“Oh comme je regrette mon bras si dodu,Ma jambe bien faite et le temps perdu.”
“Oh comme je regrette mon bras si dodu,Ma jambe bien faite et le temps perdu.”
“Oh comme je regrette mon bras si dodu,Ma jambe bien faite et le temps perdu.”
Theplanting of Miss Ransome’s siege-train could not be at once taken in hand, as a rapid gallop of the eye over the unknown persons that the room contained showed that not one of them answered to the description which she had extracted from Mr. Tancred, with many precautions in the manner of doing it, of Toby. She made out a mother at once, and an elder sister, and an elder sister’s friend, though at first not quite sure which was which of the two latter, and a couple of elderly men.
As the electric light was not turned on, and the oaky gloom of the room was lit by only a fire that, though generous, was unequal in its distribution of light, Miss Ransome did not immediately realize the additional presence of a large female figure in outdoor dress,pelotonnéein an armchair in a corner. The sight of a motor-car at the hall door had shown that there must be other callers besides themselves, but the girl had forgotten the unimportant fact. It was brought back to her with a jump.
She was halfway through her presentation to the family, executed in her very nicestjeune fillemanner, when officious servants, turning buttons, flooded the room with light and set her staringly face to face with her past. It stood opposite to her in the shape of the large dim figure—alas! no longer dim, but revealed in bounteous outline, pigeon-egg pearls, ruddled hair and sable toque, which at the sound of her name precipitated itself out of its chair to look at her.
“Bonnybell Ransome! Is it possible that it is Bonnybell Ransome—poor Cl—oh, of course!”—recalled by the chic woe of the daughter’s hat to the fact of the extinction of that former acquaintance, of whose name nobody, apparently, not even Lady Tennington, dared now pronounce more than the two first letters.
For a moment—since this was a contingency which the most foreseeing could not have guarded against—Bonnybell stood mute and aghast. Was there ever such a stroke of ill luck? Flora Tennington, who knew all about everything! Flora Tennington, so intimately associated with poor Claire’s disastrous career—with all but the last year, that is! That last year had choked even Flora Tennington off! She had held on as long as she could—one must say that for her—and she had tried, yes, tried hard to stem the flood of those dreadful champagnes and brandies and chlorals. Her failure had been the occasion of the final rupture, and then she, too, had disappeared. She was not a bad friend, to do her justice. She had gone on speaking to theunnamable Sir Algy long after he had sunk quite out of social sight; but, all the same, what extraordinary ill luck that she should have reappeared in these surroundings! She had always had the character of beingbonne enfant, but she would be more than human if she resisted the temptation to tell all she knew—and all was such a very great deal, even without that last year—of poor Claire! And if she did, what, pray, would become of Toby?
It did not take more than five seconds for this chain of actual and possible misfortune to dart through Bonnybell’s brain, nor for her to recover her presence of mind.
“What adelightfulsurprise!” she said with a sweet blush of pleasure, holding out a glad little black hand.
The rejoinder was not what might have been expected.
“Do not put out your hand,” cried Lady Tennington, precipitately; “she’ll fly at you if you do. Lisa never allows any one to touch me.” If this were true, Lisa must in past years, if report lied not, have had her paws full.
A low growl, a glimpse of age-whitened muzzle, and a struggling chestnut-coloured body revealed the presence, under her mistress’s arm, of a small dachshund. Here was another voice from the past.
“Lisa!” cried Bonnybell, hardily putting out her hand to stroke the little angry, faithful head. “Is Lisa still alive?”
There was an affectionate inflexion in her voice, which Edward, though listening with onewhole ear to his hostess, caught, and recognized as an unknown note. Art was non-existent for her, Nature invisible to her, but she understood and appreciated dogs.
“And why should not she be alive, pray?” inquired Lisa’s owner, sharply, her sensitiveness about her dog’s age being even superior to that which she manifested with regard to her own. Then, with a reverting to her original key, “And what, in the name of Fortune, my dear child, bringsyouhere?”
The little buzz of greeting was over, followed by a momentary silence among the rest of the party. Not a soul in the room but must have noticed the exaggerated emphasis on the personal pronoun, and have drawn the inevitable inference that to meet Miss Ransome in a respectable house was an experience that must take away any one’s breath. The wings of the not yet seen Toby were already spread for flight. Who could have anticipated that the egg of that bright prospect would be addled almost before it was laid? These thoughts were coursing through Bonnybell’s brain, even while she was murmuring her answer in a tone calculated in its hesitating meekness to deprecate any further showing up.
“I am staying with Mr. and Mrs. Tancred. They are good enough to let me pay them a little visit.”
The rejoinder was a rather discomfited “Humph!” a humph which had no need to have any light thrown upon it for the restof the company, but which was interpreted only later to Bonnybell, when she learned that Camilla had never shown any sign of a knowledge of Lady Tennington’s presence in the neighbourhood, nor, large as was her circumference despite French corsets and massage, any appearance of seeing her, when they had met on neutral ground.
There was a slight pause; the matron digesting the unintended snub, and the maid quakingly asking herself what she could say next best calculated to stop the flow of Flora’s reminiscences! Rescue came from an unexpected quarter.
“Miss Ransome is very much understating our hopes,” said Edward, in a slow voice of measured courtesy, through which any one who knew him well could trace some sort of smothered exasperation piercing; “my wife and I count upon her to stay with us indefinitely.”
Had he already caught from his youngprotégéethe faculty of glib lying? He knew perfectly that he was saying the thing that was not; that there was nothing in the world which Camilla ambitioned less than to have her present guest as a permanent inmate; but the impulse of partisanship of bucklering one so exposed to the world’s cruel shafts conquered the lifelong instincts of veracity in an almost invariably truthful man. He was rather shocked when he realized what he had done; yet he did not repent. His own espousing her cause would be worse than useless to her, but his wife’s, with her fifty yearsof almost awful rectitude behind her, was a name to conjure with.
Flora gave a little chuckle—not ill-natured, for she was never ill-natured, but helplessly tickled at the idea of the rigid Pharisee who had cut her for thirty years taking to her bony bosom the progeny of poor Claire—poor Claire, of all people!
“Then I hope we shall see something of each other,” she said bravely, ignoring her own relations, or rather want of relations, with the Tancred family. “I will send the motor over for you. You used to like motoring in the days when poor Al——”
She broke off. Not even she, with all her social courage and no character worth speaking of to lose, dared pronounce more than the first half of the submerged one’s name.
