Coelebs: The Love Story of a Bachelor

Mr Musgrave looked round the beautiful old hall, looked at the several couples seated on the broad oak staircase, looked into his companion’s young, fresh, smiling face, and smiled too.

“It would be unpleasantly draughty,” he allowed.

She lifted her white shoulders expressively.

“I like modern comfort,” she said. “I love everything beautiful and solid and good. I admire this house, and I admire Moresby. It is picturesque. But I wouldn’t care to live here.”

“No? Why?” he asked.

“I don’t enjoy vegetating. I should turn into a cabbage if I had to remain here. It’s the same with Peggy. We are all alike that way; we must have change.”

“Ah!” he said. “That is a sign of the times, too.”

For some reason or other he seemed ill-pleased with her last remark, though he could not have explained why a desire for change in a young lady whom he met for the first time should disturb him. Perhaps it was less the expression of Sophy’s own inclination than that reference to a similar taste on her sister’s part which vexed him; or it may have been that he resented the general tone of her remarks about the desirability of Moresby as a permanent dwelling-place. He had lived most of his life in Moresby, and he felt no nearer in kin to the vegetable world now than in the days of his more fervid youth.

“It is natural that the present generation should be representative of the times,” observed Sophy cheerfully. “I wouldn’t wish to be an anachronism.”

She laughed gaily at the perplexed gravity of his face. Her sister’s opinion, expressed earlier in the evening, to the effect that John would not like her because of the sharpness of her tongue, occurred to her as surprisingly astute. John certainly did not like her. Possibly he cherished antipathy towards most things which he failed to understand.

Mr Musgrave had never met such an astounding young woman before. By comparison, Peggy Annersley appeared a very simple and gracious contrast. He was getting perilously near to thinking of Peggy as womanly; and yet when he first met Peggy that flattering adjective was the last he would have applied as fittingly describing her. He had almost forgotten the abominable overalls. He certainly was not thinking of them when presently Peggy flitted up to them, a distractingly pleasing sight in blue, with blush roses at her breast. The roses had been made in Paris, but Mr Musgrave did not detect their artificiality. Peggy dexterously exchanged her own partner for her sister’s escort, and sat down beside Mr Musgrave on the big oak seat.

“I’m tired,” she said, and played absently with her fan, making the remark as though she considered some explanation of this rescue of her bored young sister necessary. Sophy’s idea of enjoyment was not, she knew, consistent with sitting out when she might be dancing; and the band, hired for the occasion from Rushleigh, was playing a two-step.

She did not look tired when she made this admission. But Mr Musgrave was not observant, and he considered it becoming in a woman to confess to fatigue. Also the substitution of companions was entirely agreeable to him. Peggy was undeniably the more charming of the two sisters.

“Don’t you dance?” she asked presently.

“These new dances are unfamiliar,” he replied. “I used to waltz years ago; but, save for an occasional square dance, I have not engaged in the exercise for so long that I expect I have forgotten the steps. I like to look on.”

He was not, however, indulging his liking; there was no view of the dancing from where they sat. The couples on the staircase had melted away with the first strains of the music, find Peggy and John Musgrave had the old hall to themselves.

“I don’t care about looking on,” said Peggy. “I like to take part, or get away from it altogether. It’s nice sitting here; it’s restful.”

She lifted the little decorated programme hanging from her fan and studied it, wrinkling her pretty brows over the undecipherable initials which defaced its page.

“I don’t believe you have asked me for a single dance,” she said, the faintest trace of reproach perceptible in her voice.

Before this attack Mr Musgrave experienced some embarrassment. The rebuke in its directness was tantamount to an accusation of negligence; in its suggestion of an invitation it implied a compliment. John Musgrave was as much discomfited by the one as by the other.

“I – I didn’t wish to trespass on your good nature to that extent,” he replied.

“Isn’t that just a little unkind?” hazarded Peggy, with a smile which brought the dimple into play.

Mr Musgrave fell to studying the dimple while Peggy studied her card, and became so intent in this pleasing form of research that he omitted to answer her question. Presently he took the card from her.

“Is it filled?” he inquired.

“There’s one blank – a square, towards the end,” replied Peggy demurely, not thinking it necessary to tell him with what difficulty she had preserved that blank space in her programme.

