“It is the want of trust,” she sighed, her head bowed on her chest, and one brilliant tear deftly shaken off on to her muff—“the absolute want of trust, that is what does the mischief.”
“Have you given me much cause to trust you?” he asked sadly.
To this question she found it not convenient to respond directly, but she resumed her melancholy rhetoric.
“It is the readiness to believe evil of one, to put the worst construction upon one’s words and actions, that takes the heart out of one’s efforts to do right.”
There was silence for a minute, while they still speeded homewards under the quiet trees that detached loose leaves to drop on their heads, and while a painful conflict raged in Edward’s mind. Was she speaking truth? It was just possible; as long as the music of her breaking voice was falling on his ear it was even probable.
“If I have wronged you by my accusation,” he said in a voice as unlike his usual air as her own, “I do not know any penance that I can doheavy enough to wipe out the insult. If I have wronged you, can you ever forgive me?”
“As I hope to be forgiven!” she answered, lifting a little saintly wet face to heaven. It was a tag strayed out of some tale or rhyme which came blessedly to her aid at the moment she most needed it.
It was not till some time after he had left her, and the emotion caused by her angelic unresentingness had somewhat subsided, that Mr. Tancred remembered that his young guest had given him no explanation which could by any means be made to hold water of the equivocal situation in which he had found her.
Itwas impossible that such an experience, or group of experiences, should not leave traces on the complexion; yet it had to be left to its fate, Camilla’s eye for paint being as the nose of the truffle dog for truffles. Nor, if the cause of her pallor were inquired into, would Miss Ransome have the harbour of invention to steer her dismasted vessel into. Invention, however harmless, had in her present circumstances, standing at the bar of Edward’s judgment, to be shunned like the plague. But Camilla’s questions were fortunately diverted to her husband rather than her guest.
“You went to the Dower House?”
“Yes.”
“I am glad.”
A pause long enough for Bonnybell to say to herself that Edward had begun by jibbing at the attention to her foes alluded to.
“Did you see them all?”
“All but Toby; he was out.”
“Were they well?”
“Catherine had a bad cold.”
“The result of a pneumonia blouse, I suppose! As long as girls strip themselves naked in Januarythey cannot be surprised at their chests and lungs resenting it.”
“Certainly not.”
“The following such a fashion is the solitary lapse from common sense I have ever detected in Catherine.”
Theamendewas honourable, and in consonance, as Edward felt, with Camilla’s principles, and the line she had adopted with regard to the woman whom she contemplated as her probable successor.
“Did they tell you any news?”
The question was unlike Camilla, habitually severe upon gossip and incurious of her neighbours’ affairs. It was evidently born of that Sunday serenity of mind which made her wish to keep up the cheerful trickle of family talk which her own grim paucity of words and severity of aspect quenched.
Edward hesitated for a moment, and Bonnybell gasped. Too well was she acquainted with the piece of news communicated to Mr. Tancred by his friend with the cold in her head, or more probably by that mother whom she had before utilized as a cat’s-paw.
“News? Did they? Oh yes, by-the-by, they told me that Lady Tennington is leaving Tennington at once. She has had such heavy losses at bridge lately that she wants to let it on a long lease.”
“I wish her sincerely success.”
That dry comment closed the subject, and dinner passed without any nearer approach to peril.
But it was a wakeful Miss Ransome who surveyed that night, from a bed where sleep was for a long time not even sought, the dangers of the past and the perplexities of the future. Thankfulness, deep and pure, at the tidings conveyed at dinner by Edward took the first place. If Flora left the country, her abhorred guest would have no excuse remaining for frequenting it, since no other house in the neighbourhood was open to him; and not even for the pleasure of persecuting herself would Charlie face the discomforts of a country inn. What a dirty trick, and how like him, to have hershadowed! to waylay her as soon as he saw her alone and unprotected! to try to frighten her into unjustifiable promises of giving up what he knew would be the making of her, by threats and reminders! If shehadbeen compelled to promise, if Edward had not appeared in the nick of time, much she would have kept to it! She laughed among her pillows. One advantage of her enemy’s disreputability was that, whatever he said no one would believe him! But if she had not been a fool she would have consented to the other man’s urgent entreaties to be allowed to escort her as far as the bridge, to see her safely inside the pleasure-grounds. In the dread of incurring one risk she had run head foremost into another and far more serious one. Though now safe as in the heart of a cloister, a shiver of disgusted fear at the remembrance of that hated rencounter ran over her.
Well, “All’s well that ends well.” Of course, it—the other thing—must come out now. Shewould have preferred that the announcement, with its attendant clamour—she gave an anticipatory chuckle of enjoyment at the thought of the Dower House faces, as she had last seen them, sitting in awful judgment upon her—should have followed, instead of preceding, Charlie’s departure from the neighbourhood. But, of course, it must come out now. Edward had behaved well on the whole, but he had not pretended to believe her cock-and-bull story.
“If I had had time, I could have made up a better one. Time is everything,” she reflected regretfully. “Charlie said one true thing. I shall be bored to death! Bored will not be the word for it! And how I hate being kissed! If I could only persuade him that I am so excessively modest that I cannot bear it just yet! The diamonds! I wonder, are they really fine, or only the usual sort of thing? The stones in the ring were good, but they are frightfully set.” Here she fell asleep.
It was on her return next day from a perfectly legitimate and safe constitutional within the limits of the garden that Miss Ransome was met by the announcement that Mr. Tancred would be glad to speak to her in the library. With no preliminary preening of her feathers, she followed the servant’s lead. Her heart rather dumped down, not from fear of the unknown, since she knew pretty well what was coming, but from a failure of exhilaration at the prospect.
Edward was standing, his graceful heightseeming to be even better in keeping with the grave stateliness of the room, warmly red and brown with book-backs gently redolent of Russia leather, than usual, when contrasted with the rather fleshy and extremely agitated young man beside him.
“I have taken the liberty of sending for you,” Tancred said, addressing Bonnybell with a cold perfection of politeness, “because Mr. Aylmer tells me that you have authorized him to give me a piece of news about you.”
Miss Ransome’s only immediate answer was to direct her beautiful eyes successively towards the faces of the two men who confronted her. Happily the thought behind them could not be read upon those pupils: “If it must be, I wish it could have been the other one.”
“It has rather taken me by surprise, as I did not know that you were acquainted.”
