After that, being a merciful man, Edward let her get off the
historico-artistic gridiron, upon which he had been innocently grilling
her. He showed her no more pictures, nor, indeed, anything else except
his smoking-room, in which she exhibited a lively, and this time
perfectly unfeigned interest, and where her intelligent inquiries as to
the brand of cigars favoured by him, and her discriminating knowledge of
the subject in contrast to her abysmal ignorance of the former ones,
taught him that hers had not been a past of mere cigarettes. She had
nourished a faint hope that he might have invited her to share a
friendly whiff there and then, but it was clearly not to be. Instead, he
gently ejected her. “Of course, the old camel would smell it,” said the
disappointed young creature, inwardly feeling a sensible relief in this
ingeniously insulting play upon the name of her latest benefactress.
Edward had escorted her back to the very spot where he had found her,
opposite the calumniated Dierick Bouts; and with despair she saw, or
thought she saw, in his eye an imminent intention of leaving her. What
could she do to arrest him? Rush at once into some entanglingly
interesting subject which would rob him of that wish to escape which it
was so incomprehensible that he could ever have nourished? Ask him why
he married Camilla?
She was saved from a remedy which would certainly in its results have
proved worse than the disease, by the object of her solicitude.
“I am afraid,” he said, looking first compassionately at her and then
rather helplessly round the room, as if in puzzled search among its
wealth of beautiful objects and inviting books for something capable of
amusing her--“I am afraid that you will be very dull all by yourself.”
The inevitable civil falsehood--inevitable, at least, to the ever-lying
Bonnybell, followed.
“Oh no, I love being by myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really; that is to say”--in terror that he might be obtuse enough
to believe her--“that is to say, I love it _generally_.”
The implication that she did not love it on this particular occasion was
so piteously apparent, that humanity forced him to throw a rope to her.
“What do you think about going out?”
She glanced through the window. It would have been much more consonant
with her views of the right way of spending Sunday to have sat blowing
delicate clouds through her nose and picking his brains over the
smoking-room fire, but that was a blue rose.
“What do you recommend?” she asked with a smile that looked
persuadable.
“Isn’t it rather rash ever to recommend anything to anybody?”
Mr. Tancred’s propositions were mostly put interrogatively. He had not
enough value for his own opinion to assert anything with dogmatism,
having fifteen years earlier set up so robust a self-contempt as still
showed no signs of wearing out.
“Be rash, then.” She was still smiling anxiously, divided between a
lurking fear of mud and a horror of solitude.
“I wonder,” he suggested, still tentatively, and eying doubtfully the
towny elegance of her garb, “whether you would care to walk with me as
far as what we call the Dower House?”
“Is that where you keep your dowagers?” she asked playfully, but with an
inward misgiving as to the proposed treat being “good enough.”
“It is where Camilla’s people used to keep them,” replied he, with that
careful dissevering of himself, which Bonnybell so often afterwards
noticed, from his wife’s possessions; “but as she is the last of the
Tancreds, it will not be needed again.”
“The last of the Tancreds!” repeated she, with an accent of surprise. “I
thought that Tancred was your name?”
“No,” he answered in that ill-at-ease voice with which he--and that as
rarely as might be--alluded to his marriage. “I gave mine up when I
married.”
“I hope she made it worth your while,” was the worldly wise reflection
of the listener; but on her sweet little face appeared only the
expression of an intuitive sympathy. The subject was evidently not a
much-relished one; and yet it would be disagreeable to her companion to
see that she had discovered the fact; it must be gently glided away
from.
“So I am to be taken to see an empty house--four bare walls?” she
pouted, with a charming protrusion of her nether lip.
He laughed, in sheer irrational pleasure at the prettiness of the
contortion.
“On the contrary, the friends to whom Camilla has lent it while their
own house is being rebuilt find themselves inconveniently thick upon the
ground.”
“Are there ten of them? and do they live upon _gigots à l’eau_?” cried
she, alluding to what he had told her of the full-quivered land-agent on
their way home from church.
“No, there are only three young Aylmers--only two at home, unless Toby
came back last night.”
“Toby? Who is Toby?”
“Toby is the precious only son.”
That decided her. “I should like it of all things!” she cried. “May I
come as I am, or must I make myself frightful, _à l’Anglaise_?” She held
her arms straight down a little way from her sides and “invited
inspection.”
“I think, if you go as you are, the brambles in the wood will not leave
you many of those jingly things.”
“The wood!” repeated she, with a sudden clouding of the brow.
Being much more innocent-minded than she, and accustomed to much more
cleanly company, he had not the dimmest suspicion that his mention of
the harmless coppice in question had re-aroused her misgivings. They had
been almost completely lulled by his demeanour hitherto; but had he been
acting all this while? Had his cool and distant friendliness--so
improbable in the face of all her experience of men--been assumed only
to lead up to this ominous wood? It could be safely said that with not
one of Claire’s and her own former intimates would she have for an
instant thought of trusting herself in a shady grove.
