to the efficient working of the social machinery of Moresby. If the vicar held opposite views he was too wise a man to air them; and being good-natured, and tactful beyond the ordinary run of persons in authority, he allowed them their amiable conceit, and was grateful that they in return allowed him to occupy his own pulpit and generally conduct the services. Interference in his particular department was the one thing he would have resented. On this amicable footing was the parish of Moresby run.
But with the advent of Mrs Chadwick the vicar, at least, foresaw complications, and awaited their development with curiosity. Miss Simpson alone harboured no thought of change in the conduct of Moresby affairs. That the coming of a stranger should foreshadow interference in parish matters would never have occurred to her. The coming of the vicar’s wife had not effected that.
But this afternoon, setting forth to call on Mrs Sommers, with a pleasurable thrill of anticipation which the prospective society of the ladies would scarcely seem to justify, it entered her mind for the first time that Mrs Chadwick’s residence at the Hall must work some sort of change in the pleasant routine of their daily lives.
She was not sure that she approved of Mrs Chadwick. She was very sure, when she arrived and was shown into Mr Musgrave’s drawing-room, that she, disapproved of her. Mrs Chadwick was seated at the open window, although the day was cold, and she was smoking a cigarette. She threw the cigarette away on the visitor’s entrance, and smilingly apologised.
“I hope you don’t object to smoke,” she said. “It is an incurable bad habit with me.”
Miss Simpson did not object to smoke from the proper quarter—the proper quarter being as it issued from between the lips of the sterner sex, who were privileged in the matter of bad habits, which is a feminine fallacy that is slipping out of date; she very strongly objected to smoking when her own sex indulged in it—indeed, save for Mrs Chadwick, she had never seen a woman smoke. It was, she considered, a disgusting and unfeminine practice.
She murmured “Really!” And shaking hands somewhat frigidly, addressed herself pointedly to Mrs Sommers for the first few minutes after sitting down.
Mrs Chadwick caressed the pekinese, and watched the visitor with curious interest the while. It was not, however, in Mrs Chadwick’s nature to remain outside any conversation for long; and she gracefully insinuated herself into the talk, to Miss Simpson’s further surprise. She expected, when she took the trouble to show her displeasure, to see the object thereof properly quelled. That, too, is a characteristic of parish omnipotence. And, amazingly, Mrs Chadwick was already betraying a desire to interfere in Moresby arrangements.
“I visited the schools this morning,” she observed, breaking in on Miss Simpson’s gossip about the new schoolmaster, who, seemingly, gave every satisfaction, being a great improvement on his predecessor, who was, as Miss Simpson expressed it, a horrid Radical. “It was all very amusing. They are such quaint, blunt little people. I liked them. But the schools want pulling down and rebuilding. Everything is obsolete. The ceilings are too low and the ventilation inadequate. I am all for fresh air.”
She laughed at sight of Miss Simpson’s wooden expression, and at the shiver which ran through her narrow frame as she glanced meaningly at the wide-open window.
“Do you feel this too much?” she asked pleasantly, and obligingly drew the window partially down. “Mrs Sommers and I are seasoned; but we blow Mr Musgrave away at times.”
That, of course, accounted for the absence of the master of the house which Miss Simpson had regretfully noticed. The draughts and the smoke would naturally drive Mr Musgrave away; no self-respecting man would stand it.
“I like air,” Miss Simpson answered coldly, “in moderation.”
Then she returned to the subject of the schools. This outspoken person must be given to understand from the commencement that, though she might pose as grande dame in Moresby by reason of her residence at the Hall, the older residents would not brook interference with existing institutions. Moresby was conservative in principle, and resented innovations.
“The present schools are a feature of the place,” she said. “No one would care to have them done away with. They are picturesque.”
“Yes; they are,” Mrs Chadwick admitted readily. “That is what distresses me in old places—their beauty. One hates to demolish the beautiful. But healthy children are more beautiful than old buildings; and the modern buildings, with up-to-date construction, are healthier for small people.”
“I think our village children are remarkably healthy,” Miss Simpson protested.
“Do you? Half the school, I observed, had colds. Healthy children should not be susceptible to chills. If they worked in properly ventilated rooms they would not be. The lungs of the young have immense powers of resistance, but we weaken these powers with our foolish indifference to overheating and overcrowding. It is little short of criminal to study the picturesque in preference to the well-being of the rising generation.”
