Coelebs: The Love Story of a Bachelor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twenty

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So do I,” agreed Peggy.

“He is in love with you,” said Sophy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophy laughed consciously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He is nice,” Sophy insisted.

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

Sophy looked amused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t mean,” said Sophy, opening her eyes very wide, “that you like John Musgrave?”

“As for that,” returned Peggy provokingly, “he is, I think, a very likeable person. I believe,” she added, with another quiet laugh, “that he entertains a similar opinion of me.”