Miss Ransome’seyes looked heavy next morning at breakfast. That her hostess noticed the fact was made apparent by a remark that followed her first glance at her guest.
“I suppose you were very sorry to leave Stillington?”
“What an ass I was to cry!” was the unspoken response to this question. The spoken one ran more subtilely—
“As sorry as I could be when I was so exceedingly glad too.”
“It seems delightfully natural to see you here,” responded Felicity, with not inferior fondness. “But I must not have you looking pale because I keep you up listening to my tiresome worries; of course, they are multiplied tenfold since you were here last.”
She paused to heave a sigh at the thought of the burden of her new prosperities, and Bonnybell gently echoed it at the pensive reflection how easily her own shoulders would bear the load were it transferred to them.
“I shall send you out for a walk this morning,” continued Lady Bletchley. “You look as if you wanted air.”
Bonnybell’s heart leapt at the prospect thus indicated of a solitude tempered by shops, but her voice repelled the suggestion.
“And leave you to cope alone with all that mass of work you told me of last night? Do I look very pasty? I dare say; I did not sleep very well; I suppose because I was too excited at being back again with you.”
This charming explanation was accepted as probable, and Miss Ransome’s conscience eased by receiving the assurance that she could be equally useful to her patroness doing commissions out-of-doors; that patroness’s lady’s-maid being apparently only inferior to her secretary, Miss Sloggett, in block-like stupidity.
An hour later, therefore, Bonnybell found herself walking down Bond Street, chaperoned by the functionary in question, and entrusted with many nice tasks of matching, pricing, and ordering. Shopping had always been inexpressibly dear to Miss Ransome’s towny heart; and though the choosing of vicarious finery was a very inferior pastime to the testing of colours and shapes upon her own light form and brilliant face; yet it would have been difficult to find an anodyne more effectual than that provided, with no such intention nor the least knowledge that any painkiller was needed, by her protectress.
Bonnybell had set off on her walk in the lowest spirits possible to one of her nature. She had not at all adjusted her mind to a future fromwhich Edward was eliminated. The insecurity of her present status, hinging on the more or less of water in the Scotch river honoured by Tom’s rod; and the dismal possibility of a livelihood dearly bought by conducting a Mrs. Slammer’s servants to those elevating museums and exhibitions in which she herself would never willingly set foot, called forth reflections not calculated to exhilarate.
But true philosophy, that “perpetual feast of nectared sweets,” never leaves its sincere votary long unsupported; and by the time that she had realized what startling surprises in shape and fabric the spring hats revealed, and that half a score of men had twisted their necks to get a longer look at her through the side window of their hansoms, Miss Ransome felt that there was yet balm in Gilead for her broken spirit. A really delightful hour and a half followed, spent in exhilarating intercourse with a couple of very smart dressmakers, during which she committed herself on her own account to twotoilettes sérieuses, some trivial costlinesses in the way of “little”matinées,fichus, veils, etc., and three really bewildering toques.
Her purchases made a large hole in Camilla’s handsome tip—that is to say, they would have done if she had paid for them, but, as she piously said to herself, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” adding, less piously, that there was no reason why her future husband should not pay for them.
Reluctantly, and summoned by duty, she atlength began to turn her steps homeward, and was loitering a moment before a florist’s—the flowers that grew in shops were the only ones really admired by Bonnybell—and inhaling whiffs from the white lilac boughs and stacks of lilies-of-the-valley inside, when she was startled by a voice calling to her from an electric brougham which had pulled up at the kerbstone.
“Bonnybell! Bonnybell!”
Who could be Bonnybell-ing her here in Piccadilly, whither her maiden feet had now strayed? The answer came all too soon, nor did it take more than one glance at the face of the very pronounced “chemical blonde” thrust out of the automobile’s window to tell Miss Ransome that she was once more face to face with her past and Flora Tennington.
As on a former meeting, the pleasure in the encounter was all on one side.
“This is rippin’!” cried the occupant of the brougham, who occasionally borrowed a word of slang from the little young men who frequented her. “How long have you been up? and why have not you been to see me?”
“I came up only the day before yesterday,” replied Bonnybell, in a tone which implied that the lateness of her arrival was the only reason why she had not already sought out so chosen and valued a friend. One must not make an enemy of Flora; but what a piece of ill-luck!
As she spoke she stepped quickly across the pavement, to hinder, by greater proximity, the sharing by other ears of the unavoidable impendingdialogue; and tried to put her head so far inside the carriage window as to hide from passers-by the identity of her flamboyant friend.
“Where are you staying?”
“In Hill Street.”
“Come back to luncheon with me.”
“Oh, how I should love it! but I am staying with—people.”
“What people?”
At this query a horrifying vision passed before Miss Ransome’s eyes, of Flora, champagne-headed, low-necked, whitened and sealing-waxed, sweeping into Felicity’s drawing-room and falling on her own neck under that lady’s nose.
“Oh, nobody very interesting; not your sort.”
A look of cynic humour flashed into the other’s highly decorated eyes.
“I see,” she said, dryly; adding, “But at least come and take a turn with me. If you sit well back nobody will see you, and I have a hundred things to say to you. Come, get in!”
Bonnybell hesitated, though nothing could be more distasteful to her than her present position. At high noon, in open confabulation with a lady of Flora’s appearance and antecedents, exposed to the probability of recognition, and observed with respectful surprise by the chaperoning lady’s-maid, who, if she was of the block-like stupidity attributed to her by her mistress, was likewise of the highest and touchiest respectability. The sense of having conveyed to an old friend with brutal clumsiness that she was ashamed of beingseen with her annoyed Miss Ransome also, though in a less degree. She put her face—it seemed impossible that both were made of the same materials—very close to Flora’s, and whispered—
“There’s a dragon with me—an imbecile of a maid. I dare not send her back without me.”
“Give her five shillings, and tell her to hold her tongue.”
This counsel, though its radical badness and inartistic quality was fully recognized by its recipient, was yet finally accepted, as being the least objectionable of the only two alternatives open to her. Flora, as she knew, would not let her go without a prolonged exchange of questions and answers, heard inevitably by the footman holding the brougham door open, and probably by a goodly number of Piccadillyflâneurs. Bonnybell had often before tipped servants to silence, and even when the tip was not very large or likely to have successors had seldom found reason to complain of their fidelity.
As Lady Tennington never cared what she said, where she said it, or who heard it, Miss Ransome decided that she had, on the whole, chosen practically the least perilous of the two vexatious paths open to her, when she and her companion were whizzing down the great thoroughfare.
“So it is all off!” said Flora, without preamble, as soon as they were in motion.
“What is all off?”
