With an impulse which had less of calculation in it than in any of her actions, words, or gestures, since her first entry, though even here there was a little, she slipped across the intervening space to the one person in whom she had divined some bowels of compassion,i.e.Mrs. Aylmer,and spoke tremblingly, yet not without a forlorn dignity.
“I am very,verysorry for having made such a bad return for your goodness in giving me so kind a welcome; but indeed, indeed I did it in ignorance!”
“I am quite sure you did,” replied the other precipitately, conquering her desire to throw her arms round the criminal and give her several hearty kisses only by a very fast retreat to the door; “and I would have given anything that—thatthishad not happened!”
Mrs. Aylmer must be a foolish woman, for she cried the whole way back to the Dower House.
There remained the executioner and the gallows bird. Camilla had sat down. Judges always sit, but, on the other hand, hangmen always stand. A grotesque wonder flitted through Bonnybell’s mind as to how a person who united the two functions could harmonize this discrepancy in practice? There followed an absolute silence. Camilla did not even look at her. She sat with the “starers” she had taken off lying in her lap, absently rubbing their glasses with her pocket-handkerchief. Was her wrath too deep for even further vituperation? Would it be satisfied only by a dumb ejection from her house and protection?
As the moments passed this seemed to the girl waiting the pronouncement of her doom the only possible solution, and after a time she lifted up, if such a phrase can apply to anything so low and faint, her little pathetic voice.
“Must I go to-day, or will you let me stay till to-morrow—to make arrangements?”
Camilla lifted her eyes, out of which the fire and sword had gone, but whose expression was inscrutable to the quaking would-be reader of their meaning.
“Where would you go to?”
The cool common sense of the inquiry brought home to Miss Ransome more strongly than ever before the sense of her own waifness. She threw out her hands hopelessly in front of her.
“Where indeed?”
The action once more brought the inky ensign of her studiousness into prominence, and this time it really served as a lifebuoy. Not that Camilla said anything that spoke of relenting; but some indefinable change in the atmosphere that surrounded the rigid figure in the armchair, still rubbing its goggles, emboldened the poor sinner to put up a quivering plea in her own defence.
“I have not had many advantages; it was not poor Claire’s fault”—with a hasty recurrence of that feeling that it was against the rule of the game to impute blame to the helpless dead. “She was too ill latterly to understand about anything—but—I have not had much of a chance.”
For once—except in that pardonable gloss upon the habits of her late mother—the girl was speaking God’s truth, and so strong and immediate was the effect of her appeal that neither Mrs. Tancred nor herself perceived that she had used the tabooed Christian name.
When the answer came, Bonnybell knew that neither to-day nor to-morrow would find hersur la pavé, as she herself would have worded it.
“You shall have a chance now; it will lie with yourself to profit by it.”
There was both dignity and kindness of a severe sort in voice and mien; and to the reprieved criminal the relief was so immense that she fell incontinently on the floor at her benefactress’s feet. Mrs. Tancred left her there, and hurried out of the room, in evident distaste for the prostration.
No sooner was she gone, than Miss Ransome picked herself up.
“That was another mistake,” she said. “Will there be no end to them? Oh, how did I live through it? Oh, what a near squeak! Oh for a cigarette!”
“Well, what have you to say for yourprotégéenow?”
“Who is myprotégée? Have I got one?”
There was weariness in the voice that answered; but neither that quality nor the patience that accompanied and emphasized it had any influence in persuading the putter of the question to desist or delay the communication which it prefaced.
Edward had come home dispirited and out of tune. It had been a bad day on the Stock Exchange, even the gilt-edged securities tumbling down; a rumour of the suicide of a member had been confirmed, and the sense of how little he himself risked, in comparison with the life-and-death struggle going on around him, which to many minds would have been a source of consolation, deepened Mr. Tancred’s gloom. He would have been glad to have been told something pleasant, however trivial, on his return.
But Camilla was not one of those wives who tactfully pick and choose the moments for imparting bad news. It would never have occurred to her that ill tidings told at night might probably rob the recipient of sleep, and that it wouldtherefore be better to defer them till the morning. Such a reticence would have seemed to her to argue a want of moral courage on the part of both narrator and hearer. If anything untoward occurred to herself she wished to be told it at once, no matter whether she was sick or well, waking or sleeping; and she did as she would be done by.
