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Chapter Twenty Five

The troubles of Mr Musgrave as the owner of a bull-dog began forthwith and multiplied exceedingly. Diogenes was driven into Rushleigh that afternoon in the car, and subsequently, to his secret disgust, returned disguised as a brindle, which disguise he diligently sought to remove with so much success that the journeys to Rushleigh became periodic, and Diogenes underwent chameleon-like changes in the intervals.

A large dog-kennel and brand-new chain were purchased, and, save when Mr Musgrave took Diogenes for the daily run, and Peggy, availing herself of his permission, slipped in through the tradesmen’s entrance and released her excited pet, Diogenes spent his days in complaining inactivity, with ample time in which to reflect upon his misdeeds.

The arrival of Diogenes affected some change in Mr Musgrave’s household. Eliza promptly gave notice. She would, she informed the surprised master of the establishment, as soon remain in a place with an elephant. Martha, who would have suffered elephants and other undesirable pets rather than quit Mr Musgrave’s service, sought to propitiate Diogenes, and, being a disciple of the famous explorer who phrased the axiom that the stomach governs the world, she carried bones and other delicacies to Diogenes’ kennel, to the detriment of his figure, and so won his affections that after Peggy, whom he adored, and Mr Musgrave, to whom he became speedily attached, Martha ranked as his very good friend.

The chauffeur had his doubts about Diogenes, and he nursed darker doubts in regard to his employer. To take a white bull-dog into Rushleigh and fetch home a brindle that was constantly changing its coat occurred to King is a highly suspicious circumstance.

“There’ll be a police case over that dog,” he remarked to Martha. “You mark my words. I’ve known similar cases and they’ve always been found out. The governor’s asking for trouble.”

The weight upon Mr Musgrave’s conscience attendant on the duplicity which he of necessity was called upon to practise daily was so burdensome that he was imperatively moved to confide in some one, and thereby share, if not shift, the responsibility. Some idea of confiding in Walter Errol had been with him from the first; and, meeting the vicar one morning when he was returning from an early walk with Diogenes, the desire to unburden his mind hardened to a determination upon perceiving the amazement in the vicar’s eyes as they rested upon the dog he led an unwilling captive on the chain.

The vicar halted in the road and laughed.

“I heard you were starting kennels,” he said; “but, upon my word! I didn’t believe it. Wherever did you buy that dog?”

Mr Musgrave had not bought Diogenes and he had no intention of pretending that he had.

“It was given to me,” he said.

“Oh, that explains it,” the vicar answered.

But even while he spoke it occurred to Mr Musgrave that the dog had not been given to him; he had offered to take it.

“I am taking care of it for some one,” he corrected himself.

The vicar looked mystified and faintly amused.

“That’s doing a lot for friendship, isn’t it, John?” he asked.

John Musgrave reddened.

“Is obliging a friend an excessive courtesy?” he inquired.

“Well, no. I stand rebuked.”

The vicar stooped and patted Diogenes and looked him over critically.

“It’s a funny thing,” he said, “but he’s extraordinarily like the bull they had up at the Hall – except, of course, for his colour.”

“He is,” Mr Musgrave said, firing off his bomb as calmly as though he were making a very ordinary statement, “the same dog.”

“Oh!” said the vicar, and straightened himself and looked John Musgrave squarely in the eyes. “I understood,” he said, “that Diogenes was shot.”

“Diogenes ought to have been shot,” replied Mr Musgrave, and it ran through his mind at the moment to wish that Diogenes had been shot, but he checked the ungenerous thought, and added: “Miss Annersley rescued him and smuggled him away. He is, as a matter of fact, in hiding from the authorities.”

“Which accounts,” remarked the vicar, “for his colour.” He stooped to pat Diogenes again in order to conceal from his friend’s eyes the smile in his own. “And Miss Annersley brought him to you?” he said, with the mental addition, “Little baggage?”

“No,” said Mr Musgrave, and proceeded with great care to outline the facts of the case, omitting details as far as possible. “She was so very upset,” he finished. “And really it seemed regrettable to sacrifice a valuable dog after the mischief was done. The only uneasiness I feel in the matter is in regard to the Chadwicks. I should not like to annoy them.”

“I think you may put that fear out of your thoughts at least,” Mr Errol replied. “Only yesterday Mr Chadwick was telling me how vexed he was to have been obliged to destroy the dog. He expressed the wish that he had sent him away instead.”

