Mrs Chadwick's purpose in coming to Moresby was not concerned only, or
even chiefly, with the interior decoration of the Hall, which was kept,
as far as the squire's means permitted, in very good order both inside
and out. There was a certain amount of work to be done, and Mrs
Chadwick purposed having a voice in this, as in other things; but her
presence was more concerned with the home farm than with the palatial
residence she intended to occupy. The home farm came within the range
of her scheme for the development of women's energies.
For several generations this farm had been worked on conservative lines
by tenants who from father to son had succeeded to the place in unbroken
succession, after the manner, indeed, of the family at the Hall. Though
merely tenants, they had looked upon the farm as their rightful
inheritance, quite as if it had been entailed property of their own.
That anyone should seek to dispossess them would never have occurred to
them in the light of possibility. But the present fanner was a bad
tenant, and the farm was going to ruin. With the expiration of his
lease had come the order for his eviction.
Mrs Chadwick, in taking the Hall, had stipulated for the right to find
her own tenant for the farm. In the end she became the tenant, with
full power to do what she liked with the property, providing always that
what she did was for the improvement of the farm, and was first of all
submitted to the squire for his approval. She had submitted so many
schemes to him already that the worthy man, like John Musgrave, had felt
his breath taken away; and in order to avoid any further shocks he had
applied her to his lawyer, and gone abroad for an indefinite time to
escape the worry of these matters. Change was not agreeable to him; but
he was not so unwise as to object to the improvement of his estate, and
the expenditure of other people's money upon it.
The lawyer, grasping the main point that Mrs Chadwick intended laying
out money on the property, and had plenty of it to disburse, was
satisfied to give her a free hand. Provided only that she increased the
working value of the farm, he saw no reason against her pulling down all
the old buildings and erecting new ones on improved models, and
enlarging and improving the dwelling-house. Everything was to be
brought up to date. There could be no objection, the lawyer considered,
to that. He was not averse to change when it had a sound financial
basis; and Mrs Chadwick's ideas occurred to him as practical. He was
not quite so positive that her intention to work the farm principally
with female labour would prove satisfactory. But that was her affair.
If she liked to run risks of that nature she could afford the whim.
With the passing of the days, with the coming and going of architects
and builders, and other persons the nature of whose occupation remained
a mystery to John Musgrave, Mrs Chadwick's host became more and more
bewildered, more distinctly opposed to this feverish feminine energy--to
this unfeminine encroachment on what he had always considered was the
business of his sex. What, he wondered, was Mr Chadwick thinking about
to allow his wife to interview these people, and settle without
reference to his wishes all the details of the home which was, after
all, to be paid for by cheques which he, presumably, would sign?
John Musgrave could not have brought himself to remind any woman of her
duty as a wife; but he did in many ways allow Mrs Chadwick to see that
he viewed her proceedings with amazement, and with a sort of
well-controlled disapproval. His attitude only amused her. In the
process of attempting to modernise Mr Musgrave, she took a pleasure
occasionally in shocking him.
"Does Mr Chadwick usually leave the conduct of his affairs entirely in
your hands?" he asked her once.
"His affairs!" she repeated, with an uplift of her arched brows. "Oh,
you mean `our' affairs. Will knows these things interest me; they only
bore him. He is a lazy man, except in the matter of organisation; he's
splendid at that. Generally, I suggest a certain scheme and he develops
it. He has a genius for developing."
That certainly was true of Mr Chadwick. In most of his successful
undertakings his wife had originated the idea, and he had developed it;
hers was the quick, and his the thorough, brain. Quite voluntarily he
ceded her a full share for the credit of the enormous fortune he had
amassed; and he was lazily interested in her talent for spending it, and
quite sincerely in sympathy with many of her schemes for the improvement
of the conditions of her sex, with which was closely associated the
improved conditions of the race.
It is a surprising, and would be a gratifying, fact, were it not for a
feeling that it ought to be the other way about, that men are usually
more ready to help a woman in her fight for the good of her sex than
persons of the sex she is working for. Men shake off prejudices more
readily than women, because their training and mode of life gives them a
broader outlook. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. The
narrow-minded man is, if more rare, considerably more contracted in his
outlook than even the narrow-minded woman.
John Musgrave's view was certainly contracted; but Mrs Chadwick, in her
sanguine moments, entertained the belief that the restricted line of his
horizon was due to the accident of circumstances, rather than to a
natural deficiency in breadth, and held hopes of a possible development
of his view. She did not tell him this; but she confided her belief to
Mrs Sommers, who was as sceptical of John's development as she was of
the profitable results of Mrs Chadwick's enterprises.
Mrs Chadwick told John Musgrave something else, which she deemed of
greater importance even than the development of his mind, something
which so scandalised Mr Musgrave as to render him speechless, amazed at
her audacity, her want of delicacy; and too utterly dumbfounded to
defend himself. She informed him, quite seriously, and without any
effort to conceal her meaning, that he was not doing his duty by the
State.
She had been in Moresby a week when she made this astounding attack, and
the occasion which she chose for making it was one morning when she was
returning with her host from an inspection of the village school, which,
in a moment of weakness, he had suggested might interest her.