“Miss Bonnybell has surpassed herself this time.”
“What has she done?” cried he, forgetting his pretence of not knowing to whom his wife was alluding, with a great heightening of his sense of out-of-tuneness, made up of fear of what he was going to hear and of exasperation with himself for minding so much what he ought to mind so little.
“Marian Aylmer and Catherine have been here to-day,” said Camilla, not falling into the procrastinating weakness which had been shown by the ladies alluded to, but going straight to the point.
“I thought Mrs. Alymer had an engagement in London?”
“So she had in the afternoon; but they came in the morning.” She paused, as if to let him absorb this fact, pregnant with significance of something abnormal and monstrous. “They came to make a formal complaint against”—“yourprotégée” was on the very edge of her lips, but perhaps some sudden impression of how fagged he looked prompted her at the very last moment to alter it to—“our guest.”
“What for?”
In his heart he knew that he was not very much surprised, recollecting the relieved tone of Bonnybell’s “That accounts for it!” in answer to his remark upon Meg Aylmer’s backwardness, on their homeward walk. He felt at the time with misgiving that it would be wiser not to ask what “it” was. Well, he was going to learn now.
“For corrupting Meg’s mind.”
“I did not know that Meg had a mind to corrupt,” he answered unwisely, and, with an instant awareness of his slip, added, “Miss Ransome must have been very quick about it, for she could not have been more than half an hour in the schoolroom, and the great and good Barnacre was there on guard all the time.”
“I only repeat the tale that was told me,” replied Camilla, with frosty impartiality. “She was overheard inoculating Meg with one of the worst of the current scandals of the day, dilating—no”—correcting herself with characteristic honesty—“there perhaps I am inexact; she probably had not time to dilate, but telling her how Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of ‘Waddy.’”
An odious inclination to vexed laughter assailed Edward: firstly at the ugly piquancy of the imputed criminal utterance as proceeding from such almost infantile lips, and secondly at the disproportion of such a pomp of disapproval as was implied by the “indignation meeting” alluded to. But the laughter impulse was a mere muscular contortion, and the annoyance killed it dead before he found wordsto comment on the charge. The accusation was grotesque—with the criminal’s antecedents, what else could they have expected?—but the peep given by it into her mind and its furniture hurt him all the same. The whole business, with its unnecessary parade and fuss, was a storm in a tea-cup, and yet it might have far-reaching consequences for the poor little culprit, and it was he that would have brought them on her. He knew that he ought to express abhorrence at the offence committed, and that the article which issued from the warehouse of his jaded mind was not the one expected.
“It is I that am to blame,” he said, a sharp self-reproach piercing through the natural languor of his tones. “I ought not to have introduced her to them; she had no wish for it.”
“She need not fear a repetition of the experience,” returned Camilla, folding her arms in that wrapper which she had assumed, having snatched ten minutes from the bare half-hour which she dedicated to dressing for dinner, in order to make an irruption with her Evangel into her husband’s quarters.
To Edward’s eye and mind that snuff-colouredpeignoirhad something in common with the judge’s black cap. His wife seemed always to assume it when she pronounced sentence of death. Was she going to pronounce one now? If there was any chance of averting it, that chance would not lie in the direction of a too eager partisanship on his own part.
“You must remember,” he said with a coolgentleness of reminder, “that when you undertook this task you braced yourself to the making of discoveries that would more surprise than please you.”
“That is true,” she answered after a moment’s reflection. “If you had asked me, I should have told you that I was prepared for anything—bad habits, objectionable phrases, idleness, ignorance—her ignorance isstupendous.”
“I am sure it is.”
“I put her through a few elementary questions upon English history this morning. There were not many facts that she was sure of, but she was quite sure that King Richard II. had married Philippa of Hainault. I tried to explain to her that in the fourteenth century men did not marry their grandmothers, although it has become a very common practice to-day.”
The shaft went home, as it was intended. What had he done to deserve it? Did she suspect him of an intention, by servile acquiescence in her subsidiary charges, to lead her away from the main point at issue?
