The Project Gutenberg eBook ofA waif's progressThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: A waif's progressAuthor: Rhoda BroughtonRelease date: May 20, 2024 [eBook #73654]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1905Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WAIF'S PROGRESS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: A waif's progressAuthor: Rhoda BroughtonRelease date: May 20, 2024 [eBook #73654]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1905Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Title: A waif's progress
Author: Rhoda Broughton
Author: Rhoda Broughton
Release date: May 20, 2024 [eBook #73654]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1905
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WAIF'S PROGRESS ***
CHAPTER I,II,III,IV,V,VI,VII,VIII,IX,X,XI,XII,XIII,XIV,XV,XVI,XVII,XVIII,XIX,XX,XXI,XXII,XXIII,XXIV,XXV,XXVI,XXVII,XXVIII,XXIX,XXX,XXXI,XXXII,XXXIII,XXXIV,XXXV.
A WAIF’S PROGRESS
BY THE SAME AUTHORCrown 8vo. 2s.each.Goodbye, Sweetheart!Cometh up as a Flower.Joan.Belinda.Dr. Cupid.Not Wisely but Too Well.Red as a Rose is She.Alas!Seylla or Charybdis?Mrs. Bligh.Second Thoughts.A Beginner.Dear Faustina.Nancy.The Game and the Candle.Foes in Law.Crown 8vo. 6s.Lavinia.Crown 8vo. 6s.London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.
BY THE SAME AUTHORCrown 8vo. 2s.each.
Goodbye, Sweetheart!Cometh up as a Flower.Joan.Belinda.Dr. Cupid.Not Wisely but Too Well.Red as a Rose is She.Alas!Seylla or Charybdis?Mrs. Bligh.Second Thoughts.A Beginner.Dear Faustina.Nancy.The Game and the Candle.
Foes in Law.Crown 8vo. 6s.Lavinia.Crown 8vo. 6s.
London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.
BYRHODA BROUGHTONLondonMACMILLAN AND CO.,LimitedNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPRINTED BYWILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,LONDON AND BECCLES.
“Well?” she asked.
From the other end of the breakfast-table he returned—“Well?” and for several minutes this exchange of monosyllables seemed going to be the end—it was not quite the beginning—of the conversation that had sprung from a letter, and to the perusal or reperusal of that letter Mrs. Tancred had returned.
“Here is another instance of Felicity’s talent for laying her cuckoo’s egg in other people’s nests!” she said presently with a dryish smile. “There never was a woman who did more good—by proxy—than your sister.”
Mr. Tancred gave as much acquiescence as lay in silence to his wife’s indictment. If you are credited with having married a woman for her money, and can never for one whole minute forget it, you must acquiesce in many statements from which you differ far more widely than he did from the one in question.
“Why cannot she keep the girl herself?”
“Because Tom has put his foot down.”
This time both smiled; laughed out, indeed.
“That convenient foot!”
“It does not usually come down very heavily upon a pretty woman.”
“Who says that she is pretty?”—with a touch of quickness.
“I thought you did, or Felicity—or—some one.”
“I do not think that there is any allusion to her personal appearance. Now, what has become of my spectacles?”—embarking on that exasperating chronic chase which becomes in time the only species of sport left open to the elderly.
“I believe that you can see perfectly well without them,” rejoined he, always irritated by anything that emphasized the fifteen years of disparity in age between them. “What was the use of my giving you those tortoise-shell eyeglasses, if you never use them?”
“Silly, affected things!” replied she, ungraciously, yet with a something of contradictory kindness in her eye; and at the same moment discovering her missing spectacles, unaccountably astride upon her own high well-bared brow, she searched for, found, and read aloud the following sentences—
“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome?’”
“Was that the woman who drank eye-wash and methylated spirit if she could not get anything else to quench her thirst?”
“She did it once too often. Do not interrupt again.
“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago.’”
“Methylated spirits?” he threw in, disobedient to his wife’s hest, and she avenged herself by beginning all over again.
“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago. I had done what I could for her, but it was one of those hopelessly inveterate cases of degradation for which no human aid is of any avail; and she died in a very distressing way last August. Tom went to the funeral.’
“I remember hearing that he was the only person who did, besides the two sham widowers who followed her in crape and weepers to Kensal Green.” The interruption this time emanated from the reader herself.
“‘Tom went to the funeral, and came back full of pity for the girl whom I believe to be really Lord Ransome’s daughter. We may as well give her the benefit of the doubt, at all events, though his—Lord Ransome’s—family decline to believe it, and refuse to do anything for her in consequence. As her family repudiated Claire’——”
“Who is Claire?”
“Why, the girl, of course! No, it is not. I see further down that the girl is Bonnybell. Claire must be the mother.
“‘As her family repudiated Claire when first she took to evil courses, the poor child has not a relation in the world to turn to, nor a roof to cover her. At the present moment she is with us, and as far as I am concerned might remain so indefinitely; but, then, Tom put his foot down.’”
Again one of the Tancred couple smiled with rich amusement.
“‘Under the circumstances it has struck me—I throw out the suggestion for what it is worth—thatyoumight like to have her as an inmate, at all events for a while.’”
“We?”
“Yes, that is Felicity all over! But let me finish.
“‘She is as gay as a lark’ (gay as a lark, when her mother died three months ago!)”
“Died of drink!” amended he, with that sense of justice which is always more inherent in man than woman.
“‘Gay as a lark’ (dear feeling little thing!), ‘and I thought, and think—indeed, it is one of my chief motives for making the proposal’ (ahem!), ‘that the presence of a bright young creature would bring a great accession of cheerfulness into both your lives.’”
“Are we so uncheerful?” asked the man, in a tone whose vexation was coloured with misgiving.
“A childless home is never very merry,” replied his wife, shortly.