The tone in which the implied reproach was conveyed was of the gentlest, yet it bent the head of one of the culprits in a not wholly calculated expression of shame on her breast. It drove the other into blurted speech.
“The fault was entirely mine. Our first meeting in the park was purely accidental, wasn’t it?”
“Purely,” replied she, still keeping her head down, and wondering whether, considering the very minute instructions as to the direction of her walks, instilled into her by him at Tennington, her suitor could possibly be such a fool as to believe what he said.
“And after that—after that”—floundering a little, but still stout in defence of a cause of whose badness even he must be aware, “she was afraid of my people. No wonder, after the way they had treated her!”
At that she lifted an eye-beam of meek gratitude towards her advocate’s face, but it ended its journey on the other’s.
“If you had taken my wife and me into your confidence we might have helped you a little.”
Behind the perfect restraint and courtesy of his words, Bonnybell detected the profundity of his contempt for her methods. Had they been alone she would have tried to cajole him into a more lenient view of her, but the presence of that stodgy pillar of defence—beefywas, to speak truth, the epithet that his love internally applied to him—which would henceforth for ever be interposed between her and all assailants, kept her silent.
Edward had by this time turned away from her—she looked upon the action as typical—and was directing a grave question to the scarlet Toby.
“You have not yet told your people?”
“Why should I? I am absolutely independent of my father. I owe none of them anything after the way in which they behaved toher.”
The red god of war spoke through his sullen voice, and Miss Ransome saw and grasped her opportunity.
“Whatever else happens to me, do not let me be a cause of quarrel between you and yours,” she said angelically. “If I thought I was goingto be a firebrand I would run away and hide myself somewhere where no one would find me.”
Then she pulled herself up. “I must not be melodramatic, he would see through it in a moment.” Thehedid not refer to her future husband. Her inspiration took a wiser form. Going up to herfiancé, and laying her hand on his shoulder, she said with a calculated impulsiveness that had yet the curious one grain of truth in it which her lies, spoken and acted, so often held—
“Ask them just to tolerate me. I do not expect them to like me. Poor things, it would be too much to hope”—the corners of her mouth twitching with irresistible, if rather nervous, and happily not evident mirth at the picture that rose before her quick brain, of the imminent announcement and its effect—“but if they would give me just a chance! Every one has a right to ask to be given a chance.”
Of the two pairs of eyes towards which her own rolled in a lovely candour of appeal, one met her glance with a besotted ecstasy of approbation. The other pair fell. Oh, if she could only get Toby out of the room, out of the house! Her situation between the two men was fast becoming intolerable to her. If only Toby was out of sight and hearing, she could manage Edward so far better. And the contrast between their appearances was getting on her nerves.
“Go,” she said with a charming air of self-denying insistence, “go at once. I can’t bear you to delay a moment. Whatever they mayhave done to me—and indeed,indeedyou exaggerate—your first duty must always be tothem.”
Metaphorically she pushed him out, entirely ignoring his distressed signals to her to accompany him to the hall door, on the very off-chance of snatching a moment of that privacy which was the last thing she desired. Her manœuvre did not at first seem to have achieved a particularly pleasant result.
“It was not Mr. Aylmer, I think, to whom you were talking in the park last night?”
“Have you been asking him?”
A certain scorn in his eyes at once set her mind at rest on the point, and made her sharply repent of the tell-tale rush of her question.
“If it was not Mr. Aylmer——”
“Why do you call him Mr. Aylmer? I thought to you he was always Toby.”
“If it was not he, who was it?”
“I thought I explained to you that I did not know. I took him for a tramp, but you said that he couldn’t be one, because he wore something—what was it?—that tramps do not wear. I suppose I was too frightened to notice. Anyhow, he was not anybody whom I had ever seen before.” She was lying with inartistic redundancy, and, she also felt, in vain.
“You must have lived with very credulous people,” he said slowly, the contempt in his tone veiled a little by courtesy, and tempered with pity, and so turned towards the door. She fled to intercept him.
“Are you going to tell Mrs. Tancred?”
“No, I think it will be better that you should give her your own version.”
She threw all that she knew of entreaty into her voice.
“Will you let me give it to you first?”
He hesitated. What a walking lie she was! The black gown that she wore proclaimed an entirely non-existent grief. But, on the other hand, what a very,veryjuvenile offender she looked! Would it be indulging a culpable curiosity, would it be leading her into fresh falsehoods, to hear by what ingenuity she could gloss over and whiten her abominable behaviour? She saw the momentary weakness of doubt, and plunged.
“You know that our first meeting was purely accidental?”
“Toby told me so.” The return to the familiar nickname was balm to her.
“I had just lost Jock, and he helped me to find him. It was allen règle. He had been presented to me that day—at Tennington.”
Edward did not in the least believe in the accidental meeting, though he did believe that the direct and truthful Toby had been the dupe of its fortuitous character, but all he said was—
“And then?”
“Then—we met again—perhaps not quite so accidentally. I would not let him come here, as he wanted me. I knew that Mrs. Tancred would think it her duty—as, of course, it would have been—to warn Mrs. Aylmer, and the whole thing would have beenblued!”
There was a silence. He saw it all. For once she was speaking truth. The poor little waif, seeing the goal of toilettes, diamonds, automobiles ahead of her, and making for it, fighting with all her thief’s weapons of deceit and evasion to reach it before it was removed beyond her grasp. Her next sentence looked as if she had read a part of his thoughts.
“If I had been in any other position, the last thing I should have wished would be to marry. I think it a very repulsive institution.”
She said it with quiet conviction, and without the slightest suspicion of anything shocking, considering her present position, in the utterance. But it so completely tied her hearer’s tongue that she had to go on unhelped even by one of those half-doubtful yeses with which Edward had a trick of punctuating their talk.
“It was a far better provision than I had any right to expect, and it would free both of you from an incubus.”
The worldly wisdom of the first half of her sentence might have kept him still tongue-tied, but the uncertain voice and twitching lower lip that set off the last half drove him, as she knew it would, into speech. (“I must bring home to himwhatan orphan I am, but I must not cry yet.”) She winked away a real tear.
“Is it possible,” he said, holding back with difficulty, as she triumphantly and yet tremblingly saw, the expression of an emotion far deeper than she had any suspicion of having been able to evoke—“is it possible that you have run your headinto the noose because you have fancied yourself an unwelcome visitor here? How have we shown it? By what shameful lapse from courtesy and hospitality in us have you gathered such an idea?”
