Therewas nothing unusual in Camilla’s spending a day of unexplained occupation in London. It therefore excited no surprise when, on a certain Saturday at the end of the first week in February, she departed on one of her silent excursions. It could not have had for object shopping, an occupation for which Mrs. Tancred cherished a dislike as vigorous as were most of her feelings and opinions. If her companions gave a thought to the subject, it was to decide that her errand must be one of the many noiseless good deeds which she hid as if they were crimes. The trumpet blown before actions, so inspiriting a sound in Felicity’s ears, was harshest discord in her sister-in-law’s.
Camilla returned by dinner-time, but did not during or after that repast give any of the slight indications which sometimes escaped her as to the where or the what of the day’s work. She was rather, though not very noticeably, more silent than usual. Not till after luncheon on Sunday did any perceptible change in her habits appear.
To Edward, dreamily puffing in the smoking-room, where Bonnybell, despite all her delicatehints, had never been invited to join him, his wife appeared. It was the hour when she was wont to retire to her religious exercises; and the inexorable rigidity with which, in the face of any and every obstacle, she adhered to the rule caused a look of surprise to dawn on her husband’s face as he took his cigarette out of his mouth, and rose courteously, as he always did, to receive her.
“You are surprised, and I dare say not particularly pleased to see me?” she said, with her usual crude directness.
“Why that fleer?” he asked kindly and playfully.
“Why indeed?” she answered. “It is not the spirit in which I wish to enter upon a subject that has grave bearings on both our lives.”
Her tone made him a little uneasy, though not so much so as if she had been any one else, since he knew her habit of viewing all life—even its slightnesses—from a serious standpoint.
“Whatever it is, let us at least face it under as comfortable conditions as we can,” he answered with a resigned smile, wheeling the austerest of his armchairs, and the one therefore best suited to her liking, nearer the fire for her.
He was surprised at not receiving a rebuke for the luxuriousness and self-indulgence of the sentiment, but she only assented mildly—
“Yes, if you do not mind, I will sit down, as what I have to say must take a certain amount of time.”
There was a pause. Camilla had laid aside her spectacles—a sign of good augury in her husband’s experience for her amiability; and now sat with her gaze abstractedly fixed on the old sporting and coaching coloured prints, which the eyes of her ugly solemn childhood had contemplated. He waited with an air of patient deference. Once, long ago, an ill-natured remark had reached his ears to the effect that his manner to his wife was charminglyfilial, and though the jeer had cut him to the quick, he had made no consequent change in it.
In a few minutes Camilla had apparently collected and marshalled her ideas, and began to speak. The opening took him by surprise.
“I do not think that I have ever been open to the charge of being amalade imaginaire.”
There was a startled touch in his answer. “I think you have often been abien portante imaginaire, and overworked yourself grossly in consequence.”
“I have not felt in quite my usual health for the last three months. At first I attached no importance to the fact, recognizing that at fifty-one cannot expect to have the vigour of twenty-five.” The appearance in conversation of the grand climacteric was always, as they both knew, a bugbear to Edward; but for once he recognized that there was no intention of galling him in its introduction. “But of late”—she paused, as if to choose the words best fitted for a weighty communication; then went on steadily—“I have had reason to suspect that something further must be wrong with me than the failure of power attendant upon the approach of age.”
At another moment he would have reproached her with a phrasing that might have better befitted her had twenty more years been added to the detestable fifty, which were always being thrown in his teeth, but now a painful suspense as to what was coming kept him dumb.
“Such being the case, I thought it wise to consult a specialist upon cases such as I concluded mine to be. I therefore made an appointment with Dr.——, which I went up to London yesterday to keep.”
“And never told me a word about it!” he broke in, with an almost angry upbraiding in his tone.
“Why should I?” she answered, looking at him with a stoical kindness. “Have you the power of life and death in your hands? I knew”—an expression of resolute pride settling on and dignifying her rugged face—“that whatever he told me, I should be well able to bear it.”
“What did he tell you?”
The question shot out with an abruptness most unlike Edward’s doubtful and suggestive methods, but the tidings sprung upon him had taken him by the throat.
“He could give no decided opinion; there was mischief undoubtedly—yes, but whether malignant orbenignant” (a scornful accent on the last word)—“you know the patter of medical phraseology!—it was impossible, at the present stage of the disease, to decide. I am to visit him a second time at the end of two months, when he may perhaps be better able to judge, though eventhen my fate may be still uncertain. The malady may successfully attack life, it may be comparatively harmless; it may be arrested, it may not; its progress may be slow, may be fast. There, you know as much as I do!”
Looking in his face, she could not think that it was indifference which kept him still mute at the end of her cool and lucid statement.
“I have never been much afraid to die,” Camilla went on presently, in a voice absolutely destitute of all excitement, but with a sort of reverence in it. “Death or life! If I do not deceive myself, I am ready to face the one, I am willing to face the other.” (Across the remorseful smart in the husband’s heart there flashed the painful doubt as to which alternative the willingness applied to.) “The point of the trial lies to me in the uncertainty. I have always been too fond of certainties; that is, doubtless”—with an acquiescent awe in her tone—“why this particular form of ordeal has been sent me.”
Edward had never been much a master of words, and out of the tumult of rueful pain and dazing surprise which now filled his heart and brain, none came to his aid. He could only catch the lean hand nearest him as it hung over the arm of its owner’s chair and press the oldfashioned rings into the spare flesh in an access of remorseful sympathy.
She let her fingers lie in his clasp for a moment, then quickly withdrew them.
“You must not misunderstand me—must not jump to the conclusion that there is anycertainty to go upon; there are not yet sufficient data to build upon either way.”
There was none of the too-frequent irony and sarcasm in her tone, and yet he realized with a horrible pang that she was warning him not to be too hopeful of—not to count too confidently upon—a speedy release.
“You have been suffering pain and misery all this time, and I have never guessed it! Could brutish stupidity go further?” he ejaculated, finding speech at last, though of a choked sort.
“No,” she answered, her rigid truthfulness in revolt against the exaggeration of his self-accusation. “You have no cause to blame yourself; there has been nothing noticeably different in me. There need not be, as far as I can gather”—she paused a moment—“for some little while yet; and I have suffered no pain to speak of. If pain comes, I am under no apprehension of not being well able to endure it.”
