“You do not mean to say that you let him have it for nothing?” cried Bonnybell, in animated remonstrance. “We never allowed our little Mimi to eat a mouthful without barking for it.”
“Was ‘little Mimi’ your dog?” asked Camilla, in a voice that, though carping at the silliness of the name, had yet a ring of true fellow-feeling in it.
“Yes, she was such a beauty. I do not know what Sir Alg—one of Cl—my mother’s friends—did not give for her.”
Thorny is the path of virtuous conversation. People did not talk of Sir Algernon, and she was within an ace of Claire-ing her departed parent again, and her audience was strictly silent; it expected her to go on, so she evidently must continue her narrative, trusting in whatever parody of Providence had hitherto guided her steps to steer her safely through it.
“Mimi was twin-sister to the little dog that always drove in the Bois with Lolotte, sitting up in the victoria beside her, and dressed in the same colours and jewels as her mistress.”
There was a slight sound as of somebody gasping, then a pause, then a question.
“And who, pray, is Lolotte?”
Upon this query there followed another gasp; but this time it came from the causer of the first. Was it possible that there existed in the civilized world a benighted being who had not heard of Lolotte?—an establishment where she was as unmentionable as Sir Algy? The poor young creature, who became suddenly conscious of the terriblefaux paswhich her beautifully shod feet had taken, threw an agonized glance of entreaty for help at Edward. “Youknow Lolotte,” it said dumbly; “for goodness’ sake say something, and get me out of this horrible entanglement.” But Edward maintained a masterly, if cowardly, inaction.
Thoughearly hours—except in the topsy-turvy sense of seeing the sunrise overnight—had never entered into the scheme of Miss Ransome’s existence, and she was as little indebted to the lamb as to the lark for an example, yet never had clock uttered a more welcome sound than that single stroke of half-past ten, which made Mrs. Tancred, as if by machinery, fold up her large seam, restore it to its basket, and rise from her chair. The clocks at Stillington struck all together, for all were true to Greenwich as the needle to the pole.
“You are probably tired,” said the hostess; and the guest was reduced to such a jelly-like state of tremor and self-distrust that she did not know whether to acquiesce in or disclaim the accusation. If she admitted fatigue, Camilla would probably despise her; if she denied, it would very likely—judging by her past experience of husbands and wives—be looked upon as a manœuvre for procuring atête-à-têtewith Edward in the smoking-room. So she answered, with deferential hesitation—
“Just pleasantly; nothing to speak of. Thank you so much.”
“Thank me for what? For telling you that you are tired?”
It was a discomfiting way of taking a little meaningless courtesy, but at least it ended in landing Bonnybell in the blessed security of her own bedroom. For, except that there was nothing to speak of in the way of eatables and drinkables provided for the night—Mrs. Tancred being of the antediluvian race who suppose that people after an admirable eight-o’clock dinner do not need cold cutlets or quails to sustain them till morning—she found herself extremely, roomily comfortable; and having got into a dressing-gown, with more lace and openwork about it than Camilla would think quite moral, threw herself into an admirably stuffed armchair, to take stock of her own blunders, and ask herself whether they were quite irreparable.
“Oh, what would I give for a cigarette! but I suppose that that would about finish me. However many miles off her rooms may be, she would be certain to smell it, and it is too cold to smoke out of the window.”
Her thoughts went back regretfully to the many little pleasant evening smokes in old Tom’s den in Hill Street, when Felicity was safely away at some committee meeting. “It shall be as you wish. God bless you, dear!” She laughed out loud again, as she had done in the train.
Then her reflections took a graver turn. If it were possible to avoid it, she must not be turned out of Stillington, as she had been—however poor, good-natured old Felicity might tryto gloss it over—turned out of Hill Street. To avoid this undesirable result, one of the first and most urgent postulates was to ascertain, with the least possible delay, what topics of conversation were permissible and what tabooed in this extraordinary atmosphere of Puritanism and prudery. If she could make a friend of Edward, and quietly put her case before him? She dismissed the suggestion with a shrug. “If you try to make a friend of a man, he tries to kiss you!” This was a syllogism whose accuracy she had never had any reason to doubt. Valuable as enlightenment from a person who had had fifteen years’ intimate experience of Camilla would be, it was therefore wiser to abstain from seeking it, and to work out the problem by one’s own individual lights.
With elbows propped on the old chintz-covered arms of her chair, and eyes exploring the fiery caves of a grate as generously roomy as that chair, Miss Ransome made pass in carefully scanned procession before her mind’s eye the topics likely to present themselves on the morrow, sifting and winnowing the few thoroughly sound ones from among the wilderness of subjects likely, apparently, if treated with the ease and freedom which came natural to her, to lead to her speedy expulsion. “Felicity and Tom? H’m! doubtful. Felicity safe enough; but Tom?”
A process of elimination, conducted with a strictness of which this first beginning was an example, ended by leaving only three themes upon which the seal of complete security couldbe set—the weather, the contents of the newspapers, with the exception of the Divorce Court, and Jock. Even in his case a rider had to be added, that under no circumstances was he to lead up to reminiscences of Mimi. But of the innumerable multitude of the tabooed, a trio were four-lined and three-starred. ‘Claire,’ her own past: especially anything referring to her education, and thedemi-monde en bloc.