Reassured on this head, Mr Musgrave looked relieved.

“I’m glad to know that,” he said. “Quite possibly Diogenes will be received back into the family later on, when time has softened Mrs Chadwick’s chagrin.”

“In the meanwhile,” Walter Errol said, laughing, “I foresee your attachment for the – dog having grown to the extent of refusing to part with him.”

John Musgrave was by nature literal, nor did he on this occasion depart from his habit of interpreting his friend’s speech to the letter rather than the spirit.

“My affection for Diogenes,” he returned, “will be tempered always with anxiety. And in any case the motive which led to my adoption of him will qualify any distress I may feel in parting with him. It will give me immense pleasure to restore her pet to Miss Annersley.”

“Yes,” agreed the vicar decidedly, “Miss Annersley, of course, must have Diogenes back.”

He returned to the vicarage for breakfast in a highly amused frame of mind, but, having been sworn by John Musgrave to secrecy, was denied the pleasure of relating this amazing tale of Mr Musgrave’s benevolence for the benefit of his wife. The story of Diogenes must for the present remain a secret.

But as a secret shared by an increasing number of persons it stood in considerable danger of ultimate disclosure. The risk of discovery in the quarter in which discovery was most to be avoided was minimised by the departure, of the Chadwicks for the Continent a month earlier than had been intended. The responsibility for hastening the departure rested with Mr Chadwick, who, worried with his wife’s constant bewailing her pet’s untimely end, and equally harassed by his niece’s uncomplaining but very obvious regret for her faithful four-footed companion, decided that change of scene might help them to forget these small troubles which depressed the atmosphere of his hitherto genial home.

Peggy, from motives quite apart from the distress she successfully feigned, encouraged him in this belief, and once away from Moresby brightened so suddenly and became so surprisingly cheerful that her uncle was puzzled to understand why his wife did not show a corresponding gaiety, but continued to bemoan her loss as she had done at home.

Because the murder of Diogenes had lain heavily on his conscience in consideration of the girl’s affection for the dog, the reaction of Peggy’s spirits occasioned Mr Chadwick immense relief. She could not, he decided, have been so devoted to the brute as he had supposed. But in any case he felt grateful to her for her generosity in sparing him reproach. The only reproach he received in respect of Diogenes’ end came from a quarter whence he least expected it, and from whence it was least deserved. So little prepared was he to hear his wife denounce the execution of Diogenes as mistaken and absurd, and to complain of this ill-advised act as vexatious to herself, that he found no words in which to answer her. It was significant of the unreasonableness of human nature, he reflected, that she could hurl such a charge at him, and feel herself ill-used by a prompt obedience to her expressed wish. Also it pointed to the unwisdom of carrying out a death sentence within twenty-four hours of its delivery. The road was already in the making along which Diogenes would eventually return.

Peggy decided that when they got home she would bring Diogenes to life by degrees. She was not specially desirous of bringing him to life in a hurry, her reasons for a gradual resuscitation being governed by considerations of so complex and feminine a character that Mr Musgrave would have failed to follow them. The vicar, on the other hand, would have apprehended her motives very readily; he had a surer grasp than John Musgrave on the complexities of the human mind.

To one person in Moresby the addition of Diogenes to Mr Musgrave’s establishment afforded entire satisfaction; that person was Miss Simpson. For the bull-dog at the Hall she had confessed to absolute terror; but Mr Musgrave’s brindle was a dear, so much handsomer and more gentle.

She noted the hour for Mr Musgrave’s walk in Diogenes’ company and, though he changed the direction of his walk daily, almost invariably the pertinacious spinster ran him to earth, and, to his intense annoyance, joined him and entreated permission to hold Diogenes’ chain.

That was the greatest of the many embarrassments Diogenes occasioned Mr Musgrave. He began unconsciously to look for Miss Simpson’s spare figure furtively behind trees and hedges as he proceeded on his way; when it flashed abruptly upon him, appearing unexpectedly round a bend of the road, or starting up, as it seemed to his surprised eyes, out of the very ground, he experienced a desire to loosen Diogenes’ chain and set him at her. He was growing to hate the sight of her thin, eager face. And her comparisons of the two dogs, which were one dog, disconcerted him. He came near to taking her into the secret at times. It puzzled him to think what she would make of it if she learned the truth.