She put up her hands over her ears, hands whose affecting black Suèdeness gave no hint of Toby’s diamonds.
“I will not let you say such things!” she said with something nearing a little cry; “you who have been so astonishingly good to me. Even when you made me feel a little out in the cold of late, I know it was because you thought I deserved it; you did it for my good; but”—dropping her large white eyelids and making them quiver a little—“though I am not very clever, I could not suppose that you kept me here because I was a pleasure to you.”
Her words, though soft as a baby-zephyr in their gentle implication that his coldness, his Pharisaic want of charity in interpreting her, his inability to see things from her poor little point of view, had driven her to her present precipice seemed to hit him a blow full in the chest.
“If what you have done is owing to an extraordinary misapprehension,” he said in a penetrating low voice, “it is not yet too late to——”
But she did not let him finish his sentence, breaking in in real panic. “Good heavens! how I have overdone it! He is quite capable of sacking my Toby under the impression that he is delivering me.”
“Oh, you mistake me,” she cried with a bewitching gesture of irritation at herself for having so ill conveyed her meaning. “Though I dislike the idea of marriage—I have seen such unhappy marriages—yet I am quite incapable of accepting him from mercenary motives; he is far too fine a character.”
Then Miss Ransome pulled up rather abruptly, conscious of having struck a false note. (“I am on the wrong tack again. Toby has no more a fine character than I have.”) She took up her parable in another key.
“He will be very kind to me, and he can make excellent settlements. His father’s property must come to him, as it is entailed, and he can make ducks-and-drakes of the estate he inherited from his cousin. He told me yesterday that it could all be settled on me and the younger children.”
Was she quite on the right tack, even now? Did she hear a low gasp from Edward at the revelation of the delicate choice of topics discussed between Miss Ransome and her lover? Probably not, or she would not have added the rider which presently followed, uttered with nonchalant matter-of-factness.
“That is to say, if thereareany younger children!”
Afterall, Edward was better than his word, doing what he had at first wisely declined to do, “breaking” the news to Camilla, and receiving on his own devoted head the first rush, the deadliest Levin bolts of the thunderstorm of her wrath. The skirt of the deluge was quite enough for poor Miss Ransome. The interview opened with an amenity which gave the keynote.
“Had a scullery-maid in my service,” Mrs. Tancred said, framing each word with such slow care, as if she feared even one of her pearls of speech should be lost—“had a scullery-maid in my service conducted her courtship in the way you have, I should have made my housekeeper dismiss her at once without a character.”
No etiquette book or guide to polite conversation having provided a suitable reply to such an address, Miss Ransome took it in acquiescent silence, not attempting to put up the umbrella of any useless palliative against the hurricane.
“It would be a mockery to hope that any blessing could attend a marriage resulting from an acquaintance so disgracefully made and scandalously cultivated. It is a gratifying reflectionfor me that it is I who have brought such a calamity upon my friends! I pity them; I pity him, poor deluded fool, from the bottom of my heart.”
It was in vain for the young creature so agreeably apostrophized to hug her favourite maxim that “hard words break no bones.” It began at this point to escape from her rather convulsive embrace. Two salt drops hung unshed on the lengthy eyelashes—one of her most uncommon beauties—of her lower lids.
“Do not you pitymea little too?” she said with half a sob.
“You!”
The lightning must have struck her that time. She felt as if she were black all down one side. The tears dried up on her lids.
“I had only just begun to lessen your and Mr. Tancred’s dislike for me,” she said, not as if in complaint, but with humble acquiescence in an accepted fact; “and now I have to face a whole hostile family, all of whom dislike and disapprove me more than even you can do!”
Nothing could be less civil than the “That would be difficult!” here interjected; but Miss Ransome had a closer acquaintance with her judge’s character than when once before she had stood a criminal at that judge’s awful bar, and an instinct telling her that the rudeness of the ejaculation possibly had its rise in the suspicion of a temptation to leniency under her own disarming oratory, encouraged her to proceed.
“Don’t you think I am to be pitied for knowing that, if I were to search high and low, I could never in the whole length and breadth of the land find a family who would be ready to welcome me into it?”
“They would certainly be very oddly constituted if they were.”
The comment was even more stinging than its predecessor; yet Bonnybell’s fine ear detected a little uncertainty in its brutality.
“Yes,” she answered, with a little ring of miserable humiliation in her tone, “you are right. Wherever I go, I must force myself; nobody in their senses would hold open their arms tome.”
That night Miss Ransome begged to be excused from appearing at dinner, not unwilling that it should be known that her eyes were too extinguished with crying for her to be decently visible; and, as she reflected, “When you are in disgrace aconsomméand the wing of a pheasant are better enjoyed beside your dressing-room fire than under the eyes of your exasperated patrons.”
The husband and wife faced each other in the gravity of their originaltête-à-tête. Only such a thin rivulet of remarks irrigated the drought of their silence as saved them from provoking among their servants the comment that they must have had a “row.” Facing the Spartan abstinence of his companion, Edward was compelled to eat almost entirely alone, and even hehad to force an appetite. When the men had finally retired—
“I suppose that you were”—he paused to reject one adjective and pick another—“rather severe to her?”
“I told her the truth.”
“Yes?”
“Do you wish to hear the exact words I used?”
“If you do not mind.”
“I told her that if a scullery-maid in my employment had behaved as she had done, I should have had her discharged on the spot without a character.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks? What for?”
“For gratifying my idle curiosity.”
To himself he said, “How inconceivably barbarous women are to one another!” and the thought was coupled with an ignoble wonder, which had often assailed him in the earlier days of their wedded life, as to whether there was any end at all to Camilla’s forehead, or whether it had really gone to look for the back of her head? But his voice was well under control before he asked—
“And she? How did she take it?”
“How did she take it?” repeated his wife, with a sombre wrath in her tone that testified to the intensity of the annoyance that the transaction discussed had caused her. “How does she always take slaps in the face? With turned-up eyes and turned-down mouth, and a Sainte Nitouche air thatwould almost convince one in the teeth of one’s senses that she was the innocent lamb and one’s self the butcher.”
“Did she give any explanation—make any palliating statement?”