“I think we should study both,” Mrs Sommers intervened, with a view to soothing the ruffled feelings of her visitor, who was chafing visibly under this downright attack. “The schools are certainly charming. I should hate to see them pulled down myself. We will have to effect some compromise.”
Compromise, in Mrs Chadwick’s opinion, was as ineffectual as patching a worn-out garment; the worn-out garment could but fulfil its destiny, and become rags. But she let the subject drop. It could be revived at some future date. The schools were being slowly drawn into the network of her revolutionary schemes for the modernising of Moresby.
Miss Simpson, less diplomatic, and more assertive than Mrs Sommers, showed her disapproval by abruptly changing the subject, and introducing an entirely new, and, in Mrs Chadwick’s opinion, distinctly quaint topic of conversation. She referred with considerable vim to certain matters of local importance which had been given prominence in the pages of the current number of the Parish Magazine. Mrs Chadwick betrayed such absorbed interest in these matters that Miss Simpson was beguiled into inquiring whether she had seen the current number of the Parish Magazine. She spoke of the magazine as a lover of the poets might speak of the works of Shakespeare, with a certain reverential awe for the importance of proved literary merit. Mrs Chadwick wore the vaguely distressed look that a well-read woman wears on discovering an unsuspected limitation in her literary attainments. She had not even heard before of the Parish Magazine.
“I am afraid I don’t know it,” she answered. “There are such a number of magazines, aren’t there? And so many new ones always coming out. One can’t keep pace with these things. I stick to the old magazines, like the Century, and the Strand, and the Contemporary Review. If one ought to read the Parish Magazine, of course I should wish to.”
Miss Simpson stared, and Mrs Sommers laughed softly, albeit she did not consider this quizzing altogether fair.
“The publications you refer to are not of the same nature as the Parish Magazine,” the visitor observed crushingly. “Our magazine is a purely local pamphlet for local circulation. It deals solely with parish matters.”
Mrs Chadwick considered this dull, but she did not say so. She appeared politely impressed.
“That must be very interesting to—to Moresby inhabitants,” she said gravely.
“That is its object,” Miss Simpson returned. “Most parishes have their magazines. The people like to know what takes place locally; and they find it all noted down.”
She spoke with the laboured forbearance of one who seeks to instruct a very ignorant person on a subject which should not have required explanation.
“Our magazine is a new venture,” she added, with the conscious pride of the literary aspirant. “I started it last year. I edit it.”
“Indeed!” Mrs Chadwick’s tone expressed admiration. “Please put me down as an annual subscriber.”
Miss Simpson unbent.
“I shall be delighted. It is a monthly pamphlet, issued at one penny.”
“That is not ruinous,” murmured the prospective subscriber.
“The village people could not afford more,” Miss Simpson explained patiently. “They all like to read it. Occasionally some of their names are mentioned. They expect that.”
“I should be afraid,” Mrs Chadwick remarked, surveying the editress seriously, “of letting myself in for a libel action in your place. It is so difficult to be personal without the sacrifice of truth, and refrain from giving offence. I am inclined to think a parish magazine must be a dangerous publication.”
“You haven’t got the idea at all,” Miss Simpson said acidly. “We only mention the things which reflect to the credit of the persons concerned, such as any little gift to the parish, or the participation in local entertainments, and such matters; and, of course, work done on committees. Mr Musgrave’s name appears in its columns frequently.”
“Belle,” said Mrs Chadwick, with one of her radiant smiles, “I insist upon seeing the Parish Magazine. How is it you have kept these things from me? It would amuse me immensely to read of Mr Musgrave’s doings. He is so reticent about such things himself.”
The entrance of Mr Musgrave created a diversion. He came in in advance of Eliza with the tea; and Mrs Chadwick, watching with mercilessly observant glance, noted the fluttering agitation of the visitor, whose austere manner changed as surprisingly as the colour of the chameleon, and became immediately gracious, and demurely coy. Mr Musgrave’s manner was not responsive. It suggested to Mrs Chadwick his attitude towards herself.
“I have just been hearing terrible tales of the things you do, which gain you notoriety in the columns of the Parish Magazine,” she said wickedly. “I am going to read up all the back numbers.”
John Musgrave did not smile. He crossed the room deliberately, and closed the window and fastened it—an act Miss Simpson witnessed with satisfaction.