Before Bonnybell could frame a judicious answer to this discomfiting invitation, her hostess came to her aid. She had not caught Miss Ransome’s name with any precision, mumbled as names always are mumbled by English people on introduction, and perhaps even more so on the part of Edward than was usually the case, from the consciousness that it was not a patronymic warranted to ensure a welcome for its owner. Mrs. Aylmer only saw a remarkably pretty and evidently very young girl looking confused and miserable, though trying with the greatest civility to hide it under the avalanche of Lady Tennington’s questions and invitations. Of course, a decent girl could not possibly be allowed, andevidently had no wish, to accept the latter; and, being a warm-hearted woman with a motherly heart going out to the slender black figure standing to be baited by the shocking olddemi-rep, whom she so unaccountably seemed to know, the hostess hastened to extricate her from the tight place in which the poor child found herself.
“I wonder,” she said, looking kindly at the young stranger, “whether you would care to join the schoolroom tea? My children like it so very much better than ours.”
“I should love it!” replied Bonnybell, fervently, throwing an eyebeam of unmistakable gratitude out of her enormous eyes at her saviour, and thinking with intense inward self-congratulation upon how admirably in the teeth of hideous difficulties she must have played thejeune fillethis time. Oh, if she could only keep it up! If only she could have seen Flora Tennington safe into her motor before her own exit! could—failing that—have had any trust in Flora’s reticence!
It remained to be seen what the schoolroom had to show. Its possibilities, at all events, could not include another Flora, nor could any of the disreputable men whose images rose with such unwelcome vividness upon Miss Ransome’s mind, recalled by the sight of Lady Tennington, by any possibility have crossed the scholastic threshold on whose other side a governess with a pince-nez and an assured manner, and a tall diffident girl in a pigtail presently greeted her. The third person’s salutation could scarcely be called a greeting, as it consisted merely in his standing up, stopping eating quince jam, and looking thoroughly annoyed at having to do either. The governess revealed herself on presentation as Miss Barnacre, and the leggy young Miss as Meg.
In the case of the third person, presentation, though it took place duly, was superfluous. If induction had not, intuition would have taught Miss Ransome to recognize in the sullen consumer of interrupted jam the magnet that had guided her tender feet through the puddly park of a November twilight. He conquered his indignation at her intrusion enough to set her a chair at the command of Miss Barnacre, who followed up the attention by asking her a series of patronizing questions, adapted to the intellect of a child of four years. Miss Barnacre was of the new type of instructress, that type which sometimes makes its employer privily regret its down-trodden predecessor, victim to melancholy and indigestion; that new type which, fortified by all the rites of Girton, condescends to the parents of its pupils, chaffs and lectures their brothers, and inspires adoring awed friendships in their elder sisters; that type which differs as much from the early Victorian one as does the perthouriin “bang” and streamers who commands at our sick-bed side from the classic figure of Mrs. Gamp.
Bonnybell responded with meek submissiveness to the elementary catechism so glaringly adapted to her comprehension, and consoled herself for the time wasted upon the governess bythe philosophic reflection that she might gain more by being seen and heard in the case of so obvious a cub as Toby, than by being brought into more direct colloquy with him.
Miss Barnacre interrupted her own questionings at last, to give a brusque order to the young man to ring the bell, and it was now the turn of the eldest daughter of the house.
“Lady Tennington is an old friend of yours?” she asked quite pleasantly, and with a curiosity that was well within the limits of the courteous and permissible; yet in which the young stranger divined an inevitable surprise.
Her answer must be cautious, yet not hesitating. To repudiate intimacy with Flora would be—shabby?—yes, but that might pass at a pinch, but it would also be useless.
“She was very kind to me when I was a child,” answered the dear little voice, with a deprecating gratitude in its tones; “and she was at school with my grandmother.”
“With your grandmother!” repeated Miss Aylmer, in a key of rather gratified discovery. “Oh, then she must be much older than——” The speaker broke off; but it was not difficult for the hearer to supply the missing “than she pretends.”
“My grandmother would not be so very old if she were alive,” replied Bonnybell; “Claire was only thirty-four when she died.”
The name slipped out headlong, all Miss Ransome’s wariness being unfortunately on duty in another direction. Every one looked puzzled, nothaving the slightest idea as to who “Claire” was, nor how her early death affected the age of the young stranger’s grandmother.
“Lady Tennington is verybien conservée, isn’t she?” continued the girl, hurrying away from the too-late-realized blunder; “and though she looks a good deal made up, it is really more face massage than anything else. We—I know her masseuse! We often employed her. She was the best in Paris.”
There was a slight silence, as of a company taken aback. Every eye involuntarily rested on Bonnybell’s lovely bloom, each looker asking himself or herself distrustfully whether it and the exquisite seventeen-year-old contour were due to mysterious French rubbings and unguents?
“She has not been very long in the neighbourhood; we know her only very slightly,” said the elder Miss Aylmer, presently, with an air of reserve, and the subject was felt to be closed. The never-to-be-defeated governess at once replaced it by another.
“You walked here?”
“Yes.”
“Are you fond of walking?”
“Oh yes, very, very fond.”
Of course, it was not true; but equally of course Toby would think the better of her if he could picture her stumping through wet vegetables by his side. Her ideas of all sport, except racing, were of the vaguest.
“Mrs. Tancred is inaccessible on Sunday afternoon?”
“I believe that she does not like to be disturbed; she shuts herself up to study.”
“She always interests me,” said Miss Barnacre, as if making an announcement that was advantageous to its object. “There is something stimulating to the curiosity in those resolutely solitary thinkers; but I cannot quite make her out. I used to think that she had leanings towards Hegelianism.”
“Had she?” returned Bonnybell, faintly, asking herself, with a sick heart, whether Hegelianism—whatever it might be—was one of the properties that nojeune fille bien élevéeshould be without. Let it be what else it might, it was certainly a word of ill omen, for no sooner was it pronounced than Toby pushed back his chair with such cruel violence that it fell over backwards, and left the room, shutting the door noisily behind him.
“In some respects I fancy she is nearer Esoteric Buddhism,” continued the governess, fixing her unescapable eye upon the victim of her horrible suppositions. “I must tackle her upon the subject.”
“I am sure that she will be delighted,” murmured Miss Ransome, with the greatest outward demureness, and a malicious inward wish that her tormentor would put her threat into execution and “tackle” Camilla. There could be little doubt as to the issue of the combat. Her own ardent personal wish now was to escape before revealing some damning and irretrievable ignorance.
“Do you think that Mr. Tancred is waitingfor me?” she asked, turning, with pretty deference, to Miss Aylmer, whom she thought much more worth propitiating than the pushing propounder of odious riddles.