The question was inspired, not by the idle curiosity of which Edward had accused himself, but by the forlorn hope that, since she was presumably making a clean breast of it, Miss Ransome might have added to her confession an explanation of the still uncleared-up mystery of her meeting in the park with that other person, whose moonlit outline had worn such an ominous resemblance to Colonel Landon’s.
“Explanation! Not she; she was far too shrewd. No, her line was an appeal to the feelings. She addressed herself to the wrong quarter forthat!”—with a short laugh of scorn.
Edward’s was naturally a questioning spirit, and he was still asking himself whether, after all, Miss Ransome’s gunshadbeen so ill laid and pointed when Camilla spoke again.
“It is criminal to rejoice in one’s friends’ calamities, more especially when one has brought those calamities upon them; but, at least, we are the gainers.”
“Yes.”
“We have learnt the mortifying lesson that no influences we can bring to bear have any power against hereditary depravity.”
At that something in him rose and cavilled.
“Depravity!That is scarcely the right word! There is nodepravityin an engagement tomarry between two free people, however brought about.”
Engagements to marry had always been subjects for wincing to Camilla ever since her own, and the phrase “however brought about,” though uttered without the slightestarrière-pensée, was perhaps not happily chosen. She fell silent, and later in the evening, after a prolonged pause, evidently given to painful reflection, said—
“I thought I had never seen a path more plainly indicated to me as the right one, never taken a step more unmistakably under guidance; but I now see that I was misled by that exaggerated value for physical attractions which has led me into all the gravest errors of my life.”
Edward was no coxcomb; yet it was impossible to mistake what the gravest of the grave errors of her life had, in his wife’s opinion, been.
Next morning Mrs. Tancred came down to breakfast in her bonnet.
“You are coming to London with me?” asked her husband, looking up from his coffee.
“No.”
The negative was naked, and did not seem to invite further questioning; but Mrs. Tancred presently volunteered the unasked information.
“I am going to the Dower House.”
Neither of her auditors hazarded a comment, but the sinking heart of one of them inquired of itself, “Does she mean to take me with her?” There was a pause as of Nature between two thunderbolts.
“I am going to ask pardon of my friends.” Edward was apparently run out of his stock of “yeses,” and the white face of the object of Camilla’s apologies dropped towards its heaving chest. The whiteness was partly artificial, due to an annoyed comment by the artist on her own carmines at an earlier period of the morning. (“I am incorrigibly rosy! One ought never to be pink at a crisis! I can do it so that evenwithouther spectacles she will not be able to detect it!”) “And, moreover, I wish to find out what their attitude will be towards——”
She paused before the name of Bonnybell, as before an unclean word with which she was unwilling to sully her lips. The unclean word lifted up its little pitiful voice.
“Will you ask them just to give me a chance?”
Instinct dictated to her the phrase in its undefended humility; and though the ungracious “It is no part of my mission to be your messenger!” could hardly be said to be encouraging, Miss Ransome felt that she had struck the right note. She was alone with Edward for one moment in the hall before his diurnal departure.
“How I wish you were back!” she cried in such a subdued plaint, as seemed forced out of her maiden reticence in spite of her.
“Do you?” He could only hope that the surprise he tried to throw into his words was more perceptible to her ear than the emotion that entered into them without any throwing.
“Yes, I do. I suppose that, in my dire need, I catch at straws.”
The phrase went with him through the day.
Mrs. Tancred’s absence was prolonged enough to give its cause ample time to consider her situation in every light and from every angle. The season of suspense was passed, like all ordinary mornings, in the schoolroom, but Miss Ransome gave herself a whole holiday in honour of her betrothal, and also because, as she sensibly reflected, an equipment of elegant learning would be wasted upon the mate of Toby.
“If they refuse to entertain the idea at all—and Iama pill for them”—she laughed maliciously—“and Camilla insists on my giving him up to oblige them, I suppose we shall have to be tied up at once in some hugger-mugger way at a Registry Office. Pah! how can any one marry who has any other means of subsistence? I may give up living by my wits, but I shall have Tobypour tout potagefor all eternity!”
The thought was so unexhilarating that it stemmed the current of her ruminations for a time, while she dwelt upon it, her eyes resting on the trees which masked her windows, but through which, owing to the fall of their leaves, little loopholes into the beyond had become apparent.
“It is ridiculous—deadly dull as it has been—but I believe I shall be sorry to go. One cannot enjoy the old camel’s pummellings, but I do not dislike her as much as I ought, andEdward, dear, courteous, hesitating, incredible Edward, who has never once tried to kiss me! Oh that I could say the same of Toby!”
The last and most grotesquely fervent of Miss Ransome’s aspirations was drowned in the sound of wheels, and all her being passed into her ears as she listened to hear her fate. She had not long to wait. Camilla herself—no messenger footman—opened the schoolroom door, and shut it carefully behind her.
“They will have nothing to say to me?” The just-enough-panted inquiry was accompanied with a little rush forward.
“They have no choice,” replied Camilla, dryly; “Toby is his own master.”
“I know that he is independent of his father in money matters,” rejoined Bonnybell, with an excursion into the realities of truth as injudicious as unusual, “but——”
“You would not have risked your patent-leather shoes in the park in pursuit of him if he had not been.”
The girl drew up her head with a meek air of hurt self-respect.
“I was going to say that it was not the money question that I cared about. What I want to know is whether they can bring themselves—by-and-by—in time—to look upon me as a daughter and sister.”
“They will try.” The tone in which Mrs. Tancred uttered the sentence plainly showed what, in her opinion, the upshot of the effort would be.
“That is all I can ask of them.”
“And to show that they are in earnest and are willing to give you the chance you asked for, they have generously invited you to stay at the Dower House; I am to send you over this afternoon.”
Perhaps it was excess of joy at this news of her acceptance into the bosom of the Aylmer family that caused half a minute to elapse before Bonnybell was able to ejaculate, with quite the proper emphasis—
“What have I done to deserve such goodness?”
And after the matter-of-fact frankness of Camilla’s answer, “Nothing,” there was another pause.
“Was—the news a great shock to them?”
“Yes.”
“Will they”—there was nothing spurious this time about the quailing accent—“be very severe to me?”
“You must remember that it takes time for decent people to become acclimatized to your methods, but they will do their best.”
