“My darling little Bonnybell,—(The unaccountable warmth of this opening took her eye to the signature, “Flora.”“Of course! How stupid not to have remembered Flora Tennington’s scrawls and flourishes!”)“I have just heard from Harrington” (so Harrington is still with Flora, is he?) “that he had seen your ugly old gaoler and hersouffre douleurat the station and off to London, so I have sent the motor to fetch you to spend the day. If it comes back without you I shallgo on sending ituntil it brings you, dead or alive. I havemillionsof things to say and ask.“Your loving“Flora.“P.S.—You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”
“My darling little Bonnybell,—
(The unaccountable warmth of this opening took her eye to the signature, “Flora.”
“Of course! How stupid not to have remembered Flora Tennington’s scrawls and flourishes!”)
“I have just heard from Harrington” (so Harrington is still with Flora, is he?) “that he had seen your ugly old gaoler and hersouffre douleurat the station and off to London, so I have sent the motor to fetch you to spend the day. If it comes back without you I shallgo on sending ituntil it brings you, dead or alive. I havemillionsof things to say and ask.
“Your loving“Flora.
“P.S.—You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”
Miss Ransome’s decision must be immediate. The expectant footman was still at her elbow awaiting orders. She threw her cap over the mill.
“I shall be ready in ten minutes.”
The decision—given the deep disgrace from which she had so lately emerged—sounded like madness; but a streak of reason ran through it. Her host and hostess had announced their intention of returning by a later train than the one that usually brought Edward; the servants would, in all probability, not tell upon her. Camilla’s own lifelong maid, a young lady of fifty-five, had, shortly before Bonnybell arrived, yielded to the urgencies of a bridegroom, become too pressing to be longer resisted, to crown by marriage an engagement of thirty years. Her present attendant was a young person whom she had employed because nobody else would, and in order to make her a character. But what decided Miss Ransome to take the plunge was the postscript, “You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”
“An old friend!” This by itself would act as a deterrent. It must be a man, since Claire and she never had any women friends after Flora dropped them, and of the men who formed her circle, there was not one concerning whom her most ardent wish was never to hear of or meet him again. But “a new friend!” Who could it be but Toby?
It was, perhaps, a stretch of language to give that name to a person, the sole evidence of whose meriting it was that he looked black when she entered the room, remained churlishly silent during the few minutes of their joint occupancy of it, and left it with a bang of discourteous hasteto escape her. But, at all events, it was well worth trying, and in twenty minutes from her first reception of the proposition she was flying along between the tree-stems of the park, on her way to accept it.
The motor was, to her relief, a brougham. To arrive touzled and stained—and she had not a proper motoring costume with her—would be to prejudice her chance of success at the outset. She must be pretty before all things. Whether her prettiness was to be further ornamented by a sweet innocence or a daring raciness of conversation must depend upon what a further acquaintance with Toby’s tastes and methods might reveal. If he were anhabituéof Flora’s, the latter of the two alternatives was the one more likely to please. But her deep-seated and universal distrust of man—falsified though it had been in the case of Edward by a fortnight’s acquaintance—made her finally resolve to temper her raciness, if she was racy, with caution.
Arrived, after a quarter of an hour’s whirl, Bonnybell found Flora in a hot room, crammed with flowers andbric-à-brac, whose very atmosphere brought back, with a rush of startled repulsion, to the girl’s memory the atmosphere that she had breathed through her own childhood and early youth. During the last period of her mother’s life it had been further improved by the continual perfume of champagne and drugs; but the present one, though free from these ingredients, was like enough to make her realize how far she had travelled from what it represented,and to wish that she had not come, particularly as no vestige of a redeeming Toby showed on the naked horizon.
Flora was too much occupied at the moment of her guest’s arrival to spare time for any greeting. She was sitting on the floor, as was Harrington, the broken-down gentleman who was coeval with Flora in Bonnybell’s acquaintance with that lady; the broken-down gentleman who, beginning by being her lover, had ended by being her major-domo.
Upon Flora’s lap sat the little old dachshund Lisa, down whose throat Harrington was trying to drive a pill. By holding her mouth tight shut, and stroking her throat, the object was supposed to have been, after many previous failures, attained. The fallacy of the deduction was proved an hour later by the pill being found intact on the front stairs, showing that the wily Lisa had, after all, bested her physicians; but for the present, lulled in a false security, Lisa’s mistress was able to remember her visitor’s presence.
“Wasn’t it fortunate that Harrington should have happened to be at the station just in time to see your old monster get into the train? I said to myself, ‘Now is my time.’ I had been puzzling my head as to how I was going to get at you. I could not come after you. You know I am tolerablyfacile à vivre, but Icannotstand that old woman.”
Truth is truth, even if inverted, and Bonnybell did not think it necessary to point out that in this case it was standing on its head; since, in pointof fact, it was “that old woman” who had never been able to “stand” Lady Tennington.
“I had scarcely a word with you at the Aylmers’,” continued Flora, raising her rather bulky form from the floor by the aid of Harrington, whom she immediately afterwards sent out of the room. “You were packed off to Meg and that odious prig of a governess for fear that I should corrupt your mind, I suppose.”
She laughed, both with cosmetic-ed lips and with eyes that, though brazenly bistered, were jolly and good-natured, at the humour of such a thing being possible; and Bonnybell laughed too, though with a surprised sense of annoyance at the unlimited knowledge of evil attributed to her.
“I corrupted theirs instead,” she replied, with a humorous gloom.
“The governess’s and Meg’s?” with an accent of delighted interest. “Oh, how it must have improved them!”
As she spoke, she held out an expensive and floridly coronetted cigarette-case to the girl, who pounced upon it as the camel upon a desert pool.
“Oh, how delicious! how I have longed and thirsted for one! Savory?”
“Yes, I always stick to them.”
There was a short silence of rapturous enjoyment on Bonnybell’s part. Flora had pushed her into a luxurious chair, and the smoke was going up to heaven from her pink nostrils. She was beginning to be glad of her iniquity, even though the Toby for whom it was committed had proved to be but a mirage.
“How did you corrupt their minds?” The question shared Lady Tennington’s mouth with a cigarette; but, though a little inarticulate from this cause, the relish in it was unmistakable.
“I got into a dreadful scrape. They came and complained of me next day.”
The interest aroused by this statement vanquished material enjoyment, and Lady Tennington took the “Savory” from between her rosy lips, and sat up.
“What did you say?”
“Will you believe it?” replied Bonnybell, sitting up too, her eyes sparkling intensely in the relief and enjoyment of having at length found a confidant certain to sympathize in the grievous wrong done her. “All that I said was—I was looking at a silly little newspaper with Meg, and I happened to mention—we had come to a picture of Cressida Beaulieu and her Schipperkes—that Waddy ran her. Could you imagine that there was any one in the world so ignorant as not to know that Waddy ran Cressida?”
