Читать книгу: «Coelebs: The Love Story of a Bachelor», страница 4

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.