Miss Ransome’s heart—though, in its wrong, shifty way, not uncourageous—gave a dull thud of dismay. To accept with disarming humility the admission thus cordially offered, and go with smiling readiness to meet the buffets in store for her, was plainly the only wise course to pursue, and no one was better aware of it than herself. Yet at the awful ordeal ahead of her the flesh jibbed.
“Is not this afternoon rather soon?” she asked diffidently.
“What is there to wait for?”
The trenchant question could have but the same answer as Bonnybell’s own inquiry as to what she had done to deserve such goodness had elicited from Mrs. Tancred. After a moment the latter resumed—
“I cannot pretend to you that your visit will be a pleasant one, but, as I said, they will do their best.”
At the terrific view thus conjured up of Catherine and Miss Barnacre’s best, Bonnybell’s artifices fell away from her, and in a spasm of most real consternation she dropped down on her knees beside Camilla, in the attitude most reprobated by that lady, and cried out—
“Oh, I do not think I can bear it! They will put their fingers on all my weak spots, and I have so many—many!”
Mrs. Tancred’s answer was to twitch the gown clutched by the bride-elect’s convulsive fingers out of them, and say—
“They cannot well be more uncomplimentary to you than I am.”
“That is true,” replied the other, sobbing; “but when you are down upon me I know that it is for my good. Unworthy and wretched as I am, I have always known that you did not really hate me, since that night when you came up to my bedroom and kissed me when you thought I was asleep.”
Bonnybell’s wet eyes were cast down, but sheheard her benefactress give a start at this masterly communication.
“It was of a piece with the rest of your conduct to pretend that you were asleep,” she said harshly.
But the poor innocent knew that her shot had told.
A steadyfine rain had set in, which had lasted with scarcely any daylight intermission, though, as often in wet weather, the nights were fine, since Bonnybell’s absorption into the bosom of her future family. Three days had passed since that event, and from inside the walls of her prison-house had come no sign of how things were going with her there. Sometimes Edward felt Darius’s wish to go to the edge of the lion’s den and cry out “in a lamentable voice” to a little modern Daniel to know how she was faring there. The only difference was that he did not indulge it.
Mr. Tancred had returned to find his guest already gone, and told himself at once that he was relieved. That there might be no mistake about it, he repeated the statement several times.
“She is absolutely indifferent to the young man,” Camilla said, using the generic term for humanity instead of the colloquial, on the same principle as she always spoke of Jock as “the dog” when he was in disgrace. “She went off in a flood of tears.”
“With such an ordeal before me, I think I should have done the same,” he answered.
“I reminded her that she would have the support of her accomplice; but that did not seem to give her much confidence.”
For not the first time in his life Edward wished that his wife would give him a holiday from the dry irony whose use had become a second nature to her, but he did not, it is needless to say, tell her so, and Mrs. Tancred continued in the same strain—
“She repeated what a noble character he was; but said that in this case it was some woman-friend whom she needed to cling to. I was unable to advise her to cling to”—“Catherine Aylmer” was on her tongue, but she substituted—“the ladies of the Aylmer family in their present frame of mind.”
Edward suggested weakly, “Meg, perhaps?”
“Meg was sent away this morning.”
“And Miss Barnacre?”
“No, they have kept her. They think that she will be invaluable to them.”
He gave a slight shudder, and glanced at the clock. It pointed to 10.30. For five mortal hours the lions had been crunching the tender bones of the little new Daniel.
“It seems,” continued his wife, “that she has always liked women better than men.” An arid little laugh showed how much credit Camilla attached to the statement. “I wonder, while she was about it, that she did not add that her mother had done the same.” After a pause, “She must indeed have been in sore need of some one to cling to, for she tried to cling tome!”
There was an angry ring in the voice that uttered the last clause, which showed Mr. Tancred that his wife had not been so untouched by poor Miss Bonnybell’s frantic gymnastics as she wished it to be believed; and for the first time he felt less intolerably grated upon by her tone.
“Are you determined to make her always carry that unfortunate mother upon her back?” he asked, rather wearily. “The poor creature will have enough to do through life to get away from her without your help.”
The rejoinder tarried, but when it came there was a tinge of compunction in it.
“You are quite right. I do not think that the Aylmers will let her forget her parentage in a hurry.”
Both fell silent.
Three days had passed; and during them the married pair seemed to themselves to be always falling silent. A tacit convention prevented their perpetual discussion of one subject; yet none other seemed to present itself, and the eschewed theme kept cropping up continually, like gout weed in a garden. The house seemed to both extraordinarily silent. Their late guest had never been noisy, and it would have seemed impossible that the removal of so small and soundless a presence could have made any difference in a great house’s contribution to the noise of the world. Yet the absence of so—as one would have thought—imperceptible a footfall on the deep-carpeted stairs; the extinction of such tinytrills of song and wafts of laughter made the rooms seem void, as if uninhabited, and hushed as if one lay dead in them. It was strange that this deliverance from a little adventuress, of whose existence they had six months earlier been ignorant, should have made the woman feel the bitter curse of her barrenness, and the man the contemptible vacuity of his self-murdered life more acutely than ever before.
It was under a variety of aspects that the subject reared its shunned head. Camilla was always the one to introduce and then curtly dismiss it.
“I imagine,” she said one evening, after having been observing for some moments the idle flutter and dip of the leaves of the book her husband was ostensibly reading, “that you are feeling as if all the little colour that was in them had been withdrawn from our somewhat grey lives; is it not so?”
There was no anger nor even surprise, only a sort of compassion in her tone, as of one gauging anew the drabness of an existence in which such an illumination could be felt as a loss.
Edward regained a firmer grip of his paper-knife.
“Are you judging me by yourself?” he asked, with a smile not more melancholy than, and as calmly kind as usual. “Are you sure that it is notyouwho are missing our patch of scarlet?”
“I should miss a blister when it was taken off,” she answered, and the subject dropped.
It rose again, however, and yet again, impossible apparently quite to submerge. On the third evening it came up suddenly, emerging from silence in a fresh dress.
“It would be difficult to find a worse way for disposing of money,” Camilla said, her rather grating voice breaking on the absolute stillness of her surroundings—Jock never snored and Edward never cleared his throat—“but I suppose we must give her a trousseau.”
“It would be like you,” he answered, carefully dissociating himself, as he invariably did, from any share in her generosities.