“I can’t dance,” he said, reddening. “I’ve forgotten how. It wouldn’t be fair to spoil your enjoyment. So many people would be grateful for the privilege of dancing it with you.”

Peggy shook her head.

“I do not feel like gratifying them,” she said.

Very gravely and deliberately Mr Musgrave took hold of the tiny pencil hanging by its slender cord from the card, and, pencil in one large gloved hand and programme in the other, looked searchingly into the grey eyes that met his steadfast scrutiny with a kindly smile.

“Does that,” he asked, “convey a gracious permission to me to write my name against the blank?”

“Not – unless to do so would be equally agreeable to you,” Peggy answered.

Mr Musgrave did not immediately remove his gaze from hers. So long, indeed, did he continue looking at her that Peggy felt her cheeks grow warm beneath his earnest eyes. Then he transferred his attention from her face to the card he held, and wrote his name clearly, “John Musgrave,” in the single blank space thereon.

“Thank you,” he said, and returned her programme to her with a courteous bow.

Peggy, experiencing a timid embarrassment in having so easily gained her point, felt curiously inadequate to making any suitable reply. She took the card from him with nervous fingers and let it fall into her lap, and sat gazing into the fire abstractedly, concealing in this concentration on the flames the tiny gleam of triumph that lighted the grey eyes. The thought, shaping its f mutely in her mind in inelegant phraseology, was, in effect, that Moresby would sit up when it saw John treading a measure with herself. Had Mr Musgrave divined that thought it is safe to predict that he would never have led pretty Peggy Annersley out on the ballroom floor.

Chapter Nineteen

Moresby did “sit up” when Mr Musgrave took the floor with Peggy.

His conduct in doing so was all the more remarkable inasmuch as he had not partnered anyone else during the evening.

Miss Simpson, seated against the wall, neglected save by the vicar, who sought to entertain her conversationally since he did not dance, saw him with amazed indignation take his place with Peggy in one of the sets on the floor. She could not discredit her own senses or she would have done so, but she was firmly convinced that the reason for his being there was governed less by inclination than by the designs of his partner, in which surmise she was not wholly incorrect. John Musgrave would assuredly never have faced such an ordeal but for the persuasive witchery of a certain fascinating dimple at the corner of a pretty mouth. He was as hopelessly out of his element as a damaged war-vessel in dry dock. Indeed, if one could imagine a war-vessel competing in a regatta against a number of racing yachts, one would have some idea of the utter incongruity of Mr John Musgrave forming one of the double-sided square dance, and going bewilderedly and lumberingly through the intricate mazes of the different figures, guided with unflagging watchfulness by his attentive partner.

Fair hands reached out for his direction, bright eyes watched his hesitation good-naturedly, and their owners obligingly pulled and pushed and guided him to his positions, entering with such zest into the business of keeping him to time that it could not be said he spoilt their pleasure in the dance, however little enjoyment he derived from it himself. Also, it was the one set in the room that was danced with punctilious observance of the regular figures; to have taken the liberties which modern interpretation encourages with the time-honoured dance would have been unthinkable with Mr Musgrave’s serious presence, his courtly bows, his painstaking and conscientious performance dominating the set. If the other men found it slow they resigned themselves to the inevitable; their partners at least appeared very well amused.

“You see,” Mr Musgrave said to Peggy, his breathing laboured, as he paused beside her at the finish of the grand chain, “I have forgotten how to dance.”

“You dance beautifully,” Peggy assured him, smiling up into his serious face. “The different figures are a little puzzling to remember. I am enjoying this immensely.”

“Are you?” he said, in some surprise. “It is very kind of you to say so.”

A regard for truth prevented Mr Musgrave from echoing her sentiments: to sacrifice sincerity in an effort to be courteous was not Mr Musgrave’s way; but the knowledge that he was giving her pleasure atoned in a measure for his own lack of enjoyment. That his actions were exciting comment, that heads were turned to watch him, that those in the room who were not dancing were more interested in himself than in the other dancers, was not remarked by him. Mr Musgrave was sufficiently modest to remain unconscious of the attention he received. The dance was to him an ordeal of the utmost gravity, because of his stupidity and his fear of spoiling others’ pleasure in it; it was not, however, a humiliating ordeal, as it might have been to a vainer man. In his absorbed attention he missed the smiles and the glances and the whispered comments; missed Miss Simpson’s flushed displeasure, and the vicar’s amazed and smiling observation of his old friend’s surprising energy; missed, too, his sister’s bright glance of quickened interest, and his brother-in-law’s amused grin.