“So thoughtless of me,” said Mrs Chadwick apologetically. “I always forget your dislike for fresh air.”
“I do not dislike fresh air,” he returned gravely, “in its proper place.”
“What would you describe as its proper place?” she asked.
“Out of doors,” he answered, surprised that a clever woman should ask so obvious a question.
Then, while the three women sat and watched him, he made the tea, taking from the caddy a spoonful for each guest, and an additional spoonful for the requisite strength, according to custom. Mr Musgrave had made his own tea for many years; he saw no reason now for discontinuing this practice, though one person present—the one with the least right—would gladly have relieved him of the task. It was so pathetic, she reflected, to see a man making the tea; it was significant of his lonely state. Clearly a man needed a wife to perform this homely office, a wife of a suitable age, with similar tastes, who would never distress him with any display of unwomanly traits.
“I always think that no one makes tea quite like you do,” she murmured sweetly, as she received her cup from John Musgrave’s hand.
Which speech, in its ambiguity, Mrs Chadwick considered extremely diplomatic.
Chapter Seven.
“I have,” said Mrs Chadwick dramatically that same evening to Mrs Sommers, “been exactly a week in Moresby, and I have made two enemies. What will be the result when I have lived here a year?”
This question opened up ground for reflection. Belle reflected. She did it, as she did most things, quickly.
“You will possibly overcome their prejudices, and make them love you.”
“That is a charming answer,” Mrs Chadwick replied. “But I am not sure that their love would not prove equally embarrassing. I would prefer to win their regard.”
“It is merely another term for the same emotion,” Mrs Sommers insisted.
They were seated before the fire in Mrs Chadwick’s bedroom, having a last chat before retiring. Though women live together in the same house, and part, possibly for the first time for the day, outside their bedroom doors, a last chat is a privileged necessity—that is, when women are companions; when the last chat ceases to be a necessity it is a proof of mutual boredom. Mrs Chadwick and Belle Sommers were a long way off the point of boredom.
Belle had begun going to Mrs Chadwick’s bedroom in her capacity of pseudo hostess, thinking that possibly Mrs Chadwick, who had come without a maid in deference to a hint from her friend that strange servants would be unwelcome in Mr Musgrave’s household, might find herself at a loss. But Mrs Chadwick was seldom at a loss in the matter of helping herself; a maid was a luxury, not an essential, in her train of accessories. The pekinese alone was indispensable. She had conceded the point about the maid, but she had refused to be separated from the pekinese. It is conjectural whether Mr Musgrave did not object more to the pekinese than he would have to the maid; but Belle, like Mrs Chadwick, did not consider it wise to humour all his little prejudices.
“I think,” observed Mrs Chadwick, after a pause, during which they had both been gazing reflectively into the fire, “that I have settled everything that was immediately pressing, and can now relieve your brother of the strain of my presence. I cannot begin anything until we are established at the Hall.”
Mrs Sommers looked amused.
“I believe,” she said, “that John is frightening you away.”
“He is,” Mrs Chadwick admitted. “I am afraid of John. His inextinguishable courtesy chills me. How come you and John to be the children of the same parents? I don’t believe you are. I believe that John is a changeling.”
Belle laughed.
“He is our father reproduced,” she said.
“That disposes of my theory. Then you must be the changeling. Plainly, Miss Simpson ought to have been his sister.”
“She would prefer to stand in a closer relationship,” Mrs Sommers said.
“Yes; that’s obvious. But she hasn’t the ghost of a chance. She is an old maid.”
“She would scarcely be eligible for the position if she were not an old maid,” Mrs Sommers pointed out.
“She would be eligible as an unmarried woman,” Mrs Chadwick argued. “There is a distinction. An unmarried woman is not of necessity an old maid.”
Belle allowed this. It was, indeed, irrefutable.
“I see,” she said. “Yes... just as my brother is a confirmed bachelor.”
Mrs Chadwick smiled into the flames.
“I wouldn’t be so positive on that head,” she replied. “You should visit the schools with him, as I did to-day. I think it might shake your opinion. A man who is a confirmed bachelor has not the paternal instinct. He ought to have married ten years ago, in which event he would not now make the tea, and fuss about draughts. I think, you have been neglectful of your duty to him. Before you married you should have found him a wife.”