She must have grown too much used to this habit of fifteen years to be annoyed by it; so perhaps it was some warmth in his acquiescence that ruffled her, or simply that her stock of amiability had run low, but her rejoinder was certainly not amiable.
“She shall have no voice in the choice of it.”
Ten minutes more must have elapsed before Jock pricked his ears, the finer dog-sense out-running human hearing. Camilla looked with wondering tenderness at him over the pins on which her philanthropic sweater was growing into fleecy life.
“What does he think he hears?”
Edward shook his head, and Jock jumped out of his basket and made for the door, which opened as he reached it to admit a figure racing in at the top of its speed.
Before the astounded couple realized itspresence, the figure whose flexibility of knee-joint had often been a trial to its female patron had flung itself in an attitude of prayer between them.
“I have come back to you! Do not drive me away!”
“You have been turned out?”
The ejaculated inquiry was Camilla’s. The same idea had occurred to Edward, yet his wife’s outspoken wording of it gave him a galvanic shock at her brutality.
The kneeling angel gave pause to the pants which were heaving her black chiffon breast, to gasp out, with a reproachful look from one to the other of her listeners—
“Turned out! Oh no, I turned myself out.”
The extreme improbability of this statement entirely “dumbed” that one of Miss Ransome’s hearers who was never much addicted to speech, but the other cried out in a key from which no great pains had been taken to extract the incredulity—
“You ran away? at this time of night?”
“I did not run away; I asked them to send me——” She made a dramatic pause. “I was going to sayhome.”
It was not quite at once that Camilla could bring out her curt query—
“And why, pray?”
By this time the slender darkness had risen to its feet, and was drawing itself up, not without a touch of unfamiliar dignity.
“When I found that they believed something that they had heard about me, I felt that I could not spend another night under the same roof with them.”
For a moment the vague “something” remained with no demand for an explanation of it, Edward’s silence being due to a dreadful suspicion that whatever the accusation that had been brought against Bonnybell it was in all probability true; Camilla’s to a fear of hearing a fact or facts about herprotégéeeven more shocking than those that had already wounded her ears. But as a shrinking from the disagreeable was certainly no part of Mrs. Tancred’s character, she pulled herself together, and asked brusquely—
“What was it? and was it true?”
“True!” repeated the other in a heart-wrung voice. “Oh, if you, too, are going to believe it!” She threw her hands out before her with a gesture at once of finality and desperation.
“I should have a better chance of disbelieving it if I knew what it was.”
“They received an anonymous letter about me. It came by this evening’s post.”
“H’m!”
“It accused me”—there was worldly wisdom in bringing out the accusation with difficulty; but the difficulty was real too—“the writer said he thought that the man whom I was going to marry ought to know that he had seen me one night last year in Paris at M——’s.”
The confession seemed at first to fall flat; atleast, with regard to the person to whom it was directly addressed.
“M——’s!” replied Camilla, with the unconscious ease with which an innocent young girl might pronounce an improper word. “What is M——’s?”
Bonnybell’s distraught orbs rolled with involuntary confidence towards Edward.
“You know, don’t you?”
“I have heard of it.”
“I suppose it is some very disreputable haunt of vice,” said Camilla; “but I am thankful to say I never heard of it.”
“It would be absolutely out of the question for anyfemme du mondeto be seen there if she wished to keep a rag of character; and as to ajeune fille!”
“It was not true, then?”
The question was point-blank, as was the searching eye-beam that lit it, and Bonnybell felt that the answer must be to match.
“True!” she repeated, with an anguish of upbraiding in her voice. “Oh, I cannot have explained properly! How can you ask me? I know that poor Claire was not careful enough in the places she took me to; but M——’s! and I never went anywhere without her!”
If Mrs. Tancred here had to struggle with some difficulty in suppressing her opinions of the chaperonage thus waved in her face, she came off conqueror; and “poor Claire’s” laurels, and even the objectionable pet name itself, went unimpugned.
“Have you any idea who wrote it?”
“Not the slightest!”—with wounded emphasis. “How should I? I did not know”—with innocent sorrow—“that I had an enemy in the world.”
A diversion was here effected by the fact that Edward, usually so quiet and noiseless, by some awkward movement of his foot displaced one of the fire-irons, which fell rattling from its andiron on to the hearth, before which the master of the house was standing.
Bonnybell’s heart, though in a certain sense a stout one, sank. “He knows that it was Charlie!” she said internally. “I was afraid that he must connect the letter with that unlucky episode in the park! Well, since I have begun, I must go on—‘in for a penny, in for a pound;’ and, after all, it is nearly all truth that I am telling.”
“It came by the afternoon post,” she continued, confining the appealing tragedy of her eyes to her female auditor for the present, as being the easier field of action. “I saw at dinner-time that something must have happened, they were so cold to me; not”—in plaintive, though not accusatory parenthesis—“that they have ever been anything else. Miss Barnacre kept talking all the time about—adventuresses”—the speaker’s sunk voice made a slight shamed pause before the last word—“and Catherine was likeice!”
A long sighing breath bore on its wings this last cruel reminiscence; no other sound broke upon it, and it was with a heartened sense that the air was getting warmer that the narrator presently went on with her narrative.
“Toby did all he could to prevent their showing it to me; he at least believed in me. I am afraid their doing it in spite of him will make a sad quarrel between them”—another sigh—“but they thought it right I should know; perhaps it was.”
Miss Ransome paused on the meek acquiescence in injury of this note.
“I suppose that they thought it their duty to give you an opportunity of clearing yourself,” Camilla said, in a voice whose chronic severity was tempered by some unusual relaxing of its harshness, “but for myself I should have put such a thing into the fire.”
“They gave it to me in the drawing-room after dinner. There were only Mrs. Aylmer, and Catherine, and Miss Barnacre there. I thought they need not have had Miss Barnacre; but you know how she always gives her opinion about everything, even about your religious views.” Bonnybell sank her voice at this last proof of the Barnacre’s presumption, and was rewarded by hearing a muffled snort of contempt from the direction of Mrs. Tancred. “I could not make anything of it at first, never having seen the handwriting before.” (O Bonnybell! why the inartistic superfluity of this touch?) “I asked what it meant.”
“Yes?”