“But that is not the question now. What we are primarily concerned with—what was the object of Mrs. Aylmer’s visit—is to prevent a person for whom we have made ourselves answerable from spreading the infection of her own corruption to healthier households.”
The husband and wife were standing opposite to each other, but in their respective grace and ungrace, still in morning dress; a trivial irritation with her for making him late for dinnerforming the warp of that annoyance of which her communication was the woof.
“Don’t you think that the whole thing is grossly exaggerated?” he asked with an accent where a lifelong habit of courtesy proved its value by helping him to an apparently quite good-tempered air of deference—“the pompous embassy, the inconsiderate breaking of your rules. No!”—recapitulation of his friend’s errors against good taste leavening the “sweet reasonableness” of his words with a perceptible indignation. “The whole way of setting about it was wrong, and not what I should have expected of an old friend like Mrs. Aylmer.”
“She was perfectly right,” rejoined Camilla, standing bolt upright under an electric burner, which made her look taller and scraggier than usual. “If a woman is granted the inestimable blessing of children, her first duty is to them, and besides——”
She paused. Should she tell him, as it was on the edge of her lips to do, what was the strict truth, that both the original idea of the indictment against Bonnybell and the vigour to carry it out had belonged to Catherine Aylmer and not to her mother? Should she or should she not? The neighbourhood was right. Catherine Aylmer would have made Edward a fit and congenial wife in the event of her own death, and Camilla was aware that her life was not a good one. The girl might still fill that office. Why, then, should the present tenant say anything calculated to prejudice Edward against her?
“Besides what?”
Mrs. Tancred had no powers of inventing, nor wish to invent, an altered utterance.
“I have thought better of what I was going to add,” she answered.
Silence followed. He had forgotten that she was making him late for dinner. All desire to check the flow of her communication had ceased, replaced by an awful curiosity for details.
“I suppose that they did not meet?”
“You are mistaken there; it was only fair to her that she should be confronted with them.”
The hearer hoped that the slight shudder he could not repress at the idea of this display of equity escaped detection.
“What happened?”
“Oh, she came bounding in, so delighted to see them. I explained to her at once that she had no great cause for elation at this visit. They must have felt rather like fools under her demonstration; they certainly looked it.” She stopped with a fierceish smile, as if the memory of her friend’s discomfiture were not at all disagreeable to her.
The picture rose in sharpest realism before Edward’s vision. The lovely little gay gladness coming frisking in, and its reception!
“And—and how did Miss Ransome take it?”
“She made no attempt to deny the charge.” After a moment, “Her excuse, if it can be called one, was that she had supposed every one to be acquainted with the ugly story. Perhaps every one is!” Another slight pause. “To do herjustice, I do not think that she had any glimmering of a suspicion that there was any difference between ‘decent’ and ‘indecent’ in conduct or conversation.”
He bit his lip; protestation or extenuation would be fatal, and he attempted neither.
“And then?”
“Then—why, then they went. I do not think I ever saw people in quite such a hurry to be off.”
Again her tom-cat smile reappeared, and she went off wearing it, when she at length left him to his belated toilet.
“You have heard, I suppose?”
“Heard what?”
It was disingenuous of Edward to pretend ignorance of the subject of Bonnybell’s question, but though guiltily conscious of an acute curiosity as to the criminal’s version of the story, a grave doubt as to whether it would not be the wiser course to let such sleeping dogs lie, drove him into as much prevarication as was implied by his “Heard what?”
“If you have not heard, I think it would be a relief to me to tell you, if you would allow me.”
“Oh, but Ihaveheard!” he answered rather precipitately, uncomfortably aware that he was giving himself away by admitting knowledge of what he had a moment ago feigned ignorance of.