“He doesn’t like the women I like,” said Belle slowly. “He considers them too—”
“Modern,” suggested Mrs Chadwick. She stirred the fire thoughtfully. “The very modernest of modern wives would be the saving of him. If he doesn’t find her soon he will be doomed to eternal bachelorhood, and develop hypochondria, and take up homeopathy.”
Belle laughed outright.
“Poor old John?” she said, and relapsed once more into contemplative silence.
John Musgrave, meanwhile, was going his usual nightly round of the house; which, perforce, was later than he was in the habit of making it, because the ladies did not retire, as he did when alone, at ten o’clock. He carefully examined all the gas-jets to satisfy himself that these were safely turned off. He inspected the bars and locks of doors and windows, not because he feared burglars, who were a class unknown in Moresby, but because he had always seen to the securing of his house, as his father had done before him. He placed a guard before the drawing-room fire, and examined the kitchen range to assure himself that Martha had not left too large a fire for safety—which Martha never by any chance did. John Musgrave did not expect to find any of these matters overlooked; but he enjoyed presumably satisfying himself that his instructions were faithfully observed. Then he turned off the light in the hall, and quietly mounted the stairs.
Belle, stepping forth from Mrs Chadwick’s room at the moment, with her beautiful hair falling over her shoulders, met him on the landing. He appeared slightly taken aback; and she felt instinctively that he was on the verge of apologising for surprising her in this becoming deshabille. She forestalled the apology by catching him by the lapels of his coat and kissing him in her impulsive, affectionate way.
“You old dear!” she said softly.
“I thought you were in bed,” Mr Musgrave said, feeling, without understanding why, that the touch of Belle’s soft cheek was very agreeable, that the sight of a woman standing in the dim light of the landing was pleasing, particularly with her hair streaming over her blue peignoir. It was, of course, because the woman was Belle, and that therefore it was natural that she should be standing there, that he found the picture attractive. He experienced a twinge of regret at the thought that she would go away and leave him to his solitude shortly. When he came upstairs after she had left him, he would recall the sight of her standing there, smiling at him; and the big landing would seem doubly solitary.
“I’ve been gossiping,” she explained.
He looked surprised. It baffled him to understand what she found to talk about, considering she had done nothing else all day.
“More schemes?” he said.
“Yes,” she answered, and laughed unexpectedly.
If only John guessed what the latest scheme was! Had she allowed him a hundred guesses she believed he would never have arrived at the right one.
“I hope you won’t take up schemes, Belle,” he said, with a faint uneasiness in his voice. He looked at her wistfully. “You are too nice to be caught with fads, my dear.”
She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him on the lips.
“I’m too lazy,” she said, “and have my hands too full to trouble myself about anything beyond my boys. But a childless woman, John, dear, has to mother something.”
“I suppose that’s it,” he answered, a little relieved, it occurred to her, by this explanation of what had appeared to him inexplicable. “Yes; that’s the reason, undoubtedly. I am glad you have your boys, Belle.”
“So am I,” she returned gently, and kissed him good-night, and left him standing alone on the dim landing with his lighted candle in his hand.
He sighed as he listened to the closing of her bedroom door. Then he entered his own room, his mind still intent upon her, so that for a long time he remained Inactive, gazing abstractedly at a picture of his mother hanging on his wall, comparing the sweet, lined face with the younger face of the daughter, who came and went in the old home, bringing the sunshine with her, and taking it with her again when she left. He envied Charlie Sommers more than he envied any man on earth.
And yet John Musgrave would have been surprised had anyone told him that he was lonely. He enjoyed, he believed, all the companionship that a man requires. But no one, unless he be a misanthropist, is entirely happy in the possession of a solitary hearth.
On the following morning Mrs Chadwick introduced the subject of her departure. She did not expect Mr Musgrave to be overwhelmed with distress at the announcement of her intention; nor was he; nevertheless, with the memory of his overnight reflections flooding his brain, he did not feel the relief he imagined he would feel at the prospect of having his house to himself once more. He was, oddly enough, growing accustomed to Mrs Chadwick. When she was not personal she was decidedly interesting, and not infrequently amusing. And when she left he knew Belle purposed leaving also. It was not convenient for her to be away from home just then. She had come solely to oblige Mrs Chadwick, whose recognition of this service influenced her more than her pretended alarm of her host in hastening her arrangements.
“I am sorry you are thinking of returning already,” Mr Musgrave said, expressing only his sincere sentiments, and not obeying, as his visitor believed, the prompting of his habitual courtesy. “It appears to me that you have given yourself a very limited time, considering the magnitude of your undertakings. I would not have believed it possible that anyone could do so much in a week.”