Having completed, at a late hour of the night, these dispositions for her future guidance, she betook herself to a high, wide, and admirable bed, while still sighing for a cigarette, and vainly hunting for sandwiches and whisky and soda.
If Bonnybell’s conversational infelicities had disquieted herself, they had produced a certainly not inferior effect upon one at least—and the most important—of her two auditors. It was not often that Camilla reappeared after retiring for the night, but the occasion was one worthy of the exceptional, and Edward was not much surprised by her advent in the smoking-room shortly after he had assumed his smoking-jacket, and established himself in his accustomed surroundings, to face a problem almost as difficult as that which was engaging Miss Ransome’s attention upstairs. He had rather that his wife had not broken through her usual habits, having a dim feeling that he was not ready to cope with her, and a less dim impression that herdéshabilléwas unnecessarily unbecoming.
Camilla was not one of the women who arecoquettish with their husbands, nor did she use any of the little pardonable juggles often indulged in by women who have wedded men greatly their juniors. Rather did she seem determined to underline and dash the fifteen all too obvious years that parted her from Edward. In the early days of their married life he had been wont gently to remonstrate, but it was now long since the hair, ruthlessly torn back from the already too high and bare forehead, and the tasteless, laceless woollen wrapper, had found and left him anything but silent and acquiescent.
To-night, the forehead seemed more naked and thepeignoirwoollier and drabber than usual. Mrs. Tancred did not sit down. Evidently no ease of posture could beseem such a crisis.
“What have we done? or rather what has Felicity done for us?”
He had risen, with habitual politeness, at her entrance.
“Is she worse than you expected?”
“I suppose that I am not imaginative. I wait for my eye and ear to inform me, before I realize things.”
“Youreye?” His judgment disapproved the protest, but the impress of Bonnybell’s beauty upon his brain was too strong and recent for him to be able to help it.
“Oh, I grant you that she is extraordinarily pretty!”—with a reluctant note of pleasure in the fact admitted—“prettier than a person has any business to be!” stamping relentlessly upon that weakness of hers for physical beauty whichher husband had always felt to be pathetic. “Butwhata girl!”
“Fin de siècle?” he asked, snatching at a phrase which in 1901 had lost its significance, but which he hoped expressed enough disapprobation to meet the requirements of the case.
“I never could see why the end of a century should justify immorality more than the beginning; butwhata girl! what a plane of thought she moves on! what a moral standpoint!”
The man expressed no dissent. He could not conscientiously take up the cudgels in defence of Miss Ransome’s system of ethics, and to say anything in palliation of it would do her only disservice.
“Whata girl! what amilieu! Sir Algernon Skipton! and Mademoiselle Lolotte!—unnamable men and unfortunates!”
This last well seasoned sentence did elicit an “Oh!” but it was as involuntary as the sneeze produced by an over-mustardeddevil.
“Well, what else can you call Mademoiselle Lolotte, when she is translated into plain English?”
Edward did not call Mademoiselle Lolotte anything else, though a secret flash of amusement crossed his mind at the application of the homely word to the magnificent monarch of the Parisian Half World, as he had last seen her whizzing past in her motor brougham to Longchamps.
“You must remember that she has not had much chance,” he said, making his plea with temperate carefulness.
“Who? Mademoiselle Lolotte or Mademoiselle Bonnybell?”
The juxtaposition of the two names made him unaccountably angry; but the habit of self-government was strong, and did not now fail him.
“I meant Miss Ransome.”
Something, however smothered, of what he was feeling must have pierced through his tone, or else her own inward monitor rebuked her, for Camilla rejoined in quite a different key—
“That is true, and you are right to remind me of it; but”—with a relapse into consternation—“Whata girl! She speaks of her dead mother by her Christian name as Claire!”
“You can easily break her of that.”
“She was turned out of a boarding-school in Paris!”
“She told you so?”
“Yes, in answer to a question of mine about her education.”
“For misconduct?”
“H’m! She said that the mistress of the establishment thought that some other system would suit her better. It sounds like a lie, and a bad lie, but she looked as if she were speaking truth; indeed, I am almost sure that she was.”
A memory of the air of perfect veracity with which Miss Ransome had dilated to himself upon Felicity’s immense admiration for his wife’s form of philanthropy—an admiration of whose non-existence she must have been as well aware as himself—made it difficult to Edward to endorseCamilla’s conviction; but he kept his difficulty, as he kept most things, to himself.
“If she speaks truth,” continued his wife, holding on apparently with desperation to the one rope thrown her by this possibility, “whatever awful facts she may tell us about herself—and, poor wretch, I suppose that she has not any others to tell—there will be hope for her, for us; there will be some basis to go upon; we shall know where we are.”
“And even if she does not?”
The supposition expressed was drawn from him involuntarily, and no sooner uttered than regretted.
“Have you any reason for supposing that she does not?”