“Coelebs?” murmured the vicar under his breath, and caught Belle’s eye and smiled at her.

Later he made his way to her, when the room cleared of the dancers and Peggy and her partner disappeared with the stream drifting towards the hall and the conservatory, and other convenient places fitted up for sitting out. Their eyes met in a glance of sympathetic understanding; then Belle linked a hand within his arm and suggested a retreat into the conservatory.

“Is your faith in the power of your sex increasing at all?” he asked, as, having led her to a secluded corner, he seated himself near her, and leaned back in a low chair with an air of thorough enjoyment.

“Ah!” she said, her face turned towards his, amused and retrospective. “You remember that conversation.”

“You did not believe, when you challenged Mrs Chadwick, that she would succeed to the extent we have witnessed to-night,” he said.

Belle became suddenly grave.

“Would you ascribe the success altogether to Mrs Chadwick?” she asked.

“Well, perhaps not,” he allowed. “It is a vicarious triumph. But the success is unquestionable. I experienced in watching John a return of my own youth.”

“I wish,” Belle remarked with some irrelevance, “that she was a little older.”

“Why?” asked the vicar, divining her reason even while putting the question. The wish found an echo in his own thoughts, and had its origin in the same grave doubt.

“I don’t think a girl like Peggy will fall in love with John,” she said.

“The mere fact that John danced with her does not prove that he is in any immediate danger of falling in love with her,” he returned. “I don’t suppose such an idea ever entered his head.”

Belle laughed.

“I don’t suppose it did,” she agreed. “But I think she has the power to inspire the emotion in him. It would be regrettable if she succeeded in doing that without intending it.”

“It would,” he allowed, and was silent for a space, recognising the inability of John’s friends to safeguard him against the danger if Miss Peggy Annersley chose to work in opposition to them. “She seems,” he suggested hopefully, “to be quite kind and sincere.”

“She is an incorrigible little flirt,” Belle replied, smiling at his rather obvious attempt to reassure her. “I know her a good deal better than you do.”

“All good women, I understand,” he returned, recalling his wife’s remarks on the same subject, “flirt, given the opportunity. Since you mention the propensity in connection with her, I have reason to believe she flirts with Robert. He has a poor opinion of her courage and a great idea of her amiability.”

“I can forgive her for flirting with Robert,” said Belle; “he is such a quaint old dear. But… John!”

“I refuse,” said the vicar with gentle firmness, “to entertain any unworthy thought of her in that connection. She has probably succeeded in discovering in John what you and I have failed in discovering – the vein of youthfulness he has concealed so successfully all these years. Forty is the prime of life. It will not surprise me in the least if John proves himself to be more youthful than Miss Annersley.”

“She is only twenty-eight,” said Belle.

“John is younger than that in experience,” he replied. “I am beginning to believe that at heart he is still a boy. No man who was not a boy at heart could have concentrated so much energy and earnest endeavour upon an exercise at once unfamiliar and distasteful. A boy will do what he dislikes doing if he recognises that the doing is expected of him; a man studies in preference his inclination. You cannot urge that John’s inclination tends, towards dancing.”

“No,” she answered. “But I can dispute your point, because plainly John’s inclination tends towards pleasing Peggy.”

“Well, yes,” the vicar conceded. “I begin to believe you are right.”

If he entertained the smallest doubt on that head, the doubt would have been dispelled could he have looked at the moment upon the picture of Mr Musgrave seated with his late partner in a retired spot, screened from the curious by tall palms and other pot-plants, to which retreat Peggy had led him, as she led only her favoured partners, at the finish of the dance. Mr Musgrave sat forward in his seat, fingering one of the blush roses which had fallen from Peggy’s dress when she left the ballroom. A clumsy movement of his own towards the finish of the dance had been responsible for the damage, as he was well aware. He had picked up the rose when it fell, and he was now smoothing and touching its petals as he held it lightly between his fingers, as once he had smoothed and touched, and idly played with and destroyed, a glove which she had dropped.