“When at last I made out what I was accused of, and saw that they—I am not quite sure about Mrs. Aylmer, but the other two did not even attempt any disguise—believed it, I—I did not say anything at all. I just gave them—gaveCatherine, I think it was, but I did not seem to see very well—gave Catherine back the letter and left the room.”
The foot of the figure on the hearthrug must have been on this particular night out of its owner’s control. A while ago it was the fire-irons that innocently suffered, now it was Jock; and, to his intense astonishment, nobody apologized.
Camilla said, “Well?”
“I knew that I should find Toby in the smoking-room, so I went there, and asked him to send to the stables and order something to take me—I am afraid I said,” with a humbly apologetic smile, “home!”
The wronger of Jock and of the fire-irons spoke at last, though his voice was not quite what he could have wished.
“And he let you go?”
“He had no choice, poor fellow!” replied the girl, with an unpretending dignity which made it seem to her hearer as if he saw her for the first time. “He was in a dreadful state. I never saw any one in such a dreadful state; but I was firm. I said, ‘If it is true, I am not fit to be here; and if it is not true, I ought never to speak to them again.’”
“And he acquiesced?”
“When I saidthat, oh, hewasin a dreadful state!”—with a, for once, not manufactured shudder at the recollection. “He answered that, for his part, he had every intention of speaking to them again, and he did not think that they would forget what he meant to say in a hurry.”
The narrative, pregnant though it was, had not taken long, and now it was ended.
“If your statement is true——” Camilla began with a judicial slowness.
But Bonnybell, contrary to the humble politeness of her wont, broke in with a little cry.
“True? Would it be much use my telling an untruth when ‘they’ are so close by to show me up if I did?”
The logic was as sound as the veracity of the appeal was obvious, and the little cry was, and did the work of, more than a rhetorical flourish.
“If, as I am induced to think, you have stated the facts as they occurred,” began Mrs. Tancred again, with no apparent resentment of the interruption, “I confess that I do not think there was any course open to you but the one you adopted. For once in your life you seem to have behaved with decency and dignity.”
The concession, though not very graciously worded, was an enormous one, and the relief consequent upon it proportionately great, for poor Miss Ransome had been very, very far from sure of her reception.
“Then I maystay?” she faltered.
“Stay!” repeated her hostess, with an energy of scorn which warmed the inmost core of her silent husband’s heart towards her. “Do not ask preposterous questions.”
Thereupon the returned waif flung herself incontinently upon the rigid neck whose stiff ruffles and frills no fond daughter-arms had ever disarranged. The action bulked colossal to theexecutor of it in retrospect. “HowcouldI have done it?” she asked herself in a cooler after-hour, looking back upon her feat as the man who in youth has mounted a cannon-swept, bayonet-bristling breach into a burning town may regard the feat from the armchair of placid old age. Of course, I had had a good deal to upset me, but I must have been off my head.
The embrace, if so one-sided a transaction could merit the name, did not last long. Bonnybell was curtly told to sit down and not make a fool of herself, and Camilla began almost at once to scold her; but yet it was with a sense of extreme well-being that the little gutter-snipe, as in frank soliloquy she often called herself, settled her lithe body into a familiar armchair. Edward had sat down too, and Jock, making up his mind that reparation for his wrongs was unaccountably not forthcoming to-night, stepped into his basket, which stood raised on its accustomed tripod to keep him from imaginary draughts. The girl might never have been away. Yet to herself what odious æons seemed to have rolled between her last and her present occupancy of the Hepplethwaite chair that now held her!
To a casual observer all would have seemed as before, but a nicer eye would have detected that Mrs. Tancred had not resumed her labours on the nightly sweater. She sat looking straight before her with knit brows for some good while before she at last opened her mouth to utter slow and evidently well-weighed words.
“If you have told me the truth”—oh, whythat cruel preamble?—“I think, as I have already said, that your course was the abstractly right one. Worldly wisdom would, of course, have dictated a more conciliatory line of action. To be on terms of open hostility with your husband’s family will not conduce to the happiness of your married life.”
At the beginning of this harangue Bonnybell had sat straight up in her chair to mark her respect by an attitude of close attention. Her hands now clutched the arms till her knuckle-bones stood out through the white skin.
“But I shall not have any married life,” she sighed in a trembling tone that yet seemed to mean what it said.
“Not have any married life!” repeated Mrs. Tancred, with such an accent as made Miss Ransome wonder whether the words could indeed be her own. “I am quite at a loss. I thought I understood you to say that yourfiancé” (never since his clandestine courtship had the young man been Toby)—“that yourfiancédid not share his family’s suspicions?”
“He does not, he does not!” cried Bonnybell, in a sort of half-real, half-bogus rapture. “He is absolutely stanch. He would marry me to-night if he could. Oh, it is something to haveoneperson believe in you like that; but it isIwho, after what has happened, will not marry him.”
Thehour was late before the junta that sat upon Miss Ransome’s affairs of the heart separated for the night.
“Not marry him,” Camilla had repeated, with a terrible trenchancy, “after all that has happened—after the way in which you pursued him?”
Miss Ransome waived, with wise magnanimity, discussion of the unflattering phrase.
“It is forhissake,” she said, in sweet renunciation. “There can be no happiness in married life without confidence, as you have often told me, and since I seem to have enemies who stab me in the dark, this thing may happen again; and though he does not believenow, he may gradually grow to suspect that there may be something in it, and his people will work upon him till they persuade him that I am—what they think me.”
Her voice was broken, and her air so much that of the widowed dove, that it took her hearers a minute or two to disentangle the cool common sense of her utterances from its emotional fringes and tags.
“You seem to be ready to give up rathereasily what you stuck at nothing to secure,” Camilla said, in a voice of vexed puzzledom; and Edward’s voice raised itself for almost the first time in one of those tentative utterances that always gave the impression of his thinking everybody’s opinion more valuable than his own—
“It does not strike you that it is rather hard on Toby?”
Miss Ransome turned on this diffident new interlocutor eyes glorified by a lofty self-abnegation.
“He will think so now,” she said, “but in ten years he will thank me.”
“I have known more unlikely things than that happen,” Camilla said caustically, “and there is more sense and rationality in what you say than what I have hitherto thought you capable of; but still, if you are sincerely attached to the man—and I suppose that, after having sacrificed so much in the way of delicacy to gain his affections, you must at least be fond of him?”
She paused, leaving her sentence unbalanced, with an evident intention of obtaining an answer to its first half before proceeding to the second.