His rejoinder was as disingenuous as hisprotégée’swould undoubtedly have been.
“I! Already! How is that possible?” His disclaimer was so completely successful that he felt compunction, and yet not so strongly as to regret having put his sleuth-hound off the scent.
“What were you going to say when I interrupted you?”
“Oh, nothing of any importance. I was only going to suggest that whatever shortcomings you may discover in this poor little creature—and I dare say there will be plenty of them” (he despised himself for the concession, which he knew to be a bid for his wife’s leniency)—“we must remember her antecedents; we must try to make allowances for her.”
She stood for a moment silent before him, her unbeautiful arms folded in her dull wrapper.
“Yes,” she answered dryly, yet assentingly. “Make allowances! It is a manufacture that for fifty years I have found phenomenally difficult; but you are right! one has no business to look for morals and manners in the Stews!”
He was used to the crudity of her phrases; yet now he turned with a quick movement towards the fire to hide the shudder that her old-fashioned vernacular, used in its present connection, caused him; but the accurate lyre-shaped clock on the chimney-piece above his head had ticked ten times before he could face his companion again with a controlled smile.
“And there is one thing, at all events, indisputably in her favour.”
“What?”
“Jock has taken a fancy to her.”
AsMiss Ransome was not aware of having made even the ally alluded to by Mr. Tancred overnight, it was with a very self-distrustful heart that next morning she appeared in the breakfast-room, to find her host and hostess waiting for her. It was one of the rules of Camilla’s old-fashioned code of politeness that it is as inadmissible to begin breakfast without a guest as to go in to dinner before he or she has appeared, and many a sleepy visitor had cursed this cruel civility.
Bonnybell had made what appeared to herself superhuman efforts to keep pace with the detestably unanimous clocks, that apparently, from every recess and landing-place in the house, admonished her of the flight of the minutes. For Claire and her daughter time had been not. Her apprenticeship in Hill Street had been neither long nor strict enough to uproot the habits of a lifetime; and though she had scamped her hair, and entirely omitted to underline her eyes, those eyes informed Bonnybell, on the authority of the relentlessly ticking accuser that faced her as she hurried in, that she was ten minutes late.
Edward offered her a choice of excellentfoods, and Camilla suggested that perhaps for the future she would prefer to breakfast in her own room.
She was about to accept joyfully the offer, when, just in time, some inward monitor—or was it a look on Mr. Tancred’s face?—warned her that it was sarcastic, and not meant to be taken seriously.
With trembling thanksgiving at having—and only by a hair’s-breadth—shaved the first pitfall set for her, she hastened to change the trend of her response.
“Oh no, thanks, not for worlds! I think it is a horrid habit.”
Once again Edward looked at her, and something regretful in his eye made her feel that it would have been better to have been content with the refusal of Camilla’s ironical offer, and not to have added the ornamental mendacity at the end.
Having accepted coffee, and then wished that she had chosen tea, as being more English and less reminiscential of foreign ways, Miss Ransome ate her breakfast in a wary but smiling silence. Casting about in her mind for a safe and mollifying topic, her eye presently furnished her with one.
“What a beautiful portrait!” she said, pitching with inherited bad taste upon the only modern picture in the room.
“It has no business to be here,” replied Camilla, casting a brief and unadmiring glance upon the presumptuous intruder among a goodlycompany of Antonio Mores, Cornelius Janssens, Romneys, and Gainsboroughs, “but my parents had it hung there, and I have naturally not liked to move it.”
The idea of Camilla ever having had parents, and not having issued directly from the bosom of Primeval Night, was so stupefying to Bonnybell that it kept her dumb long enough for Edward to throw in, as he did rather hurriedly—
“It is a portrait of my wife by Graves, given her, when she came of age, by the tenants.”
Furnished with this explanation, Miss Ransome’s eyes reverted to the object of an admiration which had originally been more polite than founded on conviction, and she chid herself inwardly for her stupidity in not at once recognizing that in the large-featured girl, whose sandy hair not even a courtly limner had been able to transmute into gold, lay the germ of the grim woman sitting beneath it. It was not yet too late to repair her error.
“Of course, I saw at a glance who it was,” she exclaimed glibly.
No comment followed this brave assertion, and its utterer thought it safer to go boldly on; but the want of conviction that she felt her statement had carried flurried her into a question from which her more deliberate judgment would have refrained.
“Is there no portrait ofyou, no pendant to this one?”
The query was addressed and referred to the host, but it was the hostess who answered.
“At the time that picture was painted, Edward was exactly six years old. There is a difference of fifteen years between us.”
A slight writhe upon Mr. Tancred’s part witnessed to the failure of his skin to have hardened itself against what yet must be a daily pin-prick, and Bonnybell, good-naturedly sorry for him, and still more concerned for herself at having floundered into so egregious a fault in taste, began a precipitate sentence which a look from Edward’s eyes converted into a for-ever unfinished fragment.
“No one would guess it!” was the complete form of the projected lie, but the phrase never got beyond its third word. In fact, Miss Ransome left the breakfast-table with not the slightest remorse indeed for the fibs, complete and inchoate, which she had perpetrated there, but with some misgiving as to their success.
