A WAIF’S PROGRESS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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=Seylla or Charybdis?=
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LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
A WAIF’S PROGRESS
BY
RHODA BROUGHTON
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
A WAIF’S PROGRESS
CHAPTER I
“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--that _you_ might 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 upon which 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 several
years 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 stooping to test with her forefinger the temperature
of Jock’s tea. “No, my dear boy, you are not telling the truth, it is
_not_ too 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 that _we_ should 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, veering round 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.