“I came with all my plans cut and dried, you see; and my appointments with people were prearranged. The work at the Hall will be finished in less than two months, and we shall be settled in well before Christmas. I dislike delay.”
“Yes,” said Mr Musgrave, disliking haste equally. “Moresby inhabitants will be glad to see the Hall occupied again. They have been accustomed to look to the Hall for a lead.”
“They will get it, that’s certain,” Belle put in, smiling. “I am coming down on you at Christmas, John, to see the fun.”
“Of course,” he returned readily, though he looked a little doubtful at the mention of fun. “Christmas festivities are going out of fashion,” he added slowly. “I am not sure it is not as well that is so. Too much merry-making leads to unseemly behaviour. It unsettles the people.”
“If anyone behaves in an unseemly manner we will put his name in the Parish Magazine,” Mrs Chadwick said. “That punishment should act as a sufficient restraint on future occasions. The Parish Magazine is the only thing that appals me in Moresby. I mistrust that organ. I am informed that in every issue there appears a sonnet by an anonymous poet. Where in Moresby do you conceal a poet?”
She addressed this question to Mr Musgrave; but though she looked towards him expectantly, and waited a sufficient interval for his reply, there was no response forthcoming. Mr Musgrave evaded her glance, and appeared to regard the question as put generally, and the questioner as not expecting a reply. He looked, Mrs Chadwick observed, guilty.
So John Musgrave was an anonymous poet as well as a confirmed bachelor. She determined to read before leaving his house some of John Musgrave’s sonnets.
Chapter Eight.
Mrs Chadwick’s departure was as abrupt, and therefore as disconcerting to Mr Musgrave, as her arrival had been. She announced her intention of going one morning, and on the following morning she left. This rapidity of movement, and extraordinary energy, reduced Mr Musgrave to a condition of bewildered breathlessness. He fetched Bradshaw’s Guide for the purpose of looking up her train; but she had learnt all about the train service beforehand, and knew to the minute the time of her departure. There was nothing left for Mr Musgrave to do save order his car for a certain hour to take the ladies into Rushleigh.
Most people would have been relieved to be spared further trouble; but John Musgrave was old-fashioned. He felt that in these matters it was fitting that the woman should depend on the man; just as he would prefer that a woman confronted with a burglar should scream for assistance rather than attempt an encounter with the intruder, physical courage being no more a womanly attribute than independence. But Mrs Chadwick belonged to a type of womanhood he had not met with before. She had made herself independent of the sterner sex. She would in all probability, if she encountered a burglar, tackle him; it was inconceivable that she would stop to scream. He supposed that residence abroad accounted possibly for these peculiarities. Women who lived in semi-civilised lands acquired characteristics unbecoming to their sex.
Mr Musgrave would have been surprised could he have penetrated Mrs Chadwick’s opinion of himself. Mrs Chadwick had formed an opinion early in their intercourse; she saw no reason to modify it later; and she was confirmed in it when she read some of his sonnets in the carefully preserved back numbers of the Parish Magazine. There were sonnets to the different seasons; sonnets to childhood, to youth, to flowers, to a cloud effect in a windswept sky, and to the autumnal tints. There was not, in the whole, she observed without surprise, a single reference to love. Verse-making without that essential quality must be a difficult process, she reflected. Had Byron possessed John Musgrave’s temperament, it is doubtful that he would have attained to immortality. John Musgrave with a touch of the Byronic weakness might have been interesting, and would certainly have been lovable. Coldness of itself is scarcely a virtue, nor is it an endearing characteristic. The man possessed of a big heart and a quite legitimate inclination towards the opposite sex is human; and Mrs Chadwick loved humanity.
The most human types she had as yet discovered in Moresby were those of the vicar and his wife, and Robert. Robert and the new mistress of the Hall were allies. Robert held the sex, as a sex, in contempt; that was the code of his class; and a very pronounced dread of the length of Hannah’s tongue, added to a proper recognition of Hannah’s muscular development, had accomplished little towards mitigating this sense of masculine superiority. He considered the utterance of Saint Paul, that it is better to marry than to burn, the most supreme wisdom that a man has ever given expression to. On Occasions he was a little doubtful whether it were not better to burn. He had tried marriage, but he had not tried burning, and so could not give a definite opinion. But for Mrs Chadwick he entertained an unbounded respect. Robert perhaps had a touch of the Byronic temperament; and Mrs Chadwick on coming out of church had given him one of her radiant smiles. Subsequently she stopped him in the road and chatted with him in an easy, intimate way that Robert described as “haffable.” She began by asking him if he had a wife. Robert admitted this possession reluctantly; and, upon further inquiries, owned with even less enthusiasm to a son.