It was contrary to what she would have expected, but yet the conviction came solidly home to her, as she pinned a veil with careful nicety over the chastened mournfulness and unchastened coquetry of her toque, that Camilla would be more easy to take in than Edward.
Miss Ransome was pinning on a veil at ten o’clock in the morning, not because her ejection had come thus early—though in her own opinion unlikelier things might have happened—but because it was Sunday morning, and she had been told that she was to walk to church with Mr. Tancred. There was apparently no question of Mrs. Tancred’s attending Divine Service.
“You are not coming with us?” the girl had said with an extremely engagingmoueof regret. “But I suppose that you do not feel up to it.”
“Up to what?”
“To the long morning service.”
“The long morning service lasts exactly one hour and ten minutes, and it is not because of its length that I do not attend it, but because I am not a member of the Church of England.”
“Oh!”—a little nonplussed by a momentary inability to think of a suitable comment; then, with a quick recovery, “Of course! So many of the oldest families are Catholics.”
“I am not a Roman Catholic either; but if you wait for me to expound my creed you will be late for church, and—I do not think that your hat is quite straight.” The words were snubby, but the speaker relaxed into an unintentional smile as she evoked them.
Of course, there was not the slightest foundation in fact for Bonnybell’s expressed regret, but there was a certain pleasantness in even the fiction, in even the false presentment and elusive shadow of a young thing belonging to one, and concerning itself about one’s comings and goings.
As to Miss Ransome, she skipped off, relieved, and with a humorous inward indignation at Camilla for not having perceived that her toque’s racy obliquity was intentional.
She found her escort waiting for her under the stone portico over the hall door, and casting a rather questioning eye up to a sky that did not answer very reassuringly.
“Have you an umbrella?” he asked.
Of course she had not, the decorative in costume always engaging her attention to the exclusion of the useful. They were already a couple of hundred yards from the house, and he answered her suggestion of returning to fetch one by—
“I am afraid we are already a little late, and if it comes on to rain I can hold mine over you.”
“Of course he hopes that it will rain!” was the inward comment of the innocent creature to whom this assurance was addressed, and upon it followed a feeling of wonder at Camilla’s rash confidence, in trusting her husband to atête-à-têtewith herself.
But Camilla’s belief appeared to be going to be justified; for beyond a gravely cautious warning now and again to his companion to avoid a puddle, or indication of that strip of road which the night’s rain had left driest, Mr. Tancred walked along almost in silence, with the width of the elm avenue between them.
“Perhaps he would think it wrong to make love to me going to church!” thought the wary Bonnybell. “Men have such funny scruples. I must look out for myself going back.”
It was in a hansom while returning from St. Paul’s Cathedral that Tom had first told her that she could turn him round her little finger. There was no sign at present of Edward’s executing or intending to execute a like gyration, but it was always well to be on the safe side, and nothingkept dangerous topics better at bay than a little safe small talk upon unimpeachable subjects.
“You always go to church here, I suppose?”
“Generally. And you?”
There was a slight demur. To talk about her own past and its habits formed no part of Miss Ransome’s scheme; but after a moment’s hesitation she answered—
“I went to church a good deal with the Glanvilles.”
“I cannot at this moment remember who Felicity’s favourite pope is?”
“She did not generally take me with her; she sent me with Tom—Mr. Glanville—instead.”
Bonnybell did not think it necessary to explain that towards the close of her unluckily shortened stay Felicity had deemed it advisable to alter this arrangement. Doubts such as she had already felt with regard to what the Tancreds knew or did not know of the Hill Streetfiascohurried her into a well-sounding expression of opinion.
“I like going to church, of all things.”
The turn of the phrase amused him, and, against his intention, he showed it a little.
“Is it a new sensation?”
She repented the slip, but her hearer, glanced sideways at in fleeting apprehension, looked so lenient, that she took heart.
“We—Claire and I—were not generally up in time to go to church in the morning, and we mostly played bridge in the afternoon.”
Mr. Tancred gave a slight shudder of thankfulness—if a shudder can ever be thankful—thatthis glimpse into the young stranger’s past had been revealed to him, instead of to his wife. To his thankfulness was added a prick of conscience, reminding him that he ought to chide the girl for her glib use of the forbidden Christian name. But he did not; and the civil, unrebuking attention with which he listened deceived her into fresh admissions.
“Sometimes Sir Algy took us down on his motor to Richmond or Maidenhead.”
This time the hearer’s shudder was a shudder indeed.
“You liked that?”
“It was no question of liking,” she answered, with a lightning-quick realization that she had made a false step, and that for the future “Sir Algy” had better remain in the extreme background of her conversation. “I had to go; Claire would have been dreadfully hurt if I had objected.”
There was a moment’s pause. He must brace himself to the effort, odious and anomalous as it was, to tutor her.
“Would you mind—I must apologize a thousand times for my presumption in making the suggestion—but would you mind not speaking of Lady Ransome by her Christian name? I do not mind it in the least myself”—yielding to the relief of an emphatic assertion—“but it might shock some of these strait-laced people down here. I am not sure”—very reluctantly—“that my wife would like it.”
