With this piously optimistic reflection on her lips, she fell sweetly asleep. It was not the winter dawn, nor the voice of the tea-bearing housemaid, that awoke her. The electric light full on her eyes, shot her back from the land where all things are forgotten, into a consciousness that was at first but semi. Some one was standing over her, and a voice was in her ears, uttering sounds which presently resolved themselves into words.
“You need not pretend to be asleep; I was taken in once, but it is useless to try and deceive me a second time.”
Bonnybell sat up, hazily blinking, still only half outside the gateway of sleep, and gradually realized that the form towering above her in the grimness of its snuff-coloured toga, and the inexorability of its dragged-back grey hair, was no other than Camilla.
“Is there anything wrong?” she asked, rubbing her sleepy eyes with her knuckles—a delicious gesture for once perfectly natural. “Is it a fire, or burglars, or what?” The empire of slumber was still too strong for there to be anything but misty indifference to the calamities suggested in the speaker’s tone. Then, with a spring back into full consciousness, and a frightened opening wide of the startled eyes, “Toby cannot have come already?”
“My conscience would not let me rest,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a ruthless lack ofapology for her intrusion, and a still incomplete belief in the genuineness of the drowsiness so ably presented. “Reflecting afterwards on the lightness with which you spoke of ‘throwing over’ and ‘giving up’ what you had sacrificed so much to win, I felt you could not realize that you were sacrificing what may never be offered to you again, the disinterested, protecting, shared devotion of an honourable English gentleman. To love and be loved worthily, perfectly—the most aspiring of us cannot hope to get nearer heaven on this side the grave than this!”
Camilla spoke the last sentence more as if to herself than to her auditor, and left the room immediately afterwards, as if ashamed. The dignity and solemnity of her utterance dispersed the ridicule attendant on such a Priestess of Eros, even in the trivial and hopelessly flippant mind of Bonnybell, and converted her mirth into a more human compassion.
“Poor dear old woman! I wish Edward could bring himself to be a little more demonstrative to her; but it would never do to give him a hint. So I am never to have another Toby! Well”—chuckling and yet shuddering too—“that is a deprivation I can well bear.”
Themorning had come, and with it Toby. As Bonnybell, propitiatingly punctual, appeared at the exactly nine-o’clock breakfast-table, she was informed by the butler, whose tone—the really perfectly colourless one of a well-trained servant—seemed to her ear vibrating with the compassion which all creation must feel for her, that Mr. Aylmer had been waiting for an hour and a half in the morning-room, and would be glad to speak to her as soon as she was at liberty.
The object of this very morning call cast a dismayed glance at her protectors.
“At home he is never down till long past ten!”
“An extremely bad habit, and a very good thing that he should be broken of it,” answered Camilla, unable, even at so dramatic a moment, to refrain from lifting up her voice in testimony against the vicious indulgence alluded to; but her hand rattled the cups of tea which, in contempt of servants and sideboards, she always made herself.
“I suppose I ought not to keep him waiting any longer,” said Bonnybell, turning withextreme reluctance from the tempting, gleaming table, with its beautiful old green dragon china and its Queen Anne silver, towards the door of doom.
“You had better have a cup of coffee and something to eat first,” Camilla said peremptorily. “A painful scene should never be faced upon an empty stomach.”
The homely common sense of the advice came to the aid of its imperativeness, and Bonnybell eagerly drank the offered coffee, and with some difficulty swallowed a scrap of toast. But still she lingered. The entrance of a servant with a lengthy message for Mrs. Tancred gave the girl the opportunity for a word with Edward, who had not yet sat down to the table.
“You would not come too, I suppose, to back me up?” she asked with low precipitation, casting a glance out of the corner of her eyes towards Camilla. But her alarm in that direction was unnecessary, as it was one of the rules of Mrs. Tancred’s life always to give her whole attention to the subject that at the moment engaged her; and though her interest in Miss Ransome’s love affair was undoubtedly keener than that she felt for the third housemaid’s quinsy, the latter, while she was being informed of it, entirely swept the former from her attention.
At the strange request made him, Edward’s features took on an expression which the petitioner at once recognized as not one of acquiescence.
“Poor chap, don’t you think he has a right to his last chance?”
“Very well,” she rejoined, with a hysteric laugh, and half holding out a hand. “Good-bye, if you never see me again.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that when a person is in the state of mind he is, poor fellow, one does not know what may happen.”
Her face was white as a magnolia, and yet contradictorily lovelier for the very absence of those reds which had seemed, when present, to make up half its beauty, and her eyes were full of a valedictory solemnity; facts of which, for once, she was all but quite unconscious.
“Do you mean to say that you are afraid of his being personally violent; if so——”
To her disordered fancy there sounded an echo of contempt in the form of the question.
“I am not much apt to be afraid,” she answered quietly, and a something in her tiny face, for all its blanching, confirmed the assertion. “I do not much mind if he does shoot me. What have I to lose now?”
“Do you care as much as that?”
There was a horrified astonishment in his tone, as if remorseful for some former incredulity, and for once Nature was too strong for Bonnybell. She saw in the mirror of Edward’s face that there must be a scornful denial of his accusation on her own. But in a flash she had again taken hold of herself and of her part. Not for a second must she forget, or let others forget, that she was broken-hearted at the loss of Toby.
“It would be a solution; and—and—it isnot easy to havetwopeople to fight, myself as well as him! Wish me well through it!” She was gone.
The engagement had lasted three hours, so the clock told the watchers, who—not together, for Camilla had rigorously forced herself to her daily desk—were awaiting the issue of the duel.
“I am glad that you let yourself be persuaded by me not to go to London to-day,” Edward’s wife had said to him before withdrawing.
“I do not quite know what good I do by staying,” he answered restlessly.
“In the case of two such perfectly undisciplined natures one never knows what developments may arise,” she rejoined.