“Only one?” she said.
“One’s more’n enough for me,” Robert answered sourly. “Brought up respectable, ’e was, and confirmed under Mr Errol; and then,” Robert jerked his thumb over his shoulder as though in indication of the direction the errant youth had followed, “’e takes up with a young woman, and turns Plymouth Brother to please ’er. Preaches, ’e does... they mostly do. Dresses ’isself up, and tramps five miles, and ’ollers to a lot more of ’em about their sins. Disgraceful, that’s wot I calls it.”
“Perhaps he thinks he is doing good,” she suggested.
Robert smiled grimly.
“Precious little good ’e ever done, or ever will do, mum. And ’is preaching! You should ’ear ’im.”
“Do you tramp five miles to hear him preach?” she asked.
“Wot, me? And wot would the vicar do without me, do you suppose? I ’ear quite enough without going to ’is old meeting-place. ’E practises ’is old sarmons night-times, after me and the missis is a-bed. You’d reckon it was a nuisance if ’e waked you up, as he wakes me and Hannah in the dead o’ night sometimes, screeching an’ ’ollering. ‘Is your Lord deaf?’ I asks en; ‘because if ’E be, us bain’t,’ I says, ‘and us can’t sleep for your noise.’ ’E’s gone away now. Got a job at a farm near ’is young woman; an’ I ’opes ’e stops there. I don’t ’old wi’ religion outside o’ church, and then I likes it shortened like. Our vicar is the best vicar Moresby’s ever ’ad, but ’e do make ’is sarmons long. Seems I could say as much as ’e do in ’alf the time.”
Mrs Chadwick laughed. Robert’s garrulity would seem to discredit this conceit.
“I like his sermons, Robert,” she said. “I’m glad I am going to live at Moresby. Later I shall visit Mrs Robert, if you think she won’t mind.”
“She won’t mind, mum,” Robert answered. “She’ll be proud. I’m not sure it won’t make ’er over proud,” he added reflectively. “Hannah gets obstroperous when she’s took notice of. Better let ’er think you come to see me, I reckon.”
She nodded brightly, and left him standing in the roadway looking after her retreating figure, and from it to the shining coins lying in the horny hollow of his palm. Perhaps it was due less to the Byronic temperament than to the natural love of every loyal subject for the King’s portrait set in silver that Mrs Chadwick won from thenceforth Robert’s unshakable respect. Being a man actuated by occasional chivalrous promptings, he drank to her good health conscientiously during the following days. But from a fear of making Hannah “obstroperous” he refrained from mentioning that interview with Mrs Chadwick and its amicable finish; and, in case Hannah went through his pockets while he slept, which experience taught him was the way of wives, he put temptation out of her way by concealing the coins beneath the altar cloth in the church. Familiarity with holy things had bred an undesirable freedom in Robert’s views.
The vicar and his wife stood at the vicarage gate and waved farewell to Mr Musgrave’s guests as the car drove past. Mr Musgrave on this occasion accompanied the ladies, speeding, as Mrs Errol remarked, the departure, if he had not obeyed strictly the prescribed rules of hospitality by welcoming the coming guest.
“Well, that’s over,” she said, as the car turned the bend and disappeared from sight. She tucked her hand within her husband’s arm, and walked with him a few yards down the road. “I shall be glad when they are settled at the Hall. It will make things gayer.”
“It will certainly do that,” he agreed. “Gaiety and Mrs Chadwick are synonymous terms.”
“There is no especial virtue in gravity,” Mrs Errol returned.
“There is not,” he answered readily. “I prefer a cheerful countenance myself.”