Miss Simpson was so anxious to establish the fact of the marked similarity in their tastes that she blundered into the declaration that she doted on dogs, particularly bull-dogs. Mr Musgrave received this statement coldly.

“I am afraid I cannot sympathise with your enthusiasm,” he replied. “I dislike dogs – particularly bull-dogs.”

“Then why,” asked Miss Simpson very naturally, “do you keep a bull-dog?”

“I am only taking care of it for a friend,” he explained.

“How very kind of you,” she gushed. “Such a responsibility, other people’s pets.”

She embarked upon a windy dissertation about a cat she had once taken charge of for some one, and the trouble and expense this ungrateful animal had caused her.

“But you can’t chain up a cat,” she explained. “People are so selfish. They never consider how they trespass on one’s kindness.”

“If service called for no sacrifice it would not be kindness,” Mr Musgrave replied sententiously.

“Ah, how true that is!” exclaimed Miss Simpson. “You have such a comprehensive way of putting things. One ought to be kind, of course.”

“I think,” he replied with emphasis, “if the desire to be kind is lacking, it is just as well to leave it alone.”

“Yes,” she acquiesced flatly. “That’s true, too. But we most of us desire to be kind, don’t we?”

“No,” he returned in his bluntest manner; he was feeling too annoyed to wish to be civil. “I fancy in the majority of us that desire is a negligible quantity.”

“But not in you,” she said insinuatingly.

“In me most pronouncedly,” he asserted with conviction.

If this quality were not lacking in himself in a general sense he knew at that moment it was most assuredly lacking in relation to her. Mr Musgrave, having been guilty of ungraciousness, was immediately ashamed of his irritation, and during the remainder of the walk he sought to atone for his former discourtesy by a greater amiability than Miss Simpson was accustomed to from him – a mistaken form of kindness which led to the encouragement of all manner of false hopes in Miss Simpson’s maiden mind.

Chapter Twenty Six

John Musgrave sat at his solitary breakfast-table and regarded the covered dishes before him with, for the first time within his memory, so little interest in their contents that he felt a strange disinclination to uncover them. This lack of appetite, he decided, resulted either from indisposition or from approaching age. Since he felt no indisposition, he attributed it to the latter cause. Persons of advancing middle-age were less hearty than youth at the beginning of the day. That was only natural. Therefore he did not lift the covers, but made an indifferent breakfast of toast and coffee.

Nevertheless, as the day advanced, he made the further discomfiting discovery that this lack of interest was not confined solely to the table, but spread itself like a blight over the ordinary affairs of life. He was oddly disinclined to follow any of his usual pursuits. Mr Musgrave was unaccountably bored with everything. He experienced a restlessness foreign to his habitual placidity, which restlessness, by reason of its strangeness, worried him considerably. It was inconceivable that after forty years of tranquil contentment he should develop the quality which of all others he had found so difficult to comprehend or sympathise with. Yet restless he was, and dissatisfied – dissatisfied, with Moresby and the even tenor of his days. He wanted inexplicably to fling things into a portmanteau and start off for some place – any place that was fairly distant.

He did not, of course, yield to this extraordinary impulse. Being moved by such an impulse was sufficiently amazing; to have obeyed it would have been more amazing, still. He went instead into the garden and freed Diogenes from the chain, and allowed him to exercise unchecked over the flower borders, to the indignant astonishment of Bond, who was preparing the beds for the spring planting.

“Blest if he ain’t gone dotty over that there dog,” he complained.

And the cat, who was airing herself in the belief that her enemy was confined to the restricted limits of the chain, sought refuge up a tree, and gloomily watched Diogenes as he gambolled below. She had refused to follow Eliza’s example and evacuate in the enemy’s favour, but her resentment of Diogenes’ presence was bitter and prolonged; it declined to soften before Diogenes’ persistent overtures towards a greater friendliness. Her disapproval remained closely associated with that first unfortunate meeting, which proved an unforgiving spirit. Diogenes and Mr Musgrave had decided to forget that occasion and were, as a result, firm friends.