Tancred’s eyes dropped to the object uponwhich his hand was already resting, the head of the wire-haired fox-terrier, whom his mistress spoilt most, but who liked his master best. The husband had long ceased to wince outwardly, though never inwardly, when one of the two great “raws” of his life was touched. He had married Camilla, and he had not given her the children for whom she hungered in that passionate greed, only increased by years and improbabilities, with which some women crave for offspring. And now they had been married for fifteen winters, and Camilla was fifty years old.
“You see that I was right; there is no allusion to her personal appearance.”
“No, it was my stupid mistake.”
“Though she is ‘as gay as a lark,’”—harking back rather grimly to the phrase that had displeased her—“she may also be as ugly as sin.”
He thought it unlikely, but did not say so.
“Bonnybell!” continued she, derisively. “What a cruelly ironical name to inflict—‘Bonne et belle’—when she is probably neither the one nor the other!”
“Let us hope for the worst, at all events,” said he, gently caustic.
“Bonnybell! She was probably named after one of the two sham widowers’ racehorses.”
“I thought you calculated that she dated from the pre-widower period.”
“Ay, so she must have done. Then she was named after one of Lord Ransome’s hounds. If you remember, he kept the Mudshire for severalyears before a barbed-wire fence broke his worthless neck for him.”
Tancred had known Lord Ransome a little; and the question crossed his mind as to whether it was worth while saying that his neck was not more valueless than his neighbours’. He decided that it was not. If you possess a wife with very decided opinions and a very trenchant mode of expressing them, why not let her enjoy them in peace? You may, at least, make her these trifling amends for the irreparable injury you have done her.
“If we refuse the girl,” he began slowly, after an interval spent in cogitation by two of the party, and in muffled remonstrances at the unusual delay in brewing his slopbasin of weak tea on the part of the third—“if we refuse the girl, what is the alternative?”
“None, apparently, but the streets.”
“Poor little devil!”
“I do not think that that consideration need sway us!” retorted she. “If we let ourselves go, a blind philanthropy might lead us to try and unpeople the Haymarket; and, moreover, it would not come to that. I have never known Felicity fail in getting hold of fingers to pull her chestnuts out of the fire for her, and she will not now.”
He agreed with this view of his sister, and said so; and then there was a pause for refreshment, the slopbowl claim having become too vocal to be longer ignored.
“She is probably as full of hereditary vice as she can hold,” resumed Camilla, presently stoopingto test with her forefinger the temperature of Jock’s tea. “No, my dear boy, you are not telling the truth, it isnottoo hot. Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides.”
“I never heard that Ransome was particularly immoral.”
“The presumption is in favour of it; they mostly go together.”
“And we will not give him the benefit of the doubt, eh?”
“Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides, selfishness on both sides, extravagance and folly on both sides,” enumerated she, checking off the unknown’s heritage upon her fingers.
“Poor little devil!” in a tone of even profounder compassion than had conveyed his former utterance of the phrase. “If your view is correct, she starts in life pretty well handicapped, doesn’t she?”
“Poor little devil!” repeated his wife, in a key of some exasperation. “I think thatweshould be the poor little devils if we consented to receive such an inmate.”
“But there is no necessity for us to do so. It is easy to say no.”
“Easy to say no to Felicity? Easy for you to say no to any one?”
Again he winced, though this time, if every one had their due, the wince should have been hers. Had she forgotten, or was she impossibly alluding to the one pregnant occasion on which he had not had the strength of mind to say no? Her voice, high and decided, cut into his strangled thought.
“Whichever way we settle it, must be at once—to-day. If she does not hear to the contrary by return of post, Felicity is quite capable of taking silence for consent, and packing the girl off by the next train, as she did her pet inebriate to Mrs. Holmes last summer.”
“I will leave you to decide,” he answered, with an effort at flight, contemptible since it was unsuccessful.
“You will do nothing of the kind,” answered she, seizing him by the lapel of his coat, as he passed her on his way to the door. “You will not shift the responsibility of the whole affair upon me.”
“What do you feel like?” he answered resignedly, not struggling in a clasp which had more of mastery than endearment in it. “Surely it will affect you infinitely more than it will me.”
Seeing him thus docile, she loosed her hold. “At my age,” she said, “all changes in the framework of one’s life seem to be for the worse.”
“Then let it be no,” he answered, though not again endeavouring for freedom, since he felt that one step in that direction would merely mean recapture.
“And yet,” she said, a sort of wistfulness that he too well knew coming into her hard light eyes, “the house is very silent; but for Jock it might be a house of the dead sometimes.”
“We are not very rowdy, I suppose,” he answered, following the ups and downs of her thought with a rueful gentleness.
“We are a dull couple,” she returned, veeringround instantly on the other tack; “unquestionably we are often dull—childless people must always be so—but if we admit this equivocal element into our lives, we may become something much worse than dull.”
“Then do not let us admit it.”
“On the other hand, there would to you at least be the undoubted advantage of the companionship of some one nearer your own age.”
He laughed softly, rallying her. “Felicity is foisting a young thing of five and thirty on us, then, is she?”
Camilla laughed also, a little unbending in her own grim way, but recapturing gravity and the argument almost instantaneously.
“Granting that she is eighteen or twenty in actual years, she is probably a hundred in experience of evil.”
“In short, you are afraid that she will take the bloom off our young innocence,” returned he, flying for refuge to irony, and resolutely leaving the room this time, followed by Jock, who, replete with tea, no longer saw any object in pretending that he liked his mistress best.
“Thelast day, and almost the last hour! I am thoroughly sorry,” said Felicity, and she was nearly sure that she meant it.
“Sorry is a weak word to express what I feel!” is the heartfelt answer. “Where should I have been now, I should like to know, but for you and Mr. Glanville?”
“Where indeed!”
The speculation as to Bonnybell’s hypothetical whereabouts silenced both ejaculators for a moment or two, until a glance at the clock telling Mrs. Glanville that her typewriter would be back from luncheon in ten minutes, and that she herself would have to return to multifarious work in her business room after the same time limit, hurried her into new final tendernesses.
“You know how much I should have liked to keep you permanently.”
“Oh yes, yes, of course I do.”