“It was all on; and it is all off.”
Miss Ransome was too old a hand, in experience if not in years, to be trapped into a confidence by the device of pretending to know all about it; so her rejoinder was a fence.
“Whatwas all on, andisall off?”
“Oh, come, do not pretend innocence; we have not too much time. Remember that it was I who first introduced you to him—turned you into the conservatory together, the day he came to your rescue when you were in such an abject fright at the idea of atête-à-têtedrive home with poor old Charlie.” She chuckled at the recollection; and, since the only way in which Bonnybell showed that she “rose” to this jogging of her memory was by a slight shiver, continued, “It came to grief over a letter. Did anything unlucky turn up? Did they find out anything?”
A slight repetition of the shiver produced by “Charlie’s” name ran over Bonnybell. Stillington might not have effected much in the way of moral teaching, but it had at least made Flora’s scheme of ethics unfamiliar. And Flora’s appearance did not gain in impressiveness by proximity. She had evidently lately embarked on a new dye, which had stained her hair with a brilliant pink hue. If it was champagne-coloured now, it was a very bad and headachey champagne!
There was a lovely maiden flush on Bonnybell’s cheek as she answered very gently—
“There was nothing about me to find out; nothing that I could help.”
Lady Tennington looked at her with compassionate surprise and amusement at the carefullysuppressed indignation lurking under her mild words.
“I know that; you always were a very good little miss!” she rejoined, laughing; then, more seriously, “Yes, you poor little devil, I really believe that you are speaking truth; and, of course, Claire had no business to take you to those places.”
“She never did when she was all right.”
The plea was set up with the customary generosity; nor did its utterer ever seem aware that the defence was in itself an indictment.
“Well, how much came out?”
There could be no doubt that Flora did know, yet Bonnybell’s resolution not to go further in admissions than she was absolutely compelled was instinctive.
“How did you hear about it?”
“Oh, how does one hear things? Servants, little birds, God knows what! I asked Charlie whether he knew anything about it, but he only laughed, and said, whoever the writer was, he had done Bonnybell a good turn.” (It was not because Flora’s pink hair and chalky face were disagreeable objects that Miss Ransome had turned away her head.) “Of course, I at once concluded that he had written it himself. He really will play these little games once too often, and get himself into trouble.” (To most people it would have seemed difficult for “Charlie” to effect that object more thoroughly than he had already done.) “I suppose that it is partly his way of showing his affection for you, and partlythat being in such low water himself has made him spiteful. My prudish friends tell me I ought to shut my door on him, but I am not fond of shutting doors upon people, it is not a pleasant process for either side.”
She spoke as one who had known, personally, the outside of a good many doors.
“You were always so kind.”
“Yes, so I was and am”—accepting the tribute as her undoubted due (there were so many tributes that never were and never could be paid to Flora)—“but it is not altogether that. I do not want to make an enemy of him; and, low in the world as he is, he could yet do me a nasty turn, as he has just done you. If you take my advice, my dear, you will keep on terms with him, despite his last achievement.”
Bonnybell heaved a most unaffected sigh. A feeling of disgusted despair took temporary possession of her sanguine breast. Was she never to be able to free herself from the environment of mud and slime into which circumstances, not herself, had plunged her? Was she never to get away from the past and its most hideous embodiment, Charlie? He had done her a good turn this time, but he would repeat his action when it would not be a good turn. She might be just about to pull off something really good—the eyes of the passers-by, both on foot and in hansoms, had convinced her how much lay in her power if she had a fair chance—and Charlie would come in again with his thrust in the dark,another of his anonymous letters would arrive, and it would all be “blued”!
“Is he in London?” she asked faintly.
“I do not know. He comes and goes. I generally see him when he is up. I am afraid, poor devil, that mine is the only respectable house left open to him.”
A streak of sincere amusement stirred the younger woman’s gloom. Poor, dear Flora! she must be forgetting to whom she is talking. Perhaps Flora remembered, for she left the topic.
“You know that I have left Tennington?”
“Yes, I wassosorry.”
“It is more than I was,” replied Flora, dryly. “I never had such a run of bad cards in my life as I had there, and I always detest the country.”
“How can any one who is in their senses like living there?” agreed Bonnybell, fervently, deriving the first advantage she had yet reaped from the lost Edward in the ability to lay aside for ever her rural enthusiasms.
“I shall take a cottage on the river in the summer, and you must come and stay with me, and we will get hold of some of the old set—oh no, not Charlie, of course—some of the right sort.”
It was not easy to Miss Ransome, though she accomplished it—since it pleased Flora, and tied her to nothing—to give an answer to the effect that Heaven seemed to open to her at this prospect. Flora needed some amends for the plain indications she herself had been obliged to giveher, that the world’s market-places were not the spots where conferences with her were most to be relished; and, moreover, acquiescence in distant made it easier to evade nearer projects of reunion.
“Cannot you dine quietly with me to-night or some other night? We will get somebody to feed us at the Carlton and take us to hear Suzette at the Empire. I believe she has brought over her Parisrépertoirequite unmutilated!”
Bonnybell veiled the terror inspired by this proposition by a little grimace of regret that had something of truth in it. If Lady Tennington could be made invisible and Lady Bletchley’s ears stopped, theirprotégéewould have thoroughly enjoyed listening once again, with the perfect comprehension she did herself the justice to know that she could bring to them, to Suzette’s astonishing audacities. Suzette wascanaillebefore everything; but what a genius!
“Oh,whata treat it would have been for me! and how dear of you to think of it! But it is—as pleasant things generally are for me, nowadays—quite out of the question. I am to spend a ‘Happy Evening.’”
“I hope that you would do that with me!”
“It is not quite the same class of happiness. It is a factory girls’ ‘Happy Evening.’”
Both laughed, and Bonnybell made a second and better grimace.
“Miss Sloggett is going to show them her magic lantern.”
“Miss Sloggett! What a name! Who is Miss Sloggett?”
“Oh, she is an old ass who does secretary and door-mat to—to—the friend I am staying with.”
After all, there were “points” in being able, for a whole hour, not to be “a nice girl.” Florawasa good sort, for she did not press her invitation, and without being asked—perhaps because she had not failed to perceive Bonnybell’s latent effort to conceal her hostess’s name—set her down at the corner of Hill Street, magnanimously refraining from any attempt to pry into what was so clearly meant to be hidden from her, though the motive for concealment could scarcely be a flattering one.