“I am sure she would not,” replied the objectof this rebuke, with a great candour, which would have disarmed her admonisher, if he had ever been armed. “In fact, I saw it by her manner last night. Of course, I ought not to call my mother ‘Claire,’ but it slipped out. The habit of a lifetime, you know. Well, ‘C’est plus fort que moi!’”
“Such a long lifetime, too!” returned he, with a gentle mocking of her absurd air of longevity.
“I should have been more on my guard with Mrs. Tancred,” continued she, in anxious explanation; “but with you I fancied it did not matter.”
He found a rejoinder to this speech difficult. He ought to have conveyed to her that he had no wish to be set on any different plane of intimacy with her from his wife, nor the least intention of being drawn into conniving behind Camilla’s back at what he knew that she disapproved. But long before he had found, even approximately, a form into which to cast this necessary snub, they had reached their destination. The church, standing on a little eminence above the slow midland river that slid through the park, was, from its small size and original destination, rather a chapel to the great house than a parish church.
“Is the music good? and do we come out before the sermon?” asked his charge, whispering.
He had to reply in the negative to both questions, and the slight but amusing twist that she gave her features on receiving his answer made him not as alive as he ought to have beento the knowledge that she would not have dared to make that grimace in Camilla’s presence.
The Tancreds had a small side gallery, entered by a private door in the church, set apart for them, where for generations they had worshipped in comfortable apartness, owners and guests—with a superior view of the congregation—in front, and servants ranged in decorous rows behind.
To-day, as Edward had foreseen, they were late, and—the good old days of waiting for the entrance of the “Wicked Man” by the parson being gone—it was upon an assemblage of bent heads that Miss Bonnybell’s cautiously roving eye alighted. What a sparse congregation! and what an immense space separated her from Edward when each was ensconced in his and her distant corner of the long seat. That space was obviously intended to be occupied by a numerous progeny—Edward and Camilla’s family. She gave an irreverent inward chuckle at the thought of a row of prim little boys and bony girls fashioned in Camilla’s image.
Then a panic seized her. Was a visible smile, produced by this tickling idea, showing itself on her face, to be seen now that everybody was standing up again? At once she composed her features to an expression of devout melancholy, which, being—as she had not a glass whereby to regulate the amount—a little overdone, made Edward pityingly reflect, when he occasionally glanced at her during the sermon, that, despite that playful gaiety of disposition which broke outevery now and then, her terrible past had written its name indelibly upon her tiny features.
Those veracious indicators allowed themselves to relax a little from their pious gloom, as their owner lightly trod her homeward way, and cast about for something suitable to say regarding the service. If she could also obtain a little useful information by the way no harm would be done.
“What a dear little church!”
“Yes, it is rather an interesting specimen of Transitional.”
“Built in the time of Edward the Confessor, did you say?”
“Well, not quite”—with a smile.
“And what a nice congregation!”
“I am glad you think so. But why did they strike you as so particularly nice?”
She thought it was a question that he need not have put, but took pains with her reply.
“Oh, they looked so homely, and attentive, and—and—un-smart. I liked them so much better than the London congregation I am used to. Felicity’s ‘Pope,’ as you call him, has all themondainesanddemi-mondainestoo at his feet.”
“But I thought you did not sit under Felicity’s Oracle; I thought you told me that you usually went to church with Tom.”
Miss Ransome wished, with a momentary impatience, that her companion’s memory for her statements was not so good, as it might lead to inconveniences in the long run, but she answered readily—
“Latterly, Felicity usually took me with her.Tom often had a cold or an engagement on Sunday morning.”
She laughed off further inquiries with her airy cynicism, and having the best reasons for preferring therôleof questioner to questioned, began an indirect catechism concerning the congregation, whose motive Mr. Tancred did not suspect.
“It all seemed so patriarchal; everybody looked like tenants and farmers, and people of that class. I suppose your neighbours have churches of their own to go to?”
“John Drake occasionally bicycles over to Morning Service.”
“John Drake?” She looked across the road at him with a sudden alertness of interest. Did John Drake sound like the name of the South African millionaire who was to pilot her out of her present slough of dependence and manœuvring to the odious but indispensable anchorage of marriage? “Who is John Drake? Is it very benighted of me never to have heard of him?”
The desire to keep his boots clean still apparently held in check the desire that Edward must experience to be near her, and it was across the width of the drive that his answer reached her.
“Not in the least; it would have been odd if you had. He is agent to a man who has a property near here.”
Anagent! Miss Ransome had a distinct sensation of disappointment. But agent towhom? Perhaps her chance of promotion was only set one step further off.
“I dare say he will turn up to luncheon to-day.My wife is always glad when he does. She thinks he has not enough to eat at home.”
“Why has not he enough to eat at home?”
“I dare say he has; but Camilla is convinced that when all the ten children are helped, there is not much left of the leg of mutton.” (Ten children!) “Poor chap!” continued Edward; then, checking his expression of compassion, “though I do not know why I pity him. He probably gets quite as much out of life as the rest of us”—with a smile. “He is a fair shot, and he used to play the ’cello a bit, but he has given that up; and I think that is nearly all about him.”