Possibly the extreme fervour of this reassurance was due to a something, if faintly, yet uncomfortably self-suspicious, in the tone with which the hostess made a statement in whose truth that hostess yet almost believed.
“We have not much time, alas!”—leaving a branch of the subject dimly felt to be a little ticklish with some alacrity—“and I want, before you go, to give you a tinycarte du pays; you may find it useful.”
“It will be adding an item to your long, long list of kindnesses.”
“In the first place, my sister-in-law is much older than my brother.”
The hearer, with the black hat and inky gloves of imminent departure upon head and hand, lifted a tiny face of wistful interest in this first recorded fact from thepoufat Felicity’s feet, upon which a slim body, limp with affection and regret, had thrown itself. She at once pensively commented upon it.
“If she makes up well, I dare say it does not show much.”
Mrs. Glanville broke into a horrified laugh. “Camilla make up! My dear child, wait till you see her.”
“I shall not have long to wait”—very lugubriously.
“Well, as you have not much time, I must hurry on. She is, as I say, much older than my brother.”
“Yes.”
“And she never could have been handsome.”
“Poor, poor fellow!” replied the girl, in a tone of the most good-hearted compassion. “But, no doubt, he has his consolations.”
Her hostess looked down upon the peculiarly innocent face at her knee with an expressionin which the proportion of amusement to aghastness was considerably less than it had been at some of herprotégée’sutterances.
“Bonnybell,” she said, very gravely, “I really dare not ask what you mean!” Then reflecting that the few minutes left her would be scarcely long enough to correct a moral standpoint on which three months’ intercourse had effected so little real change, she hastened on. “Camilla is a right down good woman, but her manners leave something to be desired. In point of fact, she is a good deal soured—embittered is perhaps the better word—by having no children. Unluckily, she is one of those baby-maniacs, who never can reconcile themselves to being childless. I cannot personally understand the feeling; there seems to me somethinganimalabout it.”
“I am very fond of children,” replied Bonnybell, thoughtfully; “but when I marry, I shall have only two.”
“You will have what God pleases to send you, I suppose,” rejoined Mrs. Glanville, sharply.
The other lifted her dove’s eyes. “More than two are destructive to the appearance.”
The hostess gave a sort of gasp. Of course, considering all things, the poor young creature was not to be blamed; but would not she herself have done more wisely to have in some degree prepared Camilla for the contents of the singular parcel she was sending her? Did “gay as a lark” at all cover the area occupied by this remarkable young person?
“My dear child,” she said, in a tone largelytinged with misgiving, “if you open the campaign at Stillington by remarks of that class, I shall have you back here in London by the first train to-morrow.”
“That will be clear gain, at all events.”
Mrs. Glanville did not assent.
“Camilla would be outraged at a girl of eighteen alluding to her future family at all; and if you made her the announcement that you have just made to me, I am convinced—yes, I am convinced—that she would take you by the shoulders and turn you out of the house!”
There was a minute’s pause, for Miss Ransome to assimilate this agreeable prophecy. Then she said in a voice of profound gloom—
“I believe that I shall spend my life in being turned neck and crop out of houses; and I shall never know what I have done!”
“You will, at all events, be able to give a good guess inthiscase,” rejoined the other.
“I shall be able to avoid saying that one particular thing,” returned Bonnybell, accepting her snub with the most perfect sweetness, but in a rather hopeless tone; “but I shall, no doubt, say hundreds of other things which I shall find out too late that ajeune filleought not to have said. I have not the least idea what sort of things the right kind ofjeune filledoes say.”
This wonder was expressed with apparently such perfect good faith, and such deferential asking for light, that Felicity—never very hardhearted, and possessed, in this case, by someslight inward compunction—abandoned her judicial attitude.
“Between ourselves,” she said, in a confidential tone, “there is very little that thejeune filleof to-day does not say; but Camilla is not of to-day.”
“And is he—Mr. Tancred—not of to-day either?”
Felicity thought a moment. “Edward? No, Edward is not of to-day either. Edward is of no particular day; if anything, he has strayed out of the Middle Ages.”
The phrase, as applied to the person in question, had no particular meaning; but Mrs. Glanville admired her brother, and it sounded picturesque.
“We shall make an odd jumble of periods between us!”—still more hopelessly than before. “Oh”—with a sudden burst of clinging affection—“oh, how I wish that Mr. Glanville had allowed you to keep me permanently, as you were so dear and kind as to want to do.”
Miss Ransome’s delicate black arm was flung across her protectress’s knee, and her head and attendant black feathers were flopped down upon it; but she lifted her face soon enough to notice the expression that her aspiration had called up in Felicity’s countenance.
Mrs. Glanville had quite as soon that her young friend’s eyes had remained hidden, being conscious of a slight shade of confusion on the dial-plate of her own emotions, and a qualmy question flashed across her brain as to whether it was possible that in the very tail of thedespairing orbs lifted to her, full of such unmistakable sorrowful gratitude, a tiny spark of contradictory mischief and mirth could lurk. Was it conceivable that the child—she was a terribly sharp child, and her vicious upbringing had made her still sharper—could have pricked the bladder, and detected the pious fraud of Tom’s supposed eagerness for her departure?
“You must not run away with the idea,” she said, with more flurry than approved itself to her own judgment—“you must not run away with the idea that Tom dislikes you.”
“Oh no, I am sure he does not”—with courteous hurry.
The little uplifted face was so touchingly, unresentfully sad, that Felicity decided with relief that the impression of hardly detectable amusement in it, received by her a minute ago, must have been an optical delusion.
“We shall both miss you very much,” she said with sincere cordiality. “When you are not impossible, you are as nice a little girl as one is likely to meet in a summer’s day. I have given you an excellent character, and all that you have got to do is to live up to it.”
“To live up to it!” repeated Bonnybell. “Will you mind telling me what you have said about me?”
Misgiving as to the height of the moral plane upon which Miss Ransome was warranted to move so obviously dictated this inquiry that Felicity laughed a little.
