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.