“It is inconceivable,” replied Flora, in an almost awed tone; and there was a moment or two of wondering and compassionate silence on the part of both.
“They came and laid a formal complaint against me next day, and I was sent for down from my studies—I was at my studies, if you please”—with a delightful little grimace.
“Your studies!” laughing significantly. “I should have thought that you knew as much as most people.”
At this ambiguous compliment something in Bonnybell once again felt jarred.
“Oh,whata time I had of it!” she exclaimed, gliding with only half-unconscious distaste from the subject of her own discreditable omniscience. “What a scolding!”
“From that hateful old prude?”
“Yes, from Camilla. But she is not quite all hateful. I thought she was at first, but she isn’t. After having ground me to powder—while those two women looked on—oh, I should like to be even with them!—she told me she would give me another chance! It doesn’t sound any great catch,” beginning to laugh heartily; “but I can assure you that I was very much relieved, as I felt certain that I was going to be turned out then and there, neck and crop.”
“I wish you had. I should have got you for good then.”
The phrase, in one sense, was scarcely a happy one, since it could not, by any stretch of language, be considered a good thing for any young woman to be taken under the soiled and tarnished wing of Lady Tennington.
Bonnybell’s heart did not in the least echo the aspiration, but her lips brought out their “It would have been too delightful for words!” with their accustomed lying glibness.
She looked with pretty, grateful affection at her hostess as she spoke, asking herself alternately whether it was that she had forgotten Flora, or that the latter had lost her eye and donned a greenlier gold wig than of yore, imparted a moresealing-waxy red to her mouth, and laid the powder on her nose, thick as snow on the summit of the Jung Frau, without knowing it.
“Tell me some more,” said the unconscious object of these silent queries, in the delighted voice of a child asking for the repetition of a favourite fairy tale. “Ah, here is Charlie Landon? I told you you would meet an old friend. You must begin all over again for him.”
Sothis was the “old friend” with whom the hook for her had been partially baited! Charlie Landon, the hero of that dinner at the Réservoir at Versailles; Charlie Landon, the odious old voluptuary most detested by her of all her mother’s disreputableentourage; the one whose degrading admiration and nauseous overtures she had had the most difficulty in keeping within decent bounds; Charlie Landon!
Was it to meet Charlie Landon, whom she would have compassed sea and land to avoid, that she had imperilled her salvation?—for indeed the sure refuge of the house into which she had found admittance seemed to her, in this sudden terror of deservedly losing it, to spell no less a thing. She had never seen the hateful old satyr face since the Versailles evening, as some blessed accident summoned its owner back to England on the day following it.
That Flora was quite ignorant of her young guest’s attitude of mind towards her old one was evident both from that known good-nature of hers, which would never willingly place any two people in an uncomfortable situation, and alsofrom the fact that before Charlie had become a prominent person in the ever-narrowing circle of Claire’s friends, Flora had seen herself obliged to withdraw from it personally.
Lady Tennington rather liked Charlie. He did not make love to her, and she would not have minded if he had, and his fund of indelicate anecdotes amused her. It was upon his own representation of the affectionate intimacy existing between himself and the young girl—for in the accomplishment of lying Charlie could have given Bonnybell herself points—that the invitation to meet him had gone forth veiled in the anonymity which was most likely to produce the desired effect.
Perhaps it was because Miss Bonnybell’s features, though equally practised in dissimulation, were not so expert at it as her tongue, but certainly it was that something which was not of the expected quality had expressed itself in the girl’s face, and given a surprised and interrogative quality to Flora’s next words.
“Charlie wanted to go and fetch you, but I would not let him.Iwanted to have the pleasure of seeing your pleasure at so unexpected a meeting. He tells me that you became such dear friends after—after I left Paris.”
But by this time Miss Ransome was herself again. Charlie would be a dangerous enemy, and might let out or purposely disclose circumstances in her past history—circumstances due not to her fault, indeed, but to her misfortune—yet does the world ever nicely discriminate between thetwo?—which might seriously prejudice her future. She had no more doubt of Charlie’s vindictiveness than of his sensuality, and there was as much need to be on guard against the one as against the other. So she submitted her hand, which he insisted upon kissing, to his clasp, and answered with perfect civility—
“Yes, it is quite a surprise. I had not an idea that Colonel Landon was down here.”
“Colonel Landon!” repeated he, with an affectation of reproachful astonishment. “How formal we have grown all of a sudden!”
There was an odious implication of former intimacy in his tone, and Flora, who had begun to laugh at it, stopped suddenly, arrested by the undisguisable repulsion which pierced through the set smile on her young friend’s face.
“You would not wonder at anything,” she cried hastily, “if you knew the sort of people the poor thing has fallen amongst. Do tell Charlie, Bonnybell, about your experiences with the Aylmers; he would besomuch amused, and Icouldnot hear them too often.”
But Bonnybell had, with all her knowledge of Charlie’s power of revengeful tit-for-tat in the case of a supposed snub, done as much for him as she could for the moment manage, and she excused herself with pretty ingenuity, asserting, with a smile that was ordered still to keep well to the front, that the anecdote could be entertaining only to a person acquainted with the Aylmer family, and would lose all its point in the case of one who had not that advantage. Inwardly, whileuttering her little apology for refusing, she was sharply regretting that her glove had been taken off previous to the “old friend’s” detested caress, and wondering how soon she would cease to be conscious of it on the back of her hand.
The announcement of luncheon put a welcome end to the importunities to which her refusal subjected her. The sight of one more place laid at the table than there were occupants for made her draw the inference that the “new friend” had been expected, and had failed to appear, but she waited in vain for some comment upon his absence. To Lady Tennington’s easy-going board people came or not as they chose. If they appeared at it, so much the better; if they didn’t appear at it, not so very much the worse. In Flora’s circle promises and engagements did not go for much, nor did the breaking of them cause her either annoyance or surprise.
The conversation at the repast was chiefly in Charlie’s hands and under his guidance. He was a past-master in the art ofdouble-entendre, and had a power that it would be difficult to surpass of giving to the most plain and innocent sentences an indecent meaning. From off the guileless backs of most English girls Charlie’s conversation could fall in a harmless cascade, as being too bad to be understood, but there was not one of his innuendoes and perverse twistings of the commonplaces of speech that Bonnybell did not fully comprehend, with the added knowledge that he knew that she did so.
Flora called him to order once or twice, butnot very severely. Charlie was really very amusing; and, after all, Bonnybell was not like other girls. It was such a comfort that one need not be on one’s P’s and Q’s with her.
