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.”
“Does he know you smoke?” inquired Sophy with sarcasm.
“He does. He has attempted unsuccessfully to check the habit.”
Sophy appeared to find this amusing. Her merriment had the effect of making Peggy serious again.
“I think being in love is transforming you into a sentimental goose,” she remarked with some severity. “It is plain that you consider every one must be suffering from the same, idiotic complaint. It will be a relief when you are married. That is the surest cure for sentiment that has been discovered up to the present.”
Sophy threw the end of her cigarette in the fire and started to brush her hair.
“On the next occasion when I visit the Hall,” she observed maliciously, “I anticipate there will be no smoking allowed in your bedroom.”
“It is a vile practice in anyone’s bedroom,” Peggy returned amiably.
“Besides,” added Sophy with a laugh, “it is so unwomanly.”
Mr Musgrave also was engaging in his after-dance reflections as he prepared for bed in a room in which there burned no comforting fire. He had taken the rose from his pocket on removing his dress-coat because his man when he brushed the coat in the morning was very likely to go through his pockets, and Mr Musgrave had no wish for him to discover anything so altogether foreign to a gentleman’s effects in his possession. He placed the rose on his dressing-table, and was so embarrassed at the sight of this incongruous object among his hair-brushes, and other manly accessories of the toilet, that he was unable to proceed with his undressing for staring at the thing. Odd how disconcerting a trifle such as an artificial rose can become adrift from its natural environment. Seen in the front of Peggy’s dress the effect had been simply pleasing; seen in his own bedroom the flimsy thing of dyed silk became a symbol—a significant, sentient thing, inexplicably and closely associated with its late wearer. It was as though in looking at it he looked at Peggy Annersley; looked at her as in a mirror, darkly, from which her smiling face, looked back at him.
Perplexed and immeasurably disconcerted, he stared about him, searching for some safe place in which to secrete the thing. Finally he took it up, unlocked a drawer in a writing-table before the window, and hurriedly, and with a guilty sense of acting in a manner unusual, if not absolutely foolish, he thrust the rose out of sight in the farthest corner of the drawer, where it came in contact with another frivolous feminine article; to which article also, besides its natural scent of kid, clung the same subtle, elusive fragrance of violets which clung about the silken petals of the rose; which clung, as a matter of fact, about everything that Peggy wore.
Mr Musgrave shut the drawer hurriedly and locked it, and threw the bunch of keys on the dressing-table where he could not fail to see them when dressing in the morning, and be reminded by the sight of them to transfer them to his pocket. The drawer in the writing-table was the repository for the few and very innocent secrets which John Musgrave jealously guarded from all eyes but his own.