The school did interest her; but the sight of John Musgrave surrounded
in the infants' classroom with a number of greedy, unabashed babies, who
felt in his pockets for sweets with a confidence that suggested
familiarity with the practice, interested her far more. On the homeward
walk she informed him that patronising other people's babies, while
undoubtedly commendable, was not his business in life; that he was not a
good citizen, because, from purely selfish motives, he was neglecting
his most important duty to the State.
John Musgrave was so embarrassed, and so annoyed, that during the rest
of the walk, which fortunately was not of long duration, he could not
utter a word. He turned in at his own gate in a seriously displeased
frame of mind; and Mrs Chadwick, feeling guilty but unrepentant,
preceded him up the path with the wickedest of little smiles playing
about her lips.
"Thank you so much, Mr Musgrave," she said, as they parted in the hall,
"for a really enjoyable morning."
Then she went upstairs to her room, and later she recounted for Belle's
edification the result of her visit to the school.
Mrs Sommers was amused; but she experienced a slight compassion for her
brother, who would feel, she realised, as startled at a woman
approaching a man on such a subject as he would be averse to the subject
itself. People in Moresby left the laws of life alone.
John Musgrave was, as a matter of fact, deeply disgusted. He resented,
not only the indelicacy, but the impertinence of this interference with
the individual. He summarised the proceeding as a display of bad taste.
Nevertheless the idea, once presented to him, was not easily dislodged
from his brain. Somehow he had never considered the individual in
responsible relationship to the State. The suggestion was new to him,
and highly disturbing. He had up to the present considered himself in
the light of a very good citizen, an example to other men who
disregarded their duties to the borough in which they resided, and gave
neither in money nor service to local affairs. He was respected in
Moresby as a useful as well as a generous resident. It would have been
difficult to fill his place if he left it; he could not conceive anyone
filling it satisfactorily. And now he was told that all that counted
for nothing, or at least for very little, since he was neglecting the
principal duty of all. No wonder that Mr Musgrave was annoyed; that he
looked upon Mrs Chadwick as highly objectionable, and resented her
presence in his house.
"You are a very daring woman," commented Mrs Sommers. "Although I have
grown up with John I would never have ventured to say such a thing as
that."
"Possibly," returned Mrs Chadwick calmly, "if I had been brought up
with John I would not have adventured either. Familiarity with a
person's prejudices makes one diffident. I am not laying myself out to
please Mr Musgrave, but to modernise him, as you suggested. When he is
sufficiently modernised I mean to marry him."
"You will need to obtain a divorce first," retorted Mrs Sommers,
laughing. "And I am sure John would not consider that respectable."
"You have a mischievous habit of misrepresenting things. You know
perfectly well that I am satisfied with my lot in life. I am going to
find him a wife."
"Oh?" said Mrs Sommers. She looked thoughtful. "I think you will have
in that a more difficult task than in bringing him up to date."
"We shall see," returned Mrs Chadwick, and her tone was confident. "I
think myself that lack of opportunity has bred the disinclination. No
man is born a bachelor. The state, which is a misfit, results from his
circumstances."
"It isn't due to lack of opportunity in John's case," Belle asserted.
"The women who have run after him!..."
"Yes," said Mrs Chadwick. She was thinking of Miss Simpson. "But that
sort of woman doesn't count, my dear."
The successful married woman has, as a rule, a very good idea of the
kind of women men like. The successful married woman is never the vain
woman. The vain woman always imagines that the type she represents is
the type men admire; usually she is at fault. Mrs Chadwick was not a
vain woman. She knew very well that all men are not drawn towards the
same type of woman. Some men prefer looks; others mental qualities;
and, by an odd inconsistency in human nature, the perfectly
simple-souled and self-disciplined man inclines naturally toward the
woman endowed with the captivating wickedness of her sex. There is a
big distinction between captivating wickedness and vice. No man,
whether he be good or bad in principle, admires vice in the mothers of
the race.
Since Mr Musgrave reckoned in the category of the simple,
self-disciplined soul, plainly the woman for him must have a spice of
wickedness in her. Mrs Chadwick may have been mistaken in her
deduction, but at least she believed in it firmly.
Had John Musgrave had any idea of what floated through her busy brain
while she smilingly confided to him some of her plans for the
improvement of Moresby, he would have been horrified. Marriage was the
one subject of all others he considered it indelicate to dwell upon. If
people married they did it for some good reason; to contemplate the step
impartially with, no adequate motive for so serious an undertaking was
to him unthinkable. Had he ever reflected upon it, and attempted a
portrait of the lady he might have honoured with his preference, it
certainly would not have been a woman with any latent wickedness in her.
John Musgrave's ideal, had he been called upon to embody an ideal,
would have revealed the picture of a calm-faced woman of unemotional
temperament, who would always have said and done the correct thing,
would have adorned his home, and revered himself, and would have been in
every sense of the word womanly.
Mrs Chadwick could have told him that such a woman did not exist
outside a man's imagination. She would not have done so, of course.
She believed in encouraging masculine fallacies when they were harmless;
to attempt discouragement was to invite defeat. Opposition is the least
effective form of argument. A clever woman seldom makes the mistake of
forcing her ideas; and Mrs Chadwick was undoubtedly clever.
"Anything can be accomplished through suggestion," she had been heard to
assert. "Suggestion, plant it where you will, is a seed which never
fails to germinate."