It was with a trembling hand that Bonnybell rang the bell—a project for compassing the possession of a latch-key flitting through her head—but she wasquitte pour la peur. Though the church clock in South Audley Street had pointed to five minutes past two, Felicity had not missed her. She was soon—with a mind relieved at least from that portion of its load—giving a report, with excisions something like those practised on Russian newspapers, of her morning’s employment, and adorning it with touches, so nicely adapted to Felicity’s humour, that the latter ended by expressing an ecstatic wonder as to how she had ever managed to bear so long the absence from her side of such a seasoner and sweetener of her own toilsome existence. Her regret extended even to being unable—owingto another engagement—to be present at the “Happy Evening,” to which Bonnybell and Miss Sloggett proceeded in the brougham without her.
Bonnybell would have liked to be silent during the drive, ruminating over the additions made to her difficulties by the morning’s meeting, and the news it brought her. But poor Sloggett’s spirits were in a very tender condition, and asked for delicate handling. A nascent jealousy of herself, which amused Miss Ransome, coupled with deep misgivings as to her own capacity for the evening’s task, combined to overset the poor secretary.
“I trust there will be nocontretemps! I trust it will all go well; but I have not much confidence in myself. I am only a beginner. Ihopeit will be all right.”
“What does it matter if it is not? It will only be the more amusing.” It was the sort of ointment with which she was wont to anoint her own hurts, but it was clear that such was not the balm for Miss Sloggett’s wounds.
“Oh, but Lady Bletchley would besomuch annoyed at anycontretemps.”
“Why need she ever hear of it?”
A shocked look in the face of the more conscientious understudy brought Bonnybell back at once to the sense of having deviated slightly but certainly from the path ofniceness. “It must have been that whiff of Flora which demoralized me,” she said to herself, but she hastened to mend the breach.
“I made the suggestion,” she said, with uncommon sweetness, “because I would not for the world add anything to Lady Bletchley’s trials” (it is just as well to pretend that I believe in that peach-fed old Felicity’s imaginary troubles), “and also because I do not wantyouto suffer.”
The sympathy in eye and tone was—or to Miss Sloggett it seemed so—unactably sincere.
“It is very good of you to care,” she murmured, still half-doubtfully; but there was a slight mist before her eyes.
The poor secretary’s misgivings were amply justified by the result. Not only was she, as she had tremblingly confessed, new to the task of exhibition, but the “plant” was deplorably inadequate, the magic lantern much too large for the sheet. Before it, in its first innocent blankness, sat the girls, prepared to comment, with their terrible town frankness, in giggling rows upon the magic lantern and its manager. The latter prefaced each picture with a little explanatory speech, the first tinged with regretful deprecation.
“I am afraid that, owing to the smallness of the sheet, I shall not be able to show you the whole picture at once. I will, however, show you as much as I can of ‘The Father of the Prodigal Son.’”
In fulfilment of this promise, the character alluded to flashed upon the sheet, with a very crowded and uncomfortable appearance, and—with no legs.
There was a nervous sense of not entire success in the accents with which the subsequent pictures were heralded.
“You all know the story of ‘The Prodigal Son,’ don’t you, girls? how, ‘while he was yet a great way off,’ his father met him? He did not wait for the poor prodigal to come to him; heranto meet him with outstretched arms!”
The picture followed; but the effect was somewhat marred by the fact that it revealed the father sitting motionless indoors with his head in his hands.
It was in vain that the luckless show-woman hastily explained that she had made a mistake, and that her elucidation referred to the slide that was to follow, not to the present one. To an accompaniment of squeals of laughter and flowers of cockney wit, the exhibition ignominiously ended.
It was a very crushed Miss Sloggett whose failing heart Bonnybell good-naturedly tried to uplift on the homeward drive, and a sense of amusement presently pervaded her own rather drooped spirits at the perception that, after all, the poor secretary was ready to take a leaf out of Miss Ransome’s book.
“I think,” she said, hesitatingly, “that, considering how much Lady Bletchley has of various kinds to occupy and distress her just at present, it would, perhaps, be as well not to go into details over the evening.”
Never was it the least difficult to Bonnybell to promise or perform connivance in any form ofdeceit, and she kindly and warmly acquiesced. She had not the slightest wish to harm poor Sloggett. Was not there, after all, a good deal of analogy between their fates? (“I am a pretty Sloggett, and she is an ugly Bonnybell, but we both live by our wits.”)
Thespring drew on disagreeably, according to its vernal wont. But if the thermometer did not tell that winter was on the wane, the lengthening days did so, and the flower-baskets in the streets told the town-dweller what sheets of anemone and narcissus were spreading over the pleasant fields of France, and scenting the sea round Scilly. As to the temperature, what did that matter in London? Warmed by every one else’s fire as well as your own, you had pity enough and to spare for shiverers in the odious country, but not much need for compassion yourself.
Such were a part of Miss Ransome’s reflections on the 10th of March. So far they were comfortable ones; but they shared the theatre of her mind with many less complacent—with many deep misgivings. Tom had not yet re-appeared on the scene, having transferred himself and his fishing-tackle to a wild part of Ireland; but his re-entrance could hardly be much longer delayed. That it was imminent Bonnybell gathered by the increased frequency of Felicity’s lamentations over the necessity for their ever parting. That it wasnota necessity never seemed to occur to her, evenin mid-Jeremiad; even when Bonnybell, with a touch too light to brush the bloom from a butterfly’s wing, threw in an infinitely far-off hint to that effect. The satisfaction which she therefore derived from being continually told that she was Lady Bletchley’s right hand was a very mutilated one. No sign of flinching on the part of that heroic lady from the intention of cutting off that right hand was perceptible to eyes that daily and hourly grew more strainingly anxious to discover it. To make herself indispensable, that was her one chance. It had always been the leading principle of her actions since her enforced return; but she was also by nature eminently obliging andserviable. Nor did she slack her efforts, even when each day added something to her conviction that they were going to be useless. “I shall be dismissed on the day before Tom’s return,” she said to herself, with lugubrious shrewdness. “Felicity will not turn me out earlier, for her own sake, and also because she is rather compunctious about me. That is why she is thrusting me down Mrs. Slammer’s throat.”
No sign of help showed on the horizon from the direction of Stillington. The intercourse between the two families seemed slighter than ever, and it had never been close. And even if they—if Camilla—had been willing to re-house her, she was almost sure that she did not wish to go back. After what she had learnt, it would be stupid to put herself in the way of growing fonder of Edward than she already was. The degree and pertinacity of her regard for him oftenannoyed her. No, she had no wish to go back to Stillington, and yet—what a noise those tiresome birds must be making in the wood by now!
