As Miss Ransome was not aware of having made even the ally alluded to by
Mr. Tancred overnight, it was with a very self-distrustful heart that
next morning she appeared in the breakfast-room, to find her host and
hostess waiting for her. It was one of the rules of Camilla’s
old-fashioned code of politeness that it is as inadmissible to begin
breakfast without a guest as to go in to dinner before he or she has
appeared, and many a sleepy visitor had cursed this cruel civility.
Bonnybell had made what appeared to herself superhuman efforts to keep
pace with the detestably unanimous clocks, that apparently, from every
recess and landing-place in the house, admonished her of the flight of
the minutes. For Claire and her daughter time had been not. Her
apprenticeship in Hill Street had been neither long nor strict enough to
uproot the habits of a lifetime; and though she had scamped her hair,
and entirely omitted to underline her eyes, those eyes informed
Bonnybell, on the authority of the relentlessly ticking accuser that
faced her as she hurried in, that she was ten minutes late.
Edward offered her a choice of excellent foods, and Camilla suggested
that perhaps for the future she would prefer to breakfast in her own
room.
She was about to accept joyfully the offer, when, just in time, some
inward monitor--or was it a look on Mr. Tancred’s face?--warned her that
it was sarcastic, and not meant to be taken seriously.
With trembling thanksgiving at having--and only by a
hair’s-breadth--shaved the first pitfall set for her, she hastened to
change the trend of her response.
“Oh no, thanks, not for worlds! I think it is a horrid habit.”
Once again Edward looked at her, and something regretful in his eye made
her feel that it would have been better to have been content with the
refusal of Camilla’s ironical offer, and not to have added the
ornamental mendacity at the end.
Having accepted coffee, and then wished that she had chosen tea, as
being more English and less reminiscential of foreign ways, Miss Ransome
ate her breakfast in a wary but smiling silence. Casting about in her
mind for a safe and mollifying topic, her eye presently furnished her
with one.
“What a beautiful portrait!” she said, pitching with inherited bad taste
upon the only modern picture in the room.
“It has no business to be here,” replied Camilla, casting a brief and
unadmiring glance upon the presumptuous intruder among a goodly company
of Antonio Mores, Cornelius Janssens, Romneys, and Gainsboroughs, “but
my parents had it hung there, and I have naturally not liked to move
it.”
The idea of Camilla ever having had parents, and not having issued
directly from the bosom of Primeval Night, was so stupefying to
Bonnybell that it kept her dumb long enough for Edward to throw in, as
he did rather hurriedly--
“It is a portrait of my wife by Graves, given her, when she came of age,
by the tenants.”
Furnished with this explanation, Miss Ransome’s eyes reverted to the
object of an admiration which had originally been more polite than
founded on conviction, and she chid herself inwardly for her stupidity
in not at once recognizing that in the large-featured girl, whose sandy
hair not even a courtly limner had been able to transmute into gold, lay
the germ of the grim woman sitting beneath it. It was not yet too late
to repair her error.
“Of course, I saw at a glance who it was,” she exclaimed glibly.
No comment followed this brave assertion, and its utterer thought it
safer to go boldly on; but the want of conviction that she felt her
statement had carried flurried her into a question from which her more
deliberate judgment would have refrained.
“Is there no portrait of _you_, no pendant to this one?”
The query was addressed and referred to the host, but it was the hostess
who answered.
“At the time that picture was painted, Edward was exactly six years old.
There is a difference of fifteen years between us.”
A slight writhe upon Mr. Tancred’s part witnessed to the failure of his
skin to have hardened itself against what yet must be a daily pin-prick,
and Bonnybell, good-naturedly sorry for him, and still more concerned
for herself at having floundered into so egregious a fault in taste,
began a precipitate sentence which a look from Edward’s eyes converted
into a for-ever unfinished fragment.
“No one would guess it!” was the complete form of the projected lie, but
the phrase never got beyond its third word. In fact, Miss Ransome left
the breakfast-table with not the slightest remorse indeed for the fibs,
complete and inchoate, which she had perpetrated there, but with some
misgiving as to their success.