Scarcely ever, in all the reach of her eighteen years’ memory, had Miss Ransome sat at a feast—and Flora’s cuisine deserved that title—with a more uneasy and unenjoying mind. Not even the unwonted solace of as many post-luncheon cigarettes as she could desire at all compensated her for the distastefulness of the company, or for the racking twin anxieties that occupied her mind; the anxiety to get home as fast as possible, so as to obviate all risk of discovery incident upon a possible change of plan in Mr. and Mrs. Tancred, and to prevent Charlie from escorting her. All her manœuvres to get her hostess alone in order to ask for her aid in obtaining this latter boon having failed, she had to content herself with the meagre consolation that, at all events, she would have the chaperonage of the chauffeur.
Immediately after luncheon the rest of the party sat down to dummy bridge. It was not without loud outcries on the part of two of her companions, and some umbrage at the gentle fixity of her determination not to make a fourth—for Harrington never dared show umbrage at anything—that Bonnybell escaped their upbraiding importunities. If she allowed herself to acquiesce, Heaven knows how long she might be chained to the card-table, when once they had got hold of her, and her longed-for departure postponed if she was not firm. But it was not without payingthe toll of some gibing jests at her benefactors’ expense—jests which she did not in the least enjoy, and which caused her an unexpected subsequent remorse—that she was let off, and given the inspiriting promise that the motor should be at the door in half an hour’s time. She waited to hear the message really given, and then to escape the pursuit of Charlie’s eyes, which, though not so good as they had been, were still only too embarrassing, she left the trio, to resume her hat and wraps.
In former days Bonnybell had never been in time for anything, but to-day, though twenty minutes must elapse before the motor was due, she stood restless and troubled, awaiting its arrival in a conservatory which opened out of the room in which the players had settled down to their mutilated gamble. She could hear, between the deals, Charlie firing off hisdouble-entendresto lighten the seriousness of the pursuit, and Flora’s stimulating rebuke, “Oh, come, Charlie, that is rather too stiff. You must remember that we have afille à marieron the premises.” And then they all laughed.
Well they might! thought the listener. Afille à marier! And yet that was precisely what she was! With what other purpose but the insane one of furthering that object was she there? And how likely were such amilieuand atmosphere to promote it!
The conservatory was a long one, and by walking to the end of it she could get out of earshot of the bridge-players. Why go on listening toCharlie for twenty minutes, if she could help it? A cluster of wicker chairs stood under a palm, and into the cushions of one of them she sank, looking round with uneasy eyes upon the mass of bloom about her. She did not care a straw about flowers in their natural and out-door state, and forced ones represented to her mind out-of-season extravagances of ten and twenty-five guinea January bouquets—represented to her the past and Claire.
What a fool she had been! Had ever any one risked so much to gain so little? Thinking it over coolly—that was just what she could not do, since so much was at stake—what were the odds in favour of her getting home undetected? Even if she did so, the danger was by no means over. A slip of the tongue, a stupidity, a malice on the part of one of the servants, happening any time during the next six months, might wreck her. She must be very, very civil and pleasant to the whole establishment. If she got anyétrennesin the shape of money, she would have to tip them heavily; and yet even so, she would never be able to be quite free from anxiety.
She trusted to be put out of suspense as to her worst fear—that of a premature return from London on the part of the Tancreds—in half an hour from the present moment. The return journey could not take more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
Her worst fear! Wasn’t there yet a worse than the worst?—the fear that Charlie might this time carry his point, and insist on escorting herback? Since the motor was a brougham, of what possible use or protection could the chauffeur be? Should she beg Harrington to come too? But it was a single brougham!
The sound of steps approaching roused her. Well, this was a bit of luck! She would get off sooner than she had thought possible; for here was a footman coming to tell her that the ark of her salvation was at the door. But the owner of the nearing footfall did not wear Flora’s livery.
“I was sent to look for you!” observed a young and manly, but not very gracious voice.
The heart of thefille à mariergave a jump up from her boots, to which it had latterly been sinking. Late, but not quite too late, here was the Toby for whom she had sacrificed, suffered, and imperilled so much!
“Oh, how glad I am!”
This was perfectly true, but that was not at all the reason why she uttered it! A rapid calculation resulted in the conclusion that in the very short time allotted to her, if she ever wished to make an effect—and oh, didn’t she wish it?—the stroke of her brush must be broad. This was neither the place, the time, nor the object for caution. The impulsive pleasure of one too young and inexperienced to hide a keen pleasure that had taken her by surprise, the outbreak of an emotion too glad and strong to be kept in the leading-strings of convention,—this was the appearance to be aimed at, and which the full look which she allowed her large fawn eyes totake of his fresh-coloured stolid face told her was achieved.
Toby, who, despite his stodgy shyness, was possessed of quite enough conceit to keep him in a competence, if not affluence, of self-esteem, saw no reason why he should doubt that this effusive young stranger was excessively glad to see him.
The young stranger, on her part, was pleased to have made her meaning plain; but, having done so, gave maiden modesty at having been surprised into such an admission its turn.
“You must forgive my saying what seems silly and exaggerated, considering how little I know you; but——” Then a sudden inspiration came to the prettily embarrassed, and yet really harassed, young creature. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Give herself an interest in the eyes of this block of a Toby, if he was stupid enough not to have already conceived one, by enlisting his sympathy and help; and in so doing also baffle the abhorred Charlie? No sooner thought than uttered, with no apparent hitch or hindrance in the smooth run of her sentence: “But the moment I saw you the thought struck me how much—how enormously you might help me if you would.”
“Help you?I!”
There was marked surprise in the tone, but there was also, if the hearer erred not, a hint of gratification and a willingness to hear more.
“You give me the idea”—permitting herself to take timid stock of him as she spoke—“of beingvery determined, and able to make people mind what you say.”
“Do I?”
Bonnybell hesitated a moment, both to heighten the evident curiosity that she had roused, and because she was divided between two or three artistic openings. But her time was running out. She must not allow herself to hesitate.
“Is—is Colonel Landon a friend of yours?”
“Old Charlie Landon a friend of mine? God forbid!”
There was such a distinct tone of offence at the suggestion in this robust disclaimer, that Bonnybell clasped her little black hands, which she had on several former occasions found to be so invaluable as “properties,” in an ecstasy of relief.
“Oh, Iamso glad!” After all, it was pleasant and refreshing to tell truth as a change once in a way, and with a judicious economy.
“I can’t imagine how Lady Tennington could have asked you to meet such a beastly old reprobate!”
The stodgy face had lit up, and the vigour of its owner’s vernacular found an echo in Miss Ransome’s inmost soul.
“A beastly old reprobate!” Oh, if Toby knew all! Yet caution and the dread of Charlie’s vengeance, and his power of revelation, prompted her to say—
“I knew him when I was a child, and I should not like to hurt his feelings. But I am a little afraid that he will want to take me back toStillington in the motor, and—and—it is a brougham!”