The scene was the morning-room after dinner on the same day. From that dinner Camilla had been summoned away by a messenger of ill fromthe village. She had left that small and rigidly plain portion of her own excellent food which she ever allowed herself without hesitation or regret, and was still absent, now that the tea-table was being placed in its usual position. Edward had not long rejoined his guest, who was sitting rather out of sight behind a screen, from beyond which her voice came low and plaintive. The few glances at her that he had allowed himself during dinner had told him—or he thought so—that her eyelids were a little reddened, though not to the extent of disfigurement. “I am one of the few people who can cry becomingly,” was her own dispassionate dictum, “and it will be disarming to look as if I had wept, and I am sure”—the waif feeling returning in some strength—“it will come easily enough; no one can ever have had better reason to do it.”
“I was silly enough to hope I had made a good impression.”
“I, too, quite thought so,” he answered mournfully, touched by the gentle humility of her confession of mistake.
“I dare say I should have continued in my fool’s paradise if Miss Aylmer had not persuaded her mother to come and complain of me.”
Bonnybell had not the generosity of Camilla, and the immediate effect of her words upon Miss Aylmer’s ally and supposed admirer filled her with a sincere and tranquil joy.
“Miss Aylmer!” he echoed with an unmistakable start. “Catherine Aylmer! Oh, you surely must be mistaken.”
For answer, he saw a lovely little dusky head shaking itself sadly from its seclusion.
“She was perfectly right—oh, do not think I am blaming her!—quite,quiteright, if she thought I was doing her sister harm; but oh, it is all such a differentmilieufrom what I have been used to! If you knew, if you could only guess, how utterly at sea I feel among you all.”
There was something in the forlorn and well-justified pathos in her tone that might have melted a harder heart, and affected a nature less sensitive to others’ sufferings than Edward’s. He rose out of the armchair into which he had tiredly let himself down on his first entrance, as if seeking relief from his emotion in a change of posture. (“Good Heavens!” thought she, “I have overdone it. I have been too affecting. I thought I was safe with him. One is never safe.”) But he only went and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the garlands and grouped figures of the Adams chimney-piece, and took a coat-tail pensively under each arm.
“I am afraid that it was inevitable at first,” he said at length with a faltering reassurance in his voice. “The plunge was too sudden; but things will right themselves in time, don’t you think?”
His manner was always tentative, and he had never in his life felt less sure of the truth of any proposition than of the one he was now advancing.
“Do you really think so?” she asked, once more relieved and astonished that her new fears of his harbouring purposes of enterprise were asbaseless as her former ones. She added hesitatingly. “You could help me a good deal if you would.”
“I!”
“If—when you saw that I was going to make one of my blunders, you would make some sign to me to stop.”
His head was bent a little. It gave her the opportunity to notice how thickly and with what a pretty tendency to curl at the ends his hair clothed its crown. Her proposition had not the effect of lifting it.
“I do not quite see how that can be managed,” he answered in a key whose reluctance to disappoint her and an indubitable disapproval of her project strove for mastery.
“We could agree beforehand upon a little code of signals,” she went on, pushing aside the screen that had hitherto partly hidden her in the eagerness of persuasion. “If you passed your hand across your forehead, it would mean ‘Stop at once.’ If you pulled out your shirtcuff, it would mean ‘Make your sentence end in some different way from what you are going to.’”
Still his eyes did not lift themselves, nor did he give any sign of acquiescence. An uncomfortable sense of the horrible glibness—speaking of long use of such methods—with which she developed her little underhand plan was very present to him.
“I am afraid I do not quite like the idea.”
“Don’t you?” she answered humbly and sadly. “Then I am sure it is not a good one, butif you do not consent to help me in some way—to give me some sort of rule to guide me—I shall always be getting into fresh disgrace with Mrs. Tancred; and—old people are so very easily shocked.”
He lifted the head whose well-furnished top she had been admiring now, and looked at her with a disapproval which, if gentle, was very unmistakable.
“I think, if you do not mind, that I had rather you did not speak of my wife quite like that.”
Her heart sank, and the flustered desire to repair her error led her into a far graver one.
“Now I have made an enemy of you too,” she said, “and Heaven knows that is the last thing I wish to do; but—but she looked so much more like your mother.”
Miss Ransome had touched therawof her host’s whole life.
Ofthe three denizens of Stillington its owner took by far the easiest mind to bed with her. She had accepted the presence of Bonnybell, with all its attendant ills, in the same spirit as she would have accepted the loss of her fortune, an infidelity of Edward’s, or some dire blain or boil upon her own body. Bonnybell had been sent here by the same Unerring Wisdom that would have sent her any of the other possible afflictions, and she had only to adjust her back to the burden.
