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.