“How monstrous of anybody to have ten children!” she said with the shocked accent of a philanthropist hearing of a great crime.
He did not feel inclined to discuss the subject with her; and his silence recalled her to the consciousness that the turn of her phrase was not that of thejeune fille.
“Agent to whom, did you say?”
“I do not think I did say; he is agent to Sir Frederick Milward.”
Ah, now we are beginning to get at something more promising! Sir Frederick Milward!—a well-acred baronet, perhaps, or preferably an industrial millionaire, knighted for judicious hospitalities in high places.
“Is he nice?”
“Oh, fairly; but they are scarcely ever here. His wife is a neurotic; and the place—it is a dreary barrack at the best of times—is empty for ten months of the year.”
In profound discouragement, Miss Ransome desisted from her queries. What a disgusting neighbourhood; everybody married, eating gorygigots à l’eau, and breeding like rabbits!
At luncheon Mrs. Tancred took away her guest’s appetite for the moment by asking her what the sermon was about, but dealt more gently than might have been expected with her total inability to reply, letting her off with the ironical hope that she had enjoyed her nap, and adding with that habitual grim justice which sentenced herself as uncompromisingly as others—
“You might fairly ask why, if I wished to know, I did not myself go to hear it?”
“I should be very much interested if you cared to tell me,” replied the culprit, with meek untruthfulness.
“I do not think you would,” rejoined the other, bluntly. “Anyhow, I have a creed, though I am quite sure that you would not make head or tail of it.”
Bonnybell received with joyful acquiescence this unflatteringly couched reprieve from a lesson in theology; and without the least inward or outward murmur the announcement that Camilla would not be visible before teatime. Later on she learned that it was the prosecution of her mysterious cult that kept Mrs. Tancred in austere study and Stoic meditation through the long hours. Though her husband did not share in her solitary devotions, it at first looked as if he were going to be as invisible as she.
A sense of desperation laid hold of the youngstranger on finding herself left alone, with the whole house, rich in artistic and historic interest, it is true, to range over, but with, in all probability, not a living soul to exchange a word with for two and a half mortal hours. She filched some violets and a tube-rose out of a vase, and pinned them upon her smart blackness, but she had to stand on tip-toe to get a good sight of herself in the beautiful Venetian mirror, evidently hung with a view to its own becomingness, not for the convenience of “rash gazers;” and the whole manœuvre, though she prolonged it by practising a variety of expressions that might come in useful by-and-by upon her face, did not occupy five minutes.
From among the wealth of books, new and old, that strewed the table, she picked up one, whose yellow paper back “faisait espérer des choses,” only to throw it down in disgust, since a very slight skimming of its pages proved it to belong to the literature of thejeune fille; and where a French novel is innocent, it is innocent with a vengeance.
She walked to one of the long windows. Should she go out? She decided not. Rain-charged clouds hung over the ruddy trees of the park. There was not the slightest chance in those miles of walks, whose beginnings she saw stretching hopelessly away in their odious privacy, of meeting any one not belonging to the place, and if you had to endure boredom it might as well be a dry and warm as a wet and cold one. She tried the pictures. They were all hopelesslygood, some dusky, some mellow, glowing and glooming from the harmonious dull-green brocade of their background. Why on earth didn’t they sell them, now that there was a “boom” in these dingy old masters, and hang something worth looking at on their walls? Her mind reverted admiringly to the canvases—how unlike these!—that had adorned “Le Nid,” Claire’s villa at Monaco.
Miss Ransome had not considered all her mother’s methods commendable, but surely her taste in pictures was perfect. Where had they all gone to now, those charming specimens of modern French art—“Le Bain,” “La Surprise”?
Her disparaging contemplation of the picture at which she was staring was broken in upon by the voice of Edward.
“It is hung too high,” he said, not guessing the spirit in which she was gazing. “I told Camilla so, but she is not fond of change.”
“People of her age seldom are, I suppose,” returned Bonnybell, radiant at her interrupted solitude, but at once feeling that she had said the wrong thing.
“We have always thought it a Dierick Bouts. Camilla’s grandfather brought it from Bruges,” he went on, in a tone that seemed to put him further away from her than his first remark had done. “Of course, when we sent it to a Winter Exhibition at Burlington House, the critics pronounced it a copy, but we took leave to disbelieve them.”
“I am sure you were quite right,” rejoinedshe, with outward emphasis and an inward wonder why any one should care to discuss the paternity of such a grotesque oldcroûte.
Apparently her acting was all too good, and took him in.
“Since you are fond of pictures,” he said, “perhaps you will let me show you some rather good portraits in the morning-room. They are not all by any very well-known masters; but though their interest is chiefly historical, they are not badly painted.”
She acquiesced gratefully. Any change from her late forlorn condition of being thrown on her own resources must be for the better, and if she pretended to be interested in his old daubs, she might be more likely to retain his company.