To be Lady Bletchley’s right hand was no sinecure; but though the humanitarian interest could scarcely be said to be strongly developed in Miss Ransome, she took up her share of the burden of Felicity’s good works—increased tenfold by the latter’s rise in life—with a will, reflecting philosophically that it was quite as well not to have much time to think, since she had nothing satisfactory to think about, and finding or making many little oases of worldly pleasure amid the sands of philanthropy. Lady Bletchley had announced that she was not going out; but abstention from society, as understood by her, was compatible with seeing a large number and variety of people.
Bonnybell had received ample confirmation of the verdict pronounced by the Bond Street hansoms on the first day of her arrival. She had met many young men, gilded and ungilt, in Felicity’s drawing-room, a large number of whom had been obviously willing to endear themselves to her. It was a more respectful form of love than she had been used to in the old days; but her wary eye had detected a want of seriousness in the intentions of the majority, and even among the business-like minority not one was found, after careful sifting of their positions and prospects, worth running the risk of provoking another of Charlie’s anonymous revelations. “I must not let myself go cheap because I am in low water just now,” she said, to herself, with no senseof special cynicism in the reflection. “I can well afford to wait. I shall probably even improve, and”—with a sigh—“I think I dislike the idea of marriage, if possible, more than ever!”
Charlie! Yes, Charlie was in London. She had caught sight of him one day in a little street off the Strand—Charlie was not fond of frequented thoroughfares—whither Felicity had sent her to look up a case of sweating, and, to the surprise of the chaperoning maid, had darted into a tobacconist’s shop to hide herself from him. She hoped that he had not seen her; but with Charlie one never knew. Oh, if she could make some one—some one really eligible—love her enough to dare to tell him about M——’s and the other places, she might defy Charlie—snap her fingers at him! But the test mentally applied to every one of her aspirants broke down hopelessly.
It was the 10th of March on which the blow fell. The room was the same room in which poor Miss Ransome had been made aware of Edward’s disqualifications. It seemed to gloomy after-reflections as if its one purpose in life was to be the setting for disagreeable communications. Though business was its predominant note, luxury was not altogether banished from Felicity’s sitting-room, and it was in a very well stuffed armchair, if that could be any source of comfort to her, that the “right hand” received its amputation. It was not often that Felicity allowed herself time to sit down, but she also was in an armchair, taking a brief respite from labourbetween the trying of Court gowns and laying the foundation-stone of a Home for Infant Inebriates.
Felicity was overdoing herself with the thoroughness of a fine lady “doubled” by a social reformer. But at the present moment something besides fatigue sat on her troubled countenance. And Bonnybell recognized, through having seen it before on another face, the signal for ejection. It was too late to avert it, yet none the less was there a cheerful daughterly sympathy in her pretty voice as she said—
“What a pity that you cannot put off the Infant Inebriates to another day! I know how specially interested you are in them, poor little things, even more than you are”—with an accent of affectionate reverence—“in all good works; but you do look so tired!”
“I am tired,” replied the other. “I am always tired now. As soon as the bazaar is well over—by-the-by, the Duchess has never yet answered as to the date—I shall take a rest cure. Dr. —— says it is indispensable; that I am living on my nerves.”
The first blast of the Trump of Doom had sounded. The second was not slow to follow.
“I shall be more tired still when I have to do without you.” The voice was tender and complaining, but there was also a sort of confusion—amauvaise hontein it. Ejectment was on the edge of the lamenting lips.
Bonnybell was silent. (At all events, I will not make it easier for her.)
“Tom has written to say that he will be back on Tuesday.”
Miss Ransome’s was, after all, a brave spirit. There was an interval of scarcely five seconds before she was answering playfully, in quite a gallant voice—
“And he naturally wishes his house to be cleared of rubbish before his return.”
The confusion on Felicity’s face deepened. As an actress she had neither facility nor distinction.
“You have always an amusing way of putting things, but of course you do not mean it! You know as well as I do that Tom is the last person in the world to think anybody ‘rubbish;’ and he is the soul of hospitality, but—he has been away a long time, and perhaps—at first—he would expect to have me to himself!”
Bonnybell made a little gesture of assent. She would be able to speak in a moment or two. One thought of pious thankfulness meanwhile darted across her dismay. Thank Heaven! she had not paid any of her bills, and Camilla’s tips lay intact in her despatch-box.
“What day would you like me to go?” she asked presently, with a mild but purposed baldness, in pursuance of her intention of not, as she would have phrased it, letting Felicity down easily. “Perhaps, by working very hard, I might get the bazaar lists finished by to-morrow.”
Under the apparent generosity of the sentence there lurked a little snake of pardonable malice. Miss Ransome was well aware that the functionalluded to, “The Fancy Fair for All England Cataleptics,” to be held under Distinguished Patronage in the Albert Hall in mid-May, one of the Vice-Presidencies of which had been accepted by Lady Bletchley before her new honours, with all their attendant labours, had fallen upon her, was rapidly developing into an incubus and a nightmare. Bonnybell was also aware that the loss of her own aid would be an irreparable one; but there was perhaps more subtlety than kindliness in reminding her patroness of the fact at the moment. The success was all she could have wished.
“What day I wish you to go?You can have very little idea what you have been to me to put such a question.”
Miss Ransome received the reproach, made with every evidence of a wounded feeling tending towards hysterics, in unwonted silence. She did not feel inclined to caress Felicity, and for once she might follow a natural bent, since clearly nothing was to be gained by endearments. She was thinking that though Felicity had repudiated the idea of any likeness existing between herself and her brother, there was—though he was far the more delicate artist of the two—a certain resemblance between their attitude as “Chuckers Out.” There was a hurt disappointment at not receiving an answering burst of affection in return for her output of fond reproach in Lady Bletchley’s tone when she resumed—
“As to the lists, there is no hurry; for though you will not be actually in the house, you will beable to help me almost as much as if you were. You will not be far off.”
“I do not quite know where I shall be.” A moment later, in uncomplaining after-thought—“If you could spare me for an hour this afternoon, I might inquire about lodgings; they would be better for me than an hotel, don’t you think—and—cheaper?”
At this suggestion a hot flush overspread Felicity’s fagged face.
“Lodgings! a hotel!” she repeated. “I do not know what you are talking about. Is it possible that you suppose I am going to plant you on the pavement, because I ammostreluctantly compelled to abridge your visit? Would that be like me?”
The extreme out-of-countenanceness—if such a clumsy word may be framed—of her patroness, and a consciousness of how well-founded in sound reason was her own removal from Lord Bletchley’s hearth-stone before his return to it, produced a half-magnanimous, half-malicious pity in Bonnybell, and gave her back her priceless gift of feigning.
“Because you have been incomparably good to me for many weeks gives me no claim upon you for further kindness.” Such un-upbraiding acquiescence in unmerited chastisement spoke in tone and words that Felicity’s rejoinder came chokingly.