It was contrary to what she would have expected, but yet the conviction
came solidly home to her, as she pinned a veil with careful nicety over
the chastened mournfulness and unchastened coquetry of her toque, that
Camilla would be more easy to take in than Edward.
Miss Ransome was pinning on a veil at ten o’clock in the morning, not
because her ejection had come thus early--though in her own opinion
unlikelier things might have happened--but because it was Sunday
morning, and she had been told that she was to walk to church with Mr.
Tancred. There was apparently no question of Mrs. Tancred’s attending
Divine Service.
“You are not coming with us?” the girl had said with an extremely
engaging _moue_ of regret. “But I suppose that you do not feel up to
it.”
“Up to what?”
“To the long morning service.”
“The long morning service lasts exactly one hour and ten minutes, and it
is not because of its length that I do not attend it, but because I am
not a member of the Church of England.”
“Oh!”--a little nonplussed by a momentary inability to think of a
suitable comment; then, with a quick recovery, “Of course! So many of
the oldest families are Catholics.”
“I am not a Roman Catholic either; but if you wait for me to expound my
creed you will be late for church, and--I do not think that your hat is
quite straight.” The words were snubby, but the speaker relaxed into an
unintentional smile as she evoked them.
Of course, there was not the slightest foundation in fact for
Bonnybell’s expressed regret, but there was a certain pleasantness in
even the fiction, in even the false presentment and elusive shadow of a
young thing belonging to one, and concerning itself about one’s comings
and goings.
As to Miss Ransome, she skipped off, relieved, and with a humorous
inward indignation at Camilla for not having perceived that her toque’s
racy obliquity was intentional.
She found her escort waiting for her under the stone portico over the
hall door, and casting a rather questioning eye up to a sky that did not
answer very reassuringly.
“Have you an umbrella?” he asked.
Of course she had not, the decorative in costume always engaging her
attention to the exclusion of the useful. They were already a couple of
hundred yards from the house, and he answered her suggestion of
returning to fetch one by--
“I am afraid we are already a little late, and if it comes on to rain I
can hold mine over you.”
“Of course he hopes that it will rain!” was the inward comment of the
innocent creature to whom this assurance was addressed, and upon it
followed a feeling of wonder at Camilla’s rash confidence, in trusting
her husband to a _tête-à-tête_ with herself.
But Camilla’s belief appeared to be going to be justified; for beyond a
gravely cautious warning now and again to his companion to avoid a
puddle, or indication of that strip of road which the night’s rain had
left driest, Mr. Tancred walked along almost in silence, with the width
of the elm avenue between them.
“Perhaps he would think it wrong to make love to me going to church!”
thought the wary Bonnybell. “Men have such funny scruples. I must look
out for myself going back.”
It was in a hansom while returning from St. Paul’s Cathedral that Tom
had first told her that she could turn him round her little finger.
There was no sign at present of Edward’s executing or intending to
execute a like gyration, but it was always well to be on the safe side,
and nothing kept dangerous topics better at bay than a little safe
small talk upon unimpeachable subjects.
“You always go to church here, I suppose?”
“Generally. And you?”
There was a slight demur. To talk about her own past and its habits
formed no part of Miss Ransome’s scheme; but after a moment’s hesitation
she answered--
“I went to church a good deal with the Glanvilles.”
“I cannot at this moment remember who Felicity’s favourite pope is?”
“She did not generally take me with her; she sent me with Tom--Mr.
Glanville--instead.”
Bonnybell did not think it necessary to explain that towards the close
of her unluckily shortened stay Felicity had deemed it advisable to
alter this arrangement. Doubts such as she had already felt with regard
to what the Tancreds knew or did not know of the Hill Street _fiasco_
hurried her into a well-sounding expression of opinion.
“I like going to church, of all things.”
The turn of the phrase amused him, and, against his intention, he showed
it a little.
“Is it a new sensation?”
She repented the slip, but her hearer, glanced sideways at in fleeting
apprehension, looked so lenient, that she took heart.
“We--Claire and I--were not generally up in time to go to church in the
morning, and we mostly played bridge in the afternoon.”