Miss Ransome had no such consciousness to support her as, with an inexpressible yearning for the soothing properties of tobacco, she sat in the huge chintz chair by her bedroom fire, taking stock of her errors, and their probable consequences.
“I shall bring him round in time, I suppose,” she reflected. “But what a surprise! Who would have thought he would have taken up the cudgels for his old lady’s juvenility so violently? Violent is not the word. I should not think he could ever be violent; and yet those lackadaisical eyes gave a fine flash when I suggested that she wasnot quite a slip of a girl! I must pretend for the future that she looks sixteen, or”—more shrewdly—“I had better not meddle with the subject again at all to him.” A lugubrious stare into the fire, with inky hair still unbuilt for the night, and hands clasped round slender lace-and-satin-clad knees. (Bonnybell’speignoirwould not own Camilla’s, even as a poor relation.) “After all, I believe the old camel will prove the easier of the two to get round. I did not half dislike her when she stood glowering over me as I grovelled on the floor, and told me I should have a chance—it will be an uncommonly disagreeable chance”—with a backward glance thrown by memory at her hours of evaded study in the dull schoolroom, ending in the grisly ordeal of confrontation with her accusers—“but such as it is, I must hold on to it until something better turns up.”
When will that be? Not, certainly, on the morrow of her exposure; that brought only a dictation lesson, which threw Röntgen rays of unexampled brutality upon her orthography; brought also a bluntly worded inquiry from Camilla, in allusion to a slight tinting which her late paling experiences had made seem admissible, as to whether she had “forgotten to wash her face?” A still less delicately worded hope followed, in answer to Miss Ransome’s explanation that the wind must have caught her cheeks, a caustic hope that the “zephyr” in question might remain prisoned in its cave during her stay in her present quarters. A further piece of advice to commit it to the flames with the least possibledelay displayed the discourtesy of an entire disbelief in Miss Ransome’s interpretation of her heightened roses.
The charge and its feeble parry took place in Edward’s presence; but he did not attempt the smallest share in the engagement. Not a rustle of the paper he was reading; not the least fidgeting on his chair, not an eye-glance nor a lip-biting gave evidence of any inward protest against the “baiting” that was being undergone by one whom he had yesterday seemed inclined to shield and pity. Throughout the day—or rather throughout that small part of it when he was at home and in her presence—he treated her with a perfect but distant courtesy, and so through the next and the next.
“Oh, how careful one ought to be!” she sighed to herself ruefully. “One would have thought that the one perfectly safe thing to do was to laugh at a wife to a husband, or at a husband to a wife, but in this dreadful place there are no rules, only exceptions!”
When the third day showed no sign of a relaxation of her host’s gentle austerity, Miss Ransome grew desperate. She was returning in drag-footed boredom from a walk in the shrubberies to the extreme end of which she had been lured by the distant sound of guns. It was unlikely that the park should be shot in its master’s absence; but triggers were being pulled somewhere within hearing, and one of them might be by Toby! It was on neutral ground alone that she could now have a chance of pursuing thatchase which she was so loth to abandon. It was possible that if she walked far enough into the park in the direction of the Dower House, she might intercept him on his homeward way. Her intention to make the attempt held out while she followed a long walk that wound with the slow midland rivulet, that it was long ago cut to accompany on its sluggish course through the pleasure-grounds, until a little bridge across the stream, and a rustic gate on its further side giving access to a copse that led into the Park, were reached. But, having attained this point, her resolution failed. The light was thickening. Some one had told her that this was the season when the stags—heard even from here belling loudly—were dangerous to meet. Even the very off-chance of being rescued by Toby from hoofs and antlers made it scarcely worth while to incur the probability of being tossed by the one and trampled by the other. She turned sadly away, wafting a sigh in the direction of the renounced prize, and breathing the silent, pensive ejaculation, “Oh, you great lout, if you only knew what was good for you!”