“You need not be in any hurry,” replied the other, with a pleasant smile, that yet seemed to have a touch of superiority in its deeper knowledge of Edward’s habits. “Mr. Tancred always pays us a good long visit on Sunday afternoon; but if you had rather go back to the hall——”
Bonnybell’s hesitation was of but two seconds’ duration. Barnacre and Hegelianism, or Flora and Sir Algy? If these were her only two alternatives, unpleasant as was the first, it was undoubtedly the least objectionable of the two.
“I am very happy here,” she said with soft civility, “if I am not in the way.”
She glanced appealingly across at the pigtailed Meg, in whom she seemed to divine less of neck-and-crop absorption in the utterances of the governess and more of covertly admiring interest in herself than was the case with the elder sister.
“May I help you to look at your picture-paper?” she asked, and took the acceptance of her appeal for granted, crossing the room to the side of the young girl, who was shyly holding the leaves of the journal in question, so as to be able to peep over its sheets at the startling stranger. The shyness in this case was not of the brutal, chair-oversetting, bolting character of the brother, and was compatible with honoured gratification, as was evidenced by the room readily made, and the paper hospitably spread open.
Miss Ransome’s first need was to suppress the expression of contempt which sprang to eyes and lips at the mawkish character of the publication; but to a really well-trained mind evenOur Girliescan be made to provide nutritious pabulum. The portrait of a lady, surrounded by prize-taking Schipperke dogs, was the text provided on this occasion for Bonnybell’s instructive discourse.
“Lady Cressida Beaulieu!” she read, then added elucidatingly, “She used to go to the same coiffeur in Paris as we. She has thirty wigs; and he told us that hardly a week passed without one of them coming over from London to be refrisèd, or done something to.”
“Thirty! What an expense!” ejaculated Meg, in thrifty horror.
Bonnybell laughed, her little bubbling, innocent laugh, that often swore so piquantly with the themes that called it forth.
“It would be if she paid for them.”
“And doesn’t she?”
The other looked incredulously at the putter of this question. Is it possible that ignorance of the simplest facts of nature and civilization could be so crass?
“She had not a farthing; and Reggy Beaulieu ran through the little he ever had before he married.”
Miss Meg’s eyes were opening rounder and rounder in riveted interest at each fresh stroke added to the portrait of the lady of the Schipperkes.
“Howdoesshe manage it?”
Bonnybell laughed again. “It is not very difficult. Of course, everybody knows that Waddy, the indiarubber-tyre man, runs her.”
“Runsher?”
“Yes; dresses her, finds her in diamonds, pays for her motor and her house in Grosvenor Street.”
It was a pity—at least, one of the interlocutors thought so—that so surprising, puzzling, and exciting a dialogue should be brought to a premature close; but ere Bonnybell could finish one more illuminating sentence, “Oh, I dare say there is no real harm in it; it is merely a matter of mutual convenience. Waddy pays and Cressida introduces him to——” the place at her other side was occupied by the elder Miss Aylmer, and Miss Ransome’s promising pupil disappeared on a message, to return no more.
Toolate the poor little stranger realized that even such truisms and commonplaces of conversation as the relations of climbing millionaires and smart women for their mutual weal had no place in the wretchedly limited conversationalrépertoireof the well-brought-up young girl. It was a very flat and flagging conversation that replaced her lucid word-paintings, for which she, too late, felt that the Dower House schoolroom was not the place, and with a very unfeigned relief she received the message sent up by Mr. Tancred, a message of inquiry as to her readiness to depart.
Readiness to depart!There could be little doubt as to that! The state of mind expressed in that hackneyed line, “Ready to go, but not afraid to stay,” had certainly no reference to her; she was horribly afraid to stay.
Miss Barnacre shook hands with her with brusque manliness, and uttered a condescending and rather dry query, which did not seem eager for an affirmative answer, as to her making a long stay in the neighbourhood.
Miss Aylmer politely accompanied her downstairs. The party they had left in the hall wasdiminished by two. Flora Tennington and her attendant swain were gone. Perhaps, after all, it would have been the lesser of two evils, though at the time for decision it seemed much the greater, to have abode below; at least, there would have been no danger of corruptingFlora’smind, and, judging by the undiminished kindliness with which the hostess bade her good night, and the heartiness with which she invited her to repeat her visit, Lady Tennington must have judiciously suppressed all that was damaging—and, when you came to think of it, how little there was that, according to these people’s standard, was not damaging—in Miss Ransome’s past. Flora was always a “good old sort.”
While Bonnybell was accepting with dove-like coos of gratitude the hospitable offer made her, Mr. Tancred was having a word apart with the daughter of the house. Their taste for each other’s society had been long so patent in its perfect and harmless openness, that their acquaintance had grown tired of giving them to each otheren secondes noces. He was now testing her friendship, and trying delicately and tactfully, but still with a bias which was quite apparent to her, to extract some favourable judgment upon his newprotégéefrom this tried comrade. As a rule, their opinions coincided with curious nicety; and in the girl’s family circle it had become a proverbial phrase that what Edward Tancred said Catherine would always swear to. The nearest thing to a compliment that she produced was the ejaculation, “She isamazing!” If the adjectivewas used in a flattering sense, it was too big for the occasion, and if it was not?
“Amazing?” he repeated, conveying a question with the repetition of the word, adding, as no explanation seemed forthcoming, “Amazingly pretty, do you mean?”
“She is that too, of course,” replied his friend, without excessive haste to make the admission, yet, in accordance with her character, making it conscientiously all the same. “But that was not the sense in which I meant to apply it.”
He knew that it would be wiser not to press her further; that after such an exordium no good for Bonnybell could come out of this Galilee, yet he heard himself say—
“How, then?”
“I am not good at defining, and besides, I think that before long you will find out for yourself,” she answered, her smooth, fair face, which, as all her acquaintance said, ought to be better looking than it was, assuming an expression than which her ally thought he had never seen any that became it less. Was it the case, as Toby always told her, that Catherine had a slight cast in her left eye?
The night into which Mr. Tancred and his amazing young person stepped out of the Dower House seemed at first even darker than it was, by contrast. Moon there was none; but when eyes grew used to the windless gloom, stars in plenty showed through the light fog that had gathered.
Had it not been for the ominous last wordsthat had passed between Miss Aylmer and himself, Edward would have begun at once, and naturally, to question his companion as to how she had fared in the Dower House schoolroom. But a species of dread as to what he might hear made him avoid the subject. Instead—partly for something to say, and partly because the nightly heavens had always a fascination for himself—he directed her attention to some of the constellations, making a trifling comment upon their beauty. She assented in tones of heartfelt admiration, without, as he somehow was aware, lifting her head to glance at them, her attention being indeed chiefly occupied in guiding her steps through the darkness, having again refused his aiding hand or arm. This was more from habit and prudence than from any very active alarm, but though he might be, and apparently was, an anomally, it was as well not to tempt Providence. Although in point of fact her misgivings about the success of her late visit were even graver and better founded than his, she, unlike him, did not shirk the subject, but opened the campaign gallantly, in her usual spirit of strict veracity.