With this imperfect consolation for his wasted morning, she left him. Since then, against his will, chidden by his common sense—for was not the smoking-room that held his uneasy idleness miles away from the morning-room?—he had been listening, asking himself whether, although unquestionably out of reach of any ordinary sound, the noise of—say a pistol or revolver shot might not penetrate to his straining ears? In vain to argue down the ludicrous idea. Did the danger seem real to her, or was the suggestion only thrown out to give herself a heightened interest in his eyes? She was quite capable of it. Not frightened either. Seldom as—he now realized—she spoke truth, she had spoken it then. Blanched with excitement, not fear.
Had Mr. Tancred’s eye been able to verify or correct the notions upon the current melodrama presented by his imagination, he would have seen the object of his speculations in even sorer straits than he had pictured her. The end of those dire hours left her and her antagonist exactly where it found them. From the engulfment of the initial embrace her spirit had cried out to itself, “This is exceedingly disagreeable, but I suppose it will end some time. How glad I am that I drank dear Camilla’s coffee! I do not think I could have gone through with it if I had not! His tears are taking all the curl out of my fringe. Poor devil, if he only knew how little worth while it all is!”
The same inward ejaculations were pouring themselves forth in her inmost soul at the end of the three hours, when her situation was no further amended than that she was sitting on a chair—a simulated swoon had gained her this concession—with Toby kneeling before her, his uninvited head rolling about upon her knees—while between loud sobs he formulated, with the iteration of a jay or a pie, his simple thesis: “You said you loved me! You promised to marry me! I have done nothing to make you change your mind! You cannot, and shall not chuck me.”
Against the rock of this unanswerable logic her rhetoric had for one hundred and eighty minutes broken in vain. There was not a single weapon in her not ill-furnished armoury that she had not employed; and all with a like result.“Wounded honour?” His familyen blocor severally should follow her round the room on their knees, imploring her pardon, and eating their words. “Tears?” He beat her hollow at them. “A vow never to love any one else?” This in her present nausea of endearments seemed a vow easy indeed to keep, but it was received with frenzy at the mere suggestion of such a possibility. The offer to be a sister to him and to be god-daughter to his eldest child when he was happily married to some one else were not up to her usual level of cleverness, and would not have been put forward had her mind been in its normal condition. Their effect was terrifying!
Physically exhausted, she leaned back in her chair, quite at her wits’ end, mechanically stroking with some dim hope of keeping it quiet the distraught head which, rolling about in sandy abandonment on her lap, pinned her to her seat. Never did a more poignant regret at the success of its own handiwork fill a human mind. “I ought to have known more about him before I went in for him so thoroughly, but who would have guessed that under that stodgy outside there was anything likethis?”
Another hour had passed, and yet another, and still the situation remained at the same hopeless deadlock. Occasionally the head lifted itself and the mouth repeated its pitiful parrot cry, and once, twice, thrice again, Miss Ransome went through the weapons of her armoury. In her desperation she tried a new one; offered—in utter hopelessness of ever ridding herself of him oncheaper terms—a compromise. If he would go away for a year, round the world—every one went round the world nowadays—in a year she might be cleared and made more worthy of him; and at the end——
He interrupted her with the brutal directness of one who had got through the civilized surface of things to the bed-rock of mere Nature, while a sort of cunning flashed into his dimmed and bloodshot eyes.
“I should find you waiting for me?”
“That you undoubtedly would not!” was the reply made by herself to herself, but for him there was a little tired sigh, and an “Ah! if you cannot trust me——”
At that he went off into extravagances, incoherent assertions of the impossibility of any one seeing without longing to possess her; of the madness of leaving her as a mark for other men’s desires.
She collapsed into silence. “Will no one ever arrive to rescue me?” The answer seemed to come in a loud whirring familiar sound, the prosaic boom of the gong.
“It is luncheon!” she cried. “You must not keep me!”
“You can think of luncheonnow!”
“They are very particular, very strict about hours,” she answered, casting wildly about for the rope that even now seemed to dangle just out of her reach, “and—and—dreadful, agonizing as it is to part thus, I must not—now of all times—do anything to alienate my only friends.”
He had lifted his head to make his protest, and she had nimbly taken advantage of the fact to slide eel-like away from him, and make for the door. He was there before her. But just as he reached it the mahogany portal swung open, and in the aperture stood a tranquil black form.
“If you please, sir, Mrs. Tancred wished me to say that she hoped you would stay to luncheon.”
There was a moment’s pause while the full bathos of the situation made itself felt. Then civilization resumed her sway, the primæval instincts retired into the background, and the unfortunate Toby, averting his hideously disfigured face, and swallowing his last sob, answered thickly—
“Oh, thanks very much, but I am afraid I am engaged.”
This, however, in one sense was just what he was not.
“Shewould, I should think, be glad if you let her have luncheon sent up to her.”
“I have no opinion of food eaten in bedrooms. If people are well enough to eat, they are well enough to come downstairs; but she is probably not fit to be seen, so for once I will relax my rule.”
These two remarks, to which it would be superfluous to assign their respective ownerships, were all the comment upon the recent melodrama at first possible to the reluctant managers upon whose stage it had been played. They ate their luncheon in ruffled silence.
The revolt in Camilla’s Puritan soul against the orgy of ungoverned passion which had chosen her house for its scene was incongruously mixed with an angry compassion, which suspected itself of being something even more lenient towards the cause of the whole uproar, while a very sincere annoyance at the unavoidable and imminent split between herself and her nearest and most congenial neighbours threw in its pinch of bitterness to the distasteful brew.
Edward’s feelings on the subject were evenmore complicated and less agreeable. Vexation at his own folly in allowing himself to be persuaded to forego his day’s work on the chance of a needless intervention in what no wise concerned him, a compassion even keener than his wife’s, but in his case dedicated chiefly to Toby, coupled with a dim but still existing satisfaction in his discomfiture, and that again with a biting self-disgust for being capable of such a sensation,—these ingredients composed no pleasant potion.
“It is to be hoped that, at all events, this will end the affair,” Camilla said, when at length they were alone, with a sigh of stretched endurance.
“I suppose that the length of the interview looks like it,” he answered.
“Does it?” she rejoined, her nervous irritation wreaking itself, as it had so often done before in their married life, in causelessly stinging words upon him. “I dare say you know more about these kind of extravagant love scenes than I do. You certainly cannot know less.”