She retraced her steps through the humid gloom of the laurels, and by the dimming, dull water. Near the house—but not very near—just where two giant cedars stood on each side of the path, making twilight into midnight beneath their shade, she met Edward.
“You thought I was lost!” cried her little voice in trepidating pleasure. “You came to look for me! Howmorethan kind!”
“I am afraid that I did not even know you were out,” he answered, stepping hastily out of the patch of darkness and throwing away the end—or a good deal more than the end—of his cigarette. Both actions seemed to her unnecessary and undesirable. She commented only upon the last.
“Please don’t!” she pleaded eagerly. “You know that I was brought up upon cigarettes—I mean, of course, upon their smell. You do not know how I love it!”
TheHeimwehin her tone shocked and startled him.Heimweh!Good Heavens, for what aHeim!
“Do not walk quite so fast,” she said, entreatingly. “I want, if you will let me, to get right with you. I know that I have been all wrong since Sunday.”
He slackened his pace—as what else could he do, so besought?—but it was with an unwillingness that she divined through his civil acquiescence; and he did not answer quite immediately. To deny that she had been “wrong with him” since Sunday would be to take a leaf out of that Liar’s Book, of which he had already begun to be afraid that she was a steady peruser; to assent would be certain to be followed by a re-opening of thecasus belli, and there was nothing in the world that he wished less. To refuse to listen to the explanation, which it was but too evident that she had invented and was bent on uttering, would be to give it importance. He tried to carry the thing off lightly.
“My memory refuses to go back as far as Sunday. This is Thursday. Let us start a new reckoning from to-day.”
But Bonnybell was not to be put off. She got a little nearer to him, partly in real anxiety, partly because she reckoned upon her face as her best ally in the work of propitiation, and in this scant light proximity was indispensable for him to feel its value.
“You were quite under a misapprehension the other night, when you were so displeased with me,” she began, with rapid deprecation. “Is it likely that, friendless as I am, I should want to alienate my best—a—a—well-wisher?” (She had hesitated over the last word, as if her humility had replaced by it the more presuming “friend.”) “I never meant to say or imply that Mrs. Tancred was really old.” (Oh, Miss Ransome!) “Fifty! what is fifty nowadays? Many women of fifty do not look a day over five-and-thirty. With a little touching up, Mrs. Tancred would not look a day over thirty.”
He would give his ears to stop her. There seemed to him something at once shocking and ludicrous, firstly in her brazen mendacity, and secondly in the indelicacy of her determination to discuss his wife; but she ran on so fast in the eagerness of self-exculpation that he could not find a chink in which to put a protest.
“What I meant to say was that Mrs. Tancredintendedto look old, that it was aparti-prisin her case. I thought it must be so by the way she scratches her hair off her forehead.”
But here, chink or no chink, he broke in. “Stop!” he said, authoritatively, “I must beg of you to change the subject.”
Through the damp mistiness she looked up at him, snubbed and frightened, her pomegranate-flower lips apart, and with the stream of explanatory eloquence that had been issuing from them frozen at its source.
“I see that I am making bad worse,” she said presently, her glibness fled, and in a very crestfallen little pipe.
He could not command himself to speak again yet; still sorely angry and chafed, yet with a half-relenting feeling that he had been too harsh to this wicked little waif that had been tossed on his shore.
“I am a very great trial to you both,” presently came sighingly in his direction—sighingly, and he half-suspected showerily too; “but it is far worse for Mrs. Tancred than for you.”
“Worse for Mrs. Tancred than for me!” repeated he, echoing her words in a tone of alarm.
Was she going to be guilty of some new monstrosity against good taste? Was she going to force him to a fresh rebuke? This latter was perhaps the most urgent form that his fear took. But her next words reassured him.
“Yes, because she has to see so much more of me than you have.Youare away all day, and need never cast a thought towards me between sunrise and sunset, but I am always before her eyes, shocking her every time that I open mymouth by my gross ignorance, or by saying something impossible without knowing it; and now that she has undertaken my education——”
She paused dramatically. A wholesome and welcome inclination to laugh came over him, but he checked it; he must not allow himself to decline into triviality, or she might at once resume her terrible confidentialness.