A quarter of an hour later Bonnybell was flashing homeward alone, having accidentally happened to mention to the preserver, whom she had successfully enlisted in her service, the fact of her passionate fondness for wandering in parks at winter gloamings, and having received from him in return information of almost excessive accuracy as to those parts of the Stillington Deer Park which might be safely visited at that time of year by a solitary stroller.
Allwas safe. There had been no change of plan on the part of Miss Ransome’s protectors, as, drawing a long breath, she realized on reaching home, and joyfully found the house as destitute of its masters as she had left it. To begin at once the attack upon the servants’ clemency was her next care. Bonnybell had always been charming in her manner towards all dependants; but the tone in which she now asked the butler after a sick wife whom Camilla had been doctoring, and told the housemaid, whom she found lighting her bedroom fire, how concerned she was to hear her still coughing, would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear.”
Her neglected studies were her next thought, but an unconquerable distaste towards resuming them made her persuade herself that it would be unsafe to run the risk of being found studying at so unusual an hour, and would lead to the inference that she had been playing the truant earlier. It would be better to take the least evadable books up to bed with her, and make what scrambling preparation she could beforegoing to sleep. While collecting her authors, the young student became aware of “L’Enigme du Péché” lying in tell-tale openness on the floor, where it had evidently lain since it fell off her lap in the hurry of her departure. Another sigh of relief, almost as deep as the first, signalized this timely discovery.
Camilla was in unusually good spirits at dinner that night. Her day, though she was strictly silent upon that part, had been tiring, boring, self-sacrificing. It had been devoted wholly to the unhealthy, the unprosperous, and the ungrateful. But apparently it had had a tonic effect, and she ate her slender allowance of food with more apparent enjoyment, and talked more and more cheerfully, than usual. Perhaps it was because she talked more that Edward seemed to talk less than his never garrulous custom.
Bonnybell could wish that Mrs. Tancred’s inclination to converse would have led her in another direction than inquiries as to the mode in which she, Bonnybell, had disposed of her solitary day, though those inquiries were made almost genially, and in the spirit of neither a school-mistress nor a spy. It was not that the girl was conscious of any new or even nascent disinclination for fibbing; but when the whole field of invention lay open before her, it was so difficult to know which lie to choose. Lie she must, from beginning to end of the catechism that ensued, but she had no wish to be excessive, nor to daubwhere one coat of paint would serve her purpose. It was a pity that the servants had to hear her, as, of course, they must be laughing in their sleeves; but the tips to be administered doubled themselves in her intention, and she tried to forget the silent presences that might become so ruinously vocal.
“Did you make up your mind to tear yourself from the fireside at all to-day?”
“Oh yes; I was out a good deal.”
So far truth carried her, but nervousness made her add an unnecessary gloss, which was the falsest of falsehoods—in implication, at least—
“I knew that you would wish me to take some exercise.”
“H’m! how far did you go? I dare say not farther than the houses. I know that the stove house is the kind of atmosphere you really like.”
Camilla was in wonderfully good tune; there was even an attempt at genial raillery in her tone.
“Oh, but I did. I wentmuchfurther.”
Truth again reappeared. It was as well to give that seldom-invoked goddess a look-in now and then.
“To the summer-house?”
“Further still.”
“You did not, I am sure, risk those ridiculous little shoes of yours in the wet grass of the park?”
“Oh yes, I did; they are stronger than they look. But I was sorry afterwards thatI had. Jock got among the rabbit-holes, and though I whistled and called for ten minutes, I am sure, I could not persuade him to come out.”
There was a noise as of a small object falling on the floor. Edward, who was not generally clumsy, had whisked a fork, with his coat-cuff apparently, on to the carpet. A footman picked it up, and the conversation proceeded. But Miss Ransome had caught a glimpse of her host’s face, and a cold sweat broke out inside her. Was it possible that Edward knew of her escapade? There was nothing for it but to hope for the best, and to go on boldly, since she was already too far immersed in the sea of fancy to withdraw. And besides, what she had been relating of Jock’s perversity was strictly true, only that it was post-dated by twenty-four hours, having happened yesterday.
With unconscious inhumanity, Camilla went on—
“Jock must have had two walks to-day, then, for Gillett told me she had taken him out.”
Bonnybell’s heart quailed. Suppose that Camilla next inquired at what hour her promenade with Jock had taken place, and that she herself in answer hit upon the same one as that already claimed by the maid?
“It must have been in the morning, then, that you took him out,” continued Camilla, still perfectly unsuspicious, adding, with a sternness that was more affected than real, “You musthave given him time that was filched from your reading.”
“He looked so wistful,” replied Bonnybell, post-dating Jock’s expression of emotion, as she had done his iniquities. “It is so difficult to resist him when he looks wistful.”
This was a thrust directed at the one weak spot in Camilla’s armour, and it penetrated at once.
“What a bad dog!” she said, in a ridiculously pseudo-angry voice. How different, as Bonnybell ruefully reflected, from that employed to herself, for the far smaller crime of her attempt to educate Meg Aylmer! “No biscuits to-night.”
In the execution of this threat Jock did not even affect credulity, but wagged a short black tail, which was in piquant contrast to the rest of his white body, and Bonnybell heaved her slender shoulders in a deep inspiration of relief, once again involuntarily stealing a look at Edward. She found him looking straight and full back at her, in the security of Camilla’s occupation with the dog; read in that look that he knew; that since he had promised her his friendship he would not betray her, and that he despised her from the bottom of his heart. In point of fact, Edward was not much in the habit of despising any one but himself, but he might have made an exception in Bonnybell’s favour.
The belief that he had done so, at all events, depressed that young woman to such a degree as to impart an inattentive languor to her nightlydancing lesson to Jock. That unworthy animal took a base advantage of her absent-mindedness, and executed his part of the performance on all four feet, in a shabby, ambling run, which, not even by his partial mistress, could be classified as a “trick.”
“You seem to have tired yourself with your walk,” observed Camilla, noticing the limp air of relief with which Miss Ransome subsided into a chair at the end of a display which was generally a source of unmixed enjoyment to her. “Of course, I have no wish that you should overdo yourself; there is never any sense in extremes.”
Bonnybell drooped her head in silent acquiescence. Circumstances prevented her defending herself from the charge of over-exercise by stating the fact that the longest walk she had to-day taken had been from one end of Lady Tennington’s conservatory to the other, and she felt unequal for the moment to the framing of new inventions, which one of her hearers would be perfectly aware to be such.