The steady confidence of Mrs. Tancred’s tone was not needed to assure one who had lived beside her for fifteen years of her endowments in the way of dogged endurance. But the certainty that she would face the reality of death with the same high courage as she had faced the mockery of life did not go far to allay the stings and bites of his remorse. While she had been quietly bracing herself to meet the grip of a mortal disease, he had been mooning unobservantly along beside her, full of vapourish half-guilty dreams and sickly discontents.
Presently Camilla spoke again. “I do not think that I should have mentioned the subject to you yet awhile—not until I had something more definite to tell, if”—a very slight pause this time—“I had not made up my mind, after full consideration given to the subject during the hours of last night, that, in view of the possibilities ahead of me—of us, it would be advisable to make some changes—one change, at least—in the arrangement of my—of our lives.”
No sound broke the reverence of his listening silence, but he felt as if there were a ton’s weight on the top of his head.
“If this is the beginning of the end—if, whether by inches or by some quicker action of the malady, I am to die, I think it would be better that Bonnybell should leave us.”
Edward bent his head in acquiescence. He had not consciously suspected what his wife was leading up to, yet when the climax came he felt that he had known all along that it was coming. A very sensible addition to the tumultuous wretchedness of his feelings lay in the fact that he could not disguise from himself that it came as a blow.
“I quite understand,” he answered. “It is perfectly natural that if you have to lead an invalid life, you should not wish to have a stranger living in your house.”
“You quite misunderstand me,” she retorted, with a good infusion of the wonted sharpness in her tone. “Bonnybell is no longer a stranger to either you or me, and it is a farce to pretend thatshe is; and I have not the least intention of leading an invalid life. I hope to do a good deal of work yet, to go on working, if possible, nearly to the end.”
He had heartily hailed the surliness of her voice, as something normal and healthy, but he left her free from interruption to explain the idea which he had failed to comprehend. It was a minute or two before she did so.
“I think,” she said, the pettishness of eye and tone giving place to a deep solemnity, “that if these are to be the final months of my life, I ought to try and keep them as free as possible from unnecessary temptations to irritability and anger; from profitless friction to a temper which through all these years I have failed—as you know, to your cost—to bring under proper control.”
Courteous as he was by nature and training, it did not occur to Edward to utter a polite contradiction of a statement whose truth was so painfully well known to them both. He only made a slight gesture that might mean assent.
“My motive, as I have stated it, sounds wholly selfish; but it is not so”—her voice sank slightly—“for you, too, it is better that she should go.”
At that he turned white. “Of what do you suspect me?”
“Of what do I suspect you?” she repeated, looking at him with a remorseful kindness. “Of nothing worse than of wishing to put a little colour into the life I have made so grey for you.”
There was none of the satiric bitterness with which she often alluded to the failure in the matter of happiness of their joint life voyage, only pitying pain; and only pitying pain, in full measure, rang in the remonstrance of his reply.
“Do not you think that you have made it greyer by always taking for granted that it must be grey?”
She assented almost gently. “It is possible. Since the great initial mistake, I have gone from one error of judgment to another, and I am not sure”—with an accent of humiliation—“that though I did it for the best, though I thought I saw the path of duty plain before me, that the last has not been the gravest of all.”
He did not ask her what that last and crowning lapse from wisdom had been. He made neither protest nor asseveration, and for a minute or two they sat gravely looking at the ashes in the grate, as if they had been those of her long-departed and his wasted youth. He had taken her hand again, and she suffered him to hold it longer this time. But even while it lay in its cold dryness in his, even while his heart seemed too brimful of ruth, of horrified sorrow and stunned surprise, to have room for any other denizens, there stole into it the insidious thought, “If Bonnybell is to be turned out, what will become of her?”
“Thesun has gone in. He was shining quite brightly half an hour ago,” Bonnybell said with a slight but meaning glance at the clock, and an accent of very gentle reproach.
The time for setting out on the weekly Sunday walk had been overpassed by forty minutes, and Miss Ransome was found, when at last joined by her tardy companion, fidgeting up and down the hall, with a look of upbraiding punctuality. Invariably hitherto it had been she that had kept him waiting, yet the strange thing was that even now he offered her no apology. He was too busy thinking what an unconscious aptitude there was in her words, “The sun has gone in.”
Edward would have much preferred to have intermitted the Sunday habit, which had grown so sweet, and which must shortly be abandoned for ever. It seemed an impossible feat in mental gymnastics to twist and wrench his thoughts away from the horrible coil of shocked pain and self-reproach which the last half-hour had wound round them, and turn them and his ears to the little trifling or doubtful topics on whichalone Bonnybell’s tongue frisked along with such gay glibness. He had come into the hall with the intention of asking her to let him off, of framing some excuse which would give him freedom to face the tidings of a hideous probability in the solitude which could alone steel him to meet it. But when he saw the girl his intention melted away. There was such obvious relief and pleasure in her little bright face, clearly following upon annoyance and puzzled misgiving, that he saw that his defection would cause her real disappointment—a disappointment, too, for which he could give her no reason.
It was always difficult to Edward to run counter to any one’s wishes; and, after all, what hurry was there for him to realize his wretchedness? He would, in Camilla’s showing, have weeks and months to do it in. Camilla—his poor, valiant, smitten Camilla!
“You need not look so miserable about it,” came a pretty little reassured voice in his ear; “it was only a passing cloud. He will be out again by the time we reach the bridge, and the days are so much longer now; we need not hurry home.”
“Only a passing cloud!” Into how deep an irony the aptitude of her former sentence had turned!
They walked almost in silence till the copse beyond the wooden bridge into the park was reached. There they paused to mark the progress made since last Sunday by the still small low snowdrops beginning to pierce the rain-softenedearth. Such advance in the knowledge and appreciation of Nature had been made by Miss Ransome that she had actually perceived them without their being pointed out to her.
“How pretty they are!” she cried with perhaps rather more enthusiasm than the humble blossoms really inspired in her. “I think their French name is prettier still—perce-neige. They always remind me of my old French nurse, Babette; she used to put them on her daughter’s grave in Mont Martre. The poor girl had been unlucky, had a baby and died of it; and Claire bought her a graveen perpétuité. Claire was very kind in those ways.”
The effort to induce Miss Ransome to drop the use of her mother’s Christian name in theirtête-à-têteshad long been pusillanimously abandoned by Edward, and he now listened with a dull reflection how harmoniously immoral the surroundings of poor Bonnybell’s infancy and childhood had been, not even her nurse’s daughter having been able to refrain from having an illegitimate baby.