“There is no question of kindness; between people who love each other there can be no question of kindness; but come”—pulling herself together—“we must not let ourselves besilly, and make mountains out of molehills; we shall still be able to see a great deal of each other. It is not more than five minutes’ walk from the Slammers’ house here.”
“TheSlammers?”
“Yes; how stupid of me!”—hurrying on. “I forgot that I had not explained to you that I have arranged with Mrs. Slammer for you to pay her a good long visit.”
“Mrs. Slammer!”
“Yes”—still more rapidly. “You know that she is a sort of connection of yours; and she has none of that unamiable feeling about—about thepastwhich you told me your relations in general had shown, and she is rather lonely, poor woman.Entre nous, I do not think the marriage is a great success; she has taken an immense fancy to you, and she needs a—a”—“secretary” was on the edge of Lady Bletchley’s tongue, but a memory of Bonnybell’s hopelessly fancy spelling arrested it—“a nice girl to be a sort of daughter to her. I—I could not think of anything better for the moment. I do not see why it may not work pretty well; Colonel Slammer is a great deal away from home.”
Even thenaïvetéof the last implication failed to stir the least sense of merriment in Miss Ransome. With lips parted by horror and dismay, she sat staring stupidly at the author of the atrocious project thus revealed, while the near future unrolled itself before her mental vision in all its squalid terror; a future of abetting a second-rate fool in her chimerical efforts for theelevation of minds to whose raising or lowering Miss Ransome was and would remain absolutely indifferent; a future of conducting unwilling maid-servants by bus and tram and subterranean grimynesses to museums and libraries, which it was impossible that they could dislike more than she. The prospect was monstrous, unfaceable, and for a moment or two the idea of evading it by taking refuge with Flora, abandoning the struggle to be or seem “nice,” and returning to the old life, presented itself as the most endurable alternative. The old life andCharlie? No, Charlie was more to be shunned than any museum! That would not do....
It fell out, with an irony whose pungency Miss Ransome felt to the full, that the close of the day on which a second shipwreck had overtaken her light bark was dedicated to the last “Happy Evening” of the season. Through previous functions of the kind her gayinsoucianceand adaptability had carried her triumphantly. She had been a great success among the girls; had borne their affectionate horseplay with light, good humour, and had received with gratitude, tempered with regret that they should be so audible to her coadjutor, the expressions of their candidly uttered preference of her to Miss Sloggett. To-day she had no coadjutor, the secretary being confined to bed by one of those large outspoken colds which always made Lady Bletchley angry.
As Bonnybell drove along eastwards her heart felt depressed almost beyond the power of rebound. This was to be her life; this process ofbeing bandied about from one set of unwilling benefactors to another, at every change sinking deeper into distasteful drudgery. This was all the good she was to gain from being extraordinarily pretty, and always ready to agree with everybody. If the figure of Charlie had not stood like a beacon warning her off, she would have gone back to the old life, to thepetits dinersat improper restaurants; to the loose talk and equivocal love-making.
Whether it were due to the want of spring in her own spirits, or simply to the agency of an unkind fate, the fact remained that the girls were more unruly than usual, and more difficult to amuse. It being Friday, dancing was not among the pastimes allowed, yet Miss Ransome must have been at her wits’ end before proposing the game of Consequences to which—as a last resource, when the clamour was getting beyond her control—she resorted.
“Had they ever played Consequences?”
One girl answered, “Ow yes, miss, I ’ave onst.”
Pencils and papers were produced, and the game began. Bonnybell herself was to read out the papers at the end.
The results were disastrously successful, as far as the entertainment of the players was concerned, but also in some cases unspeakable. The luckless initiator of the game was reduced to having to pretend an inability to read the handwritings submitted to her, floundering in efforts to suppress and substitute. What they were doing was invariably “kissing.” “He gave her a kiss,and she gave him a black eye.” “They met, as often as not, in a ditch.” “He said to her, ‘Give me a kiss,’ and she said to him, ‘Gow ’ome.’”The “consequences” were—— No one could call Bonnybell squeamish, yet the consequences bathed her in blushes.
A grimly amused sense of a likeness to poor Sloggett in the ill-success of her evening’s labours streaked the ink of Miss Ransome’s reflections on her homeward way.
The butler, who opened the door to her, gave her the information that her ladyship had returned, and would like to speak to Miss Ransome in her bedroom.
Felicity was in bed, but sitting up, with writing materials before her, though looking still more fagged than earlier in the day, and a good deal flushed. She dismissed Bonnybell’s expressions of surprised concern very slightly.
“Yes, the hall was hot. I felt rather faint, and had to come out before the end, but the meeting went off admirably. The delegates were delighted with their reception. What I wanted to say to you to-night, in case I might forget it to-morrow morning—not that that is likely—is that you must impress upon Mrs. Slammer that she cannot expect your help at her stall at the Cataleptics. You must explain to her that you have been engaged to me since last autumn—ever since last November.”
Afterall, if she had but known, it would not make much difference to Lady Bletchley what or what manner of assistants Mrs. Slammer would have at her stall at the Fancy Fair for All England Cataleptics, which was to be held under Distinguished Patronage in the Albert Hall at mid-May, since at that date she herself had already been two months dead. The sequence of events which led to that catastrophe was a now not uncommon one. A vital energy weakened by over-exertion, a chill, a consultation, a successful operation—in medical parlance, a successful operation is often one in which the patient dies next day, instead of immediately under the surgeon’s knife—followed two days later by a paragraph in all the morning papers: “We regret to announce the death, which took place at an early hour yesterday morning, from appendicitis, at her residence in Hill Street, of Lady Bletchley. The deceased lady, better known as Mrs. Glanville—her husband, Lord Bletchley, having succeeded to the title by the death of the fourth Lord only in January last—was a wellknown figure in social and philanthropic circles,where her loss will be long and deeply deplored. She was——” Then followed a lengthy list of societies, associations, organizations, of hospitals, institutions, and institutes, in connection with which Lady Bletchley had cut a more or less prominent figure.
Bonnybell read the flaming obituary notices carefully to the end, and then laid down the papers—her eyes felt tired—with a sigh. “Poor dear thing, how she would have enjoyed them!”
Miss Ransome still felt rather stunned from the effects of the tragic haste with which the dreadful events of the last two or three days had followed on each other’s heels—from the moment when she had left Felicity sitting up, flushed, in bed, adjuring her not to play her false in the matter of the bazaar. There had, indeed, been haste, strange haste, on the dead woman’s part to leave a world so full of a double relish and savour since her accession to fortune; such haste that she had not even waited to say a farewell word to the husband whose anxiety to “have her” to himself had been the motive for Bonnybell’s ejection.