The vicar’s road that morning taking him past Robert’s cottage, he looked in to inquire for Mrs Robert, who had been much troubled of late with mysterious pains which attacked equally mysterious parts of her anatomy. To listen to Hannah’s diagnosis of her complaints was to wonder how anyone who suffered so distressingly could continue to live, and to remain on the whole fairly active. The vicar, being accustomed to this exaggerated description of the minor ills of the flesh, was able to be sympathetic, and not unduly pessimistic in regard to the patient’s ultimate recovery. But this morning Hannah, having received a letter from her son, was less concerned with her ailments than with the epistle of Robert the younger, who, after two pages devoted to personal and intimate matters, had sent a filial exhortation to his father, in which he recommended for the latter’s careful study the sixteenth verse of the sixteenth chapter according to Saint Mark.
Robert the elder had insisted upon Hannah hunting up that particular verse in the Bible which stood in the front window, where the vicar’s eye, and the eye of the district visitor, could not fail to light upon it. The vicar’s eye had become so familiarised with this object, which looked as though it had never been displaced since first it had been put there, that he had formed a very fair estimate of its accepted value in the household. Mr Errol held no illusions concerning the piety of Robert and his wife.
Hannah, nothing loth, had found the text, and read it aloud to Robert, whose wrathful disgust had caused her quite pleasantly to forget her pains for the time. There stood the words in relentless black and white: “He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”
Hannah performed the supererogatory task of reading the text aloud to the vicar, who endeavoured while he listened to conceal the smile that found its way to his lips.
“And what has Robert to say to that?” he asked.
Robert had had a good deal to say, but his wife did not feel it necessary to quote him verbatim.
“Robert’s mad,” she answered. “He says he’ll learn ’im. But Bob’s a good boy, sir, and terrible clever.”
“He certainly possesses a strong sense of responsibility,” the vicar allowed.
When later Mr Errol saw Robert, he was reminded of young Robert’s message by the dour look on his old sexton’s face. His expression of wrathful indignation did not convey the suggestion that the seed of his son’s counsel had fallen upon fruitful ground. Robert not only looked upset, he was most unusually taciturn. When he heard that the vicar had been to his cottage that morning he merely grunted. The grunt was expressive of many emotions, the most eloquent of which was unspeakable disgust. At the same time the consciousness of certain coins concealed beneath the altar cloth in the church caused Robert to lower his gaze before his vicar’s eyes.
“So Hannah has heard from Bob,” the vicar observed pleasantly. “Bob seems to fear you are in considerable danger, Robert.”
“’E’ll be in considerable danger if ’e comes ’ome before I’ve ’ad time to cool,” answered Robert grimly. He eyed his horny hand and the wrist muscles, developed like taut leather through long usage with the spade, and smiled darkly. “Reckon I didn’ let in to en enough when ’e were a youngster,” he remarked regretfully. “I only wish ’e were young enough for me to start in again. But I’m more’n ’is match now. Learn ’is father, will ’e? Us’ll see. Thinks ’e knows a sight more’n I do, because ’e’s got a few textes in ’is ’ead. ’Tis about all ’e ’as got there. Proud, ’e is, because ’e reads ’is Bible, which ’e ’lows other folk don’t. Neither they does; but no more didn’t ’e before ’e took up wi’ preaching.”
“Oh, come, Robert,” remonstrated the vicar, smiling. “Plenty of people read their Bibles, even in Moresby.”
“Plenty of people ’as Bibles,” Robert replied darkly. “Keeps ’em for show, they do. I knows. Folks don’t read their Bibles nowadays.”
Robert spoke of the Bible as though it were a relic of prehistoric times which, being a respectable relic, and one the possession of which brought the owner occasional benefits from those in spiritual authority, was therefore worthy of a place even in the front window; but as a book for practical use, the idea was simply a pose.
“Indeed,” the vicar insisted, “I know one or two in the parish who read their Bibles consistently. I have gone in at times and found them reading it.”
Robert eyed the speaker with a gleam in his eyes that suggested affectionate patronage, and a half-contemptuous commiseration for such blind credulity.
“They seed you coming, sir,” he said, with a shake of the head at the depths to which human duplicity will go.
The vicar gazed seriously into the quaint, sincere face of his sexton.
“Don’t you ever read your Bible, Robert?” he asked gravely.
“No, sir. Never ’ear aught of it ’cept wot you reads out in church,” Robert replied with disconcerting candour.
The Rev. Walter Errol turned away abruptly to conceal from the observant eyes regarding him whatever emotion moved him at the outspoken sincerity of this man, who had worked under him for many years in the service of the church. An honest heart is a worthy possession, and truth, no matter what laxity it reveals, is preferable to deceit.