“What a charming girl Miss Aylmer is!” The remark was dictated by the fact that Bonnybell’s quick eye had detected the intimate-looking aside that had passed between her escort and the daughter of the house, and drawn from it conclusions of a dimension which would have startled both.
“I am glad that you think so.”
“How could any one think anything else?”
“She is one of the best.”
He said this, because it was a tribute due to loyalty, and because he knew that it was his real opinion, but at the moment he did not feel it.
“And that sweet Meg! And then Toby! I lost my heart to them all.”
“Toby! Oh, he was there?”
“Yes, Mr. Toby was there.”
“Did you get much out of him?”—in a tone tinged with incredulity.
“It was not so much what he said”—since the young gentleman in question had never opened his mouth except to admit jam, this was strictly true—“as his looks; such a nice, frank, straightforward English boy.” Men are jealous and grudging about other men’s praises, and it is more than likely that this encomium would never be repeated to its object; but, on the other hand, it might, and the attempt cost nothing.
“And you found plenty to talk about to them all?” returned he, going circuitously round his own alarm, and thinking that he might as well know the worst. He could not see her face, but he heard a slight hesitating catch in her breath.
“The governess—Miss Barnacre, is she?—monopolized the conversation a good deal; she talked very brilliantly, but I was not quite up in the subjects she mentioned. I think”—very tentatively—“that I was a little afraid of her.”
“Alittle?” repeated he, with much emphasisand less of doubtful suggestion than was generally the case in his utterances.
“Oh, you are afraid of her too, then!” cried Bonnybell, with an accent of joyful relief, but added, reverting cautiously to her rule of uttering no opinion about her new acquaintances that might not handsomely be repeated to its objects, “Of course, I saw what a treasure she must be to Mrs. Aylmer.”
“Did you?”
Tact told her that her praise of the detestable Barnacre had reached—perhaps a little exceeded—the limits of his power of swallowing, and she desisted gladly.
“And the girls, Catherine and Meg, had not they a chance of getting a word in?”
“Not very much”—rather slowly, as her thoughts reverted not quite comfortably to the sudden door shut upon her budding friendship with the younger Miss Aylmer. “I saw most, perhaps, of Meg. What a darling she is!”
“She is a good child, but she is a great baby for her age,” replied he, in a tone which she heard to be touched with surprise. “I should not have thought”—reviewing in his mind certain choice flowers of his present companion’s speech—“that you and she would have much in common.”
“A great baby for her age!” repeated Miss Ransome, in a key of relieved enlightenment. “Ah, that accounts for it, then.”
“Accounts for what?”
“For the surprise she showed—the ignorance of such very ordinary things—things that everybody knows.”
His heart quailed. “What sort of things?”
But Miss Ransome was all at once on her guard. It might be one’s misfortune to be shown up; but to show one’s self up was a sin against common sense not to be committed by any one even moderately wide-awake.
“I cannot recollect any particular instance,” she answered with apparent carelessness; “it was only a general impression, and I dare say quite a wrong one; but, anyhow”—returning to safe ground—“they are all darlings, and you are very lucky to have them so near. I do not say anything abouttheirluck!” she added in a witching lower key.
All the same, she was relieved that, when the small family was reseated round the supper-table, spread with enticing cold foods, in Sunday leniency to the admirably treated and very much underworked servants, Camilla put her through no catechism as to her afternoon’s experiences. The note of alarm in Edward’s voice had made Miss Ransome resolve to be wholly reticent as to the slightcontretempsabout stupid Meg; and beyond a message sent by Mrs. Aylmer to his wife and faithfully delivered by Edward, to the effect that a day’s shopping in London would prevent her fulfilling a promise to visit Mrs. Tancred on the morrow afternoon, the Dower House remained for some good while unmentioned.
To Bonnybell it would have been an unmixedblessing that this silence should last through the evening. To pick Camilla’s brains upon any subject would require the courage and dexterity of a lion-tamer, and by a series of delicate feelers, veiled suggestions, and innocent-looking suppositions on the dusky homeward walk, Bonnybell had wiled out of Edward all the information about the Aylmer family that it was really of any consequence to her to know, viz. that through the bequest of a distant kinsman the suave Toby was independent, and at the death of a decrepit great-uncle would be more independent still of his father. She had also learnt that he was called a woman-hater; but, so far from being daunted by this information she, put her own encouraging gloss upon it. “A woman-hater! Pooh! that only means that he is bored with respectable women; and though Iamrespectable, and mean to remain so, I am not sure that I look it.”
In this soothed and hopeful mood Miss Bonnybell sat down to supper. Not for long, however, did she remain quietly seated. Since from the Sunday supper servants were banished, and that on Edward devolved the whole onus of handingchaudfroidsand pouring claret, an instant desire to help him sent her circling round the table too. He had rather that she did not. It gave him the same sense of superannuation as if she had offered to help him into his greatcoat, but after one gentle protest he desisted, fearing to hurt her feelings. Camilla’s sarcastic-sounding observation that, decrepit as Edward looked, he was capable of waiting upon two people, had itssting taken out by the lenient smile that accompanied it, and that seemed almost to approve of the eager rejoinder—
“Oh, but Ilovewaiting upon people!” There was no denying that this praiseworthy ejaculation was uttered chiefly because its author hoped that it might advance her in the good graces of her benefactress, but it was also accidentally and incidentally true. Bonnybell was one of those born obliging andserviable; and her terrible education had at least had the merit of developing these qualities in her. She added humbly, “But if it fidgets you—either of you—to see me capering round, please say so, and I will try to sit still and be waited on.”
She was rewarded by a look that was almost benign.
“Is it so difficult to you to sit still?”
Edward smiled slightly too, a sudden senseless warmth, for which he at once chid himself, about his heart at these signs that his womenkind were beginning to “get on.”
“I used to wait hand and foot upon——”
She broke off, looking down; and Camilla’s conscience—always too painfully active for her own or her surroundings’ comfort—gave her a smart stab.
The poor child was—thanks to her, Camilla’s, severity—afraid to mention her own mother. She made her amends at once; but even the suavity of Camilla was gruff, and her “It is a fault on the right side, but to night I think I had rather you would keep quiet!” though received with thepretty gratitude of one led by rosy chains into the way she had been seeking provoked in the young stranger’s mind the inward comment, “What a surly old camel it is! I always heard that they were odious-tempered animals.” But her meek face gave no slightest indication of this reflection; and she sat down docilely, nor made any further protest against the host’s ministrations, beyond an occasional glance of deprecating gratitude when he offered her anything particularly appetizing, followed by a furtive peep at Mrs. Tancred, to ensure her not having noticed and thought too affectionate this proof of thankfulness.
