Coelebs: The Love Story of a Bachelor

“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.