“I fear,” he said, “I am in fault for the detachment of this. You will begin to think me a very clumsy person.”

“Those little accidents happen so often when one is dancing,” she replied. “It is of no consequence.”

“It could, perhaps,” he suggested, “be sewn on again.”

“I don’t think it is worth bothering about,” she answered. “Besides, it is broken off at the head. Never mind the rose; it isn’t a real one. I hope you weren’t horribly bored at dancing with me? I believe you only danced because – ”

She paused. Mr Musgrave, still fingering the silken petals of the rose, looked up inquiringly.

“Why do you think I danced?” he asked.

“Because I asked you to,” she answered, smiling.

He smiled too.

“No,” he contradicted. “The idea certainly arose from your suggestion. I doubt whether I should have the courage to inflict myself on anyone as a dance partner without that encouragement. But I had another reason.”

“Tell me,” she said softly, and looked at him with so demure an expression, and then looked away again even more demurely, so that had the vicar chanced upon this tableau also he would assuredly have applied to her the term he had once made use of to his wife in speaking of her; he would have called her a little baggage. But the vicar was not there to see, and John Musgrave rather liked the demure expression. He had an altogether different term for it, which was “womanly.”

“If it interests you to know,” he said, “I had in remembrance the occasion when I declined to oblige you in the matter of the tableaux. I did not desire to appear ungracious a second time.”

“Then,” said Peggy, in a low voice, and still without looking at him, “you danced to please me.”

“You have stated my reason correctly this time,” John Musgrave answered quietly. “I wanted to please you.”

He rose as the sound of the music broke upon their ears, and offered her his arm.

“And now I am going to please myself,” he said, “and watch you dancing this.”

When he led her back to the ballroom and delivered her to her partner he became aware as he stood for a moment alone at the entrance to the crowded room that he still held the silken rose in his hand. He looked at it in some perplexity. Mr Musgrave was a man of tidy habits; to drop the rose upon the floor was not a tidy habit; it would, moreover, be in the way, and it would certainly get crushed. He slipped it instead into his pocket. Clearly in the circumstances that was the best thing to do with it. The present difficulty of the disposal of the rose being thus overcome, Mr Musgrave dismissed from his mind the embarrassment of its further disposal and turned his attention to the agreeable occupation of observing the graceful evolutions of the various couples on the floor; and if his eyes followed one figure more particularly, other eyes were doing the same, so that it could not be said of him that he was in any way peculiar in his preference for watching the prettiest and most graceful dancer in the room.

Chapter Twenty

When Peggy Annersley got out of her ball-dress in the early hours of that New Year’s morning she slipped on a comfortable dressing-gown and sat down before the fire and lighted a cigarette, while she awaited the arrival of her sister, whose room adjoined hers, and who, on separating outside the bedroom door, had stated her intention of joining her to talk over the evening before going to bed. Peggy was very agreeable to talk over anything. She was not in the least sleepy, and only pleasantly tired. Excitement with her acted as a nerve-tonic, and the night had not been without its excitements.

Sophy entering in a similarly comfortable deshabille, and approaching the hearth, hairbrush in hand, surprised her sister looking contemplatively into the flames and smiling at her thoughts. She was wondering – and it was this speculation which brought the smile to her lips – what John had done with her rose. She had made some search for it after he had left and had failed to discover it. It crossed her mind that perhaps John made a practice of collecting such souvenirs.

“You look,” said Sophy, as she stood for a moment and scrutinised the smiling face, “wicked. A lifelong acquaintance with your facial expressions leads me to conclude that you are indulging in a review of your conquests. Vanity will be your undoing, Peg o’ my heart.”

“Sit down,” said Peggy, “and have a cigarette.”

Sophy took a cigarette, but she did not immediately light it. She put her slippered feet on the fender and continued her study of her sister’s face. Seen in the flicker of the firelight, with the brown curls falling about her shoulders, Peggy made a charming picture. She looked so surprisingly young and so full of the joy of life. But she was not young, Sophy reflected. In a few years she would be thirty, and after thirty a woman loses her youth.

“I like Doctor Fairbridge,” Sophy remarked, with an abruptness that caused the smile to fade, though the challenge did not, she observed, produce any other effect.

“So do I,” agreed Peggy.

“He is in love with you,” said Sophy.