The thought that his apparently harmless proposition implied an intended
enterprise of the usual sort inspired her with no particular disgust. He
would only be acting after his kind. All men were alike. This formula,
from which she had hitherto had no cause to make any exception, covered
with its contemptuous generality her whole masculine acquaintance,
actual and possible.
“Well, does the wood frighten you?” he asked, with a slight and most
unsuspicious laugh at the perturbation and doubt written in her face.
“What do you think will happen to you in it?”
If she answered him truly--which, to do her justice, was the last thing
that she had ever any temptation to do--he would probably think it
necessary to pretend indignation, and go off in a huff without her, so
she temporized.
“It only just struck me that possibly I might be out too late; that Mrs.
Tancred might want me.”
“Camilla never wants any one on Sunday afternoon,” returned he, with a
sort of compassionate amusement at the idea of his wife ever “wanting,”
or doing anything but groan under, the society of her little incubus;
“and besides, it was her own suggestion.”
There was no more to be said, and, remarking to herself in derisive
gaiety, that “There is no fool like an old fool,” Miss Ransome skipped
off to make grudging modifications in her costume.
“Toby would have preferred me as I was,” was her final verdict on her
own reflected image; “but I have no doubt that I am good enough, and too
good for him, as I am.”
The Dower House stood in the park, sundered by a mere green mile from
the great house, so that the departed dowagers had been able clearly to
view the scene of their ended importance, and to contrast their
successors’ methods unfavourably with their own. It was of such roomy
proportions as to suggest the idea that it had been planned by some
foreseeing lady, providing cannily for her own days of deposition. Not
having been porticoed and stone-faced, as its parent-building had been
in the days when you were compelled to inhabit a sham Grecian temple, or
forfeit your self-respect, it retained those modest Tudor charms of old
red brick and twisted chimney-stacks, which, fashion having happily
wheeled them round again into favour, might chance to remain unmutilated
during our little day.
The dreaded “wood” was nothing more than the skirt of a large covert,
and was easily traversed in five minutes. Although a cautious inquiry as
to its length had elicited this fact, Miss Ransome quickened her pace as
she entered the shade, which the still adhering leaves on the trees, and
the quickly lessening daylight of a November afternoon, rendered thick
and almost more than dusk.
Her companion noted with innocent surprise her nervous haste, and again
asked her what she was afraid of, adding, with perfect unsuspiciousness
that he himself was the cause of her fear--
“There is rather a boggy place just ahead of us in the path; I must have
it looked to. Shall I give you a hand?”
She refused softly, but with such decision as provided him with a lazy
sense of entertainment at the independence of her spirit, which was only
equalled apparently by her absolute indifference to, and unconsciousness
of, any of the sights and sounds of Nature. There was nothing very
striking, it is true, in a Berkshire park--“as flat as a denial or a
pancake”--on a winter afternoon, and he should not have been surprised
that the lightly speaking voices of birds, whose songs were long since
over, should hit unnoticed her sophisticated ear; but that the glorious
colours which still stained the noble trees, that the wonderful eyebeam
which the sky--smoke-coloured all day--shot from under lifted lids in
good night to whitening grass and copper and rust-tinted bracken, should
be apparently entirely invisible to her, gave him a slight shock. He
pointed out to her one superb effect of interlacing tints, but did not
repeat the experiment.
She was too civil and too anxious to please not to respond with a
perfunctory superlative “Yes, too delightful!” but in a moment had
dropped back into her chatter about people, a chatter which circled
round the family to whom she was on her way to be introduced, and which
contained exhaustive, though circuitous, inquiries as to why “Toby” was
“precious.” She must know before his presentation to her why and to what
extent “Toby” was “precious.” Was it merely the usual dull British
adoration of the solitary male of an over-feminine family which made him
so? Or was it that he was heir to something so considerable as to render
his life of importance to his family stem? Also, why were they
rebuilding their house?
By the time she had reached the nail-studded oak front door of the Dower
House, both questions were set at rest in her mind. The house was being
rebuilt, because, through the carelessness of a housemaid, it had
regrettably been burnt down; happily, however, the original plans had
been found, and it was being rebuilt, stone for stone, as Sir John
Vanbrugh had first erected it.
Bonnybell had never heard of Sir John Vanbrugh as either architect or
playwright, but she ejaculated fervently, “_What_ a blessing!” and
reckoning up mentally the sum of the information given her, said to
herself, with a thankful heart, as she followed the servant into the
hall, that Toby was well worth her nicest attention.