“I never could have believed that I could have grown to love the country so dearly,” pursued Bonnybell, inwardly wondering at the unaccountably occupied air of Edward, and determining to be even more endearingly rural than usual.
“And yet you would rather be in London, wouldn’t you?”
It was the first question he had put to her since their walk began, and she smiled inwardlyat its superfluousness. Of course she had rather be in London. Who but a fool wouldn’t? London or Paris! Were there any other places where a sane person who was not fifty, and had not a young husband whom she wanted to keep an eye upon,couldwish to live? The only fear was lest her answer should let pierce through too much of the internal radiance kindled by the suggestion.
“Are we going up, after all? Has Mrs. Tancred changed her plans?”
Edward’s answer lagged. He had not meant to tell his companion of the imminent change in their lives, yet now he felt that he was going to do so.
“Why should it be ‘we’?” he asked presently, with an exaggeration of his suggestive and querying manner. “Would not it do as well ifyouwere going up?”
Her face told him that it would not. Half the light of glad expectation went out of it, and he was guiltily aware of the first sensation of pleasure that had touched him since Camilla’s communication.
“Are you only teasing me,” she asked, with a not artificialtremoloin her voice, “or do you really mean that I am to be sent away, after all? I—I—hoped that I had not done anything fresh lately.”
Her fallen countenance, the trembling diffidence of her accents, the cloud that, settling on her face, contrasted with the sunbeam which had shot through the leafless twigs to dance there, made him heartily repent of the undertakingon which he had embarked. Why could not he have left it to Camilla? Then a knife of self-reproach turned in the fresh wound in his heart. Had not he always left everything disagreeable to Camilla? Was not it time—the time of which probably so little would be left to him—to take some share of the burden he had for fifteen years been shifting on to those enduring shoulders?
“Done anything fresh!” he repeated, trying to give an accent of lightness to the repetition of her fear. “Nothing beyond being more delightfully kind and helpful and spoiling to us with every week you have given us.” (Miss Ransome’s brow did not clear. Edward was not in the habit of complimenting her, and instinct told her that the enumeration of her merits had something ominous in it. He was leaning against a tree-trunk, and she noticed that there was a false nonchalance in the way in which he was stirring the dead leaves with his stick, and that he did not look at her, as he added a finishing clause to his civilities.) “But we cannot be so selfish as to hope to keep you always to ourselves!”
It was such a bolt out of the blue, that no wonder if a sort of darkness settled on Bonnybell’s vision. “I am bound to go to the dogs if they kick me out, as they are going to do,” she said to herself crudely, “and I shall have no more Sunday walks.” The collocation of two future events of such unequal consequence had something ludicrous in it, but for the moment the misfortunes prophesied counted to her as about equal.
“It has been wonderfully good of you to put up with me so long,” she said after a pause; and even in this crisis of feeling she could not help thinking how infinitely better the natural tremble in her voice was than any of the many artificial ones she had executed. Its success was, as she at once felt, proportionate to its superiority. Edward forgot himself just a little.
“Put up with,” he repeated, in a key of low emphasis—“put up with sunshine and wonderful temper and tact! Has it been so great a credit to us to put up with these?”
Her quick ear caught the plural pronoun, and set her wondering whether Mr. Tancred was joining his old wife with him only for the sake of euphony? or, if her opinion of the temper and tact alluded to, and which she had put to the test so very much more severely than he had ever done, was as high as his, why this imminent expulsion?
His voice, recovered and recontrolled, broke upon her anxious speculation.
“But because you have been infinitely good and forbearing to a cranky old couple is no reason why they should stand in your light!”
She could not even compass another tremble now, it would have broken into a sob, and it was too soon, as the tact he had praised taught her, to use that ultimate weapon. But something of the blank cold wonder that was icing her heart sat in her desolate orphan eyes as they looked in meek expectancy of her doom at him who had taken upon himself to pronounce it.
“I am making a stupid bungle,” he said, averting his own eyes. If he did not fix them on some other object, he should have to close them, so unendurable to him was the sight of her little darkened face, unalterably sweet in its expectation of an imminent blow. “I am going on the supposition that you know what I am talking about, which of course you cannot do. Camilla has not yet had an opportunity of telling you, but this morning she received an invitation for you which she does not think it fair to you to refuse.”
No assenting comment.
“Camilla heard this morning from my sister Felicity, begging us to spare you to her. It seems that you made yourself so helpful and indispensable when you stayed with her last autumn that she has missed you grievously ever since. She wrote so urgently—Felicity is one of those people who always manage to get what they want—that my wife did not think it right to refuse her, more especially as she thought it would be doing you a good turn—giving you a pleasant change.”
His voice died away into an indistinct murmur. Every word uttered by him had been strict truth—to offer untruth to Bonnybell would have been, as has been already observed, sending coals to Newcastle. Yet in his own ears his statement sounded like a bad, bald lie.
Of itsun-veracity not the slightest doubt traversed the girl’s mind. “What a much better story I could have made up,” she said to herself, with an artist’s pity for acroûte. Across theunaffected quiver of her lips a slight sigh of relief stole. “There’s not a word of truth in it! As long as old Tom was alive, Felicity would never have asked me to stay with her again; but they are somehow going to force her to take me.”
Miss Ransome’s philosophy here began to return to her aid. “It is better than the streets, anyhow, and five minutes ago I did not see any other outlet. But I certainly am sorrier to leave Edward than a wretched little adventuress like me ought ever to let herself be about anything.”
These reflections did not lend themselves to utterance, and after all, as he had evidently made no effort to run counter to Camilla’sfiatfor her dismissal, it was as well to make him feel as uncomfortable as an attitude of submissive but heartbroken silence could render him. Bonnybell’s heart was not of those that break, but there was quite enough of true stuff in the mixed woof of real and counterfeit which went to make up her attitude of sacrificial lamb bound to the altarhorns, to make it inimitably touching.
“The only wonder is that you should have kept me so long,” she murmured at last, with the most submissive figurative kissing of the hand that smote her, yet, in the turmoil of her spirits, forgetting to feign any belief in the supposed fiction of Felicity’s summons. “You will laugh at me, but I had begun to hope that I was becoming a little useful to Mrs. Tancred, that she was growing to be just a very little fond of me.”