They had reached the morning-room, and Tancred held back the heavy curtain from the nearest window, to let a larger measure of the niggard daylight of a November afternoon fall upon the object he was exhibiting.
“That is Sir Thomas Overbury; it was given by him to a cousin of his who married an ancestor of my wife’s. That”—indicating another portrait—“is Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. There is a grim irony in hanging them cheek by jowl, isn’t there?”
“Very grim,” returned she, and called inwardly upon her gods for help in enabling her to disguise how little she knew why it was grim, or why there was any question of irony.
“And that is Somerset’s wife”—pointing to a good female portrait by Van Somers. “I alwaysthink she has such a deceptive face; one would never read her story in it, would one?”
“Never.”
This was perfectly true, since Bonnybell had not the foggiest notion of what the illustrious murderess’s story was.
“It was taken when she was Lady Essex.”
“Oh yes, of course.”
The “of course” was redundant, and a mistake. It made him look at her in slight surprise, and with that look dawned upon him the fact that never before had Miss Ransome “heard tell” of any one of the three notorious personages to whose effigies he had just introduced her.
Afterthat, being a merciful man, Edward let her get off the historico-artistic gridiron, upon which he had been innocently grilling her. He showed her no more pictures, nor, indeed, anything else except his smoking-room, in which she exhibited a lively, and this time perfectly unfeigned interest, and where her intelligent inquiries as to the brand of cigars favoured by him, and her discriminating knowledge of the subject in contrast to her abysmal ignorance of the former ones, taught him that hers had not been a past of mere cigarettes. She had nourished a faint hope that he might have invited her to share a friendly whiff there and then, but it was clearly not to be. Instead, he gently ejected her. “Of course, the old camel would smell it,” said the disappointed young creature, inwardly feeling a sensible relief in this ingeniously insulting play upon the name of her latest benefactress.
Edward had escorted her back to the very spot where he had found her, opposite the calumniated Dierick Bouts; and with despair she saw, or thought she saw, in his eye an imminent intention of leaving her. What could she do to arrest him?Rush at once into some entanglingly interesting subject which would rob him of that wish to escape which it was so incomprehensible that he could ever have nourished? Ask him why he married Camilla?
She was saved from a remedy which would certainly in its results have proved worse than the disease, by the object of her solicitude.
“I am afraid,” he said, looking first compassionately at her and then rather helplessly round the room, as if in puzzled search among its wealth of beautiful objects and inviting books for something capable of amusing her—“I am afraid that you will be very dull all by yourself.”
The inevitable civil falsehood—inevitable, at least, to the ever-lying Bonnybell, followed.
“Oh no, I love being by myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really; that is to say”—in terror that he might be obtuse enough to believe her—“that is to say, I love itgenerally.”
The implication that she did not love it on this particular occasion was so piteously apparent, that humanity forced him to throw a rope to her.
“What do you think about going out?”
She glanced through the window. It would have been much more consonant with her views of the right way of spending Sunday to have sat blowing delicate clouds through her nose and picking his brains over the smoking-room fire, but that was a blue rose.
“What do you recommend?” she asked with a smile that looked persuadable.
“Isn’t it rather rash ever to recommend anything to anybody?”
Mr. Tancred’s propositions were mostly put interrogatively. He had not enough value for his own opinion to assert anything with dogmatism, having fifteen years earlier set up so robust a self-contempt as still showed no signs of wearing out.
“Be rash, then.” She was still smiling anxiously, divided between a lurking fear of mud and a horror of solitude.
“I wonder,” he suggested, still tentatively, and eying doubtfully the towny elegance of her garb, “whether you would care to walk with me as far as what we call the Dower House?”
“Is that where you keep your dowagers?” she asked playfully, but with an inward misgiving as to the proposed treat being “good enough.”
“It is where Camilla’s people used to keep them,” replied he, with that careful dissevering of himself, which Bonnybell so often afterwards noticed, from his wife’s possessions; “but as she is the last of the Tancreds, it will not be needed again.”
“The last of the Tancreds!” repeated she, with an accent of surprise. “I thought that Tancred was your name?”
“No,” he answered in that ill-at-ease voice with which he—and that as rarely as might be—alluded to his marriage. “I gave mine up when I married.”
“I hope she made it worth your while,” was the worldly wise reflection of the listener; but on her sweet little face appeared only the expression of an intuitive sympathy. The subject was evidently not a much-relished one; and yet it would be disagreeable to her companion to see that she had discovered the fact; it must be gently glided away from.
“So I am to be taken to see an empty house—four bare walls?” she pouted, with a charming protrusion of her nether lip.
He laughed, in sheer irrational pleasure at the prettiness of the contortion.
“On the contrary, the friends to whom Camilla has lent it while their own house is being rebuilt find themselves inconveniently thick upon the ground.”
“Are there ten of them? and do they live upongigots à l’eau?” cried she, alluding to what he had told her of the full-quivered land-agent on their way home from church.
“No, there are only three young Aylmers—only two at home, unless Toby came back last night.”
“Toby? Who is Toby?”
“Toby is the precious only son.”