Mr. Tancred gave a slight shudder of thankfulness--if a shudder can ever
be thankful--that this glimpse into the young stranger’s past had been
revealed to him, instead of to his wife. To his thankfulness was added a
prick of conscience, reminding him that he ought to chide the girl for
her glib use of the forbidden Christian name. But he did not; and the
civil, unrebuking attention with which he listened deceived her into
fresh admissions.
“Sometimes Sir Algy took us down on his motor to Richmond or
Maidenhead.”
This time the hearer’s shudder was a shudder indeed.
“You liked that?”
“It was no question of liking,” she answered, with a lightning-quick
realization that she had made a false step, and that for the future “Sir
Algy” had better remain in the extreme background of her conversation.
“I had to go; Claire would have been dreadfully hurt if I had objected.”
There was a moment’s pause. He must brace himself to the effort, odious
and anomalous as it was, to tutor her.
“Would you mind--I must apologize a thousand times for my presumption in
making the suggestion--but would you mind not speaking of Lady Ransome
by her Christian name? I do not mind it in the least myself”--yielding
to the relief of an emphatic assertion--“but it might shock some of
these strait-laced people down here. I am not sure”--very
reluctantly--“that my wife would like it.”
“I am sure she would not,” replied the object of this rebuke, with a
great candour, which would have disarmed her admonisher, if he had ever
been armed. “In fact, I saw it by her manner last night. Of course, I
ought not to call my mother ‘Claire,’ but it slipped out. The habit of a
lifetime, you know. Well, ‘C’est plus fort que moi!’”
“Such a long lifetime, too!” returned he, with a gentle mocking of her
absurd air of longevity.
“I should have been more on my guard with Mrs. Tancred,” continued she,
in anxious explanation; “but with you I fancied it did not matter.”
He found a rejoinder to this speech difficult. He ought to have conveyed
to her that he had no wish to be set on any different plane of intimacy
with her from his wife, nor the least intention of being drawn into
conniving behind Camilla’s back at what he knew that she disapproved.
But long before he had found, even approximately, a form into which to
cast this necessary snub, they had reached their destination. The
church, standing on a little eminence above the slow midland river that
slid through the park, was, from its small size and original
destination, rather a chapel to the great house than a parish church.
“Is the music good? and do we come out before the sermon?” asked his
charge, whispering.
He had to reply in the negative to both questions, and the slight but
amusing twist that she gave her features on receiving his answer made
him not as alive as he ought to have been to the knowledge that she
would not have dared to make that grimace in Camilla’s presence.
The Tancreds had a small side gallery, entered by a private door in the
church, set apart for them, where for generations they had worshipped in
comfortable apartness, owners and guests--with a superior view of the
congregation--in front, and servants ranged in decorous rows behind.
To-day, as Edward had foreseen, they were late, and--the good old days
of waiting for the entrance of the “Wicked Man” by the parson being
gone--it was upon an assemblage of bent heads that Miss Bonnybell’s
cautiously roving eye alighted. What a sparse congregation! and what an
immense space separated her from Edward when each was ensconced in his
and her distant corner of the long seat. That space was obviously
intended to be occupied by a numerous progeny--Edward and Camilla’s
family. She gave an irreverent inward chuckle at the thought of a row of
prim little boys and bony girls fashioned in Camilla’s image.
Then a panic seized her. Was a visible smile, produced by this tickling
idea, showing itself on her face, to be seen now that everybody was
standing up again? At once she composed her features to an expression of
devout melancholy, which, being--as she had not a glass whereby to
regulate the amount--a little overdone, made Edward pityingly reflect,
when he occasionally glanced at her during the sermon, that, despite
that playful gaiety of disposition which broke out every now and then,
her terrible past had written its name indelibly upon her tiny features.
Those veracious indicators allowed themselves to relax a little from
their pious gloom, as their owner lightly trod her homeward way, and
cast about for something suitable to say regarding the service. If she
could also obtain a little useful information by the way no harm would
be done.
“What a dear little church!”
“Yes, it is rather an interesting specimen of Transitional.”
“Built in the time of Edward the Confessor, did you say?”
“Well, not quite”--with a smile.
“And what a nice congregation!”
“I am glad you think so. But why did they strike you as so particularly
nice?”
She thought it was a question that he need not have put, but took pains
with her reply.
“Oh, they looked so homely, and attentive, and--and--_un_-smart. I liked
them so much better than the London congregation I am used to.