The evening was halfway towards bedtime, and Bonnybell, lulled in a false security, was capering down the long morning-room with biscuit held aloft, in tantalizing education of Jock, pleased and pleasing, when the topic she had been dreading broke upon her ear.
“I hear that you paid the Dower House a visit this afternoon?”
The slender whiteness of the raised arm dropped to its owner’s side, and with a surprised and dishonest grab Jock mastered a practically “unearned increment.”
“Yes,” rather falteringly, “Mr. Tancred thought that a little exercise would do me good.”
“Are you fond of walking?”
“Oh yes, very,veryfond.”
“You will have to wear stronger shoes than the ridiculous things you went to churchin, if you mean to indulge in that pleasure here.”
“Oh, of course”—with an eager snatch at the subject of shoe-leather, in the hope of thereby averting further inquiries as to her visit. “Perhaps you will very kindly give me the address of a good boot-maker.”
The elder woman looked at her with a something of incredulity at such an excess of acquiescence, and Bonnybell made an inward note that though she must always agree with Camilla, it was a mistake to do it too suddenly. That defeated its own end, as the mechanical unanimity of the laugh of supers on the stage destroys all impression of mirth.
“I hope that my friends made a pleasant impression upon you?” Camilla would not be put off by any boots, thick or thin, from her intended aim; and her strong eyes demanded truth even more than did her lips. It was the one commodity of which poor Miss Ransome’s warehouse was almost always empty, but she was able to scrape up quite a respectable amount of it for her answer.
“I thought them all delightful—perfectly delightful! There was only one”—with a diffident hesitation—“that I was not quite sure I liked.”
“And who is that unfortunate person?”
“I—I have no doubt that I am wrong, but I did not much fancy Miss Barnacre.”
“And do you always expect to fall in love with all humanity at first sight?”
There was no great severity in this mode of acceptance of her feeler, and Bonnybell rejoicingly told herself that for once she was on the right tack.
“I did not quite like the way she spoke of you.”
Camilla’s always rigid features grew rigider; and Bonnybell’s happy conviction of the right tack slid from under her.
“I have no opinion of tales told out of school,” answered Mrs. Tancred, coldly.
“Oh, but you must let me explain,” cried Bonnybell, in a key of anguished exegesis. “I have expressed myself so badly, as I always do. If you do not let me tell you what she really said, you will think it is much worse than it was.”
As Camilla maintained a disapproving silence, the young girl, too late conscious of a new blunder, threw a shipwrecked glance at Edward, and verifying that he looked thoroughly uncomfortable, made the lightning-quick shrewd reflection, “He wants to stick up for me, but he thinks it will make it worse for me if he does.”
“I have no doubt that she meant well, and, of course, she is a most valuable person; but I thought it impertinent in—in—a girl of her age to say that she meant to ‘tackle’ you about—about—your religious opinions.”
The austerity of Camilla’s face thawed a little, and something that might do duty for a smile turned upwards the corners of her thin-lined mouth.
“Did Miss Barnacre happen to mention the day and hour at which her investigations are to take place, so that I may not be found unprepared?”
Bonnybell breathed again; and so—or she thought so—did Edward.
“Farfrom the sun and summer shade”—far, that is to say, from the distractions and liability to intrusion of the more public parts of the house, lay a gallery; and off that gallery lay a room which had witnessed the evolution of Camilla. It was to witness the evolution of Bonnybell.
“In my old schoolroom you will be quite safe from interruption,” Mrs. Tancred had said, when first breaking to her future pupil her intention of repairing the yawning gaps in that pupil’s education. It was on the Monday morning, and there had been very little “breaking” about the—to the ears that received it—horrible and staggering announcement.
“You are only seventeen, I believe?”
“Yes, only seventeen.” She would be eighteen in three days, but did not think it necessary to add this superfluous admission. And, as she reflected afterwards, it would not have saved her.
“So that, if taken in hand at once, you will be able in some degree to make up for the time you have so grievously lost.”
An indistinct assent. To what grisly project was this the preface?
Miss Ransome had been boredly speculating as to how she was to get through the day with Edward away in the City; and Toby so near and yet so far at the Dower House, but it seemed that the solving of the problem was to be done for her.
“I do not know whether you are aware of it, but your spelling is phonetic.”
“Yes, I know it is.” The speaker had not the faintest notion of the sense of the adjective employed, but as applied to her own accomplishment, it evidently connoted something bad, so that it was safe to acquiesce.
“You know what phonetic means?”
“Oh yes, perfectly.”
“It is carrying your principle a little far to spell the carriage I sent to meet you ‘b-r-o-o-m.’”
“It must have been a slip of the pen,” replied Bonnybell, devoutly praying that she might not be asked how the word that had played her this scurvy trick really spelt itself.
“It will be safer to guard against the possibility of such slips in the future,” rejoined Camilla, with a resolute dryness, which showed how little she believed in her future disciple’s gloss.
The disciple made another feeble struggle against the meshes of the net which she felt to be closing round her.
“Do you think that it is any use to teach people spelling? Isn’t it born with them? I have heard it said that there are people who can never learn to spell; perhaps I am one of them.”
“It is, at all events, worth a trial,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a determination which brooked no further attempt to overset it.
Half an hour later saw Bonnybell established in solitary confinement in her prison, with the instruments of her torture methodically arrayed around her. During that baleful half hour she had, in answer to questions, revealed a knowledge of history and geography quite on a par with her orthography, since she had married Richard II. of England to his grandmother Philippa; had treated Argentina as a town, and generously given it a seat on the Italian sea-board.
When the depths of her hitherto unsunned ignorance had been satisfactorily plumbed, Mrs. Tancred left her, having pencil-marked the limit to which her investigation of each volume must extend, having opened an atlas and hinted at sums. (“Oh, but I am very good at figures! I could always calculate the odds in all the races!” was an unconsidered interpolation which did her no good.) With a detestable promise to return in an hour and a half’s time to give her a lesson in dictation, with a view to fettering the freedom of her spelling, and the observation “Your ignorance is incredible; but at seventeen nothing is irremediable,” her instructress withdrew.
Bonnybell remained for a few moments sedulously staring at the first words of the opening chapter of Green’s “History of the English People;” as who knew to what treachery of sudden return and inexcusable espionage she might be liable? Not even the sound of theswing-door at the end of the passage closing behind Camilla’s departing form, nor the perfect silence that settled down upon her practically uninhabited wing, reassured Miss Ransome.