Her slight, desolate smile at the fatuity ofhaving hoped to reap a small crop of that affection which to most girls of her age was a banal matter of course, reduced her hearer to a state of wretchedness far deeper than her mild aspiration after vengeance had wished.
“Laugh at you!” he said in a choked voice. “Laugh at you for believing what falls so far short of the real truth! You have been like a most kind and dear daughter to my wife—to us both.”
This last clause, with its evident effort to set the rickety situation on four strong straight legs, provoked so acute a mirth in Bonnybell’s spirit, sore as it was, that she had much ado to disguise it. “The poor dear is so determined to be my ‘papa,’ and he looks and feels so unlike it!” she said to herself. She drew a long, patient sigh.
“Thank you for saying so! I am glad that I am not being sent away in disgrace.”
He caught up the phrase with an intonation of acute distress.
“In disgrace?How can you misunderstand me so lamentably as to suggest such an idea?” Then, ruth and pity carrying him, like runaway horses, quite beyond the limits of his self-imposed commission, “Why, I cannot think how my wife will get on without you.”
At that a tiny smile stole to the drooped corners of her sad mouth. “He has always suspected me of telling lies, but my imagination has never run to such a big one as his!” Aloud she said, while the least tinge of malice, which she was unableto get rid of, coloured the plaintive innocence of her speech—
“It is you, then, who have come to the end of your patience! you who, like Tom—Lord Bletchley, I mean—haveput down your foot!”
At the pseudo-naïveté of this reproach Mr. Tancred’s pale face grew suddenly suffused with a hot flush, but he looked his interlocutor full in the eyes as he answered with a steady dryness—
“I do not think there is any analogy between the cases.”
The response showed her that he was as perfectly aware as she herself of the reason of her ejectment from the Glanville household; and also that he repudiated any kinship with Tom’s amorous weakness. The—in her experience—unexampled severity of his tone, coupled with the consciousness of having made a deplorably false step, combined to overset her. “It is time to begin to cry,” she said to herself, yielding by policy to what was a very real breakdown of self-control, and at once the obedient tears welled into and blurred the meek lustre of her eyes.
“It is hard that when we are going to part so soon we should keep misunderstanding each other!” she murmured, with just enough and not too much of a sob. “I never dreamed that you would think that I could imply that there was any likeness between such a person as poor Lord Bletchley and—you!”
The little subtle pause before the personal pronoun somehow gave a sense of so enormousa superiority in the person to whom it referred to his unlucky brother-in-law, that Edward felt his temporary anger melting back into the original mass of misery from which it had sprung. How could she tell what a hornet’s sting her perhaps unintended insinuation had gained from that news of Camilla’s, of which she could know nothing? How could she tell that her flippant shaft had struck a heart and conscience already writhing with remorse? In word and deed Edward had been absolutely faithful to his wife. But how about thought? Despite his Pharisaical attitude, was he in reality so very much Tom’s superior?
“You have misunderstood me too,” he said, his voice resuming its courteous gentleness. “No doubt through my fault—my muddled way of explaining a plan which we thought would be for your happiness—give you pleasure!”
The plural pronoun dried her tears, which had done their mollifying work, and were no longer either needed or easy.
“I shall be very glad to see the Bletchleys again,” she said, with a resigned acquiescence; and unostentatiously passing a small fine handkerchief over her eyes and cheeks. “It is very good of them—ofanybody—to take me in.”
The forlorn orphan note in her voice was the one he could least bear. Already he was telling himself that he had been too harsh to her, to this friendless fragility, shortly to be driven so reluctantly—despite her meek consent, there could be no doubt about the reluctance—from his door.Hisdoor! No, had it beenhis, she would never have been driven from it!
Then the pendulum swung back again; the image of Camilla, with her future of probable agony and lingering death, resumed its supremacy in his mind, and in shocked return to his allegiance he spoke with a cool matter-of-fact kindness.
“You will find only Felicity at first. Tom is gone to Scotland for fishing. You know he is always glad of an excuse to get out of London.”
Had Mr. Tancred been able to see under the large white lids that drooped over Miss Ransome’s eyes, he would have noticed in those eyes a glitter that would have surprised him. “I thought so,” was her inward comment. “Old Felicity has her head too well screwed on to ask me there when Tom is at home.” Aloud she said humbly—
“I must try to be a little useful to her.”
Bonnybell’s words carried a very delicately sad implication that her efforts to make herself acceptable in her present surroundings had been so unsuccessful as to prevent any sanguine hope of their flourishing better in another soil. Her inward ruminations proceeded a step farther on the path they had begun to tread. “Tom cannot fish for ever; and then?” Yet it was not the vista of future expulsions unfolding before her mental eyes that made her say to herself, “Hemustfeel it too, though he tries to carry it off.”
There was a silence, not the dull indoor silence broken only by a buzzing house-fly ora falling cinder, but the outdoor February silence invaded by the beginning melodies of new-wedded birds.
“I am afraid that I shall never now learn to distinguish the notes of the birds from each other, as you had promised to teach me to do,” Bonnybell said presently, with an exquisite modulation of chastened regret.
Her hearer had on other Sundays perfectly taken the measure of her ornithological curiosity, and was as aware as herself that it was got up only to gratify his own tastes, and had less than no existence out of his presence; yet something in the resigned yearning of her tone sent a look into his eyes which presently emboldened her to say—
“I must try not to think of these kind of things, mustn’t I?” adding a little later, with a tentative timidity, “I suppose you go to see Lady Bletchley now and then?”
But he had pulled himself together. “It is not much use looking up Felicity. As you are aware, female philanthropists are not often to be found at their own firesides.”
Her face fell, but presently regained a beam of hope. (“Of course, if he has not been in the habit of going to see her he could not begin now; she would smell a rat at once.”)
“Perhaps we may meet in the street accidentally some day,” Miss Ransome continued, with an affecting air of forced cheerfulness, yet feeling her way as she went along; “or, after all your kindness to me, it would be too dreadful tothink of never seeing you again! I would try—to meet—you anywhere—that was convenient—to you—if you gave me notice in time.”
He shook his head resolutely and quickly. Never had he felt less mirthful; yet a bitter amusement crossed his mind at the thought of the distance which the young creature before him had traversed since the not distant date, when, according to her own avowal, she had been afraid to be left alone in the room with him!