That decided her. “I should like it of all things!” she cried. “May I come as I am, or must I make myself frightful,à l’Anglaise?” She held her arms straight down a little way from her sides and “invited inspection.”
“I think, if you go as you are, the brambles in the wood will not leave you many of those jingly things.”
“The wood!” repeated she, with a sudden clouding of the brow.
Being much more innocent-minded than she, and accustomed to much more cleanly company, he had not the dimmest suspicion that his mention of the harmless coppice in question had re-aroused her misgivings. They had been almost completely lulled by his demeanour hitherto; but had he been acting all this while? Had his cool and distant friendliness—so improbable in the face of all her experience of men—been assumed only to lead up to this ominous wood? It could be safely said that with not one of Claire’s and her own former intimates would she have for an instant thought of trusting herself in a shady grove.
The thought that his apparently harmless proposition implied an intended enterprise of the usual sort inspired her with no particular disgust. He would only be acting after his kind. All men were alike. This formula, from which she had hitherto had no cause to make any exception, covered with its contemptuous generality her whole masculine acquaintance, actual and possible.
“Well, does the wood frighten you?” he asked, with a slight and most unsuspicious laugh at the perturbation and doubt written in her face. “What do you think will happen to you in it?”
If she answered him truly—which, to do her justice, was the last thing that she had ever any temptation to do—he would probably think itnecessary to pretend indignation, and go off in a huff without her, so she temporized.
“It only just struck me that possibly I might be out too late; that Mrs. Tancred might want me.”
“Camilla never wants any one on Sunday afternoon,” returned he, with a sort of compassionate amusement at the idea of his wife ever “wanting,” or doing anything but groan under, the society of her little incubus; “and besides, it was her own suggestion.”
There was no more to be said, and, remarking to herself in derisive gaiety, that “There is no fool like an old fool,” Miss Ransome skipped off to make grudging modifications in her costume.
“Toby would have preferred me as I was,” was her final verdict on her own reflected image; “but I have no doubt that I am good enough, and too good for him, as I am.”
The Dower House stood in the park, sundered by a mere green mile from the great house, so that the departed dowagers had been able clearly to view the scene of their ended importance, and to contrast their successors’ methods unfavourably with their own. It was of such roomy proportions as to suggest the idea that it had been planned by some foreseeing lady, providing cannily for her own days of deposition. Not having been porticoed and stone-faced, as its parent-building had been in the days when you were compelled to inhabit a sham Grecian temple, or forfeit your self-respect, it retained those modestTudor charms of old red brick and twisted chimney-stacks, which, fashion having happily wheeled them round again into favour, might chance to remain unmutilated during our little day.
The dreaded “wood” was nothing more than the skirt of a large covert, and was easily traversed in five minutes. Although a cautious inquiry as to its length had elicited this fact, Miss Ransome quickened her pace as she entered the shade, which the still adhering leaves on the trees, and the quickly lessening daylight of a November afternoon, rendered thick and almost more than dusk.
Her companion noted with innocent surprise her nervous haste, and again asked her what she was afraid of, adding, with perfect unsuspiciousness that he himself was the cause of her fear—
“There is rather a boggy place just ahead of us in the path; I must have it looked to. Shall I give you a hand?”
She refused softly, but with such decision as provided him with a lazy sense of entertainment at the independence of her spirit, which was only equalled apparently by her absolute indifference to, and unconsciousness of, any of the sights and sounds of Nature. There was nothing very striking, it is true, in a Berkshire park—“as flat as a denial or a pancake”—on a winter afternoon, and he should not have been surprised that the lightly speaking voices of birds, whose songs were long since over, should hit unnoticed her sophisticated ear; but that the glorious colours which stillstained the noble trees, that the wonderful eyebeam which the sky—smoke-coloured all day—shot from under lifted lids in good night to whitening grass and copper and rust-tinted bracken, should be apparently entirely invisible to her, gave him a slight shock. He pointed out to her one superb effect of interlacing tints, but did not repeat the experiment.
She was too civil and too anxious to please not to respond with a perfunctory superlative “Yes, too delightful!” but in a moment had dropped back into her chatter about people, a chatter which circled round the family to whom she was on her way to be introduced, and which contained exhaustive, though circuitous, inquiries as to why “Toby” was “precious.” She must know before his presentation to her why and to what extent “Toby” was “precious.” Was it merely the usual dull British adoration of the solitary male of an over-feminine family which made him so? Or was it that he was heir to something so considerable as to render his life of importance to his family stem? Also, why were they rebuilding their house?
By the time she had reached the nail-studded oak front door of the Dower House, both questions were set at rest in her mind. The house was being rebuilt, because, through the carelessness of a housemaid, it had regrettably been burnt down; happily, however, the original plans had been found, and it was being rebuilt, stone for stone, as Sir John Vanbrugh had first erected it.
Bonnybell had never heard of Sir John Vanbrugh as either architect or playwright, but she ejaculated fervently, “Whata blessing!” and reckoning up mentally the sum of the information given her, said to herself, with a thankful heart, as she followed the servant into the hall, that Toby was well worth her nicest attention.