Bonnybell hesitated a moment. Even if she had been enamoured of her Toby, she would have much preferred not to say so before Edward, and things being as they were—— However, she got out of the dilemma fairly well.
“Need I answer that question?” she asked, with virgin reticence.
Camilla received this graceful parry with a puzzled “Humph!” adding presently—
“It does not seem to strike you that there is an injustice in punishing the man for what he has not done.”
“Punishing him!” repeated Miss Ransome, in a tone of startled anguish. “Oh no, I am only giving him a little pain now, to save him a great deal of pain later.”
The baffled keenness on Camilla’s face grew more acute, and its young object was also made aware by some sixth sense that Edward’s acumen was also at fault through this new double in a course that had never run particularly straight.
“You must have had an uncommonly unpleasant three days,” Mrs. Tancred remarked, after a ruminating space, “to be so anxious to loose what before you were so determined to grasp.”
Bonnybell could have spared these repeated allusions to the methods by which her conquest had been achieved, but she took it beautifully, and with gentle head drooped.
“That is true. Whatever happens to me in the future, I do not think I can well have a bitterer cup to drink than what they have held to my lips for the last three days.”
A caught breath in one direction and a fidgeted foot in another here assured Miss Ransome that her simple oratory had told, and she hastened to go on striking while the iron was hot.
“It was not only this last blow,” she said, with a long shuddering sigh, “but all along they took pleasure in humiliating me, in showingup my ignorance and my foolishness—Heaven knows it was easy enough—and they were glad and ready to believe evil—even such unbelievable evil as this—of me!”
A mental gloss followed this last statement. “I am speaking truth, in a way; itisunbelievable that any mother could have taken her daughter to M——’s; and even poor Claire would not have done it if she had not been even less herself than usual that night.”
A distinctly emotional pause ensued, which Camilla, with a movement of the shoulders as of one shaking off an unwelcome burden, broke.
“Come,” she said brusquely, “this will not do. You must not try to work upon our feelings. For once in your life you have been the aggrieved person. I own that I cannot myself comprehend”—drawing up her bony figure with a scornful dignity that for once made it seem beautiful in Bonnybell’s eyes—“stooping to notice any accusation that took so low a form as an anonymous letter; but we must not allow ourselves to be led away into an exaggeration of feeling. After all, the whole thing rests upon a misconception. They are good and conscientious people.” (Miss Ransome was glad to verify that to make this admission cost Camilla what is vulgarly called a “swallow.”) “When your innocence is proved, they will be the first to own themselves in the wrong.”
“Howcanit be proved?” answered Bonnybell, dejectedly. “How can any one rebut a charge that comes one does not know whence,and one does not know why?” The falsehood came more easily this time, but prudence and something, too, of authentic feeling bid it not stand alone. “I would not thank them for believing in me when my innocence was proved. The people I love and bless are those who believe in me first, and do without proof.”
The description, though perhaps not quite accurately fitting her present audience, was obviously meant to cover them, and it was not very harshly that Camilla repressed this new excursion into the realms of the emotional.
“If it is false,” she said, not unkindly, though without any direct acknowledgment of Bonnybell’s magnificent compliment to her own and her husband’s credulity, “you have only to wait, and it will die of itself. It is the essence of the false to perish.” (“That is a bad look-out for me,” thought Bonnybell, humorously, but she only bowed her head.) “The very monstrousness of the accusation”—indignation gave an unwonted quiver to the speaker’s voice—“will kill it the more quickly, and even if it takes time, you can well afford to wait. A year, two years, might make you a little less grossly unfit for the duties of a wife and mother than you are now.”
Again Bonnybell bowed her head, and across Edward’s memory there flashed in ludicrous incongruity the recollection of Miss Ransome’s views on maternity, as slightly but graphically sketched for his own benefit a few days earlier.
“I have always heard that there is nothing so wearing as a long engagement,” suggested MissRansome, presently, with much hesitancy—“nor so ruinous to the appearance,” she was about to add, but thought better of it.
The severity, singularly absent from her latest utterance, here showed signs of returning to Camilla’s eye and tone.
“I do not quite understand the drift of your remark. You cannot be suggesting the advisability of thrusting yourself into a family which would receive you in the spirit that characterizes the Aylmers’ present attitude towards you.”
“No,” replied Bonnybell, with a little heartbroken gesture of renunciation. “I meant that there is nothing for me but to give him up.”
She held to the same text through the hour and a half during which the debate lasted, although listening with the most attentive and sorrowing mildness to all the arguments that could be adduced on the other side.
Arrived at the haven of her own room, she cast herself on the bed, and kissed it hysterically. “Was ever any one so glad to be back anywhere as I am to be here?” she sighed out. “Oh,whata three days! Did ever any one before go through three such days? I thought at the beginning of them that I had as tough a hide as most people. But oh, in five minutes they were through it. Barnacre, Catherine, shall I ever get their needles out of my skin?”
She turned over on her face for a moment or two to bury the memory of those poisoned pricks in the soothing softness of that hospitable pillow, then sat up on the edge of the bed, with her legsdangling, while her reflections took a less painful turn. “I suppose there is some truth in what poor Claire used to say, that all respectable women are ill-natured.”
She ruminated awhile upon this wise, witty, and tender saying of her departed parent. Then her thoughts returned to fact, from their excursion into theory. “And to think thatCharlieshould have turned out a blessing in disguise! Without the help of his blackguardly letter—what an unspeakable sweep he is—how could I ever have got out of theimpasse? Toby would never have let me go. Even now I should not be surprised at his putting a bullet into me to-morrow, as one is always seeing in the papers that grooms do to faithless kitchen-maids, when I give him his finalcongé. Well, that would be the end, and the dear old camel and Edward would be rid of their incubus. Poor Toby! How sea-sick the mere thought of him makes me! How very sincerely I dislike men!”
By this time she had jumped down from the bed and strolled to the cheval-glass. “I ought to do better—much better—than Toby,” she said, appraising her reflection. “Of course, the last three days have ravaged me and added five years to my age, but that is only temporary. I shall probably go on improving up to twenty-five, and Toby has so very much less in his power to settle than I at first understood, and he unwisely let me see that he meant to keep me ten months of the year in the country. I am sorry to play into thehands of that detestable Barnacre, but it is really all for the best.”