He smiled a little sadly. “Mine was a very simple deduction; if she had relented, Toby would not have foregone his luncheon.”
“That is true,” she said, mollified by his gentleness, a gentleness that yet never prevented the recurrence of her stings, “and I was unnecessarily snappish, as you must often find me. Poor little wretch! She has shown more principle and grit than I gave her credit for, if she has kept to her renunciation of him.”
Edward was silent. The having lived in the house with Bonnybell for several weeks hadpossibly made him more attached to rigid truth than ever before; and the motive of her heroic abandonment was still too obscure to him for him to be able to join as cordially as he would have liked in encomiums of it.
“It is, of course, a severe trial to have her returned upon our hands, when we had thought our responsibility nearly ended; but we must try not to let her see it—a needless caution to you, whose tendency is always towards over-indulgence—but in this case I should be in agreement with you; in a mind like hers, the first germs of good cannot be too carefully fostered.”
Edward’s acquiescence in this plan of campaign, though really a fervent one, was indicated only by a slight nod, and Mrs. Tancred went on, the leniency and forbearance of her first proposal sliding into a withering sarcasm.
“Our friendship with the Aylmers is, of course, at an end; and doubtless this is only the beginning. An easy calculation will tell us how soon we shall be deprived of all acquaintances who number an unmarried male member among their family; perhaps”—the edge of her weapon growing keener, and fancy taking a bitter flight—“perhaps, indeed, the limitation toun-married male members is superfluous!”
Was it a happy moment for the object of this philippic to appear in person to answer it? Happy or unhappy, there she was. Scarcely had the climax of her forebodings as to the ultimate result of her hospitality passed Camilla’s lips when Bonnybell stood before her. But what aBonnybell! What a blurred, dimmed, dishevelled, altogether lamentable Bonnybell! A drowned toy terrier is the only image that for wretchedness, smallness, dilapidation, and pathos, could at all convey the idea of the figure that now presented itself to its protectors.
“I do not want any luncheon,” the dim ghost said in a voice that matched its face, “and I know that you do not approve of people eating things in their rooms; but thank you so much, all the same, for thinking of it! Oh, if I once begin to thank you, when shall I stop?” She ended with a low wail.
“Don’t be hysterical,” replied Camilla, hastily. “Edward, go and fetch her a glass of port wine and a biscuit. The servants must not see her. There, lie down and go to sleep. What is the use of crying yourself into a jelly just because for once in your life you have behaved properly?”
Edward departed on his errand with the greatest alacrity, glad to escape from the horrible yearning of angry pity that the sight of Bonnybell in her distorted misery inspired him with, and from the grating severity of his wife’s voice. Yet he took with him a feeling more subtly unpleasant than those from which he fled—the suspicion, namely, that the very abandonment of Miss Ransome’s woe was in itself partly a pose. “She might have washed her face and combed her hair,” he said to himself wrathfully; but the wrath, if not quite the suspicion, died down, swallowed in an immense pity as her trembling hand took the offered glass from his, and her sunk and diminishedeyes lifted themselves in mute gratitude. “Poor little soul! It can be noparti pristhat has dwindled her to half her size; and even if she has tried to make a bid for the compassion of the only friends left to her in the world by intentional accentuation of a forlornness real enough in all conscience without accenting, isn’t she even for that poor deceit the more an object of the profoundest, most lenient sympathy?”
By this time Love’s victim had been ordered to a sofa; and Camilla’s knuckly hands were arranging a crocheted shawl of their own manufacture over the little shivering body with an air of protest that was yet not ungentle.
“You may go now,” she said, addressing her husband brusquely in a key that, though also protesting, yet seemed to convey the impression that her unwonted occupation was not altogether disagreeable to her; “there is nothing to make a fuss about. She will have quite recovered from this silly lapse from self-control by teatime.”
This, as it turned out, was a slight over-statement of Miss Ransome’s powers of recuperation, and when Edward forced himself to reappear at five o’clock, mastering a strong spasm of æsthetic dread at the expected sight of the miserable little object that he had carried on the retina of his eyes throughout his ride, he found, to his relief, that she had asked leave to retire to bed.
“Would it be wise to send for the doctor?” Edward asked rather futilely, and received the withering response he deserved.
“The doctor? Why, Hutton would laugh in my face. She is simply sharing the necessity, common to us all, of enduring the consequences of her own actions. If she will lash up men by illicit means into the state to which she has reduced this headstrong and rather brainless young man, she must not complain of the result. One can only hope that it will be a lesson to her not to repeat the achievement. From what I can gather, I do not think that she had a very agreeable forenoon.”
The marks of the forenoon alluded to were still plainly visible on Miss Ransome’s face when, punctual to the moment, she placed herself next morning at the breakfast-table. Her eyes were still reduced to half their size, and the reds still absent from her cheek. She had regarded her own countenance in the glass before coming down to breakfast, with an artist’s regret at the prohibition laid on her by prudence to throw in the little repairs and improvements which might have been easily effected in the mirror before her. “I begin to be afraid,” she said to herself, thoughtfully, “that I shall ‘go off’ sooner than I expected. I depend very much upon colour, but it would be madness to touch up. I must try and keep pale, without whitening, for at least a week. I wonder when my spirits may begin to improve after such a blow?”
She chuckled a little, but not very heartily. “Ithasshaken me a good deal, all the same. Poor devil, I wonder how he is feeling thismorning! I would give a good deal—a safe offer, as I do not possess a sixpence—that I had let him alone. But howisone to tell? He looked so stodgy.”
With a sigh of real regret for the accomplished mischief, she went downstairs with the springless step that her really shaken nerves and the maintenance of her supposed condition of spirits dictated. A fresh blow awaited her.
“I am afraid that you are not yet at the end of your difficulties,” Camilla said, and the rigidity of her tone revealed that some unpleasant new development of the situation had shown itself.