She peeped cautiously out, and finding the coast clear, at once deserted her studies in order to ascertain on what the range of windows that lighted the gallery upon which her torture-chamber opened, looked out? They gave upon a court-yard, surrounded by offices, and in which, at the moment of her survey, nothing livelier was happening than the crossing it by a footman in shirt-sleeves. Her own prospect—that from the schoolroom itself—was even more hopeless. Two tall sash-windows looked right into an impenetrable belt of thick evergreen trees and shrubs, which entirely baffled all attempts to penetrate it. To the girl’s angry fancy it seemed as if the old witch who had laid this tedious spell upon her, must have made it spring up in the night in its choking density. She turned her attention to the interior of the room, and beguiled some half-hour in examining and inwardly ridiculing its appointments and adornments—the aniline-dyed carpet, the crinolined and whiskered hideousities in the shape of photographs, presumably of Camilla’s parents, since they were male and female, and a portrait of Camilla, herself in a sashed frock and frilled trousers, with a hoop in one hand, artistically balanced by a hoop-stick in the other. The likeness was still a staring one: large bald forehead, long upper lip, and piercing eyes, already in evidence. “Put her into a sash and frilledtrousers, and she would not look much different now! When I get to know Edward a good deal better I shall suggest it to him!”
She laughed out loud, excessively tickled by the idea of this humane and feasible project, then pulled herself together in alarm. Who knew how far her voice might carry in the echoing void of this desolate region? nor what spies might be set to check and report her movements? Candour compelled her to reject the latter supposition as soon as formed, divining and acknowledging the absolute straightness—stupid, contemptible, and unaccountable as it was—of her tyrant.
After having exhausted the objects of interest and mirth afforded her by the—to Camilla—sacred relics of her severe infancy and adolescence, and having learnt from a perfectly accurate bald-faced clock, upon which she fastened an imaginary likeness to its owner, that she had succeeded in frittering three-quarters of an hour out of the hour and a half allotted to her in which to prepare for Mrs. Tancred’s re-appearance and the threatened dictation lesson, she returned most reluctantly to Greene, skimming and peeping and skipping, in the style of the true-born dunce, in search of what she would call “plums.” Her acquaintance with history was indeed slender; but she had a sort of idea that in the driest of that species of literature might be found oases in the shape of anecdotes about king’s mistresses, etc. Her quest in this case was very poorly rewarded, and with a heartfelt sigh she returned to Chapter I. “Angles, Saxons, Jutes! What tommy rot!Jutes!What a ridiculous name!Jute!That is the cheap stuff to cover chairs with, whose colour always flies.”
Her eye left the page, and fixed itself absently upon that branch of the nearest of the shrubbery trees, which absolutely swept the window. To think ofher, Bonnybell Ransome, of all people, sitting here like a good little schoolchild learning lessons! She, with her experiences in the past! Memory went back to them; indeed, they were never very far away. To do her justice, the reminiscences, begun with a scornful smile of superiority, ended by sending a slight shudder over her. That evening when they automobiled down from Paris to dine at the Réservoir at Versailles, that was about the nearest shave she ever had! Hateful, hateful old Charlie Landon! And to have to be civil to him afterwards! It would never have done to tell poor Claire. She had plenty of other things to worry her, and latterly it was so difficult to make her understand anything. But how angry evenshewould have been! Well,assommant épatantas it was here, it was at all events better than that.
Good Heavens! she could not have been thinking of Charlie Landon and the park at Versailles for three-quarters of an hour; yet some one—Camilla, of course—was nearing the door, and she had not yet mastered even those wretched elementary Jutes! But it was not Camilla.
Camilla was frying other fish, and, for the morning at least, Miss Ransome was saved fromany exposure of her frittered opportunities. Perhaps, however, she would be glad to compound for such an exposure in exchange for the one that was hovering over her unsuspecting head. Mrs. Tancred was sitting at her large and business-like writing-table, tranquilly attacking her daily task. Her correspondence was immense, and as she never left any letter or note unanswered, but sent speedy and conscientious replies, even to such valueless trivialities as most people commit at once to the waste-paper basket; as she flouted the idea of a secretary or typist, occasionally suggested by Edward, her labours sometimes threatened to overwhelm her. But the threat was never fulfilled; to-day she was going through her tale of bricks with a heart at peace. Bonnybell was out of possible mischief, with her feet set on the upward path, and in her long solitary hours of the previous day Camilla had drawn strength from communion with her own strong spirit and earnest appeal to her Unknown God worthily to bear and even profit by the heavy burden and responsibility laid upon her. Whether Miss Ransome would be flattered did she know that she was regarded in the light of a hair shirt is doubtful.
It was an understood thing that Mrs. Tancred was not to be disturbed during the forenoon, and it was a displeased face that she turned upon the butler who invaded her busy privacy.
“Mrs. Aylmer and Miss Aylmer are in the morning-room, ma’am, and wish to speak to you.”
“There must be some mistake. Mrs. Aylmer knows that I am never at home in the morning.”
“Mrs. Aylmer told me to say that she wished to apologize for disturbing you, but that, as it is something very urgent, she thought you would not mind breaking through your rule for once in a way.”
Without any further remonstrance or inquiry, and no change of countenance to indicate the surprise that her friend’s audacity bred in her, Mrs. Tancred obeyed the summons to the morning-room. There she found the Aylmers, mother and eldest daughter, standing close together, and somehow giving the impression of doing it for mutual protection, near the fireplace.
“What can it be that will not keep till the afternoon?” she asked, rather severely, but holding out a hand to each in a manner that implied intimacy and goodwill.
She looked from one to the other as she put her rebuking question, and it would need a much less penetrating vision than hers to perceive that both were, in servant phrase, “very much upset.”
“I am going to London in the afternoon,” replied Mrs. Aylmer, “as I sent word by Edward last evening, but even if I was not I do not think I could have borne to put it off—to delay getting it off my mind.”
“To putwhatoff? To gettingwhatoff your mind? Will you please come to the point?”
There was a very perceptible stiffening in Camilla’s manner; anything of the evasive or shilly-shallying being abhorrent to her. Her friend was well aware of this peculiarity, and was very much frightened by having provoked it,but she was also too much frightened at the task she had in hand to state even now directly her errand.
“It is the first—the very first touch of anything disagreeable that has ever come into our relations with each other.”
“Had not we better sit down?” rejoined Camilla, with an elaborate patience. “There is no use in tiring ourselves by standing until we get to the point.”
The expectation of an immense period of waiting implied by this suggestion ought to have decided the matron addressed to take the plunge; but it did not.
“I do not think that I should ever have had the courage to tell you—to enter upon so painful a subject at all—if Catherine——” She broke off with a drowning-man look at her daughter.