“I have said that you are as gay as a lark,to begin with. By-the-by”—with an air of bethinking herself—“if I were you I would not betoogay, just at first. Of course, I thoroughly understand that it argues no want of feeling on your part, and that the rebound is perfectly natural; but Camilla is very conventional.”
Miss Ransome bowed her head submissively under the blast of these somewhat contradictory counsels.
“Gay, but not too gay,” she said, softly; and once again an uneasy faint impression of infinitesimal mirth went like a whiff through Mrs. Glanville’s consciousness.
“I have told her how invaluable you have been to me at the ‘Happy Evenings.’ There I shall miss youcruelly”—with an unmistakable accent of sincerity. “Your knack of holding the girls’ attention and keeping them amused is really very remarkable; so different from poor Miss Sloggett”—with a disgusted backhander at a subordinate fellow-worker in the vineyard of philanthropy.
“Is Mrs. Tancred like you? Like you, I mean, in giving up her life to—to doing good?”
“She is not as active as she might be,” replied Felicity, with a modest regret at the poor figure cut by her sister-in-law in the path of mercy. “Camilla does not come forward as she ought to do; she has that silly horror which I cannot understand”—and, indeed, no one has ever suspected Felicity of it—“of seeing her name in print; but I believe”—magnanimously—“that in her humdrum way, and with the greatestprecaution, lest any one should hear of it, she does a fair amount of good.”
“And Mr. Tancred? Does he do good too?”
“Oh yes, of course, whenever he has the chance. He is on the Stock Exchange!” There was no unconscious irony in the juxtaposition of the two statements.
“On the Stock Exchange!” repeated the hearer, thoughtfully.
“He was determined not to be dependent on Camilla—to have a profession—so he went on the Stock Exchange. I do not know that it suits him particularly well; but anyhow it gives him something to do.”
“I see,” after a short pause; “Mr. Tancred is away most of every day, then?”
“Yes. Why shouldn’t he be?”—rather quickly.
“Oh, no reason at all; I was only thinking how nice and sensible it was!”
After another pause, “Does he never go to race-meetings?”
“Never.”
It took Miss Ransome two or three moments to assimilate this last, to her, incredible piece of intelligence; then she put another question.
“Do they never come up to London?”
“Oh yes, they are always in town from Christmas to Easter. They are not people who do much in the way of society, but in any case that would not affect you this year in your deep mourning.”
Bonnybell’s lip quivered, as if in preparation for a tear or two, but they were relentlessly snubbed back by their owner.
“Of course it would not.”
“But you shall help me with my Happy Evenings again,” continued Felicity, perceiving the droop in her young friend’s spirits, and with bowels genuinely yearning over her; “and the Fancy Fair for the All England Cataleptics will be coming off in May. You shall help me with that too. Oh, I am not joking; I really cannot say how much I shall miss my dear little right hand! There is the carriage,” as the butler entered to announce that the brougham was at the door. “This is really too sad! How I do hate the word ‘good-bye!’”
There were tears of real regret in Felicity’s eyes, and a quiver in her voice, as she explained that if the wind were not so cold she would accompany herprotégéeto the hall door; and that she would say good-bye for her to Tom, who would be so sorry to have been out at the moment of her departure. But as it happened Tom had no need to be sorry. Tom was not out. As the long black slimness set its narrow foot on the last step of the stair, Tom emerged from the smoking-room.
“I am coming to see you off. I will jump into a hansom, and be at Paddington before you,” he said with a carefully lowered voice.
“You will do nothing of the kind,” came the precipitate answer. “I mean”—with a dove-like gentleness of correction of whatever was harshin her first utterance, “that there is no place so odious for saying good-bye as at a railway-station.”
“It shall be as you wish. God bless you, dear!”
Tom’s heart was as large as his waistcoat, and there was a tear in his blue eye. It was still trembling there, as he turned from the street door, whence the neat green brougham was no longer visible, to face his wife, who, remembering a forgotten last word, had run downstairs just too late to utter it.
“You arenotout! How silly of you, with your bald head, to expose yourself to an east wind.”
“I wish that you would not rub my bald head quite so freely into me before the servants,” returned he, with less gratitude than exasperation, retreating into his lair.
“And I wish,” retorted she, “that you had not compelled me, by your silly sentimentality about her, to banish that poor dear homeless little creature.”
And then they both felt better.
“I cannotthink why she is coming by such an early train,” said Mrs. Tancred, referring to a note less blackly bordered than she thought it ought to be.
“Perhaps Tom has put his foot down,” returned her husband.
“She spells brougham phonetically, as if it were a besom.” After a moment, “What on earth shall I do with her between tea and dinner time?”
“Tell her to ‘rest.’ Is not that the proper thing?”
“Pooh! at eighteen they never want to rest.”
“Shall you onlysendto meet her at Swinston, or go yourself?”
He had tried to make the question as colourless as possible, but had not been able quite to keep out of his tone a slight indication of bias towards the more welcoming course.
“I shall send. I have no wish to be seen by any chance member of my acquaintance who may happen to be on the platform with a young member of thedemi-mondesobbing in my arms.”
Edward Tancred received this fiat in silence;even the shrug with which he greeted it was an inward one of the spirit alone, and in which the shoulders took no part. Perhaps the rebuke implied in his muteness or the stings of her own conscience might have suggested to Camilla that she had rather overdone the brutality of her last speech, for though her next utterance was not amiable, the key in which it was pitched was distinctly less trenchant than its predecessor’s.
“I hope she will not think it necessary to kiss me. Of course she will notwishto do so”—Mrs. Tancred had no illusion as to her own destituteness in the matter of charm; her husband sometimes thought that life would be rather easier if she had—“but she may think I expect it.”
“If she does, and it happens indoors, so that nothing compromising is involved, I hope you will be equal to the occasion.”
There was that something of lightly mocking in his tone which, as Camilla knew, implied the nearest approach to disapproval he ever permitted himself of any of her words or actions.