Miss Ransome gave a gasp. She had come down thinking that a little chastened demonstrativeness towards her benefactress might not, under the circumstances, come amiss, but Camilla’s tone froze the little rill of gush at its source.
“He has not come back?” The words would scarcely form themselves for the terror behind them.
The question was ignored, and Camilla, faithful to her principle of never blinking, veiling, or delaying the conveyance of bad news to its lawful owner, explained her announcement of yet unaccomplished calamity.
“Mrs. Aylmer has written to announce that she and her eldest daughter propose to be here at eleven o’clock this morning, for the purpose of begging you to reconsider your decision.”
The carefully matter-of-fact key in which this fact was delivered did not disguise from Bonnybell the profound annoyance underlying it. Herown stupefaction at it was so great as to restore her wholly to Nature.
“And is Miss Barnacre coming too?” was all that her white lips could stammer. A reassuring snort from Camilla—the war-horse snort which the name of the too progressive governess always evoked—reassured Bonnybell on this head, and she was presently able to add, “He has made them do it.”
“So Mrs. Aylmer says,” referring to a letter lying open before her, and relentlessly reading aloud the sentence alluded to. “I cannot, cannot lose my boy—my only boy! And the state he is in gives us well-founded fears for his life or reason.”
A flash of wondering contempt for a life so lightly forfeited and a reason so easily upset, darted across Bonnybell’s brain; but it is needless to say that no hint of such a feeling was to be read on her tiny woe-wrung visage.
“Oh, how little worth enduring so much for I am!” she moaned.
“Very little indeed; but truisms will not help us.”
“What is the use of their coming?” continued the young creature, still with that moaning intonation, but gathering her wits about her, and seasoning pathos with common sense. “What is the use of my seeing them? Nothing is changed. It cannot be that in so short a time they have found out that they have wronged me—that—that the accusation they were so ready to bring against me was a false one?”
A pang of real apprehension nipped Miss Ransome at this supposed solution, but she was quickly reassured.
“Nothing is changed,” replied Mrs. Tancred, solemnly. “Least of all the immutable, eternal law, that we must abide the consequences of our own actions. You have made your bed, and you must lie on it. You had better be in the morning-room by eleven to receive them.”
There was no need for artificial face-whitening now.
“You will be there too?”
“Why should I? It is not I who have brought discord and disunion among them.”
A transient—very transient—gleam of amusement shot through Bonnybell’s brain at the idea of Camilla’s charms working havoc in any happy home, but it was gone, engulfed in gloom before she had realized its presence.
“I know that I have no right to ask it,” she said, throwing all she knew of humility, deference, and desperate beseechment into her voice, “but the knowledge that you were near me—that you thought I was in the right—it is so seldom that you have been able to think me in the right—would be the one thing that could enable me to go through with it. I—I feel rather shaken, after yesterday, and—and as if—I could not bear much more.”
There was a pause. Perhaps the appeal, borne on its helpless low wail, went straight to the ever-empty mother heart of Mrs. Tancred. The girl before her was an ill-conducted littleadventuress, but if everything about her, except that clinging attitude of prayer for help and belief in her power to aid, had been different, it would have been sweet to have called her daughter.
Thevisitors, arriving ten minutes before their appointed hour, were welcomed—though that is scarcely the word to express the profoundly grave and fully armed civility of Mrs. Tancred’s attitude—by Camilla alone.
“She will not see us?”
The primal emotions had, in one respect, acted upon Mrs. Aylmer in the same manner as upon her son. Gentle and suave-mannered as she usually was, to-day she had evidently forgotten, or at least brushed aside, all the conventions. What place had they in the map of such a calamity as hers?
“Of course, she will see you,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a dignified acquiescence in the abolishing of all preliminaries, and ready, as usual, to go direct to the heart of the matter; “that is to say, if, after what I have to tell you from her, you still think it advisable.”
“What have you to tell us?”—coming a pace or two nearer, as if to snatch the answer more quickly—“that she is ready to renew her engagement? Oh, itmustbe that.”
“She isnotready to renew it,” replied Camilla, coldly; “why should she be?”
For a moment the other was too knocked out of time by this answer to do anything more purposeful than give a sort of stagger, and the combatants looked at each other in silence, Camilla noting, with a rather grudging, yet not shallow compassion, how dreadfully ill and aged her friend looked. She and her daughter were both dressed in black, as Volumnia and Virgilia had been on their mission, and though Mrs. Aylmer was as little like Volumnia as Bonnybell was like Coriolanus, the motive of their dusky habit was the same.
“I am sure that you would be the last person to encourage her in such a revengeful spirit,” Catherine said presently, speaking for the first time, and with a good deal less of heartbreak and a good deal more of resentment in her voice than had found place in her mother’s. “Of course, we had never wished to be connected with her. How could we? And when this hideous accusation came, we naturally waited for an explanation of it, but she would give none. She simply walked out of the house.”
“And in my judgment it was the only course of action open to a decent woman after such an insult,” replied Camilla, incisively. Mrs. Tancred had never been very fond of Miss Aylmer, but her conscience, alarmed now at the pleasure she was aware of deriving from snubbing her, drove her into an admission of the justice of a part, at least, of Catherine’s contention. “I perfectlyagree with you in your unwillingness to be connected with Miss Ransome, and congratulate you sincerely on having escaped so very real a peril.”
“But we have not escaped it; we do not want to escape it! You must not call it a peril,” cried Mrs. Aylmer, incoherently, distracted at the injury which was evidently being done to the cause she had come prepared to spend her heart’s blood in pleading. “I dare not go back without her. You have no conception of the state he is in. He has renounced us all. He swears he will never see one of our faces again. He has said things that I could not have believed possible to me—his own mother. Oh, if you had children of your own, you would understand, but of course you cannot; how should you?”
Mrs. Tancred met the half-unconscious cruelty of this tearing open of one of the two lifelong raws of her life with Lacedæmonian fortitude. If she suffered she showed it only by a slight addition to the cold kindness in the controlled and measured words of her next speech.
“I am extremely sorry for his and your sufferings; even my naturally defective sympathy tells me how acute they are. My concern is the deeper as they have been inflicted by a member of my household.”