Mrs. Tancred looked also at that daughter. She had never liked Catherine as much as she did Catherine’s mother, nor had ever hidden from herself that it was because of her supposed high appreciation by Edward, and because the neighbourhood’s habitual observation, “What a nice and suitable wife she would have made for him!” had penetrated, if not to her bodily ears, yet to the ears of her heart. For these very reasons, driven by her unsquarable conscience, she had always treated the girl with an unusual leniency.
“Perhaps Catherine will explain,” she said, with a strained patience, but not harshly.
Miss Alymer was already highly pink; she waxed pinker.
“I think it would come better from mother.”
Mrs. Tancred made a movement, instantly checked, of extreme irritation at being thus shuttle-cocked between two foolish battledores to the waste of time and temper.
“I will get my knitting until you have decided which of you is likely to regain your powers of speech first,” she said, moving towards her large work-basket, and drawing it within reach of her chair.
The determined endurance expressed by her knitting-needles—for she was nearing the end of her patience, and was never much of a hand at feigning—at length goaded the jibbing pair into more explicit utterance.
“We came to speak to you about the girl that Edward brought to see us yesterday.”
“Yes?” Mrs. Tancred had laid down the cardigan upon which she had just engaged, and her gimlet eyes were looking over, not through, her large spectacles in that manner which made erring kitchen-maids, drunken husbands, and even Edward himself, call on the mountains to fall on them.
“She—she is a very lovely creature!”
“But you did not break through my rule to tell me that?”
“Oh no, of course not; of course not.”
“What, then?”
“I did not catch her name at first.”
“Her name is Ransome”—articulated very distinctly—“that is, her surname; her Christian name is Bonnybell, an extremely silly one, butshe is not responsible for it.” There was a feeling in the air as of putting armour on. “She is the daughter of that—that”—an adjective at once presentable and applicable seemed hard to find—“that very notorious Lady Ransome who died this year.”
“She is the daughter of that infamous woman! What first surprised me about her was that she seemed so intimate with Lady Tennington, who happened to be calling at the same time.”
“That is a fact which I should not have been able to verify.” Here Mrs. Tancred undoubtedly scored, strong in her immovable resolve to have no “truck” with the good-natured but completely unvirtuous Flora. Yet even this weapon might be turned against her.
Mrs. Aylmer, like her daughter, was growing rosy. There was no drop of vitriol or even gall in her whole composition, but when a stone had been thrown at her, would she be human if she did not return it?
“I was surprised that any one coming fromyourhouse, any girl under your wing, should be intimate to the degree of Christian-naming with Lady Tennington.”
“I am to understand, then, that it is on the score of her acquaintance with Lady Tennington that you have come to complain of Miss Ransome?”
The glaring inconsistency with their own practice thus coldly fastened upon them loosened still further the string of both intruders’ tongues.
“What a misrepresentation!” said Catherine, in a low key of indignation; and, “Oh, dear Camilla, how you do manage to put one in the wrong when one knows that one is absolutely in the right!” cried her more emotional mother.
Camilla’s reply was to fold her bony hands.
“I wait for an explanation.”
“I came to speak to you about the girl,” returned the other, attacking her words at a great pace, for fear they should decline to come at all, “not because I have any grudge against her—in fact, I was very much prepossessed by her appearance—but because—because—I am afraid—I really and truly think that she is not a fit companion for my children.”
There was a slight pause.
“You think that because the fathers have eaten sour grapes the children’s teeth should be set on edge? Well, there is a good deal to be said in favour of your view.”
The cold impartiality aimed at, if not quite attained, in this utterance with its underlying suggestion of Pharisaism in the person addressed, called forth a hurried retort.
“You are quite mistaken; I am not blaming her for her unfortunate origin. It would be iniquitous to do that, but for her own behaviour.”
“What has she done?”
“As I told you, I knew nothing about her, but, thinking that she looked uncomfortable while Lady Tennington was talking to her, I sent her up to tea in the schoolroom. Catherine can tell you the rest.”
The burden thus shifted was taken up with evident reluctance, but yet without flinching, by the daughter.
“She seemed rather shy with Miss Barnacre, who did her best to put her at ease by asking her questions about subjects she thought would interest her.” (Here a slight upward curl, like an angry tom cat’s, of the corners of Mrs. Tancred’s rigid lips, incomprehensible to her companions, would have revealed to the initiated a recalling on her part of one of the subjects,i.e.her own religious creed, of the governess’s catechism as retailed by the culprit now under discussion.) “She got up suddenly, and went over to the other side of the table, and joined Meg, who was looking at an illustrated paper.”
“Well?”
“Miss Barnacre and I went on talking, but I could not help catching snatches of the two girls’ conversation—of Miss Ransome’s, rather—and I can only say that it was of such a kind that I thought it best to send Meg out of the room.”
“I shall be glad to know precisely what you overheard.”
“She was retailing to Meg very objectionable scandal.”
“Yes?”
Miss Aylmer was evidently to be spared no detail of the attributed crime, nor had she indeed, now that the action was well engaged, any objection to making good her accusation.
“I heard her telling Megaproposof a picture of some prize Schipperkes, that Lady CressidaBeaulieu, who showed them, had no money of her own, but was “run” by Waddy, the indiarubber-tyre manufacturer. I thought then”—with a well-justified air of having made out her cause, “that it would be better that Meg should hear no more.”
The case for the prosecution was complete.
“You were perfectly right,” said Camilla, without a moment’s hesitation, though her voice was even harsher than usual, and as she spoke she walked to the bell, and rang it.
“You are not going to send for her?” gasped Mrs. Aylmer, in a key of the most unvarnished consternation.
“That is exactly what Iamgoing to do.”
Thusit was not the task-mistress, but a mere footman, whose approaching tread struck compunctious fear into the breast of the pseudo-student in the east gallery—a footman who simply requested her presence in the morning-room, coupling with his message the information that Mrs. and Miss Aylmer were there.
This ambiguous piece of news was enough to drive Jutes and Angles from a mind on which they had a firmer clutch than could be said of Miss Ransome’s. Mrs. and Miss Aylmer calling at half-past eleven in the morning! What could the infringement of what had been already impressed upon her as an iron law of Mrs. Tancred’s life portend? With a sinking heart the vision of pig-tailed Meg making her abrupt exit from the Dower House schoolroom upon an obviously vamped-up errand presented itself once more to her inward sight. Had they come to complain of her for corrupting that gaping goose’s mind?
The footman was gone, and she laughed out loud and clear.Impossible!What had she said that was not matter of common knowledge to all the world? A brighter possibility suggested itself.Perhaps—Mrs. Aylmer’s manner to herself had been friendly, almost caressing—perhaps they had taken a fancy to her, had pitied her sore bondage, had come to rescue her, to propose some pleasant plan—a plan that would include Toby, or leading up to others that would include him!