“He thinks he is,” Peggy corrected. “I expect he often finds himself in that condition.”

“That’s hedging, Peggy. He isn’t half bad. You might do worse.”

“I might. I daresay I shall,” returned Peggy unmoved.

“You’ll die an old maid, my Pegtop; men are none too plentiful.”

“I can even contemplate that condition undismayed,” Peggy replied calmly. “The unmarried woman is the best off, if she would only recognise it. Marriage is – ”

She paused, at a loss for a fitting definition, and during the pause Sophy lighted her cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully and looked into the fire.

“Marriage isn’t the heaven many people think, I know,” she allowed; “but it – settles one.”

“It settles two as a rule,” Peggy retorted flippantly.

She wrinkled her brows and stared into the fire likewise, and was silent awhile.

“I have never heard you so eloquent on marriage before,” she said presently. “I don’t believe, as a matter of fact, I have heard you discuss the subject until now. Are you contemplating it?”

Sophy laughed consciously.

“There’s some one,” she confided, and hesitated, aware of her sister’s quickened interest. “But he’s poor,” she added hastily. “He’s an architect too. One day, perhaps…”

“One day, of course,” Peggy returned softly, and got up and kissed the young, earnest face.

“I’m so glad, dear. I want to hear all about him.”

“Another time,” said Sophy, smiling. “I am a little shy of talking about him yet. But he is a dear.”

“I am sure he is, or you wouldn’t care for him.”

Peggy stood in front of the fire with her back to it, and regarded her sister critically. She regretted that Sophy’s romance had not sooner revealed itself. Assuredly, if their aunt had known of it, the dear would have been included in the Hall party.

“And so we have the reason for your newly-awakened interest in the affairs of the heart of less fortunate folk,” she remarked presently. “That’s rather nice of you, Sophy. Most people when they have ‘settled’ themselves don’t care a flick of the fingers about the settlement of the world in general.”

“I don’t suppose I feel especially concerned about the world in general myself,” replied Sophy. “You can scarcely class yourself in that category.”

“Oh, it’s I?” said Peggy, smiling ironically. “I thought it was Doctor Fairbridge you were particularly interested in.”

“He is nice,” Sophy insisted.

“Is he? He didn’t happen to tell you, I suppose, as he did me when we first met, with an air of weary resignation to the obligation of his profession, that he had to marry because unmarried medical men were at a disadvantage?”

Sophy looked amused.

“I don’t think if he had I should have placed undue importance on that,” she replied.

“Perhaps not, since you have no intention to assist him in his difficulty. But imagine what a complacent reflection it will be for his wife when she realises that she owes the honour of the bestowal of his name upon her to the accident which made him a doctor, and to the super-sensitiveness of the feminine portion of his practice.”

“And because of that unfortunate remark of his,” Sophy observed with an air of reproach, “you intend to snub him badly one day.”

“Snubbing,” Peggy returned, “is a wholesome corrective for conceited men.”

“I don’t think he is nearly so conceited,” Sophy contended, “as the pompous person you delight in encouraging to make a fool of himself.”

It was significant that although no mention was made of Mr Musgrave’s name, although her sister’s description was so little accurate as to be, in Peggy’s opinion, a libel, she nevertheless had no difficulty in recognising to whom Sophy thus unflatteringly alluded. For a moment she did not answer, having no answer ready, which was unusual. She met Sophy’s steadfast eye with a slightly deprecating look, as though she acknowledged reluctantly the justice of the rebuke to herself contained in the other’s speech. Then she laughed. There was a quality of mischief in the satisfied ring of the laugh, a captivating infectiousness in its quiet enjoyment. Sophy laughed with her.

“It’s too bad of you, Peggy,” she protested.

“You have not, for all your shrewdness,” observed Peggy deliberately, “gauged Mr Musgrave’s character correctly. He couldn’t make a fool of himself, because he has no foolish impulses. He is the antithesis of a conceited person. He is a simple, kindly soul, with a number of false ideas of life, and a few ready-made beliefs which he is too conservative to correct or individualise. Aunt Ruby is bent on modernising him; but to modernise John Musgrave would be like pulling down a Norman tower and reconstructing on its foundation a factory-chimney of red brick. I prefer Norman towers myself, though they may have less commercial value.”