Thetransfer had been effected; the shuttlecock had returned to that one of the two battledores which had first propelled it.
“It seems as if you had never been away!” Lady Bletchley said, clasping Bonnybell to a heart still draped in complimentary mourning for the beneficent cousin who had turned her into a peeress.
“Yes, doesn’t it?” answered the new arrival, with a warmly responsive embrace.
It was not true. Half a lifetime’s experience seemed to yawn between the present moment and the one during which she had questioned Felicity as to Edward’s habits, and suggested Camilla’s rejuvenating herself with dye. But to assent to whatever proposition her host and hostess might choose to advance, more particularly in the earlier hours and days of a stay, was one of the fundamental rules of Miss Ransome’s code.
“It is very delightful to have you back!”—looking at the girl whose hand she still held with eyes so kind and admiring that Bonnybell made the comforting reflection, “I have evidently not gone off!” “I missed you dreadfully! Itwas very good of me to let them keep you all this while—two whole months, isn’t it?”
Miss Ransome did not think it necessary to point out the trifling twist from strict veracity given to this sentence, but responded in meek correction of the faultiness of her patroness’s memory.
“Three.”
“To be sure! Three, of course. How sweet of you to remember the exact time that you have been away from me! And how did you leave them?”
“I did not see Mr. Tancred,” replied Bonnybell, with a very slight lagging of the voice, which tallied with an inward pang of resentment at Edward’s having shirked the farewell on which she had counted as the bouquet of her fireworks, by an earlier departure for London than his usual one. She added, “Mrs. Tancred was much as usual.”
As she spoke Miss Ransome’s mind repictured the parting with the iron-grey woman who had last ejected her; recalled the valuable presents ungracefully given, the handsome tip coupled with harsh advice as to the methods of spending it, the cold formal farewell ended unexpectedly by both giver and receiver in a sudden kiss and “God bless you!”
“Much as usual!” repeated Lady Bletchley, underlining Bonnybell’s colourless description. “I am glad to hear you say so!”
“Why?”
“The last time she was here I thought herlooking so exceptionally ill! She is always a shocking colour; but that day she lookedlivid. Of course, she pooh-poohed my anxiety about her; but, do you know, it has occurred to me once or twice of late that there must be something rather gravely amiss with her.”
Bonnybell looked startled. Mrs. Tancred’s complexion had never presented itself to the girl’s eye or mind, except as a harmonious part of her general ugliness. That its leaden pallor had any relation to ill health had never struck her. Something gravely amiss with Camilla! Did that mean that before long she was going to die? To do Miss Ransome justice, her first sensation when this idea presented itself was one of regret. Poor old Camilla! with her doughty championship against the Aylmers, and her handsome presents, and her tip, and that shamed and hurried yet motherly parting kiss! Poor dear old Camilla! It was only that second thought, which, despite the praising adage, is often a shabby thing, which presented the image of what would be the consequence of the extinction of the harsh old kindliness that had sheltered and fought for her! Edward with his handcuffs knocked off! Edward able conscientiously to let himself go! Whither? There could be little doubt as to the answer!
“I do not think I noticed any difference,” she replied slowly, seeing that her interlocutor was awaiting a response.
“I am very much relieved to hear you say so,” rejoined Lady Bletchley, as easily reassured as we all are when our hearts are not muchengaged. “Of course, you, who have been seeing her daily, are a far better judge than I. No doubt it was the effect of some passing fatigue which frightened me. I have been rather wretched about her, as, apart from the real regard I have for her, I cannot imagine what would become of Edward if anything were to happen to her!”
Miss Ransome bent her head in sympathetic acquiescence. “What a ridiculous misrepresentation! andhowunnecessary!” she said to herself. She did not think the least the worse of Lady Bletchley for telling a lie, but felt a gentle pity for her for having produced such a poor specimen.
“But come, do not let us talk of sad things to-day of all days!” continued the matron, allowing her voice to resume a prosperous cheerfulness which came very naturally to it, and giving a final squeeze to Bonnybell’s fingers before dismissing them.
“No, indeed!”—following her companion’s lead with her usual sweet pliability. “And I have not congratulated you yet!”—with a pretty hesitating smile and a slight glance at the complimentary mourning.
“What about?”—with a rather transparent assumption of oblivion of her new honours.
“What about?” repeated Bonnybell, with a wise though inwardly amused air of being taken in by this simple affectation. “But I know how unworldly you always are!”
Lady Bletchley accepted this tribute as no more than her due.
“I will own to you that Tom is unaffectedly pleased—very sorry for the poor fellow’s untimely fate, of course, but otherwise, very happy about it all. As for me, I frankly told him that I could see no great cause for elation in having to change a very old name for a rather Brummagem title.”
Miss Bonnybell listened with the restrained admiration for such lofty disinterestedness which she felt was expected of her, and put in at the end—
“You must remember how much more good you will be able to do. How often you used to regret that your means were rather limited!”
“Yes, if one keeps one’s mind on that aspect of the affair—indeed, I do not attempt to deny”—relapsing into nature and complacency—“that there are things about it that I like.”
There was a short silence, Miss Ransome in fond fancy scattering old Tom’s new millions with a liberal hand, and Felicity—— The trend of the latter’s thought appeared presently in a sentence tinged with a natural regret that had no pose in it.
“The only sad thing about it is that we have no one to come after us!”
“Have you tried Schwalbach?” asked Bonnybell, with heartfelt sympathy, and not for the moment recollecting that she was making her first lapse fromjeune fille-ism; “and have you heard of the new doctor in Paris? Lady —— swears by him. She must be quite as old as you, and had been married twenty years, without chick or child; but now——”
Lady Bletchley reddened. “It is not a subject I can discuss with you,” she said, dryly; but, mollified presently by the snubbed deprecation of the little innocent face opposite her, added, with an embarrassed laugh, “I see that Camilla has not, as I had hoped, succeeded in curing you of that deplorable habit of yours.”
Although feverishly eager to regain the ground lost by her slip, Miss Ransome could not help a very small smile, evoked by some pungent memory, yet it was with a mournful accent of remorse at the insuccess of the recorded admonishments that she said—
“Mrs. Tancred often corrected me; and I did try to improve, but I suppose it is because I feel so happy and at home here that I say just what comes uppermost.”