When Diogenes was again on the chain, and Mr Musgrave was once more facing the unwanted viands on his table, looking about him round the large empty room – empty that is, in the matter of companionship – he made the biggest and most startling discovery of the lay: he was lonely – really lonely, as he had not been since the months immediately following his sister’s marriage. Why, in the name of mystery, should he, who had not enjoyed companionship in his home since his sister had left it, who had not, save in a vague fashion when she left him solitary after one of her brief return visits, felt the need of companionship, be suddenly gripped with this desolating sense of loneliness? He could not understand it; and it was the more disconcerting on account of his inability to comprehend this obsession which fretted him, and prevented him from settling calmly to the ordinary routine of the lay.

Mr Musgrave lunched sparingly and later set out for the vicarage for a chat with the vicar. He remained for tea, and in the genial society of the Errols forgot his depression to the extent of believing himself cured of the inconvenience. But the depression had lightened merely temporarily under the influence of that cheery little home circle: out again in the open, facing the keen east wind, John Musgrave felt the heaviness of his mood descending upon him once more, and with an odd distaste for his lonely fireside he fetched Diogenes and took him for a long walk.

On returning from this walk Mr Musgrave did an unexampled thing. Instead of taking Diogenes back to his kennel he led him into the house, into the drawing-room, having removed the chain in the hall and left it hanging there. Diogenes, with the noblesse oblige of good breeding, accepted all this as a matter of course, and, having first made a snuffing tour of inspection round the room, walked to the big skin rug before the fire and lay down. So uncertain was he of the enduring nature of this concession that he did not permit himself to sleep, but lay, winking complacently at the flames, and furtively every now and again blinking at Mr Musgrave. Mr Musgrave seated himself wearily in a chair and stared reflectively at Diogenes.

“I begin to believe,” he said half aloud, “that there is considerable companionableness in a dog. I wonder that I never kept a dog.”

Diogenes, under the impression that he was being directly addressed, got up and moved nearer to Mr Musgrave and sat on his haunches, looking with his bulging, affectionate eyes into Mr Musgrave’s face. The man put out a hand and caressed the big head.

“I daresay you are lonely too,” he said. “You miss your mistress, I expect.”

The bulging eyes were eloquent.

“I think, Diogenes,” Mr Musgrave added, “that you are sufficiently well behaved to be allowed indoors. I – like to see you here.”

Diogenes thumped the carpet with his tail, which was tantamount to replying that he liked being there and was very well satisfied to remain.

Mr Musgrave continued caressing the big head and talking fragmentally with his dumb friend, until the booming of the gong warned him of the hour. He rose to go to his room to dress, and, when Diogenes would have accompanied him, pointed to the rug and bade him lie there and wait. Perplexed, but obedient, Diogenes returned to the fire, and Mr Musgrave left him there, and stepping forth into the hall and closing the door behind him, was surprised to find himself confronted with Martha, Martha hot and red in the face from the exertions of preparing the evening meal, and so manifestly worried that something more than Mr Musgrave’s dinner must have been bearing on her mind.

Mr Musgrave halted and regarded her inquiringly, and Martha, with the fear of King’s warning relative to the police and the criminal nature of concealing dogs exciting her worst apprehensions, informed him dolefully that some one must have taken Diogenes away.

“I went out to ’is blessed kennel to take him a few bones,” she explained, “an’ the turn it give me to find the dear hanimal gone – chain an’ all, sir.”

Mr Musgrave with the utmost gravity pointed to the door at his back.

“Diogenes is in there,” he announced. “I forgot his feeding time.”

Martha gasped.

“In the drawing-room, sir?” she ejaculated.

“I was lonely,” Mr Musgrave explained. From force of long habit he treated Martha as a tried and trusted friend. “I find him companionable.”

“Lor’!” remarked Martha. She scrutinised her master attentively, the idea that he must be sickening for something suggesting itself to her mind. “Dogs are company, that’s certain,” she said. “When he’s ’ad ’is supper you’d like ’im back in the drawing-room, I suppose, sir?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I think he is sufficiently at home now to be allowed to run about as he likes.”

Martha took Diogenes to the kitchen and fed him, contemplating him with renewed interest while he gnawed his bones under the table.

“There’s something about that hanimal as I don’t understand,” she mused. “If that ain’t the same dog, though different, as burst in after the cat with the young lady from the ’All, I’ll eat my apron. It’s the same young lady comes to see ’im, anyway. If it isn’t ’er dog what does she come for? And if it is ’er dog what’s the master doing with it? It’s my belief,” she further reflected, wiping the perspiration from her face with the apron she had dedicated to gastronomic purposes, “that the master is courtin’ the young lady, or the young lady is courtin’ the master, through that blessed dog. Now I wonder,” and Martha turned to the stove and went through mysterious manoeuvres with the vessels upon it, “how that will work? Come to my time o’ life and his, change – that kind of change – makes for trouble as a rule.”