“It is not that I am notmostanxious to learn. Oh, do not misunderstand me on that point! I have had enough of misunderstandings the last three dreadful days.”
Through the dusk he could see that her little black orphaned hands were tightly clasping each other, but he did not know that their anxious grip was a matter of calculation, nor that the penitent before him was saying to herself, “I am really very touching. The odd thing is that I am rather touched myself too.”
“If I thought I should ever do her any credit,” she continued, inserting a slight quaver into her tone; “but I have no natural aptitude for learning, and I am beginning so late. I cannot bear to think of what uphill work it will be for her.”
“That is an aspect of the question that will never present itself to her,” replied he, with what might be a shade of dryness in his voice; and the anxious Bonnybell divined that she was not even yet quite on the right tack.
(“I am overdoing it; I must not be too angelic. He is beginning to suspect that I embroider a little.”)
“Perhaps it was one word for Mrs. Tancred and two for myself”—allowing a tinge of self-rallying playfulness to creep into her words. “Perhaps I am only a born dunce, and want an excuse for remaining one.”
The unvarnished truth of her last sentence did her far more service with her hearer, as she in a moment felt, than the high varnish of her preceding ones.
“There are worse things in life than a dunce,” he answered, in a tone of unmistakable indulgence, and for which he contemned himself.
“Then we are friends again,” rejoined she, softly sliding out, with carefully studied impulsiveness, four little humble fingers and a hesitating thumb to meet his clasp.
“Yes,” he answered, accepting her hand with a frank comradeship, in which even her expert palm could detect no attempt at a squeeze, “by all means let us be friends; only”—with a return to his habitually tentative, non-assertive manner—“would not it be a good plan for us to remember that even in the most intimate friendships there are reticences?”
Miss Ransome’s education proceeded, despite all her struggles, with inexorable regularity. “Apace” is hardly the word to apply to its progress, since her own resolution to learn as little as possible rescued her from all danger of its course being a rapid one. It was impossible to peruse a contraband novel from across the Channel, or enjoy a ribald little Parisian journal, smuggled toher by a foreign admirer, during the whole time of her incarceration in the schoolroom, as detection must inevitably have followed upon an entire neglect of the imposed tasks. But her intelligence was quick, and she was able to assimilate enough surface knowledge of the subjects in which she would have to undergo an examination by her tormentor without absolute disgrace, and yet have a good margin of time to bestow upon “L’Enigme du Péché” andLe Petit Journal.
A discovery that her reading of her native tongue was on a par with, if not upon an even lower plane of accomplishment than her spelling, led to the imposition of acorvéemore hated by its victim, as less able to be shirked or scamped than any of its fellows. In an evil hour, it occurred to Camilla that to make her pupil read aloud the daily newspapers to herself would be the best method by which at once to discover and correct the extent of her ignorance. Through foreign intelligences, leaders, money-markets the unhappy girl ploughed with stumbles and jibs. Once a gleam of possible relief came to her.
“Would you care for me to read you the Racing intelligence?”
“You might as well read me a page of Coptic.”
“I could explain it a little to you, if you cared to hear”—with a delicate bashfulness at this proposal to reverse their respective relations and turn instructor.
Camilla brushed away the proposal as with a new-twigged besom.
“I know nothing in the world that I wish less! Read the review of the new ‘Life of Schopenhauer.’”
But if Miss Ransome was an unsuccessful and unwilling pupil, she was, as Jock soon learnt to his cost, a relentless and successful teacher. He disliked being educated almost as much as she did herself—it would be impossible to do so more—yet that perseverance on her part which, if exerted in another direction, would have made her a profound and eloquent scholar, and his own vanity, of which he had as large a share as most dogs—and that is saying a good deal—combined to enable him to reach a very high standard of unnatural accomplishments.
“If I ever get round her, it will beviâJock!” Bonnybell said to herself astutely, seeing the unwilling laughter that wrinkled the mouth of Jock’s mistress, and hearing the latent enjoyment that pierced through the superficial snub of her words.
“What a fool you are making of the dog!”