“Oh, we do not blame you forthat!” put in Catherine, resuming therôleof spokeswoman with something like eagerness. “We are not so unjust. Of course, when you took her in youhad as little knowledge as we of what she really was.”
Camilla turned upon her apologist with a frosty rebuke in her keen eyes.
“I have no wish to be exonerated from blame for doing what I—mistakenly, perhaps—conceived to be my duty. Nor, since you need no longer lie under any apprehension of nearer connection with her, can it concern you what Miss Ransome really is or is not.”
“Oh, Catherine, what a false impression you are giving,” broke in Mrs. Aylmer, with something of the distraught readiness of the real mother in the Judgment of Solomon to say anything or do anything that would save her son. “It is no question of what she is or is not, and we are sure that she is everything that is nice and right, and we ought never to have taken any notice of that abominable letter. It was against my judgment that we did it.”
“It seemed right to give her an opportunity of clearing herself,” replied Miss Aylmer, in a crestfallen voice, and with a suspicion of nearing tears; “at least, so it seemed to a valuable outside opinion.”
“You are alluding to Miss Barnacre, I presume?”
There was such a belligerent note in the query that Mrs. Aylmer’s alarm at the adverse way in which her battle was going rose to panic.
“Send for Bonnybell!” she cried, with hysterical imperativeness. “I must and will see her. If she is not a fiend—if she has not the heart of astone, shecannothelp relenting, when she sees to what a state she has brought us all.”
Thus it came about that two or three minutes later Miss Ransome, who had been kept in readiness by Camilla’s order, to be produced if her presence were insisted on, appeared on the scene. As she stole in mouse-quiet, snowdrop-pale, the recollection of the last occasion on which she had been summoned to the same room to meet the same two persons darted into her mind. She saw herself frisking up to Mrs. Aylmer, confident of an excellent reception; and the scene of ignominy and disgrace for her that had followed upon that ludicrous accusation of having corrupted stupid Meg’s mind. She was in a better position now; arbiter of the destinies of a whole highly respectable family, she, Bonnybell, poor Claire’s daughter! A spasm of unforgivable laughter seemed likely for a moment to choke her; but the disagreeables of a situation out of which it would take all her ingenuity to wriggle herself conjured it.
“We have come to beg you to forgive us!” Mrs. Aylmer said, precipitating herself to meet the object of her entreaties, and speaking with a trembling eagerness of humility which in its reversal of their natural attitude towards each other gave even Bonnybell a shock.
Before entering the room she had been putting to herself the humorous suggestion, “Shall I make them walk round the room on their knees to me, as poor Toby volunteered that they should?” That question now received a decided negative. “It really would not give me anypleasure!” The ravages it was impossible not to verify on the smooth middle-aged fairness of her would-be mother-in-law’s face gave Miss Ransome anew the measure of the mischief she had done. “Poor creature! she looks nearly as bad as Toby did! I am afraid that I have given her a couple of crow’s-feet that she will never get the better of!”
“We do not blame you for a moment; it was perfectly natural that you should do it, but perhaps it was a little hasty to leave us all in a minute, without a word.”
This plea was poured forth with such painful velocity that its utterer had to stop to draw breath, and Bonnybell felt that she must speak. She would far rather have stood silent in her impregnable fortress of injured maiden weakness.
“I supposed that you could not wish to keep such a—wicked girl—any longer under your roof!”
There was not the slightest tinge of vindictiveness in her tone, as indeed she felt none; the desire to come with flying colours out of a tight place, coupled with a very sincere if cool pity for the victims before her, leaving no place for any less amiable feeling in her mind.
“But we do not think you a wicked girl; it was all a misapprehension, and we quite see that we ought never to have shown you that—that disgraceful letter, or taken any notice of it. It was contrary to my opinion that it was shown you. No doubt the person whose idea it was, meant well, and we have got into a way of dependingon her judgment; but it will be a long time before I can forgive her for the harm she has done.”
“She always means well,” Catherine interjected, casting a reproachful glance out of tear-brimmed eyes at her mother for thus throwing the family oracle to the wolves.
“I suppose that you are alluding to Miss Barnacre,” Bonnybell said mildly, and glad to escape from the main issue into any side alley of the subject, “but please do not blame her; from her point of view she was perfectly right.”
“It is very generous of you to say so”—giving a final push overboard to the family sage—“and she will be as ready as we are to beg your pardon. She shall do it as soon as we get home. I am come to take you home with us.”
There was a quivering asseveration in the announcement of this intention that tried to exclude all possibility of question from it, but Bonnybell only gently shook her head.
“I dare not go back without you! I dare not face him! I do not know what you have done to him, but—oh no”—hurriedly correcting her phrase, in fear of its giving offence, “I do not mean that you have done anything; but—the—possibility of losing you—not that there is any danger of it now that everything is explained—has almost unhinged his reason.”
Once again a very profound regret for the completeness of her own handiwork occupied Miss Ransome’s mind, and for one second the idea of yielding to the frantic entreaties of the poor motherbefore her, who had got hold of her hands, and was unconsciously but painfully grinding their little knuckles together, presented itself. One “yes” would end this odious scene—odious since the humiliation of her humiliators gave her none of the gratification she had faintly anticipated from it; and, after all, marriage with Toby would still be, in a sense, the harbour of refuge she had once thought it. But before she had taken any false step, a head much stronger than her heart and a poignant recollection of the horrors of yesterday came to her rescue. The anchorage was not nearly so good as she had believed, and how could any union be endurable between two persons whose views of matrimony differed so diametrically as hers and Toby’s? Hers a cool commercial bargain, sweetened bycamaraderieand lightened by indifference; his—a sick qualm passed over her at the recollection, only twenty-four hours old, of yesterday’s agony of balked animalism; and the knowledge, relieved by no maiden ignorance, that the detested experience was only the porch to the mansion which Toby had prepared for her to dwell in.
But the instant of hesitation gave the crushed Catherine time and opportunity to throw in a phrase of exaggerated humility.
“Would you mind telling us whatelsewe can do?”