Small wonder that in the disturbed preoccupation of his cook’s mind Mr Musgrave’s dinner that night suffered in the cooking. But Mr Musgrave was himself too preoccupied to notice this; the business of eating had no interest for him.

He was relieved on returning to the drawing-room to find Diogenes in occupation of the rug once more; and Diogenes, who had the gregarious instinct even more deeply implanted than Mr Musgrave, in whom it was a recent development, welcomed him effusively and finally stretched himself at Mr Musgrave’s feet and snorted contentedly, while the master, of the house sat back in his chair and read, and – which did not astonish Diogenes, though it would have amazed anyone intimate with John Musgrave’s lifetime habits – violated another rule by smoking a cigar while he read.

The grouping of the man and the dog in the warm, firelit room made a pleasing, homelike picture, so different in effect from the ordinary picture of John Musgrave reading in scholarly solitude by his shaded lamp, without the solace of tobacco even, that it scarcely seemed the same room or the same man seated in the big chair wreathed in ascending clouds of blue smoke spirals.

This picture, as it impressed the vicar, when a few evenings later he was shown in and beheld a similar grouping, so similar that it appeared as if the man and dog had remained in the same positions without interruption, was so surprising, despite its cosy, natural air, that he entirely forgot the object of his visit, nor remembered it until he was on his homeward way.

“Hallo!” he exclaimed, as John Musgrave rose to greet him, and, removing the cigar from his mouth, wrung his hand warmly. “You look jolly comfortable. The wind is bitter to-night. It is good to shelter in a room like this.”

“Sit down,” said Mr Musgrave. He pushed the cigars towards his friend. “Will you smoke?” he asked.

Walter Errol’s eyes twinkled as he accepted a cigar and snipped the end with a contemplative stare at Diogenes. He did not, however, betray the amazement he felt, but appeared to regard these innovations as very ordinary events.

The big dog sprawling before the hearth and the smoke-laden atmosphere of the room which, until Mrs Chadwick had first profaned it, had been preserved from the fumes of tobacco, were surprisingly agreeable novelties. The vicar had seldom enjoyed an evening in John Musgrave’s drawing-room so much as he enjoyed that evening, sitting chatting with his friend over old college days and acquaintances. It was late when he rose to go, and still he had not mentioned the matter about which he had come, did not mention it at all; it had slipped from his mind entirely.

“It’s so comfortable here,” he said, with his jolly laugh, “that I’m loth to go, John. There is only one substitution I could suggest, and one addition, to improve the picture.”

“What are they?” asked Mr Musgrave, his glance travelling round the homelike room.

The vicar paused and seemed to reflect.

“Well,” he said at last, “I would substitute a child in place of the dog, and… But you don’t need to inquire what form the addition would take. We’ve discussed all that before. I’m not sure I wouldn’t make them both additions,” he added, “and let the dog remain.”

Mr Musgrave reddened.

“Don’t you think,” he suggested, with a diffidence altogether at variance with his usual manner of receiving this advice, “that I am rather old for such changes?”

“You are just over forty,” the other answered, “and forty is the prime of life… Any age is the prime of life when a man is disposed to regard it so. You grow younger every day, John.”

When the vicar left him John Musgrave returned to the fire and stood beside Diogenes on the rug, staring thoughtfully down into the flames. In the heart of the flames he saw a picture of an upturned face, of a pair of darkly grey eyes gazing earnestly into his.

“You are so kind, so very kind.” The words repeated themselves in his memory. “I wish there was something I could do for you…”

John Musgrave stirred restlessly. Were the words sincere, he wondered? They had been sincere at the time, he knew; but possibly they had been prompted by the gratitude of the moment; and gratitude is no more enduring than any other quality. He glanced at Diogenes, who, with a much-wrinkled brow, was also contemplating the flames.

“I think it would be extortionate to demand payment for the service, Diogenes,” he said.

Diogenes looked up and snorted approval.

“It is, after all, a privilege to feel that one has rendered some service and has received her thanks. I don’t think it would be fair – to her – to expect more.”