Robert seized the vicar’s overcoat and helped him into it, and, with unusual solicitude for his health, inquired if he had not thought of wearing a muffler.
“The cold’s cruel,” he said. “You ought to take care o’ yer throat. Think o’ the disappointment if you was laid by, and couldn’t preach.”
“I wish,” the vicar observed drily, “that you would study your own constitution as carefully.”
“That’s all right, sir,” Robert answered, wilfully misunderstanding. “I allays wears a old muffler when the weather’s sharp.”
He handed the vicar his hat, performing these supererogatory offices with the patronising air of a man humouring his superior’s peculiarities.
“Milk punch they said it was,” he muttered in the form of a soliloquy. “I thought a babby could ’a’ swallowed it. Milk don’t digest, I reckon, in a stummick come to my age. But ’twas pretty drinking, howsomever.”
So much, the vicar mused, for Robert’s repentance. It were as profitable to rebuke the weather for inclemency as Robert for his sins.
The vicar dismissed Robert from his mind on emerging into the open, and allowed his thoughts to dwell instead on something he had witnessed the previous night, and had reviewed so often since, that, brief as had been his glimpse of the scene, it was photographed on his memory with the distinctness of a picture actually present to his gaze. This scene which was so startlingly fresh in his mind was a glimpse he had obtained in passing the open door of the billiard-room, of John Musgrave holding Peggy Annersley’s hand while he hung over the back of the settee on which she was seated and looked into the upturned face. So quiet had been the grouping of this picture, so utterly unexpected and unreal had it appeared to Walter Errol’s surprised gaze, that it might have been the enactment of another tableau, such as those he had been witnessing in the room he had just left. One long astonished look he had given it, and then, utterly bewildered, like a man who feels his solid world reduced to unsubstantiality, he had passed on and mingled with the other guests in the hall. He had been a witness of the tardy appearance of John Musgrave and Miss Annersley; and for the rest of the night was conscious of a watchful curiosity in regard to them which, against his volition, he found himself exercising until the party broke up.
“Coelebs!... Old Coelebs!” he mused, and laughed softly as he pursued his way to the vicarage, where, in the cosy morning-room, his wife and tiny daughter waited for him with their Christmas gifts.
A happy man was the vicar that Christmas morning, and comparing his comfortable, pleasant home with the lonely elegance of John Musgrave’s house it gave him genuine satisfaction to recall the amazing picture of John Musgrave bending over pretty Peggy Annersley in an attitude which conveyed more to the impartial observer than a merely friendly interest in his charming companion. Possibly last night was the first occasion on which John Musgrave had ever held a girl’s hand in this way and hung over her, looking into her eyes. Such conduct in the case of the average man would have counted for nothing, or for very little... But Coelebs... The man who never looked at a woman with the natural interest of the ordinary male...