“I look more young and innocent with my hair a little dishevelled,” she said, carefully pulling out a strand and letting it amble down the back of her neck.
Having smeared a drop or two of ink on the middle finger of her right hand to give the idea of past obedience to Camilla’s suggestion of taking notes as she read, Miss Ransome, having wasted only two minutes on her preparations, flew along the endless passages and down the slippery polished stairs in prompt and cheerful obedience. Short as had been the interval between her being sent for and her arrival, it had seemed phenomenal in length to the three people making forced conversation during it—conversation all the harder for being so out of character with their usual easy intimacy.
Bonnybell, on her downward flight, had quickly decided that it would be wisest to come in impulsively, and with no hint of a suspicion that the motive for her production could be other than a pleasant one. She carried her intention out admirably, and the graceful, young cordiality of her greeting to the visitors, with its respectfully grateful stage aside to Mrs. Tancred, “How good of you to let me know!” could not beimproved upon. But the first touch of the visitors’ limp hands, the first glance at their overset countenances, told her that her earliest and worst supposition was the true one, and that the object of their coming was not to invite her to gambols with Toby, but to arraign her for some crime against their stupid and unintelligible code. The accusing forms of Waddy and Cressida rose before her, and she said to herself with an inward groan, “What an ass I was to cast my pearls before such swine!”
Meanwhile the “swine” might provoke pity in their worst enemy; and Camilla allowed a moment or two to elapse, perhaps with a touch of malice, perhaps only while gathering herself to strike, before she relieved them from their cruelly false position.
“I do not think you need be so very glad to see Mrs. Aylmer,” she said with a dryness in comparison of which the desert sand was juicy. “She has come upon an errand that is not particularly pleasant for either herself or you.”
The light died out of Miss Ransome’s face; she was careful that it should do so gradually, to keep up the impression of complete unsuspiciousness. With the little escaped tendril of hair straying over her whitenuque, and her immense and gentle eyes widely opened, she looked like a child whom some ruffian had with unexplained brutality hit and hurt. (“I am sure that I cannot be looking a day over fifteen.”) She made no protest, deciding to be too stunned forthat, but only turned from one to another in innocent astonished alarm.
“Mrs. Aylmer has come to lay a very grave charge against you,” continued Camilla, in an awful voice. “She will explain to you.”
There was nothing in the world that Mrs. Aylmer at the present moment relished less than the task thus imposed upon her. In her angriest moments she had never contemplated having to bring the accusation with this horrible publicity against the poor child herself. “She looks such a mere child! not a day more than fifteen!” A quiet remonstrance with Camilla upon the subject had been all she had bargained for; and now to be suddenly summoned to stick a knife into this pretty, fragile, motherless creature who had run up to her with such a sweet sureness of welcome, such pretty open pleasure,—this poor little waif whom she felt so much more inclined to take into her warm motherly arms! No, it was more than human nature could stand.
“It was Catherine who heard. Catherine knows better than I; she will tell you,” was all that Catherine’s mother was able to produce.
Miss Aylmer, to do her justice, had no zest for the deputed duty, but as she had in the first instance been less attracted than her parent by the young sinner, so was it less impossible to her to be “faithful” in the discharge of the unpleasant feat they had come expressly to perform.
“I could not help overhearing what you were saying to Meg.”
The great eyes opened wider in a helpless lackof comprehension, and there was an air of painful puzzledom about the delicate brows knit in the effort to recall any utterance that could have given offence.
“What—I said—to Meg?”
Happen what might, she would not make it easier for this squinting prude, who had given her away. It was in these harsh terms that her own distress of mind made her qualify the very nearly invisible cast in Miss Aylmer’s left eye.
“You were telling her things that I thought—that I knew—my mother would think she had better not hear.”
“I am very,verysorry!”—in a low key of meek apology that was yet completely at sea as to the ground of that apology. “But what sort of things?”
“You told her that Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of Waddy.”
The colour died out of Bonnybell’s cheek, a feat which not even she would have been able to perform, but which a very real dismay executed for her. Good-bye, Toby! Good-bye, probably the very roof that now covered her! Here lies would avail her nothing. Here innocence, penitence, and brass must go hand-in-hand; and it was too likely that not even that trio would be strong enough to drag her out of the swamp into which she had fallen neck-deep.
“But he does!” she answered, her startled-fawn air and her apparent fifteen years giving a piquancy, if any of her present hearers were in a condition to appreciate it, to her scandalous words.“I thought that everybody knew it. Why, people always ask them to their houses together; quitegoodpeople do.”
There was a horrid silence, broken at first only by Miss Aylmer’s long breath of relief at the accomplishment of a hateful duty, and its immediately following justification. To the eye of faith, Camilla might have been almost seen lifting her bludgeon. It fell.
“Because a blatant indecency is nowadays the key-note of a certain section of society,” she said with an eye-flash that literally scorched its unlucky object, “there is no need for you to introduce its pollution into our midst; if you have the misfortune to possess a mind full of unsavoury knowledge, I must at least request you to keep it within the bounds of that mind.”
The young girl stood shivering with bowed head under the blast of this blizzard. She could not help shivering a little, but had still presence of mind enough to shiver even more than shecouldhelp, particularly as a restless movement and a sort of sigh coming from the direction of Mrs. Aylmer gave her a faint hope that to one at least of her accusers the punishment that had overtaken her seemed excessive in its severity.
“I was brought up a good deal abroad,” Bonnybell whispered faintly. “I am afraid that I do not yet quite understand English ways.”
“That is nonsense,” replied Camilla, very harshly, but yet not quite with the awful voice-quality of her former Philippic—“sheer nonsense.The standard for the behaviour of young girls in France is a far stricter one than ours.”
“Then I can say nothing!” rejoined the poor child in a voice of despair, folding her slight hands, and really not for the moment noticing how advantageously the ink-stain on the middle finger of the right hand was introduced to notice by this gesture. But Camilla saw the tell-tale spot—tell-tale of obedience and honest effort, and it caused her an odd qualm of pity.
Probably the accusers found the situation too poignantly unpleasant for further endurance, which was also, since their work was done, needless. A murmured proposition to depart from the mother was followed by a murmured consent from the daughter. There was a little natural difficulty about their farewells, and in the moment of hanging back which resulted, and before this problem was solved by Camilla’s shaking hands with them and saying in a hard, conscientious voice, “You were perfectly right. I am glad that you had the courage to tell me. You shall have no cause for further complaint,” Bonnybell realized that before the clock had ticked thirty times she would be left alone with her judge and executioner to hear what awful sentence of hopeless doom?