Bonnybell gave a slight groan. In her nature there was no vindictiveness, and the sight and sound of the absolute abasement of her enemies before her was for the moment undoubtedly disagreeable toher; though a reflex action of her mind suggested that by-and-by she might find some matter for complacency in it. But meanwhile she must find something to say that would be noble and magnanimous and, above all,final; and, what is more, not overdo it. “I must say something very beautiful,” she reflected, “and where on earth am I to lay my hands upon it?”
“Whatelsecan you say?” she ended by sighing out, as if crushed under the weight of so enormous a suggestion. “Oh, nothing,nothing! You have said a great deal too much already; more—oh, how much more!—than I am worth.”
“This is waste of time,” said Camilla, striking in for the first time; and something in the sound of her harsh voice gave the sorely bested heroine a sense of being backed up which nothing in the unbiassed words justified. “These ladies have asked you categorically two questions; and you must answer them in the same way. Will you, or will you not, return with them to the Dower House, and resume your engagement to their son and brother?”
“No, a thousand times no,” replied Bonnybell, dropping upon those pliant knees, on which in any emergency she was ever ready to fall—“not while I lie under this dreadful cloud. I would far sooner die than bring a slur on his honoured name!” (“Bad and stagey,” was her own impartial inward comment on this flight. “Oh, how thankful I am that Edward did not hear it! He has such good taste. How it would have disgusted him!”)
“That being the case,” continued Camilla, in an arid voice, whose matter-of-fact dryness did not give the impression of having been much affected by Bonnybell’s magnanimous outburst, and thereby confirmed its author’s own ill opinion of her achievement—“such being the case, there is no use in prolonging this painful scene. You had better leave the room; that is to say, if you are quite sure that your answer is final.”
“But it cannot be final!” cried Mrs. Aylmer, with almost a shriek, losing all self-control, and pouring out her words in a boiling strain of incoherent violence. “I will not hear of its being final! You cannot have understood what I was saying. I must have expressed myself ill. I tell you that I dare not go back without you. You do not realize what a state you have brought him to. I could not have believed it myself if I had not seen it with my own eyes. If I do not bring you back he will blow his brains out! Do you understandthat? Oh, what am I saying? I am only setting you more against me. But just think what a case I am in! Only one son, and he hating and cursing me! You will have a son yourself some day”—Bonnybell gave an imperceptible shudder; maternity played but a small and unhandsome part in her life’s programme—“and some one will rob you of him, and then you will feel as I do towards you!”
She broke off, suffocated, and flinging the girl’s hands from her with a gesture of despair and rage.
“Imustgo into hysterics,” Bonnybell said to herself, “there is nothing else for it, and I do feel very miserable and upset. I had better make as much noise as I can. I shall be the sooner sent out of the room.” She was as good as her word.
Inthe height of a simoom it seems incredible that the face of Nature should ever recover from its distortion and resume its smiles and dimples, yet a few hours effect this marvellous restoration. In the case of the Stillington simoom it took less than a week to remove the more obvious signs of the devastation it had caused in its destructive passage. In less than a week the Aylmers had not only ceased to be the only subject of conversation, but by tacit consent had been banished from it as too painful a topic for even incidental allusion. In less than a week the distracted Toby, having thought better of—if, indeed, he had ever really entertained the idea of—self-slaughter, had actually set off on that globe-circling voyage which his cruel fair one had prescribed to him, and the rest of the Aylmer family were in mid-process of indignantly bundling out of the Dower House, to await inconveniently on the shores of the Riviera the completion of their rebuilding house.
“They are punishing themselves more than me,” was Mrs. Tancred’s sole comment upon theannouncement that her quondam friends could no longer bear to lie under the obligation of a roof-tree to her. But Edward, conscious of the strong hold of habit upon his wife’s mind, conscious also of her small power of making new friends, and of the tenacity with which she clung to ancient ties, recognized with pitying sorrow the cut which so painful and abrupt a severance of an old and pleasant relation gave her.
Only one sentence from that final interview’s stormy end which Miss Ransome’s well planned and timed hysterics had saved her from witnessing ever leaked out to the curious little public around. It had been addressed by Catherine Aylmer to Camilla, and must have been repeated in a species of triumph at its point and fitness, and have filtered through who knows what channel of confidential Barnacre or eavesdropping servants back to the ears of Bonnybell.
“We can only hope that you will not havepersonalcause to regret your championship!”
“What a cat!” was Miss Ransome’s inward comment upon this innuendo. “I am glad that she does not know how little difficulty I have in keeping dear Edward at arm’s length. But it is a word to the wise. I must be additionally careful.”
By Christmas everything at Stillington was to all appearances as it had been. Life ran in its accustomed grooves, and not even the yearly hospitalities, largely understood by and still more largely carried out by Mrs. Tancred, as regarded the surrounding poor, were allowed to interferewith the resolutely resumed and ruthlessly adhered-to education of Bonnybell. Her eager offers to help in the dispensing of her hostess’s gifts, and arranging of her entertainments, were received with a curt and modified acquiescence. But a cautiously slidden out suggestion that a reprieve from study would help her to throw herself with more heart and soul into the work of benevolence met with a decided negative. To it was due the one sigh of regret ever breathed by Miss Ransome for her broken engagement. “If I had married Toby, I need never again have opened a book! It would have been impossible to know less than he did, and bad taste to know more.”
But, despite the considerable drawback of having to waste so much time on the improvement of her mind, the spirits of Miss Ransome rose, on the removal of the incubus laid upon them, to a height that often gave her grave uneasiness as to how to bridle and conceal them—spirits whose ebullition had to be worked off in low singings and childish skippings about her own room, before they could be tamed to the chastened sorrowfulness and veiled heartbreak which beseemed their supposed condition. Even with the nicest care a spurt of young joyousness would go nigh to betray her, but, happily, in each case Edward had been the sole witness, and Miss Ransome had never felt quite sure that Edward had found the evidences of her affliction personally convincing. How soon might she begin to be cheerful again? Earnestly she wished that she had someone to consult on that head; and sometimes the grotesque notion of taking Edward’s opinion darted across her mind; the hypothetical idea of what would happen supposing she were to put to him the question how soon—in case he were bereaved of Camilla—he would think it seemly to dress his countenance again in smiles? But, after all, it would not be a parallel case, since Edward never suffered from high spirits, and the experiment would probably blow the hospitable floor that carried her from under her feet. And, meanwhile, her inconvenient gaiety stood the shock not only of the rigorously pursued cultivation of her intelligence—for, after all, it was astonishing how little one need learn if one put one’s mind to it—but the information conveyed to her, without any explanation of its reason, that the family’s yearly habit of migrating to London after Christmas was this year to be intermitted.