Felicity’s ‘Pope,’ as you call him, has all the _mondaines_ and
_demi-mondaines_ too at his feet.”
“But I thought you did not sit under Felicity’s Oracle; I thought you
told me that you usually went to church with Tom.”
Miss Ransome wished, with a momentary impatience, that her companion’s
memory for her statements was not so good, as it might lead to
inconveniences in the long run, but she answered readily--
“Latterly, Felicity usually took me with her. Tom often had a cold or
an engagement on Sunday morning.”
She laughed off further inquiries with her airy cynicism, and having the
best reasons for preferring the _rôle_ of questioner to questioned,
began an indirect catechism concerning the congregation, whose motive
Mr. Tancred did not suspect.
“It all seemed so patriarchal; everybody looked like tenants and
farmers, and people of that class. I suppose your neighbours have
churches of their own to go to?”
“John Drake occasionally bicycles over to Morning Service.”
“John Drake?” She looked across the road at him with a sudden alertness
of interest. Did John Drake sound like the name of the South African
millionaire who was to pilot her out of her present slough of dependence
and manœuvring to the odious but indispensable anchorage of marriage?
“Who is John Drake? Is it very benighted of me never to have heard of
him?”
The desire to keep his boots clean still apparently held in check the
desire that Edward must experience to be near her, and it was across the
width of the drive that his answer reached her.
“Not in the least; it would have been odd if you had. He is agent to a
man who has a property near here.”
An _agent_! Miss Ransome had a distinct sensation of disappointment. But
agent to _whom_? Perhaps her chance of promotion was only set one step
further off.
“I dare say he will turn up to luncheon to-day. My wife is always glad
when he does. She thinks he has not enough to eat at home.”
“Why has not he enough to eat at home?”
“I dare say he has; but Camilla is convinced that when all the ten
children are helped, there is not much left of the leg of mutton.” (Ten
children!) “Poor chap!” continued Edward; then, checking his expression
of compassion, “though I do not know why I pity him. He probably gets
quite as much out of life as the rest of us”--with a smile. “He is a
fair shot, and he used to play the ’cello a bit, but he has given that
up; and I think that is nearly all about him.”
“How monstrous of anybody to have ten children!” she said with the
shocked accent of a philanthropist hearing of a great crime.
He did not feel inclined to discuss the subject with her; and his
silence recalled her to the consciousness that the turn of her phrase
was not that of the _jeune fille_.
“Agent to whom, did you say?”
“I do not think I did say; he is agent to Sir Frederick Milward.”
Ah, now we are beginning to get at something more promising! Sir
Frederick Milward!--a well-acred baronet, perhaps, or preferably an
industrial millionaire, knighted for judicious hospitalities in high
places.
“Is he nice?”
“Oh, fairly; but they are scarcely ever here. His wife is a neurotic;
and the place--it is a dreary barrack at the best of times--is empty for
ten months of the year.”
In profound discouragement, Miss Ransome desisted from her queries. What
a disgusting neighbourhood; everybody married, eating gory _gigots à
l’eau_, and breeding like rabbits!
At luncheon Mrs. Tancred took away her guest’s appetite for the moment
by asking her what the sermon was about, but dealt more gently than
might have been expected with her total inability to reply, letting her
off with the ironical hope that she had enjoyed her nap, and adding with
that habitual grim justice which sentenced herself as uncompromisingly
as others--
“You might fairly ask why, if I wished to know, I did not myself go to
hear it?”
“I should be very much interested if you cared to tell me,” replied the
culprit, with meek untruthfulness.
“I do not think you would,” rejoined the other, bluntly. “Anyhow, I have
a creed, though I am quite sure that you would not make head or tail of
it.”
Bonnybell received with joyful acquiescence this unflatteringly couched
reprieve from a lesson in theology; and without the least inward or
outward murmur the announcement that Camilla would not be visible before
teatime. Later on she learned that it was the prosecution of her
mysterious cult that kept Mrs. Tancred in austere study and Stoic
meditation through the long hours. Though her husband did not share in
her solitary devotions, it at first looked as if he were going to be as
invisible as she.