A little kiss, falling light as thistle-down upon the well-cared-for hand nearest her, and accepted in quite a different spirit from that which had shaken off those attempted to be executed upon Camilla’s bony knuckles, achieved the sinner’s forgiveness. It was in a comfortable tone of intimacy and prospective enjoyment that Felicity began her catechism as to Miss Ransome’s rural experiences, a catechism which the latter had foreseen, and, as far as possible, provided for, or rather against.
“Now tell me, did Camilla make any difficulties about letting you go? Was she much upset when my letter came?”
The attitude of Mrs. Tancred’s mind towards her own departure had differed so widely from the one with which she was thus credited that eventhe ready Bonnybell had to hesitate a second or two before adjusting her answer.
“I hope she missed me a little, but she was quite determined not to stand in my light.”
“H’m! She thought it was to your advantage that you should come back to me?”
“How could she think anything else?”
Felicity looked flattered, yet a faint shade of doubt clouded the complacency of her good-humoured countenance. Former experiences of her sister-in-law did not quite tally with the admiring estimate thus implied.
“She thought, too, that the life at Stillington was too quiet for a girl, and that a little London would be good for me,” resumed Bonnybell, perceiving the infant incredulity, and meeting it with less art than she would have done had more leisure been given her.
Lady Bletchley lifted her eyebrows. “Commend me to the inconsistency of a woman who piques herself upon being nothing if not consistent! Camilla has always given me to understand that I am imperilling my soul by living in such a sink of iniquity.”
The incredulity of Felicity’s tone was so decidedly increased that Bonnybell felt she was makingfausse route.
“Perhaps I am mistaken, and that it was Mr. Tancred who said that London would be good for me.”
Her thoughts went back to the sun-smitten trunk of the leafless tree, and Edward leaning against it, looking miserable and trying to smoothher fall by the unveracities with which she herself had now awkwardly saddled his eminently veracious wife.
“Edward?H’m!”
Something in the accent laid by Lady Bletchley on her brother’s name alarmed Miss Ransome. “Oh, why did I put her on that tack? She is wondering whether he was tarred with the same brush as old Tom. What possessed me to mention his name?”
“Edward!” repeated Felicity a second time and thoughtfully. “So he had an opinion about it too!”
“It was exactly the same as Mrs. Tancred’s.”
“He would have kept it to himself if it had not been,” replied Felicity, with a slightly sarcastic laugh. “Well, tell me all about it. How did you like Edward?”
“I thought him perfectly charming; he reminded me so much ofyou.”
The comparison instituted was meant by Miss Ransome as a compliment of the highest order, but in most human breasts there lie depths of self-esteem only accidentally hit upon by their acquaintances; and the tone in which Edward’s sister repeated “Ofme!” adding, with a heightened colour, “Well, at all events, I always know my own mind,” showed that once again Bonnybell had mistaken the finger-posts of her road. She hastened to qualify her statement.
“Of course, your characters are not alike, but I noticed little turns of expression that broughtyou back to me. I was so glad of anything which did that.”
This adroit and touching exegesis merited and received a caress, and a fresh start was happily made.
“Did you see much of him?”
“Hardly anything. He was in London all and every day.”
This negative scarcely pleased its utterer. It sounded to her own ears too emphatic, but it passed current admirably.
“Yes, poor dear, I suppose he thinks he works quite hard.”
The slight tinge of friendly contempt in the tone and words would have roused another nature to angry partisanship; but, as Miss Ransome wisely and soothingly remarked to herself, paupers could never afford to be angry or to defend their friends, and she therefore curved her lips into an acquiescent smile.
“I suppose he was very nice to you when youdidsee him?”
“Very nice, when he remembered I was there.”
The catechiser looked at her curiously. “I should not think it was easy for any one to forget that you were there.”
“I mean that I did not make much difference tohim, one way or the other,” rejoined Bonnybell, still carefully labouring to erase some undesirable impression. “I was much more in Mrs. Tancred’s way, poor thing!”
“You were a good deal with her?”—with a slight accent of surprise.
“Oh yes, she thought it right to see a good deal of me. You see, she was educating me. She thought me so grossly ignorant. Of course I am.”
“I am going to educate you too,” returned Felicity, in a tone of slight pique, “inmyway, which, I dare say, is rather a different one from Camilla’s. I assure you I have plenty of work cut out for you.”
“Oh, Iamglad,” replied Miss Ransome, fervently, and bringing her hands together with a pretty childish gesture of elation, and inwardly congratulating herself upon the trend of the conversation away from a topic which she could not feel to be a safe one. But in this she rejoiced too soon, for after this slight diversion Lady Bletchley returned to the original theme.
“You got on perfectly with both?”
“Oh, perfectly.”
“You must be very adaptable. But I know that you are that.”
“It is very good of you to think me so. When shall I begin my work?”
“No rubs at all?”
“No-o,none.”
“Not even when you said indecent things?”
“If I said them it was because I did not know that they were indecent”—with the prettiest air of hurt artlessness.
Felicity ruminated a minute or two, though, as the upshot showed, not upon thescabreuxnature of her young friend’s conversation. It was clear that her inquisitiveness as to her relations’ménagehad got the better of her sense of decorum.
“They are a strange couple, are not they?”
The confidential character of words and intonation betrayed poor Miss Ransome into a new slip.
“I suppose,” she said, with a curiosity not at all inferior to that of which she herself was the object, “that their marriage has never been anything but a nominal one.”
Felicitywas as good as her word; nor was there any delay in setting the restored acolyte to her destined labours.
“I am afraid you will not find it very gay,” Lady Bletchley had said, “but what with this mourning”—glancing at the very diluted ink of her attire—“and the terriblecorvéeof getting into the new house, I really cannot be bothered with society just now. However”—with a consolatory shrug—“it cannot well be duller than Stillington, where I suppose you literally never set eyes upon any one except the Aylmers.”
The entire innocence of purpose evident in this mention of the family alluded to proved to a relieved Miss Ransome that her late hosts had kept the secret of her misdemeanors faithfully.
“By-the-by, I hear they have left the Dower House,” continued the other, carelessly. “Whatcanpoor Edward do with his Sunday afternoons!”
Upon this topic Bonnybell could have shed some light, but as the question took an ejaculatory shape she did not think it necessary to answer it.