“Perhaps it is because the wind has not caught your face to-day,” continued Mrs. Tancred, in caustic but not hostile allusion to Bonnybell’s former explanation of her excess of bloom, “but you look pale to-night. Neither Edward—I think I may answer for you,” with a scarcely inquiring spectacled glance at her husband—“nor I will take it amiss if you feel inclined to go to bed.”
The girl accepted, with apologetic courtesy,which she tried not to make too eager. Not even the sight of the piled books by her bedside, heaped there with an intention of midnight study, could lessen the sense of relaxed tension in being alone. Shewastired, dispirited, anxious, with sore disquiet for the future.
Edward knew that she was a liar, and hated her for being one. More shame for him! If he had been in her grievous straits, he would have lied too. It was very unsympathetic andbornéof him not to understand that! Now that Charlie Landon was aware that she was in the neighbourhood, he would never leave her in peace. Did she not read an intention of persecution in the baffled anger of his face when it was made clear to him by Flora that his escort was to be dispensed with?
Yes, the future was heavy with clouds, and she regarded it, as has been said, with some disquiet. Yet her repentance for the past was by no means complete. If Edward and Charlie—unnatural alliance of names!—weighed down one scale of the balance, did not Toby in the other make it greatly out-dip them? The campaign against Toby—hitherto existing only in aspiration and intention—had passed into the domain of fact. It had really and seriously opened, and how artistically too, by that sudden inspiration or an appeal for help. A stroke of such genius had enabled her to skip over at least a dozen preliminary steps, and rushed him into the propitious situation of benefactor and rescuer before he knew where he was.
“Never in my life have I managed to get hold of anything good or pleasant without having to pay heavily for it,” she said to herself in bitter retrospect, “and I suppose that it will always be so; but, at all events, this time I have something to show for my efforts! ‘Quite safe to walk anywhere between the belt of firs on the left of the big covert and the group of Spanish chestnuts near the gazebo.’ Quite safe forme, I suppose he meant! I would not swear that it was quite as safe forhim!”
She fell asleep with an angelic smile on her parted lips at the thought of Toby’s insecurity, the pile of unopened books forgotten beside her.
An hour later a figure, who had carefully chosen that one of the electric burners to turn up whose light would not fall on the sleeper’s face, stood by Bonnybell’s bedside.
“I do not think that that child is well,” Camilla had said, after an interval of silence, addressing her husband; “she seemed unnaturally depressed. Depression under such circumstances as hers would be natural and proper in any thinking being, but as she certainly does not come under that head, there must be some other cause.”
As she spoke Mrs. Tancred left her chair and the room. Her absence lasted for a quarter of an hour, and towards the end of it Edward grew restless; that is to say, inwardly, for he allowed himself no change of posture that would recognize or indulge his uneasiness. Was she ill? and ifso, was hers the kind of constitution upon which illness would take much hold? Both her parents had died when well under forty, but as neither of their deaths could be called natural ones, their shortlivedness could not be held to lend probability to hers, unless her mother’s tendencies were hereditary.
Camilla’s re-entrance interrupted the shudder caused by the last supposition.
“I was mistaken,” she said calmly, though his eye noted the sign of an emotion of some kind on her harsh face; “she was sleeping quite quietly.”
Both settled down again to their occupations, and a few minutes elapsed before Camilla, bringing out the words as one forced to make an admission against the grain, said—
“I am afraid that my tendency is to judge people too severely; and I believe that in the case of this unfortunate girl I may have done so.”
She paused, and he had time for an inwardly interjected wish that she had used some other adjective than that which, employed as a noun, had such an unsavoury significance when applied to a woman!
“I am led to think that some glimmer of a sense of right and wrong is awakening in her; that I trace some germ of a desire for better things!”
Again she halted, and he threw in a “Yes?”
“You heard at dinner to-day how she had conquered her dislike to leaving the fireside indeference to my wishes; it came out quite unostentatiously—not as if she were making a merit of it.”
Perhaps it was surprise at the change in his wife’s tone that hindered Tancred from expressing that pleased acquiescence in their joint incubus’s improvement which might have been expected; but neither did he give any sign of dissent.
“And though she could not have expected a visit from me to-night—I have never before gone near her,” continued Camilla, in the key of one resolved to make her amends for possible former injustice handsome and complete—“she had evidently taken to heart my reproach of having wasted the time, that should have been devoted to study, upon the dog.” (When Camilla occasionally tried to make her family believe that she was indifferent to Jock, she spoke of him as “the dog.”) “The poor girl had evidently been at work until overtaken by sleep, for the books were piled at her bedside.”
Edward must make some comment now, and must try not to let it be too stony; but the “Indeed! how very creditable!” which he at last brought out sounded to himself so coldly ironical that it must rouse his wife’s suspicions by its contrast with his former championship. To his relief, he soon perceived that she was occupied by a train of thought, and stirred by an emotion which blunted her powers of observation.
“She looked very sweet and innocent,” Mrs. Tancred said, in a softened tone, as one recalling a gentle, dreamy vision; “all traces of her terribleheredity wiped away by sleep!” After a short pause in a lower key, “The All Wise gave one more proof of All Wisdom in denying me the blessing of children, for I should have made idols of them.”
Itwas a source of mixed wonder and thankfulness to Miss Ransome on the succeeding day that she got off so cheaply when the discovery of the extent to which she had neglected her studies was made. The rebuke incurred was so inexplicably gentle, that though by this time Bonnybell was pretty well acquainted with the directness of her instructress’s methods, she at first suspected that a trap must lie beneath it. She did not know that she had been saved by her usual means, a lie; only that in this case it was an innocent and unintentional one, the lie, namely, of the piled books at her bedside. She escaped with a more sorrowful than indignant expression of opinion from Camilla as to the slenderness of her intellect and her inability to grasp any subjects other than those appertaining to the cult of the frivolous and the trashy.
Insults to her intellect left Miss Ransome perfectly calm. She had long believed the truth of the saying that “Hard words break no bones,” having been dieted upon expletives and adjectives both vigorous and varied whenever “poor Claire” was “not quite right.” Were her mindfurnished as Camilla would have it, she might become a second Miss Barnacre, and all that she would know of men would be the banging of doors by them, in hastening from her presence whenever she lifted up her voice in the odious terminology of science and philosophy.
Snubs to her appearance, occasionally administered on hygienic principles by Mrs. Tancred, left her equally good-humoured, though from another cause. Having grown up with her beauty from babyhood, she was as sure of possessing it as she was of possessing hands or a palate. Any one who did not think her pretty must be either blind or jesting. It was valued highly by her, as being the only means of escape she had from the sordid darkness of her outlook. But it was not the source of pleasure to her which their good looks afforded to most handsome women. It had been associated with too many disagreeables; had obliged her to struggle against too many imminent degradations, for her to have much fondness for it, apart from its commercial value as a matrimonial asset.