Tom had not returned in time to see his wife alive. Though she had now been twenty-four hours dead, he had not yet returned. Camilla and Edward were in the house. They had come at once. How widely all the many ways in which Bonnybell had figured to herself the manner of her next meeting with Edward had differed from the real one! Camilla? No, there was no change in Camilla. If anything, she looked perhaps a shade less haggard than when MissRansome had parted from her. Camilla’s face was one that matched a house of mourning. It needed no dressing to harmonize with gloom. On looking back, Miss Ransome seemed dimly to remember that she herself had been voluntarily embraced with an only half-smothered kindness, but at the time of the Tancreds’ arrival, when poor Felicity’s fate still hung in the balance, her own mind was in such a state of strained tension and grisly surprise that impressions came but blurred to it.
Now that the power of observation was coming back to her, the extreme wretchedness of Edward’s air struck her with a sense of excess. Of course, the whole affair was terrible in its suddenness; but Edward had never seemed to be very fond of his sister. Miss Ransome’s knowledge of human nature was not yet deep enough to teach her that the death of a person to whom one has owed and not given love sometimes brings with it a bitterer pang than that of one to whom has been given our poor best of tenderness.
Now that the thing was impossible, Edward was telling himself what an innocent pretence it would have been to have feigned a little interest in his sister’s unpractical schemes, a little admiration for her sincere, if wasted, humanity. The lesson that life dins into our ears with such ceaseless iteration that it seems impossible that any of us could ever fail to hear it is,To make haste to be kind! Edward felt that he had not made haste, and that now the opportunity had for ever escaped him.
For a whole day and night Felicity had been dead, and Tom had not yet returned. The telegrams sent after had missed him, owing to a change in his quarters from one remote fishing village to another. More and more urgent ones had been sent in every direction, and to every one who might possibly be in communication with him, but so far he had not appeared. There could be no doubt that he would arrive to-day. After all Felicity’s precautions against their meeting, it would be Bonnybell that would receive him, and not she. Nothing ever affected Miss Ransome very deeply, but at this reflection a profounder sense than ever before of the grim quality of Fate’s sense of humour penetrated her.
She was sitting idle, in the room which had been the scene of so many of her mornings’ labours for Felicity. Evidence of the dead woman’s interrupted toils lay strewn all over the large brass-bound writing-table, bulging out of pigeon-holes in the bureau, occupying in their varied multiplicity even a part of the carpet. Poor Felicity! how astonishing it was of her to die! A quite sincere compassion, and even a small contraction of the heart, slid off into painful speculation as to how yesterday’s catastrophe would affect the speculator’s future? Would the Slammer plan still hold good? Perhaps, now that there was no longer a socially influential Lady Bletchley to oblige, it would be allowed by its entertainer to damp off. And if it did not—if it became action, how much more dismal a future it involved than it had done, even in its originaldreary conception! Had poor Felicity lived, she would always have been a resource, a refuge, an antidote! She would have been always joyfully grateful for as much of her society as Miss Ransome could spare; as much, that is, as would have been consistent with keeping her well separated from Tom.Tom!
Bonnybell’s thoughts came to a full stop upon the name. Irony, irony! Who was there to prevent her meeting Tom now? Poor Felicity! She was going to meet him that very minute, meet himtête-á-tête! His footfall was inaudible upon the thickly carpeted stairs; but the turning of the door-handle gave her an instant of preparation. It was as well that she had expected, since otherwise she would scarcely have recognized him! Where was the rubicund, pink-clean, amorously smiling Tom of her recollection? Could this livid, staring-haired, unshorn stranger, whose eyes were wild with misery, and mouth twitched with pain, be indeed he?
The first moment that their looks crossed, Bonnybell saw that the sight of her gave him a shock of surprise. Poor Felicity! It flashed through the girl’s mind in a moment that Tom’s wife had hidden from him all along the fact of her being a guest in his house. The look of surprise vanished, as it had come, instantaneously. It was clear that in his whole being there was no room for any feeling but one. (Perhaps, after all, Felicity had spoken the truth! Perhaps, after all, he would have liked to have her to himself!)
“So I am too late?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Yesterday morning, at twenty minutes to eight.”
“Did she leave any message for me?”
“She was unconscious.”
At that answer it seemed as if there could be nothing more of any consequence to him on earth. He asked no further questions, but sat down heavily on a chair—a business-like, green-leather-seated one—which had so often held the form of Felicity as she dictated her circulars, notices, and leaflets.
Bonnybell stood beside him, a slender, silent image of sympathy. How very much sorrier he was than she had expected! What sort of things ought she to say to him? A vague idea of having heard that people sinking into a stunned state from grief ought to be roused crossed her mind. How was he to be roused?
“As long as she was conscious she was always talking of you.”
At that he broke into loud weeping. “If I could have heard her speak just once again—just to tell me that she forgave me!”
“I am sure that she did not think there was anything to forgive.”
“Oh, but there was—plenty.”
He was so evidently going over in acute remorse his past peccadilloes, that Bonnybell fell silent again, divided between a repelled pity—his noisy grief reminded her of Toby, never a pleasing memory—and an uncomfortable wonderwhether, in his present frame of mind, she herself might not be a somewhat unwelcome object to him? How curiously tender some men’s consciences were! After all, what had poor old Tom to reproach himself with?—some sly and invariably baffled attempts at caresses, and a few silly letters!
“She said over and over again to me how kind and indulgent you always were to her!”
“Kind, indulgent!” he repeated, from between his hard sobs. “Was that the way she put it? Good God! But it was just like her! There never was such an angel of goodness and gentleness and forbearance! Married five and twenty years—we should have kept our silver wedding this year—and I never had a cross word from her all that time!”
“I know you had not.”
It was not in the least true. Many were the pungent snubs that, on her first visit, Miss Ransome had heard administered by Felicity to her mate, and many the nettled retorts with which he had answered. But she saw that he believed in the perfect truth of his statement, and that it gave him a sort of relief from his misery to raise his lost wife to the clouds and depress himself to the pit.
“Just look round,” he went on, turning his streaming and reddened eyes about the room upon the evidences of Felicity’s labours. “This was her life—always working for others; never giving a thought to herself; working herself to death for other people; but all on the quiet!You never would have known it from her! Never a word of boasting; just doing it for the love of the thing, not wanting any credit or glory for herself!”
He paused, not because hisCornucopiaof praises was empty, but because tears strangled him. Bonnybell listened in covert wonder. Was it possible that he believed all that? Could not he have found something a little nearer the truth to say of her?