Although Lady Bletchley had alluded to herfuture change of house as acorvée, her haste to display the proportions of her new mansion—which deserved that pompous name for better reasons than the prosaic technical one of possessing a backstairs—to Bonnybell, took precedence of even her eagerness to set Miss Ransome to work; and in enumerating the length of feet to which the ballroom ran, and giving the genealogies of the cabinets and chimney-pieces, she forgot to be bored. Her companion’s mouth was filled with praise and thanksgiving, and her heart with upbraiding wonder at the ways of Providence. Fancy meanwhile sported among the alterations and improvements—all in atrocious taste—which she herself would make, were Tom’s affection blessedly to take a less amorous tone and he be moved to adopt and make her his heiress.
While awaiting this happy consummation she had to content herself with receiving flattering comments upon her intelligent sympathy, as contrasted with the block-like manner in which Miss Sloggett—Felicity’s secretary—had treated the wonders of French art and delicate eighteenth-century luxury displayed before her unappreciative eyes. In point of fact, the worthy lady, with a desire as sincere as Bonnybell’s to hit her employer’s mood, but a tact less sure, had expressed only an aspiration in imagined accordance with Lady Bletchley’s well-published philanthropy, that Lord Bletchley might be persuaded to sell all these useless superfluities for the benefit of the East End.
Thisnaïveproposal to return to methods inculcated by the Teaching beside the Sea of Galilee did not meet with the reception it expected, and Miss Sloggett was shown nothing more. Even the present exhibition to a much more understanding spectator had to be scamped.
“You are a delightful person to show things to, and there are any number more treasures for you to see”—the poor fellow was a well-known collector—“but the meeting is to be at four, and I have a good deal to arrange in connection with it beforehand. You will help me, I know. One is so cramped for space in Hill Street!”
The tone of resigned contempt in which the last clause of her speech was uttered showed that Felicity’s ideas had thus early expanded to the size of her new surroundings, and Bonnybell gave a sardonic inward chuckle. But she threw herself with such ardour and appetite into the arrangements for the function indicated, and showed such mingled capacity and suavity in her manner of assigning seats to the company when it arrived, as to draw upon her from Lady Bletchley further comparisons of an invidiously favourable character with the blundering Sloggett.
The meeting was that of a Ladies’ Debating Society, held by turns at the house of each of the members, and was of a now not uncommon type. The subject of discussion was “Domestic Servants. Whether they need culture. If so, how we are to give it them?” It opened with the reading of a fairly practical paper, much interrupted by voluble members. One large woman with a lisp, andapparently enfranchised from the bondage of corsets, was irrepressible in suggestions—not valuable—and autobiographical experiences. A second joked rather scathingly. A third was sensible and serious, but dull. The fourth, and worst, a very foolish vessel, still more autobiographic, telling at great length of how she almost daily personally conducted her servants to the British Museum and the Tower. And when it was objected that this course must lead to difficulties as to the discharge of their duties, answered threadbarely, that if you wanted to do good you must make up your mind to sacrifice your own convenience to a certain extent, and that she kept a good many servants. The reader of the paper rejoined politely, but sarcastically, that perhaps those who had smaller households would suggest how the objection was to be met. And thereupon so many fair ones complied at once—the irrepressible obesity leading the van—that the chairwoman, Lady Bletchley, had to ring her bell repeatedly to call them to order.
“Perhaps some of the members at the lower end of the room will let us hear what they have to say on the subject,” Felicity suggested, when at length she was able to make herself audible, and looking encouragingly at half a dozen silent women. “Those at this end have taken up so much time in the discussion that the others have not had a chance.”
But the silent women remained silent, and the localized garrulity continued to rage fiercely, turning its boiling stream into the channel of theG.F.S.; the foolish matron who announced the largeness of her establishment taking up her tale again, and going into details almost as intimate as, though less indelicate than, Mrs. Cluppins, when she appeared as witness for the prosecution in the trial of Bardellv.Pickwick, of her domestic economy.
“It takes a good deal out of one,” Felicity ejaculated, when at the close of the meeting—which every one present agreed had been a particularly good and helpful one—she and Bonnybell retired to Lady Bletchley’s private room, while the drawing-rooms were being restored to their normal state. “But, as you see, it is well worth it.”
“Indeed I do.”
“The society has only been started three months, and it has already done an untold amount of good.”
“I am sure it has.”
“Subjects are threshed out, and people are woke up to a sense of duties which they had either forgotten or never realized.”
“I am sure they are.”
“But”—with a yawn and a stretch of luxurious relief—“itdoestake a good deal out of one!”
“Has the lady who takes her cook every day to the British Museum a husband?” asked Bonnybell, feeling her way cautiously to a little gibe.
Felicity laughed. “Yes; but he can go to his club. Of course, she is a fool, poor dear;but she is always good for a drawing-room meeting or a cheque.”
Miss Ransome was respectfully silent, musing upon the different roots from which the beauteous flower of female friendship springs.
“She is a Mrs. Slammer,” continued Felicity, between two luxurious yawns. “She was an heiress, and her husband had to take her name. He was a Colonel Ransome, a well-known fortune-hunter, but quite in society. By-the-by, he may be a relation of yours. Is he?”
Bonnybell paused a moment. It was not likely to heighten her consideration in the eyes of the world that her kindred had repudiated her; but, on the other hand, the fact of Miss Ransome’s friendless state might intensify Felicity’s compassion for her, and if she told a lie upon the subject it was certain to be discovered, so she said with a drooped head—
“Our relations would not have anything to say to us, and of course I could not give Cl—my mother up.”
Felicity’s heart was not a hard one, and she rejoined hastily—
“Oh yes, of course; it was stupid of me to forget. I remember now what unnatural monsters we thought them at the time; but, at all events, they didmea good turn in giving meyou.”
This was charming, and Bonnybell would have been glad to be sure of being able to keep the thermometer of her friend’s affection up to the point indicated by this little burst of effusiveness, but even the next sentence showed a descent.
“All the same, it might not be a bad plan for you to cultivate her—she is not a bad-hearted woman, and has kept him wonderfully straight; and, good and indulgent as Tom is to me, I cannot expect him to be willing always to have some oneen tiersbetween him and me; and life is so uncertain—Camilla’s alarmingly so—that you cannot count upon Stillington.”
She paused, a little out of breath, or Bonnybell fancied so, from the haste with which she had scampered away from the clause that referred to Tom.