The serenely sweet acquiescence with which Miss Ransome received the information given as to the unusual smallness of the mind power with which she had been endowed still further increased her teacher’s leniency.
“She thinks that I am half-witted,” said Miss Ransome to herself, “and it will certainly be wiser to encourage her in the idea, as she will expect less of me. In her present mood I might safely finish ‘L’Enigme du Péché’ without fear ofdetection, but”—with a slight sense of unwonted repulsion—“I don’t think I care to; it is too like Charlie.”
To escape the odious memory evoked, Bonnybell diverted her thoughts into another channel. “What induced her to come up to my room last night? I felt sure it was because she had found me out, and I thought it safer to sham being asleep till I could make up my mind what excuse to offer. And why, in Heaven’s name, did she kiss me?”
The girl lost herself in contradictory solutions of this enigma. Was it in order to test the reality of her slumbers or to break them that Camilla had inflicted that astounding caress? Or was it humanly possible that the poor old lady was growing a little fond of her, and treated her as she would have done a young Camilla? The notion, to her own surprise, touched her oddly at first, but she shook off the sensation almost indignantly. How likely! She drove away her own inchoate softness by exchanging it for the ridiculous thought of what a hideous object a sleeping young Camilla would have been, and how impossible that in wildest fancy she could have been mistaken for such an imaginary monster.
“I always knew that Camilla would be easier to take in than Edward,” pursued Miss Ransome, a rather anxious wrinkle furrowing her brow; “and it is unlucky that just as I had brought him round, his belief in me should have received this fresh shock. With him now I have, I am afraid, my work cut out.”
The ensuing days justified this forecast. There could be no doubt that Edward was in possession of the fact that she had taken “the key of the fields.” “He must have heard it at the stables,” was Bonnybell’s conclusion; “but how could I ward off that? How could I ask all the grooms and helpers after their colds, or offer them anti-kamnia for their wives’ neuralgias? In this case I am not to blame. It is my misfortune, not my fault.”
Misfortune or fault, the result remained the same; Edward did not betray her. It did not surprise her that he refrained from doing so, though it was only doubtfully that she attributed his silence to loyalty to that promise of friendship which she had extracted from him.
Loyalty to given promises was not a quality with which she had ever had more than a bowing acquaintance. In all probability it was a taste for peace, coupled with the knowledge of what a terrific household storm his communication would arouse, that sealed his lips. Doubtless during the last fifteen years he had had frequent need of reticences and concealments on his own account. But whatever the cause of his conduct, Miss Ransome had regretfully to own that it was not due to any of that lurking partiality for herself, with which she had, up to yesterday evening, credited him. If his eye met hers—a rencounter apparently neither sought nor avoided—no grain of admiration was to be detected in its cold beam. A repelled curiosity, a sort of frosty wonder was all that was to be read in it.
However, a philosophic mind is able to see the good derivable from even the least propitious set of circumstances. There was an advantageous side even to Edward’s objectionable attitude. She would never be in the least afraid of being left alone in the same room with him. The fears apparently were all on the other side. She laughed to herself jeeringly. Would any one believe it? And yet it was true, that without overtly seeming to seek that end, her host undoubtedly avoided her.
She set herself with all the power of the wits her benefactress held so cheaply to propitiate him. But it was a path beset with pitfalls. His ideas, springs of action, standards were so radically different from those she had been used to find in the men of her acquaintance, that experience lent no candle to light her steps. She had learnt, indeed, by the process of burning her fingers at the flame kindled at one taper, that any discussion of Camilla’s body or mind, any comments on her actions, however mendaciously flattering, were to be shunned like the plague. But even thus much of progress was negative, and held out little hope, as a method of rebuilding his good opinion. What were his weak spots? And what chance had she of finding them out, if he never indulged her in any enlightening talk about himself? It was chiefly interest and the desire for a valuable ally in her arduous life battle that prompted her efforts to bring him round, but mixed with it was a worthier regret at having forfeited the only chance of a pure and honourable friendship witha man that her short ignoble life had yet offered her.
For several days she cast her little cautious nets in vain. Not a worthless sprat did the meshes enfold when drawn to land. He must be vulnerable somewhere, if only it were given her to discover the spot. The days passed in the fruitless search, and by the time the second Sunday came round since the disaster of her falsehood—or, as she would have it, the disaster of its discovery—she was almost desperate of success. On that day an idea struck her, which she hastened to put into execution. Luncheon was just over. Camilla had retired to her weekly stock-taking of her spiritual condition, and Edward was in the act of withdrawing himself, as he had done on the previous Sunday, for the whole afternoon. This self-effacement of his might have had its advantages, by leaving her free to carry out any innocent project of her own, but the motive that prompted it was at once too obvious and too distressing in its results not to demand one more urgent effort for its renewal. He had the door-handle already in his hand, when she addressed him so pointedly that politeness—and in that, at all events, he had never been lacking—compelled him to pause a moment to listen.
“I noticed,” she said, with what sounded like the painful diffidence of one making a great effort over herself, “that you did not go to the Dower House last Sunday.”
“No.” There was a slight inflection of chilly surprise in his monosyllable.
“I do not think that you have been there since the day you kindly took me to tea?”
“No?” The monosyllable was interrogative this time, and seemed discouragingly to ask what the drift of these idle remarks might be.
“I think I have understood that you always used to go there every Sunday afternoon?”
It was on the edge of his lips to say carelessly that he believed he did call on the Aylmers now and then; but with a timely realization of the necessity of giving her the example of a rigid truthfulness he answered, still with that daunting air of cold wonder as to her purpose in putting the question, that such had been his weekly habit.
“You will forgive me if I am mistaken,” she said, with a half-frightened meekness that would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear,” “but I have sometimes been afraid that I had come between you and your friends.”
She had hit the nail so exactly on the head, that the nearest approach to denial of her suggestion within his reach was a “You?” that sounded to himself a contemptible paltering with the truth, and to her a cold snubbing of her presumption.
“I am not so silly as to dream that any liking for me was your motive,” Bonnybell went on with an exquisite humility. “Whyshouldyou like me? What is there to like in me?” (The question was accompanied by a sorrowful smile which evoked within its executor the reflection, “If that harrowing contortion does not fetch him, I may as well shut up shop!”) “But I feared that perhaps your generosity had resented theirunnecessarily harsh treatment of such a forlorn creature!”
Answer to this speech would in any case have been difficult, and apparently Edward found it more than difficult, impossible, for he made none; and with a more dragging tone and a heavier spirit Miss Ransome took up her apparently useless little parable.
“If I am mistaken, I can only ask you to forgive me—I am always having to ask people to forgive me—but I could not bear the idea of coming between you and—people you are fond of.”