“Perhaps you would like to go to meet her in the brougham yourself?”
“I shall not be back from London.”
The matter-of-fact answer to a question intended to be a scoff took the wind out of Mrs. Tancred’s sails, which for a moment or two flapped idly against her masts. But presently a new zephyr swelled them.
“It is a leap in the dark, if ever there was one; and at my age the taste for such agilities is pretty well extinct.”
There was such a sombre misgiving in her tone, that his own changed at once to that of the kindest, patientest reasoning.
“Don’t you think you are making rather a mountain out of a molehill? The girl comes as an ordinary visitor. Supposing the worst, that you—we” (correcting himself) “do not care much about her, the visit ends, she goes, and whose bones are broken?”
Mrs. Tancred shook her head. “Having once undertaken her, I shall put it through, unless, of course”—with her little dry laugh—“you set your foot down, like Tom.”
“The comparison jarred upon him. She had meant it to do so, as a relief to her own ill humour, but not being one of those fortunate people who can indulge in pet vices, like indigestible dainties, without after ill effects, she expiated her ebullition by an instantaneous remorse, which, being unexpressed, did neither of them any good.
“Felicity gave one absolutely no data to go upon”—drawing from her pocket the brief note inserted in Miss Ransome’s letter by the warranter of that young lady’s general soundness. “‘Gay as a lark.’”She paused after the quotation, and Edward had a nervous dread that she was going to add the oft-repeated gloss, “When her mother died three months ago,” but for once she abstained. “‘Gay as a lark, and has been of invaluable assistance to me in my “Happy evenings.”’Not a word else! not a hint as to her character, her tastes, her faults!”
“Perhaps she will be of invaluable assistance to us in our happy evenings.”
It was said in a perfectly innocent voice, as offering a plausible suggestion; but his wife knew that it was his revenge for Tom’s foot.
“B-r-o-o-m! Yes, there can be no mistake about it!” said Mrs. Tancred, recurring to and carefully verifying poor Miss Ransome’s stumble upon the path of orthography, and forcing her husband to verify it too.
He laughed with contemptible male leniency. “Do you think she will arrive riding upon it, like a witch?” His slight mirth was not infectious.
“I think that to our other treats we shall have to add that of educating her.”
“Oh, I would not bother about that!” replied he, departing from his golden rule of never offering advice to that consort, who had had so much longer a time to learn wisdom in than had been his portion. “I would not bother about that. Let her ride through life upon her broom, if it amuses her.”
“That may be your happy-go-lucky way,” replied she, crisply, “but it is not mine.”
Happy-go-lucky! He repeated the epithet over to himself several times, in the dogcart, as he sent his horse along the flat old coach road, liberal of margin, to Swinston station; while the idle question put itself to his intelligence, whether a compound word, of which neither of the component parts was true, could be true as a whole? Happy-go-lucky. He was neither “happy” nor“lucky.” Could he, therefore, be truly said to be happy-go-lucky?
There was another traveller on the same line of railway, in the afternoon of that day, who made the hour’s journey from Paddington in a train that preceded the express which brought Mr. Tancred back from the City, and whose reflections, despite the lark-quality with which she was credited, were not much more rosy-tinted than his own.
“I wonder,” she said to herself, as her great eyes, that were no longer under any compulsion to look grateful, or affectionate, or docile, in the matchless freedom of an empty railway-carriage, followed the yellow-brick squalors of the sliding slums. “I wonder how long it will be before Edward puts his foot down in the same way that Tom did? Will it be a matter of months or weeks? Judging from the portrait good old Felicity drew of her sister-in-law, I should say it might be minutes! If old Tom had not been such an ass, I might have stayed with them for ever and a day, and it was not a bad berth! What asses most men are! andallwhat brutes! No, notall! Old Tom is not a brute!Howkind he was on the day of the funeral during that horrible drive to Kensal Green! Butwhatan ass! ‘I shall be at Paddington before you! God bless you, dear!’”
She chuckled a little, and the lark—a very sophisticated town lark—began to re-awake in her.
Presently, having the carriage to herself, sheleft her seat and flitted to the opposite window, then back again, standing up to command the landscape better. Not that she had any taste for landscape, an appreciation of the beauties of Nature being as much a matter of education as spelling or ciphering, and possessed as little by the peasant as the dog. She knew that Italy or Switzerland expect to be admired; but that the tame, Alpless, templeless Berkshire, through which the G.W.R. was carrying her, could command any approbation would never have occurred to her, even though November seemed reluctant yet to tear from the pleasant countryside its red and sombre garment of autumn.
But though gifted with no love of the picturesque, Miss Ransome was endowed with plenty of alert curiosity, which grew sharper as the little diamond-set watch at her wrist told her that she must be nearing her destined station, and caused her to scan with a keener interest the “country seats”—in advertisement phrase—which here and there were indicated by a lodge visible from the line, or a gable peeping through red woods. She had not been informed as to the distance from Swinston to Stillington Manor. Any one of those half or quarter revealed houses might therefore prove to be her future home. If not, it might prove to be the home of a neighbour and acquaintance. Any one of those neighbours might possess an eldest son.
“Marriage is the only possible outlet for me,” she said to herself, relapsing into gloom, as her eye rested appraisingly upon the brand-newmachicolations of a pretentious mansion on a low hillside. “It is an odious one, yet there is no other; but whatever old Felicity may say, I will not have more than two children. If I have not a very good settlement, I will have none. Why should I bring any poor creature into the world to be a wretched little adventurer like myself?”
“Miss Ransome.”
Never had the voice of her butler made an announcement less grateful to Mrs. Tancred’s ears. They were prepared for it, as the sound of the horses’ hoofs had penetrated to the morning-room, where she sat alone before her tea-table. But that sound had not been permitted to lift her spectacles—the pair most hated of Edward’s soul, with the thickest rims and the largest goggles—from her book. She would do her duty by the expected imposition when once it was laid on her shoulders, but that she should manifestempressementor pleasure in assuming the burden so brazenly shifted by Felicity from her own to Camilla’s back would be an offence at once against truth and decency.