“There is no greater mistake than going to meet misfortune,” continued Felicity, distracted by her own reference to Stillington from the theme originally started; “but I really dare not face the question of what would become of Edward in the case of Camilla’s death.”
Bonnybell turned her head aside, with a little wincing movement that stood for emotion, but that in reality hid the ironic mirth which she feared must be in some degree making itself visible on her face at this grossly overcharged picture of Edward’s prospective affliction.
“Of course, they are very deeply attached to each other,” she answered mournfully, “but men do get over things.”
“Get over things! Deeply attached!” repeated Felicity, derisively. “Edward’s manner to her has always been perfect, his whole relation to her kept in a key of the most exquisite taste, and I am sure that he has a very sincere respect for her; but, poor dear Camilla”—with a littleinvoluntary laugh—“is hardly a person to inspire agrander passion. No, no; it is the financial aspect of the question that keeps me awake at night.”
There was nothing “put on” in the lengthening oval of Miss Ransome’s face at this announcement.
“Do you mean,” she asked slowly, “that Mr. Tancred would not be so well off if—he were to lose Mrs. Tancred?”
“Not so well off?” repeated Felicity, with an annoyed laugh. “That is putting it very mildly. Why, if Camilla were to die to-morrow, he would be left with his paltry younger son’s portion, and with whatever he makes”—the accompanying shrug expressed a minimum—“on the Stock Exchange.”
To put direct questions about other people’s finances had never been permissible by Miss Ransome’s code of manners, yet she asked boldly and blankly—
“Will not she leave him anything at all?”
“It is no question of her not leaving him anything,” rejoined Lady Bletchley, impatiently, “but ofhisfolly in refusing to accept a penny. At the time of the marriage he absolutely declined to allow her to make any provision for him, in the event of her death. It was a Quixotic notion that, because he did not care about her——quite between ourselves,shemarried him! Never shall I forget my stupefaction when I heard the news. ‘That oldguy!’ I said—people used the word ‘guy’ more in those days thanthey do now, but I dare say you know what it means.”
“I can guess.”
“Since he did not care about her”—picking up the dropped thread of her sentence—“he would not be indebted to her for anything but his board and lodging; and indeed” (with a renewal of vexed mirth), “I would not answer for it that he is not highflown enough to pay her even for that. I remember telling you once that Edward had strayed out of the Middle Ages; you see now what I meant.”
Miss Ransome’s knowledge of the period indicated was not equal to informing her whether the centuries alluded to were characterized by a marked aversion from profiting pecuniarily by unions with elderly heiresses; but she assented, adding, with a very grave face—
“Poor Mr. Tancred! he has indeed every reason to try to keep Mrs. Tancred alive!” Then, feeling dimly that the reflection had not quite a suitable ring, she hung on it a postscript. “And I am sure,” she said prayerfully, “that I heartily wish it, for both their sakes.”
“I am sure you do,” replied Felicity, but she spoke, or Bonnybell thought so, somewhat slowly, and looked at her rather hard, adding more glibly, “So you see that, considering the uncertainty of everything, it would not be a bad plan to cultivate the Slammers; and I shall see that you have every opportunity for doing so.”
Bonnybell thanked her, and wondered internally whether they would be likely to go to bedearly. It needed solitude to face such a new aspect of affairs as the last ten minutes’ conversation had presented to her.
“If Camilla died to-morrow, Edward would be almost as much of a pauper as I am!” This was the fact that could be better faced by Bonnybell with her hair hanging down her back in its nightly twisted cable and the enlargement of a dressing-gown. The added flights of stairs which Lady Bletchley would have had to climb made her visitor feel pretty secure from an invasion by her, but, to be on the safe side, Miss Ransome locked her door.
“A pauper!” During her eighteen years Bonnybell had known many persons who freely gave themselves that name; but it had never, so far as she could observe, produced any appreciable effect upon their mode of life or expenditure. She dimly felt that Edward’s pauperism would be of a different type. Her imagination tried to construct a pauper of the upper classes with a sense of duty to his tailor and wine-merchant. Would he smoke pipes, and drink gin-and-water, and wear napless hats, and reach-me-down overcoats?
The frame was one into which it was so impossible to fit the portrait of Mr. Tancred that she laughed aloud, secure in having a whole floor to herself. “My jaw dropped half a yard when I heard it,” she soliloquized. “I am afraid that Felicity must have noticed it.”
An advance upon the glass and a practise init of elongating her face to different lengths produced such unsatisfactory results that she soon left off her efforts to reconstruct her own attitude under the late thunderbolt. Nor did she disguise from herself that itwasa thunderbolt! To do her justice, she had never, since hearing of its probability, consciously wished for Camilla’s death; yet there was no doubt that she had seen through a rosy mist, and at some future epoch, herself in various attitudes of near relationship to Edward.
People’s love-dreams are shaped consonantly to their characters; and Bonnybell’s were as artificial and sophisticated as herself. She saw herself whizzing up the Champs Elysées in an automobile in May when the chestnuts were out, in adernier crihat, by Edward’s side; sitting in an opera-box at Covent Garden, blazing in Camilla’s diamonds, reset by a jeweller of the Rue de la Paix, by Edward’s side; at Stillington, during one of their Saturday-to-Mondays there, smoking the best cigarettes procurable for money all over the house, and with no apprehension of any one smelling them, by Edward’s side; or without cigarettes, and receiving discreet and moderate endearments, well and easily kept within such bounds as she herself prescribed, from Edward.
To her own surprise, it was the last picture upon which she dwelt longest, and with most pleasure. And now her house of cards lay in ruins at her feet, and it took her all her philosophy, and a little more, to pull herself together, and extract any cause of congratulation that might be found among theirdébris.
“What a mercy it was that we kept ourselves well in hand! I do not think he could have held out much longer; and as for me, whatever confidence one has in one’s self, it is well not to put it to too severe a test. I really believe that two more Sunday walks, if the sun had shone, and those birds whose notes I never could distinguish apart had gone on singing, would have finished me off!” After a pause, “I never could have believed that it would be hard to keep from being fond of any one.”
With that she dropped down in a sitting position on the hearthrug, and, embracing her knees with her lily arms and stooping her head down upon them, wept copiously. She went to bed later, and her last thought was a truly Christian one, “Poor dear old Camilla! Her death would not do me the least good in the world, and I sincerely hope she may live to the age of Methuselah.”