“Thank you; but indeed you need not distress yourself. I am going to the Dower House to-day,” he answered, with his usual gentle intonation, perhaps a little hurried from its wonted leisureliness, and so left the room, giving her no opportunity for a rejoinder.
Bonnybell, left to herself thus cursorily, walked to the Venetian mirror nearest her, carrying with her as nearly as possible the expression her face had worn during this last successless venture, in order to judge of what ought to have been its efficacy; and then, exhaling a large sigh, soliloquized, “H’m! I might as well have saved my eloquence, my magnanimity, the tremble in my voice (I am afraid that I am not quite sparing enough in the use of that), and my heartbroken smile, which really was a masterpiece in its way. Bah! and all for one poor harmless indispensable fib! What a ridiculously warped view to take!” She gave a little snort of indignation, but theplace where her heart ought to be, and as she had always supposed was not, felt oddly sore.
Neither had Edward’s heart much leap about its actions as he took his way—the way weekly trod by his Sunday feet—to the house where until a fortnight ago he had found pleasant, if not excessive, entertainment for his spirit. It shocked him to find how laggardly that spirit guided him to-day. There was nothing changed in the reciprocal attitude of the Aylmers and himself. Mrs. Aylmer would give him the geniality of her matter-of-course welcome, and to whomsoever Catherine was talking at the moment of his entrance, he would find her—for it was an unwritten law of their recognized comradeship—by his side in as many or as few moments as civility—for Catherine was nothing if not civil—demanded to rid her of her interlocutor. He was always treated like one of the family, but to-day the kind imitation of kinship offered had no charm for him; and he felt a dead reluctance towards the occupation of that wainscoted recess, with none of the secretiveness of a corner, yet all its privacy, where in the course of a good many consecutive Sundays his gentle friend with the candid if not quite straight eyes had made him the happy master of her sentiments about some of the greatest themes upon which our poor intelligences turn the dark lanterns of their groping speculations, and, pleasanter still, had lured some of his own shy imaginings out of him. Cart-ropes should not drag him to that friendship-hallowed window-seat this afternoon. And yet he must not hurt thefeelings of his comrade! Why shouldn’t he? The question rose rather brutally in his mind. He had had no scruples as to hurting the feelings of another person, of one whose wretched circumstances claimed a much tenderer handling than the full-blown prosperity of Miss Aylmer.
He stopped in his walk to look up as if in interrogation to the ash-coloured sky, hung so low over his head, that it seemed as if touchable by an uplifted hand.
“How long can I keep up the pretence of harshness with the poor little creature? Why should I be angrier with her than I was with Jock for killing rats in the barn yesterday? Both follow their nature; she her shifty lying one. She is a liar! Yes, but am I not one too? Is not my whole life an actual lie? If it had only been one or two”—his thoughts harping in exasperated pain on Bonnybell’s delinquencies—“they might have been accidents, the result of that abject fear she evidently feels towards us both. But the dreadful glibness of it! the plausibility! the circumstantiality!” The circumstantiality brought him to the Dower House door, and rang the bell for him.
Themoon unexpectedly lighted Mr. Tancred home. As if she had something agreeable to show him, she had shoved and elbowed aside the smoke-coloured curtains, drawn so closely across the sky when he arrived, and though still vapourish and a little sickly, gave radiance enough by which to distinguish objects. At first her lamp seemed officious. He could find his way home blindfolded along the familiar path, but before the end of his walk he discovered a use for it.
The evening air was mild and mawkish, and it was not because he was chilly that he covered the ground quickly. It was unlikely—scarcely possible—that anything untoward could have happened during his hour’s absence; yet he had heard something at the Dower House which made him eager to verify by his own eyesight the fact that the terrible charge committed to him was still safe, that he should surprise her as he did last Sunday, sampling his best cigarettes over the fire in the smoking-room, to which he had betaken himself earlier than her calculations had led her to expect, and where the austerity of his own manner had routed her, not in repentance for hertheft, which at this moment she was probably repeating, but in confusion at its discovery.
His wife had no toleration for female smokers. How, then, did he reconcile it to his conscience that, before leaving that wife’s house this afternoon, he had placed the box of cigarettes, of the brand of Miss Ransome’s predilection, where she could not possibly miss it? Yes, undoubtedly he would find his little lazy, lying inmate, with her depraved instincts and her seraphic eyes, stretched disconsolately on an armchair, scheming some false new wheedlings by which to undermine his principles and cajole him out of his just displeasure.
His reason was convinced that there was no need for haste, and yet he hastened. The moon was getting the better of the vapours as she walked higher up the low sky; and at even some distance off he could see not only the dark bodies of the deer moving in the open spaces between the dead bracken, but could distinguish the branched heads of the stags.
Presently other objects made themselves out against the steel-washed dusk. Neither were they unfamiliar, since a right-of-way, which for a century had vexed the souls of the owners of Stillington, intersected at about halfway between the Dower House and the Manor the path he was pursuing. The objects in question were the figures of a man and woman standing in the middle of the public footway, which held a transverse course across the park, and just outside the shade of a copse.
There was no reason why the couple shouldnot be any pair of village lovers—of his own servants taking loitering farewell at the crossing of the ways. Yet Edward quickened his pace. The added proximity of fifty yards told him that the man’s figure was elderly and bulky, and that he was holding the wrists of his slender companion against her will. Both were talking with such vehemence and concentration of gesture as to be absolutely unconscious of anything outside themselves.
A horrible suspicion, with the strength of almost a certainty, first stopped the observer’s feet stock still, then fevered them into a run. At the same moment a little voyaging cloud, thick enough momentarily to hide her, wholly covered the moon, and when it had swept past the man had disappeared, and the girl was running away in the direction of the Manor, with all the fleetness of which a very light body and longish legs were capable.
In two minutes her pursuer had overtaken her. She stopped, panting, and said gaspingly—
“Oh, it isyou! Iamthankful to see you! I—I—have—had—sucha fright!”
For once he could not doubt that she was speaking truth. Her eyes were full of terror, and her breath came in little dry sobs.
“Yes?”
“I—I had taken Jock out for a run—you—you know how he teases one. By-the-by, where is he? He must have run after a rabbit.”
Alas! she was off the lines again. Her hearer knew perfectly that the innocent Jock had notshared her mysterious evening promenade. His heart turned to stone against her, or at all events he thought so, and she had to continue her lame narrative unhelped by any expression of interest or belief in it.
“I had just reached that cross-path, when a man—you saw that a man was talking to me—jumped out of the trees. I had never seen him before, and—and—began to—to beg of me.”
She paused, her invention for the moment spent, apparently. It would be humane to give some sign of a pretence of credulity, but none came.