A sense of desperation laid hold of the young stranger on finding
herself left alone, with the whole house, rich in artistic and historic
interest, it is true, to range over, but with, in all probability, not a
living soul to exchange a word with for two and a half mortal hours. She
filched some violets and a tube-rose out of a vase, and pinned them upon
her smart blackness, but she had to stand on tip-toe to get a good sight
of herself in the beautiful Venetian mirror, evidently hung with a view
to its own becomingness, not for the convenience of “rash gazers;” and
the whole manœuvre, though she prolonged it by practising a variety of
expressions that might come in useful by-and-by upon her face, did not
occupy five minutes.
From among the wealth of books, new and old, that strewed the table, she
picked up one, whose yellow paper back “faisait espérer des choses,”
only to throw it down in disgust, since a very slight skimming of its
pages proved it to belong to the literature of the _jeune fille_; and
where a French novel is innocent, it is innocent with a vengeance.
She walked to one of the long windows. Should she go out? She decided
not. Rain-charged clouds hung over the ruddy trees of the park. There
was not the slightest chance in those miles of walks, whose beginnings
she saw stretching hopelessly away in their odious privacy, of meeting
any one not belonging to the place, and if you had to endure boredom it
might as well be a dry and warm as a wet and cold one. She tried the
pictures. They were all hopelessly good, some dusky, some mellow,
glowing and glooming from the harmonious dull-green brocade of their
background. Why on earth didn’t they sell them, now that there was a
“boom” in these dingy old masters, and hang something worth looking at
on their walls? Her mind reverted admiringly to the canvases--how unlike
these!--that had adorned “Le Nid,” Claire’s villa at Monaco.
Miss Ransome had not considered all her mother’s methods commendable,
but surely her taste in pictures was perfect. Where had they all gone to
now, those charming specimens of modern French art--“Le Bain,” “La
Surprise”?
Her disparaging contemplation of the picture at which she was staring
was broken in upon by the voice of Edward.
“It is hung too high,” he said, not guessing the spirit in which she was
gazing. “I told Camilla so, but she is not fond of change.”
“People of her age seldom are, I suppose,” returned Bonnybell, radiant
at her interrupted solitude, but at once feeling that she had said the
wrong thing.
“We have always thought it a Dierick Bouts. Camilla’s grandfather
brought it from Bruges,” he went on, in a tone that seemed to put him
further away from her than his first remark had done. “Of course, when
we sent it to a Winter Exhibition at Burlington House, the critics
pronounced it a copy, but we took leave to disbelieve them.”
“I am sure you were quite right,” rejoined she, with outward emphasis
and an inward wonder why any one should care to discuss the paternity of
such a grotesque old _croûte_.
Apparently her acting was all too good, and took him in.
“Since you are fond of pictures,” he said, “perhaps you will let me show
you some rather good portraits in the morning-room. They are not all by
any very well-known masters; but though their interest is chiefly
historical, they are not badly painted.”
She acquiesced gratefully. Any change from her late forlorn condition of
being thrown on her own resources must be for the better, and if she
pretended to be interested in his old daubs, she might be more likely to
retain his company.
They had reached the morning-room, and Tancred held back the heavy
curtain from the nearest window, to let a larger measure of the niggard
daylight of a November afternoon fall upon the object he was exhibiting.
“That is Sir Thomas Overbury; it was given by him to a cousin of his who
married an ancestor of my wife’s. That”--indicating another
portrait--“is Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. There is a grim irony in
hanging them cheek by jowl, isn’t there?”
“Very grim,” returned she, and called inwardly upon her gods for help in
enabling her to disguise how little she knew why it was grim, or why
there was any question of irony.
“And that is Somerset’s wife”--pointing to a good female portrait by Van
Somers. “I always think she has such a deceptive face; one would never
read her story in it, would one?”
“Never.”
This was perfectly true, since Bonnybell had not the foggiest notion of
what the illustrious murderess’s story was.
“It was taken when she was Lady Essex.”
“Oh yes, of course.”
The “of course” was redundant, and a mistake. It made him look at her in
slight surprise, and with that look dawned upon him the fact that never
before had Miss Ransome “heard tell” of any one of the three notorious
personages to whose effigies he had just introduced her.