Though Bonnybell had heartily dreaded and disliked the idea of her change ofmilieu, it had never occurred to her that the introduction to her new patroness would make her feel shy. Felicity kissed her upon arriving.A fortiori, Camilla would wish to kiss her, since in Miss Ransome’s experience the less attractive a human countenance was, the more anxious it was to approach itself to one’s own. She must be prepared for this, mustappear willing, if possible more than willing, to be embraced.
This had been her plan of campaign during the five-mile drive in the brougham, while clanking under the stone portico of the hall door, while passing through the evidently much-sat-in large hall, and being ushered into the morning-room opening out of it; but no sooner had her feet crossed the threshold of this latter, and seen the tall gauntness that faced her slowly rising from its seat and deliberately replacing its spectacles in their leather case, and awaiting her without one conciliatory inch of advance towards her, then, with lightning speed, she realized the impossibility of her project. Attempt to kiss that icy mask! Her buoyant step faltered, her ideas grew confused, only a hazy notion that her plan was a good one, and that she must carry out as much of it as was possible, still occupying her brain.
With merely this dim guide for her conduct, and becoming aware that she was now quite close to the grey-haired iceberg ahead, she dropped a little French curtsey, and laid a small, respectful, butterfly kiss upon the bony fingers held grudgingly out to her.
Mrs. Tancred snatched away her hand, though more in a sort of ferociousmauvaise hontethan from any more hostile motive. It was so very seldom, throughout her fifty years, that any one had kissed Camilla’s hand. Edward had done so, fifteen years ago, as a graceful unmarried lad of twenty, in innocent acknowledgment of long hospitalities, and she had thereupon straightwayproposed marriage to him—that marriage which he had been too young, too grateful, and too much taken aback to decline.
Was it any wonder that, having such associations with the courtesy in question, Mrs. Tancred should mark her disapprobation of it with what, to the uninitiated, might seem needless emphasis?
To Bonnybell this miscarriage of her plan of action at its very outset brought a momentary paralysis, and she stood dumbfounded, while an awkward remorse for her reception of what, though silly and misplaced, might have been a well-meant civility, impelled Camilla to make a conciliatory remark to the effect that she was afraid the tea was cold.
“I like it cold,” replied Miss Ransome, with the sweetest promptitude and the most instantaneous rally.
“You like it cold?” repeated Camilla.
The repetition of the polite assertion was merely because that ferocious shyness of hers did not suggest to Mrs. Tancred any more original observation; but the tone in which it was conveyed made Miss Ransome say to herself that “the old woman was even more terrible than she had expected.” No sign of this reflection appeared, however, on the dial-plate of her innocent face.
“I mean that I do notmindits being cold. I like to take it just as it comes.”
“Is that the way in which you like to take things generally?” asked the other, unstiffening into an involuntary smile.
It was difficult to look at anything so small, so dewy, so palpably made of rose-leaves as Bonnybell’s face without smiling; and in addition to this impulse shared by the generality of her species, Mrs. Tancred had for her own portion that extravagant admiration of beauty which, unmixed with any tincture of spite, is the doubtful appanage of the frankly ugly and really good among women.
“I think one has to, more or less, don’t you think?” replied the rose-leaf with a pretty diffidence, as one not competent to hold an opinion with any tenacity in the presence of a person so far superior in wisdom to herself.
With a passing shudder at the slipshodness of the grammar displayed in the answer, coupled with a slight sense of approbation of the deference of its tone, and an inward reflection—somewhat the reverse of that lately made by its object—that the new arrival was not quite so impossible as she had expected, Mrs. Tancred thawed a little further, and put an almost friendly question as to the welfare of the couple whom her visitor had just left.
“Mrs. Glanville has a slight cold,” replied the other, with the glad glibness of feeling herself on safe ground, “but taking care of it, and I do not think it will be much. She caught it as we were coming out of the ‘Happy Evening’ last Thursday.”
For a moment Mrs. Tancred hesitated. Should she seize this early opportunity for beginning the projected education of her charge,and point out to her that it is grammatically impossible to come out of a “Happy Evening,” or should she let the slip pass? Her rejoinder showed that she had chosen the weaker-minded alternative.
“Felicity tells me that you have been invaluable to her at the Recreation Hall.”
“I was so glad to be able to do any little thing to show my gratitude to her.”
The statement was certainly not untrue, but as certainly that was not the reason for its utterance. Veracity being a goddess who had never occupied a very high position in Bonnybell’s Pantheon, she said it because she thought that thejeune fille, up to whose character she was in these surroundings bound to try to live, should and would say it.
“Felicity would have liked you to prolong your visit to them indefinitely?”
There was a faint accent of asking in what would otherwise sound like the assertion of a fact, and Miss Ransome stole a wily glance at her hostess. Did she know about Tom, or was she trying to find out?
Twenty-four hours later the girl would not have put this question even to herself, having long ere the expiration of that time learnt how little the indirect or circuitous entered into Camilla’s methods. Here was need for wary walking.
“She said so.”
“Then the objection came from Tom?”—with an accent of very thinly veiled incredulity.
But the cautious young stranger was not to be surprised into any such admission, nor did the fact that Felicity’s version of the circumstances departed somewhat widely from strict accuracy make it at all less easy to her youngprotégéeto back it up.
“Of course, it must be a nuisance for any man to have a third person alwaysen tierswith him and his wife,” she replied with a judicious generality. Then, divining from something in Mrs. Tancred’s face that the ground was not very firm under her, she skipped off it with a masterly agility. “That was what made it so overwhelmingly kind of you and Mr. Tancred to let me be sent here.”
The humility of the wording, with its plain implication that the speaker could never be regarded except as a burdensome parcel to be transferred from one pair of reluctant hands to another, and the guilty feeling that such had been precisely her own attitude of mind towards her, combined to mollify yet further the person at whom they were aimed.