“I suppose,” she resumed with regathered pluck, though still trembling all over from the evidently very bad fright she had had, “that when he saw I had nothing to give—I told him I had no purse with me—he got angry, and——”
A voice at last broke in—an icy voice. Why should he allow her to sink deeper into her abyss of lies?
“Beggars do not usually wear fur coats and motoring caps.”
He saw a new and different fear born in her eyes; but in a second she was trying to conceal it.
“Was he—dressed like that? I was too frightened to notice! Was he—anybody that—that—you knew? that—that you recognized?”
The temptation to lead her into confession, by affecting to know more than he did, was strong; but he resisted.
“No!” he answered, and instantly saw alight of relief spring into her eyes. “I could not see his face clearly enough for recognition; but,” he added, with stern gentleness, “I cannot believe that he was equally unknown to you!”
By this time she was recovering, and her weapons were getting into order again, the bodily terror that had for the moment floored her giving way to a moral fear.
“I cannot think why you are always so ready to distrust me!” she sighed. “What motive could I have for deceiving you?”
“I do not presume to judge of your motives,” he replied; “I go only upon facts.”
If she had not been very much flurried, she would have abstained from the question she now put.
“What facts?”
“Since you force me into incivility,” he answered, with grave sadness, “I must remind you that ten days ago you told an elaborate falsehood, or rather series of falsehoods, to disguise the fact that you had spent the afternoon of my wife’s absence in London, in motoring to Tennington.”
Here was a facer. Yet it did not produce the effect he expected, and in an instant he realized that she had been aware of his knowledge all along.
“So that is why you have been so cruel to me all this weary time?” she cried, astute in softness, and trying with nice strategy to turn a position which it was quite impossible to face.
A suspicious tendency to grow lenient, recognized in time and rebutted, hardened his voice.
“You do not deny it?”
“Why should I?”—her look taking a surprised unbraiding. “I meant no harm! I only did it because I was afraid of giving pain to either of you. I knew that you did not approve of Lady Tennington; and yet”—anxiously watching to see the good effect of the next utterance—“I could not bear to neglect an old friend who is down in the world.”
She had so deftly changed the ground of conflict, and confused the issues, that he could only repeat stupidly—
“Down in the world?”
“Yes; isn’t she? Isn’t she verymal vue? And I am so down in the world myself, that it is not for me, of all people, to be hard on her!”
Perhaps the whole success of Miss Ransome’s not very artistic falsehoods lay in the poignant flashes of truth that she unintentionally lit up their darkness with, here and there. No hearer could doubt the reality of her desolate fellow-feeling for the social outcast with the golden wig, concerning whom Mr. Tancred had just been hearing something that made him feel that flaying alive would be too lenient a fate for her.
“It is no question of Lady Tennington,” he interrupted with a cold severity, “but of the person who left you so suddenly as soon as he saw me.”
“Did not I tell you—I thought I had—that he was a perfect stranger to me? that Ihad never seen him before? He jumped out of the trees, as I was passing! Oh, how frightened I was!”
A perfectly unaffected shudder told the listener that here again was a stratum of unalloyed truth.
“You do believe me, don’t you?”
“I believe that you were frightened.”
Had poor Miss Ransome remembered a certain fact, she would not here have lifted her clasped hands, nor would Edward have had the pain of seeing the glint of unfamiliar diamonds on one of them, showing her up by moonlight.
“Thank you so much! Of course I know that appearances are against me; and if, as you say, that man”—another shudder—“wore a fur coat, I suppose he could not have been a real beggar. But if you believe me——”
“Pardon me! my belief was limited to your being frightened! I can’t believe that the person to whom you were talking with so much animation and intimacy was a stranger to you, nor that you mistook him for a beggar.”
She drew her breath heavily, and to his relief did not repeat her asseveration.
“Whom do you suppose that he was? Have you any idea?”
“I am afraid that I have a very good one.”
The gravity of his answer was tinged with such a disgusted reluctance, that Bonnybell’s heart, not really at all recovered from its late intensity of fear, stood still. Loathsome old Charlie! She had always known that he would be the death of her! Would it be better to tell thetruth now? No! the truth was always a mistake for people like her, who had to live by their wits. The truth was, like motors and tiaras, only for the well-off! But she must express some curiosity; put the question to which she already knew the answer so fatally well.
“Whom?”
“I hardly like to insult you by saying so; but I believe the man to whom you were talking to have been Colonel Landon.”
Her answer came without apparent delay; yet three alternatives had raced through her head before she adopted it. “Shall I deny it flat? It is impossible that by this light he could have recognized him; he owned that he did not: it is just a trap to catch me! Shall I pretend never to have heard of Charlie? By this time Edward knows that I am not very innocent, so that will never do? Shall I just give a great start of indignation, and begin to walk home very fast?”
The last project was adopted, and at once put into execution. So well done was it, that it was a self-reproachful Edward, fearful of having done a grave wrong, who came up alongside of the fleeing victim to appearances.
“If I was mistaken, I can never ask your pardon enough. I was mistaken?”
The interrogation was so urgent, yet so apologetic, that somehow the bang-out lie that she had ready died on the fugitive’s lips. Perhaps the evasion to which she resorted was not much more really truthful.
“I do not know what I have done”—by thistime art had advised, and nature had readily supplied tears—“that you should accuse me of being friends with such a man”—“as Charlie” was on the edge of her lips; but the misleading diminutive was arrested just in time. “Of course, I do not know what he has done, but I know that everybody, except Flora, cuts him. How could you imagine that I could like such a detestable old beast, or want to meet him?”
In the application of the strong noun applied to Flora’sprotégéthere was such intense heartiness that Edward’s relief deepened.
“If I have been mistaken, how can I ever beg your pardon enough?” he said with a horrified accent of remorse, she posting along beside him, sobbing in the moonlight. “I must have been the victim of a preconceived idea and a fancied likeness. But I have just been hearing that that person had been staying for the last fortnight or more at Tennington; and I unhappily could not forget that you had been reduced to—to invention to hide the fact of your visit there.”
The links in the chain of evidence were closely knit. Yet there was hope as well as apology in his tone—hope of a denial as emphatic as her expression of distaste had been.
But Miss Ransome had already begun to repent of an outspokenness so foreign to her usual methods. “If Charlie ever heard that I called him a detestable old beast, it would be all up with me.”
They had by this time crossed the plank bridge that parted park from pleasure-grounds. Thesluggish river, by which her bored feet had so often stepped, gleamed beside the path ennobled by moonlight; and Bonnybell began to feel safer. In this extremely tight place she must invoke the subtlest diplomacy to her aid. The high line of injured innocence which a few minutes ago had seemed out of the question, now, thanks to Edward’s changed and humbled attitude, appeared more practicable than any other, and without delay she adopted it.