There was, therefore, nothing visibly ahead of her but the monotonous life she was at present pursuing. Of course, it wasassommantas to dullness; and the only wonder was that she felt its oppression so little. She supposed that she must be kept up by the little fillip of Edward’s daily return; and the—as daily—effort to present herself convincingly to his mind as a very nice and thoroughly truthful young girl! The enduring doubt as to what progress—if any—she made in this praiseworthy task kept her zest for it keen.
As for Edward, if his estimate of his guest still held any elements of uncertainty, it was not for want of thought upon the subject. Howcould he help thinking of her? Was not she the one scarlet thing that stood out saliently from the iron-grey background of his life? How could he help, when on his daily downward journey from Paddington his evening paper was finished, and even whilst “Telegrams” and “Stop Press” were writing themselves on his retina—how could he help the ever-repeated question asking itself, “Has she got into any fresh mischief to-day? If she has, how can I hinder her telling me lies about it? Has she any more glimmer of a sense of the existence of such things as truth and honour than when she came to us?”
For the first week or two after the angry flitting of the Aylmer family had been accomplished, Mr. Tancred had anxiously watched his wife, partly in an intensifying of the compassion he always felt for her, partly in a fear that the irritation of nerves caused by the break with the inmates of the Dower House might wreak itself upon Bonnybell, instead of—as he devoutly hoped it might, in pursuance of a habit of fifteen years—upon himself. But he found with relief that his fears on this head were groundless. Camilla, it is true, continued to snub her pupil with unstinted liberality, and ruthlessly pruned away the little fripperies with which Miss Ransome tried cautiously to qualify the morose black of her mourning garb; but a smile forced its way oftener than she was aware into her hard eyes when the girl entered the room; and she never failed—whatever her effort to the contrary—to break into that laugh of hers, so rare, hitherto,as to be almost terrifying, over Bonnybell’s games and idiocies with Jock.
But to do Miss Ransome justice, her worst enemy could not deny that at this period of her history she was a very agreeable inmate. The extreme unpleasantness of her late experience, the fright it had caused her, and the entire absence of an opportunity for a temptation to new errors, combined to make her “conduct as the noonday clear.” It is not the highest qualities which make men or womenfacile à vivre! The tender conscience, the high ideal, the strong affections, when brought into friction with the wrongnesses, the basenesses, the coldnesses of everyday life, produce rubs to the temper which are avoided by the cool heart, which does not care enough for anything to ache; the pliant temper, which gives in because nothing matters much; the absence of aspiration, which acquiesces pleasantly in the actual.
Bonnybell was, as her housemates more and more realized, a shining instance of the value of small virtues in daily intercourse. She was immovably good-tempered, invariably civil, always on the look-out for opportunities for paying little attentions, light-hearted even beneath the pressure of the severe affliction under which she was at present labouring, yet subdued in her mirth as in her graceful movements. Even her efforts to avoid her studies were made with the most shrinking delicacy, and their frustration met with the quickest, sweetest acquiescence; and lastly, her skill in applying antiseptic to Jock’s wounds when the latter’s lifelong feud with the second coachman’s yellow Irish terrier culminated in a battle, which, like Waterloo, “with Cannae’s carnage vied,” was beyond praise. Now and again, indeed, but more and more rarely in Camilla’s presence, some all too intimate trait relating to the habits and haunts of a class never to be recognized as existing by Mrs. Tancred’s school—some startling theory, fact, or opinion, concerning population or the relations of the sexes, would slip out. But these were but tiny blemishes upon the else spotless white of her life and conversation.
So January passed, questionably enlivened by a few stiff shooting-parties, during which the modestly proffered attentions of Miss Ransome to the least attractive among the guests were patent to all eyes, and reaped an immediate harvest of approbation; while her one or two unlucky lapses fromjeune-fille-ismin conversation did not transpire till long afterwards.
January was drawing to its close, when to the uneventful household at Stillington the post brought one morning a piece of news which was received and commented upon according to their different characters by the three persons who learnt it. The news in question was communicated by Mrs. Glanville, and announced the fact that, by the perfectly unexpected accidental death of the head of his family, an unmarried cousin less than half his age, her husband had come into possession of a barony and a rent roll of thirty thousand a year.
“What a nuisance for the poor chap!” was Edward’s heartfelt exclamation.
Camilla said, dryly, that she hoped the command of so much money—since, of course, given the weakness of Tom’s character, the whole disposition of it would lie with her—might not lead Felicity into chimerical schemes, like her Guild of St. Swithin, the members of which were to devote half of every wet day to intercession for their erring sisters in society.
Bonnybell’s contribution, though made half under her breath, was unfortunately audible—
“They really ought to try to manage to set up an heir now!”
She was a little off her guard, suddenly dazzled by the brilliant accession of consequence and fortune that had come to her former—nay, as she had reason to know—her present admirer, and wondering whether or not she had been wise in so firmly, though sweetly and sadly, refusing the surreptitious correspondence that poor silly old Tom had pressed upon her. Her ruminations were broken in upon by a short—
“You have a happy knack of giving an indelicate turn to what you say,” Camilla said severely; “and if you have no more valuable contribution to the subject to make, I think you would do well to be silent.”
Bonnybell bowed her head, and one shining tear dropped in her lap. It was due less to the rebuke than to an inward reflection of what luck some people had, and how it was thrown away upon them. Even better than Felicity shecould have turned old Tom round her finger; but to what a different tune would she have set his gyrations!