“He may not enjoy being educated, but, like me, he knows that it is good for him,” replied Bonnybell, with pretty insincerity, throwing a glance, as she delivered herself of her fib, at Edward, to see how he took it—whether with approbation of her sweet docility, or with that grain of distrust which she had uneasily surmised several times lately in his reception of her statements both as to fact and sentiment?
She could read no expression of either approvalor disapproval in his eyes; but he broke out into one of his rare laughs, as she capered off again down the long room, whirling Jock along in an ambling waltz, against which his dragging hind legs made a bored protest. There was calculation and consciousness in the childish frisking gaiety of Jock’s partner; but yet there was real young enjoyment too. One might be a little Mayfair mudlark, obliged to earn one’s bread by currying favour with one’s patrons in any way that seemed most likely to succeed; but one was only eighteen, and it took but a very little to make one’s heart feel uncommonly light.
Having landed Jock in front of his mistress, and by judicious pressure upon his stomach forced him to execute an angry bow to that lady as a finale to his performances, Miss Ransome, forsaken by her good genius, lapsed into ruinous reminiscence.
“When we were at Deauville there was a poodle at the hotel who could walk as well on his forelegs, with his hind ones in the air, as on all four. My mother was so pleased with him that she wanted to buy him; but the lady to whom he belonged—she was not quite a lady; she was with the Prince de Compiègne—would not hear of parting with him. Claire could never bear not getting what she wished; so we had a scene about it one night on the stairs.”
This interesting trait was followed by absolute silence.
“There is nothing for it but patience, I suppose!” said Mrs. Tancred, a little later, whenBonnybell, not enjoying the atmosphere which she had created, expressed herself tired and went to bed; and Edward answered, with brief acquiescence—
“I suppose not.”
A weekhad elapsed, and a morning came on which Edward set off for London accompanied by his wife, instead of, as usual, alone! The result was obvious: freedom—temporary, indeed! but still freedom for Miss Ransome. But of what use was that noblest of God’s gifts to one who had no means of employing it?
“Don’t get into mischief if you can help it,” was Camilla’s parting benediction; and the smiling humility of Bonnybell’s “I will try not,” took an ambiguous meaning as she turned it over afterwards in the leisure and liberty of her own mind. “Try not to get into mischief?” or “Try not to help getting into mischief? How can I help helping? What mischief could I get into if I tried?”
This problem set her pondering. If she were to borrow Camilla’s cutting-out scissors from her work-basket, she might cut snips in the canvases of those dismalprimitifs. If she were to employ the aid of a poker, she might break the nose of the young Augustus coldly glimmering at her from his pedestal in the centre of the little circular vestibule at the stairs’ foot. But in neitherof these, nor in any analogous crimes, would there be much point nor any enjoyment.
In her total destitution of all opportunities for evil, the poor young creature snatched eagerly at the one sin—though it was only a paltry one of omission—open to her; the entire neglect of the tasks assigned her by her departed tyrant. It relieved her to kick the instruments of her intended elevation and enlightenment into a corner, and when “L’Enigme du Péché”—a work whose very title would make Camilla’s straight hair break into horrified curls—was produced from its hiding-place; when the little shoes lately employed in propelling Greene, Bryce, etc., were hoisted to the top of the nursery fender, which still stood in long-unneeded precaution before the generous grate, Bonnybell’s conscience grew clear. Her power of doing wrong in her present surroundings was infinitesimal, but she had done what she could. To do what one could!—this was a standard beyond which Mrs. Tancred herself did not attempt to rise. At the ingenious perversity of this reflection, Bonnybell laughed delightedly.
She had been in the enjoyment of her illicit pleasures for an hour and a half, and had begun to suspect that the solution of the “Enigma” would form aplattoo highly spiced for even her seasoned palate, when the door opened. She whisked her feet down from their dizzy height and sat up, to find a salver, a note, and a footman at her elbow.
“Any answer?” she asked, taking the note and looking at its superscription curiously. Thehandwriting was at once familiar and unfamiliar; known, but not lately known.
“The chauffeur wished to know how soon you would like the motor to come round?”
“The chauffeur? The motor?” repeated she, staring; then, bethinking herself that the best way to solve this new enigma would be the same as that which she had been employing on the other, she tore open the envelope and read—