“Edward and I are too old married people to have Tom’s eagerness for atête-à-tête,” she said, with a hint of what Bonnybell suspected to be irony, “but”—with a smile that, though, like everything else about her, was unbeautiful, was yet not hostile—“I think itwaskind of us!”
“Theymust have achef,” said Bonnybell after dinner to herself, as she and Camilla began to tread back their path through the long enfilade of rooms that led from the dining-room to the library, where, accompanied by ceiling-high books, the small family apparently spent its evenings. “The cuisine is better than the Glanvilles’. I fancy that philanthropic women very seldom have good cooks. Yes, they have achef! What a fool he must be to spend two-thirds of the year in the country!”
As she and her hostess stood by the fire, Miss Ransome’s reflections took another turn.
“What a gloomy room! Not a single photograph about! How much better those old ancestors would look taken out of their frames and draped in light-blue velvet, as poor Claire did ours before she sold them!”
Mrs. Tancred, with an evident intention of industry, sat down by a green-shaded electric lamp, and drawing a roomy work-basket towards her, extracted from it a large piece of homely plain sewing.
“Ought I to set a footstool for her, or is shethe kind of person who likes to do everything herself? Ah, it is as I thought,” as the diffidently offered support was rejected with the words—
“Thank you, my dear; but my legs are long, and I have no wish to have my knees knocking against my nose.”
“I am so sorry,” returned Bonnybell, humbly; “it is a silly habit that I have got into! Claire never could bear to be without a footstool!”
Mrs. Tancred’s seam remained suspended in mid air, the needle arrested in its journey, while through her spectacles her eyes, which looked far too penetratingly keen to need them, flashed in shocked displeasure at her visitor.
“Claire!” she repeated in an awful voice. “Who is Claire?”
“Claire was my mother,” replied the girl, quailing, and crying to herself in a passion of self-reproach that she had made a colossal blunder on the very threshold; that, of course, thejeune filledoes not allude to her mother by her Christian name.
“And you speak of her as Claire?”
“It was her own wish. She could not bear me to call her mother; she thought it dated her—of course, it did.”
Mrs. Tancred was silent for a minute or two. It would be unseemly to address to the daughter of the departed the vigorous epithets which alone sprang to her own lips in connection with that lady. Presently a suddenly risen hope set speech free again.
“If those were Lady Ransome’s views, she probably did not care to have you much with her.”
“Oh yes, she did—sometimes,” replied the girl, slowly, and with a painful weighing of each word by thejeune fillestandard. “She liked us to be taken for sisters; and when the light was not strong there really looked very little difference in age between us.”
Again there was a pause, the potent reasons of her deadness and her motherhood being scarcely potent enough to keep within the barrier of Mrs. Tancred’s lips the expression of her estimate of the scandalous author of Bonnybell’s being. Her next question in the constraint of its tone evidenced the violence done to her inclinations.
“You were educated at home? or were you sent to school?”
“I was at school in Paris for a while.”
“For long?”
Bonnybell hesitated slightly. In point of fact, her sojourn in the Pension de Demoiselles in question had not outlasted a month; but “Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.”
“For some time.”
“And then Lady Ransome found that she could not get on without you?”
Reprobation of the implied selfish disregard of her daughter’s welfare had forced itself unconquerably into Camilla’s voice; and Bonnybell, who, with all her numerous faults, was not devoid of generosity, found herself unable to leave herquestioner in what would be for herself an advantageous error.
“It was not Cl—my mother’s fault,” she explained slowly; “Madame le Roy asked her to take me away.”
“Asked her to take you away?”
Again for a moment Bonnybell hesitated. Should she “give away” her parent, whom, after all, nothing could now harm, and tell the truth, seeing that it was on getting wind of that parent’s antecedents, and the estimate in which she was held by her countrymen and countrywomen, that Madame le Roy had requested the removal of her daughter? It was clear that at the present moment the girl’s new patroness was labouring under the perfectly natural error that it was for misconduct of her own that the young creature before her had been ejected.
“She thinks that I was kicked out for someamourette! Well”—the hesitation had not lasted more than five clock-ticks—“let her go on thinking so. If I had stayed another month, I dare say I should have been, and poor Claire is dead, and cannot take up the cudgels for herself.”
“Asked her to take you away?” Mrs. Tancred had laid down her spectacles; but though their glowering roundness had been frightening, the unshaded rebuke of the eyes behind them was distinctly more so.
The repetition of the sentence had taken so plainly interrogative a tone that it must needs be answered. In this case thejeune filleidea was ofno help. Thejeune fillecould never have been turned out of a boarding school, and Miss Ransome must be guided by her own lights. Since truth was never asine quâ nonwith her, she might as well make out as good a case as she could for herself.
“I believe that Madame le Roy thought I was not making much progress—that another system of education might suit me better.”
A long practice in the art of fibbing had given Bonnybell a high degree of proficiency, and no one that heard this unhesitating utterance, and saw the unflinching though modest directness with which her eyes met those of her catechist, would guess how much larger a draft upon the girl’s imagination than her memory the explanation had made.
Camilla listened, uncomfortably puzzled. The reason given sounded ludicrously inadequate, yet the child’s whole air and manner was that of one telling the simple truth.
Mrs. Tancred had never had the advantage of living with a really good liar; and so dismissing all doubt of the unlikely fact recorded, her mind made a transition to the cynically amused speculation as to what the alternative system of education could be that taught its pupil to spell the word “brougham” as poor Miss Ransome had so lately been innocently guilty of doing.
Bonnybell’s thoughts meanwhile resolved themselves into the two distressed self-queries, “If she goes on like this much longer, shall I be able to help contradicting myself?” and, “Is it possiblethat Edward is going to have the brutality to leave us to ourselves for the whole evening?”
It was not possible; or, at least, the dreaded contingency did not happen, and Edward himself followed soon, though saunteringly, upon the heels of his guest’s fears.