“And there was I all the time, in my beastly selfishness, thinking of nothing but my own amusements; shirking everything disagreeable; laying everything on her shoulders; never profiting in the least by her example; disregarding her advice; wasting my time in doing things that I knew she disapproved of!”
The picture was to the full as overcharged as the companion portrait had been, but it was not yet highly coloured enough to suit the painter’s fancy; and since it gave a little relief to the poor man’s remorse, Bonnybell took care not to interrupt him.
“I often hurt her feelings by the things I did, even making much of other people under her very eyes! She never took the least notice, or gave me one word of reproach; but I am sure it hurt her, though she must have known how little I cared about them, about anybody, or anything, in comparison of her!”
In the bewildered agony of his mind, poor Tom had evidently clean forgotten how prominent a place in the group alluded to the lady beforehim had taken; but she herself was somewhat acutely conscious of it, and since she had always been able to laugh at her own expense, a dreadful sense of amusement tinged the distress and awkwardness of the situation.
“She was a wonderfully handsome woman to her last day, wasn’t she? I never went into a room with her that she was not the best-looking woman there; but you have no conception what she was when I married her; her beauty was quite—quite—unearthly.”
“I can well believe it!”
Truth had once again returned to the bottom of her well. Felicity’s somewhat buxom charms had never struck Bonnybell as of so overpowering a character either in the present or the past. But if ever there was a pardonable fiction it lay in her acquiescence in his flights of remorseful fancy.
For another half-hour he went on piling up encomiums, some partially merited, some grossly undeserved, upon his departed wife, and heightening the whiteness of her portrait by additional strokes of lampblack added to his own, until at last he stopped, exhausted, there being no more glory left in memory or imagination to pile upon her, nor any further disgrace with which to daub himself. But the exercise had done him good.
Felicity’sobsequies had been celebrated with due pomp, and—fate still continuing in her ironic vein—Lady Bletchley’s first visit to the most imposing of her new country houses—there were half a dozen of them—was made under circumstances which precluded all enjoyment of its beauties.
As Miss Ransome noted the throng of delegates and journalists who crowded round Felicity’s grave, and glanced at the inscriptions on gigantic wreaths sent by societies and institutions, she repeated to herself with less of cynicism than sincere compassion, “Poor thing, how she would have enjoyed it!”
And now the mourners were back again in Hill Street, and feeling the dull relief that ensues after an ended ordeal.
Edward, who had been with the widower, had just received and obeyed a summons to Camilla. He found her lying on the sofa in her dressing-room. She was doing it thoroughly, as she did everything; that is to say, she lay perfectly flat, with her head resting on a cushion; but herattitude managed to express a protest which proclaimed that its adoption was due solely to doctor’s orders, and as little as possible to any inclination towards self-indulgence.
“How is he now?”
“Oh, he’ll be all right.”
“Is he calmer?”
“Yes, now and then. He has just been telling me of a new man whom his keeper has heard of to get pheasants’ eggs from.”
Mrs. Tancred looked at her husband with penetrating surprise. She had never known Edward intolerant before; yet there was not much warmth of compassion in his tone. To one of Edward’s nature, noise and grief were impossible companions, and his brother-in-law’s uncontrolled demonstration at the graveside had, as Camilla was aware, been almost intolerable to her husband.
“Sorrow affects people in different ways,” she said, with a rebuke which was gently meant, though it sounded, as her mildest utterances always did, severe and didactic.
“Yes, I know; but he made such an exhibition of himself.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“You will be glad to get back to Stillington?”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“We must take Bonnybell with us.”
At that he gave—not a stage start, but one of those almost invisible movements for which stage starts are meant to stand.
“We cannot, of course, leave her here.”
There was no form of ejaculation or assent in the whole range of language strong enough to express Mr. Tancred’s acquiescence in this impossibility, so he said only—
“No.”
“I have not yet talked to her about her plans; if she has made any—and I doubt her having gone even so far—they are probably perfectly irrational and chimerical.”
“I dare say.”
“I do not even know—the intercourse between us has been so slack of late—whether—under your sister’s auspices—she has made any friends that could be useful or helpful to her.”
Any one but Camilla would at such a moment have prefixed a “poor” to Felicity’s name; but Mrs. Tancred would have scorned to employ the adjective to any him or her simply because they were dead. To her it seemed a very doubtful ground for compassion.
Edward shook his head.
“Under the circumstances, I think there is no doubt that it is our duty to have her back, at all events, for a while.”
This time the hearer gave at first no sign of either acquiescence or dissent; then he spoke—not easily.
“Butyou? how aboutyou?”
“How about me?” she repeated. “You know that for the present my malady seems to be at a standstill; whether owing or not to the treatment I have been undergoing I cannot tell; personallyI believe it to be only what I suppose would be called areprieve, and that the operation, which lately seemed imminent, is only deferred for a more or less brief period. Anyhow, the fact remains, that I have no longer an excuse for avoiding duties disagreeable or otherwise; and I believe the case we are discussing comes under one or other of those heads.”
There could be no doubt in the husband’s mind under which head the return of Miss Ransome was mentally classed by his wife, though she magnanimously refrained from specifying it.
“It is like you to propose it,” he answered slowly; but more laggingly still, “I cannot see why you should embitter your life for the sake of a person who, after all, has no real claim upon you.”
Camilla looked at him with a calm compassion, accurately gauging what an utterance in such absolute discord with his own clearly divined inclinations had cost him.
“My life is not so easily embittered,” she rejoined quietly, “and I have never wished or expected personal enjoyment to have a very prominent part in my programme—you need not feel any disquiet on that head—and besides”—her usual rigid truthfulness combining with a wish to meet her companion’s self-sacrificing utterance in a like spirit to produce the concluding, “and besides, there is much about the girl as an inmate that is not disagreeable to me.”
If he had followed his impulses, he would have broken out into emphatic expressions ofgratitude; but realizing just in time what a frightful lapse from taste and seemliness it would involve to accept as a personal kindness done to himself the contemplated step, he refrained.
“It shall be, of course, as you wish,” he said, and so left the room.