The subject was not afterwards much discussed in the little circle, nor did it at first appear to have much bearing on the three lives of which that restricted circle was composed.
A wily hint from Miss Ransome as to the propriety of her paying a visit of congratulation to the late Mrs. Glanville, now Lady Bletchley, in acknowledgment of former hospitalities, was not taken up. It might so easily have been combined with one of those trips to London which since Christmas had been of bi-weekly occurrence. They were undertaken under the strict surveillance of Camilla’s maid, and had for object the receiving of lessons from masters, in addition to the private teaching at home. As pleasures they were, in Bonnybell’s opinion, better than nothing, but what a mockery in comparison of what they might have been!
Generally Edward returned by the same train, but as he invariably travelled in a smoking-carriage, and drove himself home in a dog-cart, her opportunities for thosetête-à-têtetalks with him, for which her zest was daily growing, were confined to a very few minutes’ pacing of the Paddington platform together. There was the Sunday walk, indeed, which had become a habit, and to which she looked forward with an eagerness which she was obliged generally to explain away to herself. “There is not really the slightest risk; he has himself well in hand; and as for me, the onlyreason why I am fond of him is that he is not like a man—at least, not like the bestial men I have known.”
Their course was almost always about the park, and through the whims and variations of an English winter Bonnybell, had her senses ever been much open to the sweet surprises of Nature, might have learnt how much beauty even January holds in her hard lap; what wild fantasies of ice-flowers on oak and beech, when sudden frost had surprised their wet boughs; what pensive dignity of mist-enfolded coppice and spinney! She was generally much too busy talking to be aware of any difference in the effects presented to her eyes. One is happily not expected to admire in winter, and so as the north wind did not succeed in piercing the astrachan fur under her chin, nor the crisp grass wet too much the thick boots which Camilla compelled her to wear, she asked no more of the outside world of Stillington.
At first Edward had tried to open her perceptions to the phenomena around her, attributing her obtuseness to the defectiveness of her training; since the eye, strangely enough, has to be told what to see, and the ear what to hear, quite as much as the brain what to admit and assimilate. But a short time sufficed to show him the uselessness of the attempt. Miss Ransome was, and was likely to remain, Nature-deaf and Nature-blind! There was something even pathetic, or so it seemed to her companion, in her efforts to do what was expected of her in the way of appreciation; and though among what seemed toher the shivery drearinesses of the winter snow it was difficult to guess what one was expected to admire, yet her quick tact prevented her from falling into any very gross error. She even, during a spell of hard weather, got up quite a successful show of interest in tracking on the snow the footsteps of some little animal which puzzled Edward; and though her suggestion that perhaps it was aloup garoudid not help him much, none the less was he grateful for the good fellowship shown by her aid in the investigation.
At first, by a tacit united agreement, they had avoided the Dower House, but one day, because it lay in the direction preferred by Jock, they found themselves half-accidentally in its neighbourhood. It was on one of the two showery Sundays that they found themselves looking up at its gables and dormer-windows from the closed gates. The dead eyeless look of a house whence the dwellers have departed was accentuated by the cold layer of white that hid the beauty of the old grey slates of its high-pitched roof, and by the many humps that indicated the whereabouts of its garden-beds. A small but piercing air blew in their faces, chill as the liking of the self-ejected friends, that had been wont to give so warm a welcome to one of the two persons who peered silently through the iron-work of the fine old gates.
“Let us come away,” Bonnybell said softly. “This must make you feel bad.”
“And you?”
He turned and looked full at her, which he did not often do, and she felt or imagined a glint of irony in his eye. It was not a happy moment, perhaps, for the bringing up of the fable of her affliction. The snow had had the exhilarating effect it mostly has upon dogs, and had made Jock forget his years, and sent him plunging through little drifts and scattering the frozen powder flying about his rejuvenated heels.
Bonnybell had no years to speak of to forget, and she had plunged and frolicked too; and now stood betrayingly rosy and radiant, surveying the casket of her lost treasure. Something in the tone as well as the eyes of her companion in putting his apparently sympathetic question, sobered her at once.
“You think that I ought not to be so cheerful?” she asked in a troubled tone.
“I am very glad that you should be.”
The answer was not quite up to Edward’s usual standard of amiability; nor could Bonnybell divine that it was irritation with himself at the discovery of how little he really missed the Catherine of past Sundays that gave a touch of ill-nature to his response. She took the faint snub, as she always took all snubs, in unresenting silence; but when they had turned away from the house, and were walking homewards, she meekly took up her own defence.
“Do not you think that one is right, for the sake of the people one lives with, not to show too plainly when one is unhappy?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And perhaps, in a way, it is not as great a blow to me as it might have been to some one else, because I have no temperament.” She made this singular confidence quite glibly and without any consciousness of its being unusual. But, used as he now was to her, it startled Edward so much that she was able to add thoughtfully, “Toby has a good deal.”
The shyness resulting from the reception of this obliging revelation was on Mr. Tancred’s side, and it kept him dumb.
“The kind of love I should like to inspire,” continued Miss Ransome, forgetting to kick the snow as she had been doing with childish pleasure, “is the nice quiet sort that would look after me, and keep disagreeable things and people away from me, and never expect anything beyond; but”—with pensive regret, yet not the slightest hesitation—“that is just the kind I never get; what I am offered is always the other—the horrid sort.”
The winter dusk, though nearly due, was, owing to the snow-shine, a little deferred; and it would have been impossible for any one looking at him not to see that Mr. Tancred was growing very much out of countenance. He wished he could stop her, but nothing came to him in time to arrest the still more embarrassing revelation that followed.
“I am going to tell you something that will make you laugh,” she said in a tone of frank and gently mirthful confidence. “Do you know that when first I knew you, I thought that, of course, you would be like all the rest!I wasafraid to be left alone in the room with you!” She ended with a glance at him of expectant enjoyment of his enjoyment of the joke.
Exhilaration was not quite the leading characteristic of his half-strangled answer.
“May I ask how soon you were undeceived?”