“They must have a _chef_,” 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 a
_chef_! 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 she the 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, the _jeune fille_ does
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 the _jeune fille_ standard. “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 her questioner 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 some _amourette_! 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 the _jeune fille_ idea was
of no help. The _jeune fille_ could never have been turned out of a
boarding school, and Miss Ransome must be guided by her own lights.
Since truth was never a _sine quâ non_ with 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 possible that 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 of
_tête-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 in the 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 could _like_ his 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 or averse 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.
“You do not mean to say that you let him have it for nothing?” cried
Bonnybell, in animated remonstrance. “We never allowed our little Mimi
to eat a mouthful without barking for it.”
“Was ‘little Mimi’ your dog?” asked Camilla, in a voice that, though
carping at the silliness of the name, had yet a ring of true
fellow-feeling in it.
“Yes, she was such a beauty. I do not know what Sir Alg--one of Cl--my
mother’s friends--did not give for her.”
Thorny is the path of virtuous conversation. People did not talk of Sir
Algernon, and she was within an ace of Claire-ing her departed parent
again, and her audience was strictly silent; it expected her to go on,
so she evidently must continue her narrative, trusting in whatever
parody of Providence had hitherto guided her steps to steer her safely
through it.
“Mimi was twin-sister to the little dog that always drove in the Bois
with Lolotte, sitting up in the victoria beside her, and dressed in the
same colours and jewels as her mistress.”
There was a slight sound as of somebody gasping, then a pause, then a
question.
“And who, pray, is Lolotte?”
Upon this query there followed another gasp; but this time it came from
the causer of the first. Was it possible that there existed in the
civilized world a benighted being who had not heard of Lolotte?--an
establishment where she was as unmentionable as Sir Algy? The poor young
creature, who became suddenly conscious of the terrible _faux pas_ which
her beautifully shod feet had taken, threw an agonized glance of
entreaty for help at Edward. “_You_ know Lolotte,” it said dumbly; “for
goodness’ sake say something, and get me out of this horrible
entanglement.” But Edward maintained a masterly, if cowardly, inaction.