He left the house too, the confinement of walls and roof seeming unbearable. He must have open air and solitude in which to bring himself face to face with the new prospect, at which in his wife’s presence he had trusted himself to give only a glance. What right had he to think it so fair? He must call mightily upon Reason and Honour to cudgel him, if necessary, out of so mad and ruinous a belief. But they might cudgel him as they would—and they did belabour him soundly during the next hour—nothing could hinder him from looking at the Great Scheme of Things from a different standpoint to that with which he had regarded it as he remorsefully followed his too-little-loved sister’s hearse! Since those moments of woolly despair what had happened to better his lot or brighten his prospects? What had happened, but that a young girl of vicious origin and upbringing, standing upon a hopelessly low plane of thought and action, a young girl who had brought discomfort and scandal into his home, alienated his friends, and poisoned his wife’s peace, was to be given the opportunity of pursuing and completing her work of disintegration! What but this had happened to make “the March sun shine like May,” to turn the dry easterly blast into a zephyr? Reason and Honour combinedto answer emphatically, “Nothing, less than nothing!” but another voice out-shouted them,dumbingthem with its insistent joyous asseveration, “Everything!” This voice was so impossible to silence, that at last he was reduced to listening to it, to asking it what it had to say for itself; and it began lengthily to explain. There were, certainly, disadvantages inseparable from the girl’s resumption of her place at his fireside—he tried to school himself into treating her in his innermost thoughts merely as “the girl”—but there would be good to be extracted from it too, if it was taken in the right way. Never could she hope to be under such wholesome and elevating an influence as his wife’s; and he himself might do something too, if he took the relation in the right way. Everything depended on taking it in the right way! He would begin at once—the very next time that they met—to set it upon a safe basis; to give the keynote of their future intercourse, and, with her extraordinary quickness and brightness, she would at once catch the right tone and keep it. God knows he had tried to do his best for her; to give her some notion of honour and truth, and decent living; and hehadmadesomeprogress. She lied still, but she said fewer indecent things; and she tried with such sweet docility to see his point of view, when she managed to grasp what it was.
Thank God, he had nothing to reproach himself with, nothing, that is, that was visible or audible to any human eye or ear; but sometimes the ground had seemed to be crumblinginto sand under his feet. Henceforth the foundation on which he and she were together to stand was to be of granite; and if, by-and-by, he were to succeed—he and his wife together—in leading her on and up, till her mind and moral nature more nearly matched her exquisite body, what an entrancing little friend she would make for them both! how she would soothe and brighten their waning years!
To be quite on the safe side, he framed to himself the fiction that Camilla and he were coeval. That there should be any delay in embarking on this halcyon plan seemed unendurable, and he began at once to reflect upon the earliest train by which he and his augmented party might return to Stillington on the morrow.
It was in the highest degree unseemly to suspect Tom, at such an infant stage of his loud sorrow and early widowhood; but Edward knew his brother-in-law well enough to be quite sure that the lapse of a very few days would see him—if Bonnybell wore an apron—drying his eyes upon a corner of it. So Mr. Tancred wondered whether his wife would think the 8.50 train too early.
Meanwhile, the cause of Mr. Tancred’s self-schoolings was in no danger of incurring a remorse like his for being too cheerful. She was alone in a sitting-room, which had been occupied by her during the last two or three days, because, since it looked to the back, its blinds had not needed to be pulled down, and she was sitting in an attitude of, for once, entirely unstudied dejection.Since no one was likely to intrude upon her, she might be and look just as miserable or as little miserable as she felt inclined. The quantum of grief expressed by her whole person was enough to have satisfied even the claims of Tom’s gluttonous demands upon his friends for a sorrow as vociferous as his own.
For once Miss Ransome’s philosophy was quite out of gear, and her spirits had descended below the soles of her feet, and abode there. She had cried a good deal, though not in public—a thing which she always disliked. Private weeping could serve no purpose of cajoling, persuading, or mollifying, and was likely to be damaging to that stock in trade of which her eyes formed so valuable an item; and she had hated the funeral. It had reminded her of poor Claire’s, though, except in the main fact, no other functions could ever have differed more widely; and for “Claire” in her small, cool heart, there always lingered a remnant of rueful pity, though it never ran to the length of wishing to have her back again.
Tom’s deportment and appearance at the ceremony had been as repulsive to her as to his brother-in-law. Why, in Heaven’s name, if he were so overwhelmed with grief at the loss of a wife, his tenderness to whom while in life had been eked out by so many fond by-plays with others, could not he control it as an English gentleman of his class and breeding was bound to do? Why, in the face of that large and reverent gathering, need he have roared like a bull and blubbered like a whipped schoolboy?And why, oh, why need Edward and he have stood side by side, so as to bring into monstrous prominence the contrast between them? Not even grief had succeeded in paling Tom, and the image of his rubicund face defaced by tears, of his bulky outline and shining bared head beside the silent pale dignity of Edward’s sorrow, filled Bonnybell with physical disgust.
Her thoughts moved on a little from the funeral to a scene that followed the return from it. “Poor old woman, she really did not do it badly, considering how little practice she has had in pretending. I could have given her a few hints, but it really was a very creditable performance; and in a way I think it was a disappointment to her to forego continuing my education. Never again can she hope to have a pupil who set off by, and meant to go on, knowing as little as I!”
Upon the hitherto unlightened gloom of her spirits there played a little ray of cynic mirth, but the gust of a heavy sigh blew it out. “But what a relief too! I saw a sort of shining come into her poor old eyes—they are not nearly so hard and horny as they were when first I knew them—and when she at last took in that I was in earnest, that the Slammers’ invitation was not one of my tasteful embroideries, how hard she tried not to beam too flagrantly!”
A pause, and then a still heavier sigh than the last. “I was right, undoubtedly I was right. It would have been madness. It may be all very well for people who have a high level, and thinkthey can keep up to it—it would still remain to be proved if they could—but as for me, I never had any level to speak of, and I do not possess that confidence in myself which I once had. I believe I am quite capable of committing asottiseif I put myself in the way of it; and at this time of the year I suppose all those horrid birds in the copse would be love-making, and it might have been catching.”
As she spoke, the door gently opened; and, since the sitting-room was a general one there was nothing strange in the fact, the object of her thoughts came in.
“I was looking for you.”
“Were you?”
“My wife will have told you that we hope, unless you have any objection to the plan, to take you back to Stillington with us to-morrow, and I have come to ask you if the 8.50 from Paddington would be too early for you.”
He had got the right key, hospitable and courteous, erring perhaps a little on the side of excess in the way of formality, but that was a fault on the safe side.
Before he spoke, Bonnybell had known that he had not yet heard, and that it would be her task to tell him. She saw also, with a slight tinge of bitter amusement, his anxiety not to let their point of departure for the long ordeal ahead of them be one of too great intimacy. (“Reassure yourself, my poor Edward; you may set your mind at rest.”)
The lack of her usual civil promptness inacknowledging a courtesy caused him a slight surprise, but it was so far not coupled with any misgiving. It did not need any of that self-esteem in which Edward was so singularly lacking to feel sure that his hearer could have no alternative plan which she would think preferable to the one now offered her, so he added, still with thatsoupçonof formality—