He stood for a few minutes with his back to the fire, not looking particularly at either of his ladies, but rubbing his foot gently over Jock’s reverse, that dog sharing the belief of many of his race, that the really civil way to receive a friend is to roll over on your back, and flourish all your four legs in the air at once, like waved hands, at him.
Bonnybell drew a breath of relief. How much lighter the atmosphere had grown since he came in! and one might relax the strain to remember what one’s last sentence had been, and to be sure that it did not contradict one’s last but one! Yet it seemed destined to be an evening oftête-à-têtes. Though the one whose prolongation she had dreaded was happily at an end, Miss Ransome soon found herself involved in a second one with her host himself.
Mrs. Tancred having been given a low-voiced message by the butler, from which the words “water-bed,” “gratitude,” “invaluable” dimly emerged, a message whose tail was brusquely cut off by the recipient of it, but which resulted in her hastily leaving the room, a peril of a different kind from her former one must await the visitor.
“Of course, now that she is clear off, he will begin to make love to me! Was I ever alone inthe room for five minutes with a man without his beginning to make love to me! Tom began the first evening. Happily I am a good way off!”
But apparently the manners and customs of the shady debauchees to whom Miss Bonnybell’s upbringing had acclimatized her, and from whom she generalized, formed no criterion for the conduct of the gentleman in whose company she now found herself. He did not change his attitude or his occupation by an inch, his foot still gently rolling the beatified Jock slowly to and fro, after the method that experience had taught him to be most acceptable. Neither did he speak.
Edward Ransome had never much flow of small talk, going mooning through that life whose circumstances forbade his ever giving open expression to his real feelings or true thoughts, in a sort of dreamy twilight of silence and self-suppression. He ought to say something to the dazzling anomaly that had seated itself by his dull hearthstone, but for the life of him he could not think what.
It was the anomaly who, surprised and relieved at his entire apparent innocence of the kind of enterprise with which she had credited or discredited him, saved him the trouble of initiating a subject.
“Am I sitting in your chair?” A movement just sketched with hasty grace towards leaving the seat she occupied accompanied the question.
“Oh dear, no!” in courteous distress at the suggestion. “I have not got a chair.”
“You do not say so?”
The words were nothing, but the tone carried such a delicate implication of interest in anything relating to his habits, coupled with a still more delicate fear of carrying that interest into intrusiveness, that Edward felt vaguely gratified.
“I mean that I have not any special chair which makes me inclined to growl as Jock does when another dog approaches the sacred confines of his basket.”
“Thank you for relieving my mind!” she answered gratefully. “I thought I might have taken it without knowing—one makes such stupid mistakes out of ignorance!”
There was a meek but not exaggerated thankfulness for his reassuring information in her whole air; and as if encouraged by his indulgence to gain further enlightenment, she went on—
“But Mrs. Tancred has?”
“Has what?” He had lost sight of her queries in a dreamy enjoyment of her prettiness.
“Has a special chair?”
“Has she?”
“Hasn’t she?”
Both were smiling; he at the inquiring turn of her mind, she at his vagueness. Both looked at the lately vacated seat, and Bonnybell said with hesitating solicitude—
“I hope it was not anything annoying that took Mrs. Tancred away.”
He shook his head. “It often happens. The village and the parson are perfectly conscienceless in their calls upon her.”
There was what sounded like a regretful and rather affectionate admiration in his voice. Was it possible that he couldlikehis old Gorgon? It was, at all events, safer to go upon the supposition that he did, and to shape one’s remarks accordingly.
“Mrs. Glanville spoke with the deepest admiration of Mrs. Tancred’s work,” the girl said in a very respectful tone, and executing her piece of embroidery upon Felicity’s real utterance with the deftest speed and readiness.
“Did she indeed?” replied he, in a key of high surprise, while his lazy eyes flashed a look at her, of whose keenness she had not supposed them capable, and which would not have disgraced Camilla’s own. “And yet their methods are not much alike.”
“You mean that Mrs. Tancred does not get up on platforms—does not speak in public?”
In her perfect darkness as to which mode of influencing the human race, his wife’s or his sister’s, most recommended itself to the husband and brother, Miss Ransome stole out her feeler with cautious colourlessness.
“No, my wife does not get up upon platforms.”
There was no emphasis laid on the denial of Camilla’s claim to puffed and self-advertised usefulness, and the answer might seem as colourless as the question, yet after its utterance no vestige of doubt remained in Bonnybell’s mind as to which of his female philanthropists’ methods Edward preferred. Perhaps he did not care much about either. Perhaps he was indifferent to oraverse from philanthropy at all. She might as well ask him. Men were so much easier to ask questions of than women.
“You do not do anything of the kind yourself?”
“Of what kind?”
“Oh, good works—that sort of thing.”
She expected his answer with a flattering hanging on his words, but a slight frown creased his forehead as he replied—
“No, I do not do any good works—or bad ones either. I am a mere cumberer of the ground.”
There was a slight pause; she commenting inwardly upon his phrase, or rather upon a part of it—“no bad ones either.” I know how much of that to believe. “Qui s’excuse s’accuse!” Her amiable rejoinder, when it came, was gently playful.
“I see that I must not take you at your own valuation.”
The want of an answering smile, and the averting of his eyes, told her that the topic was not a gratifying one to him; that here was one of the men—almost unknown in her experience—who did not wish to talk about themselves; nor did she suspect that the gravity of his reception of her feeler was due to the slight sense of discomfort that one of her late carefully prepared sentences had produced. Why did she tell that unnecessary lie about Felicity’s admiration of Camilla’s work? She must have known that it was one!
He was glad, and Bonnybell was not as sorry as she would have expected to be, when the door opened to admit Camilla. The latter was shortly followed by men-servants, who laid out a teatable—an evident survival from the, to Bonnybell, incredible period of Mrs. Tancred’s girlhood; and Jock, ceasing to make a fool of himself on the hearthrug, and knowing that the hour of pet-dog biscuits had come, trotted confidently up to the board. He did not know that in the unprecedented novelty whom he had carefully sniffed over, and finally acquiesced in, lay an enemy to his own peace.