Thus it was not the task-mistress, but a mere footman, whose approaching
tread struck compunctious fear into the breast of the pseudo-student in
the east gallery--a footman who simply requested her presence in the
morning-room, coupling with his message the information that Mrs. and
Miss Aylmer were there.
This ambiguous piece of news was enough to drive Jutes and Angles from a
mind on which they had a firmer clutch than could be said of Miss
Ransome’s. Mrs. and Miss Aylmer calling at half-past eleven in the
morning! What could the infringement of what had been already impressed
upon her as an iron law of Mrs. Tancred’s life portend? With a sinking
heart the vision of pig-tailed Meg making her abrupt exit from the Dower
House schoolroom upon an obviously vamped-up errand presented itself
once more to her inward sight. Had they come to complain of her for
corrupting that gaping goose’s mind?
The footman was gone, and she laughed out loud and clear. _Impossible!_
What had she said that was not matter of common knowledge to all the
world? A brighter possibility suggested itself. Perhaps--Mrs. Aylmer’s
manner to herself had been friendly, almost caressing--perhaps they had
taken a fancy to her, had pitied her sore bondage, had come to rescue
her, to propose some pleasant plan--a plan that would include Toby, or
leading up to others that would include him!
“I look more young and innocent with my hair a little dishevelled,” she
said, carefully pulling out a strand and letting it amble down the back
of her neck.
Having smeared a drop or two of ink on the middle finger of her right
hand to give the idea of past obedience to Camilla’s suggestion of
taking notes as she read, Miss Ransome, having wasted only two minutes
on her preparations, flew along the endless passages and down the
slippery polished stairs in prompt and cheerful obedience. Short as had
been the interval between her being sent for and her arrival, it had
seemed phenomenal in length to the three people making forced
conversation during it--conversation all the harder for being so out of
character with their usual easy intimacy.
Bonnybell, on her downward flight, had quickly decided that it would be
wisest to come in impulsively, and with no hint of a suspicion that the
motive for her production could be other than a pleasant one. She
carried her intention out admirably, and the graceful, young cordiality
of her greeting to the visitors, with its respectfully grateful stage
aside to Mrs. Tancred, “How good of you to let me know!” could not be
improved upon. But the first touch of the visitors’ limp hands, the
first glance at their overset countenances, told her that her earliest
and worst supposition was the true one, and that the object of their
coming was not to invite her to gambols with Toby, but to arraign her
for some crime against their stupid and unintelligible code. The
accusing forms of Waddy and Cressida rose before her, and she said to
herself with an inward groan, “What an ass I was to cast my pearls
before such swine!”
Meanwhile the “swine” might provoke pity in their worst enemy; and
Camilla allowed a moment or two to elapse, perhaps with a touch of
malice, perhaps only while gathering herself to strike, before she
relieved them from their cruelly false position.
“I do not think you need be so very glad to see Mrs. Aylmer,” she said
with a dryness in comparison of which the desert sand was juicy. “She
has come upon an errand that is not particularly pleasant for either
herself or you.”
The light died out of Miss Ransome’s face; she was careful that it
should do so gradually, to keep up the impression of complete
unsuspiciousness. With the little escaped tendril of hair straying over
her white _nuque_, and her immense and gentle eyes widely opened, she
looked like a child whom some ruffian had with unexplained brutality hit
and hurt. (“I am sure that I cannot be looking a day over fifteen.”) She
made no protest, deciding to be too stunned for that, but only turned
from one to another in innocent astonished alarm.
“Mrs. Aylmer has come to lay a very grave charge against you,” continued
Camilla, in an awful voice. “She will explain to you.”
There was nothing in the world that Mrs. Aylmer at the present moment
relished less than the task thus imposed upon her. In her angriest
moments she had never contemplated having to bring the accusation with
this horrible publicity against the poor child herself. “She looks such
a mere child! not a day more than fifteen!” A quiet remonstrance with
Camilla upon the subject had been all she had bargained for; and now to
be suddenly summoned to stick a knife into this pretty, fragile,
motherless creature who had run up to her with such a sweet sureness of
welcome, such pretty open pleasure,--this poor little waif whom she felt
so much more inclined to take into her warm motherly arms! No, it was
more than human nature could stand.
“It was Catherine who heard. Catherine knows better than I; she will
tell you,” was all that Catherine’s mother was able to produce.
Miss Aylmer, to do her justice, had no zest for the deputed duty, but as
she had in the first instance been less attracted than her parent by the
young sinner, so was it less impossible to her to be “faithful” in the
discharge of the unpleasant feat they had come expressly to perform.
“I could not help overhearing what you were saying to Meg.”
The great eyes opened wider in a helpless lack of comprehension, and
there was an air of painful puzzledom about the delicate brows knit in
the effort to recall any utterance that could have given offence.
“What--I said--to Meg?”
Happen what might, she would not make it easier for this squinting
prude, who had given her away. It was in these harsh terms that her own
distress of mind made her qualify the very nearly invisible cast in Miss
Aylmer’s left eye.
“You were telling her things that I thought--that I knew--my mother
would think she had better not hear.”
“I am very, _very_ sorry!”--in a low key of meek apology that was yet
completely at sea as to the ground of that apology. “But what sort of
things?”
“You told her that Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name
of Waddy.”
The colour died out of Bonnybell’s cheek, a feat which not even she
would have been able to perform, but which a very real dismay executed
for her. Good-bye, Toby! Good-bye, probably the very roof that now
covered her! Here lies would avail her nothing. Here innocence,
penitence, and brass must go hand-in-hand; and it was too likely that
not even that trio would be strong enough to drag her out of the swamp
into which she had fallen neck-deep.
“But he does!” she answered, her startled-fawn air and her apparent
fifteen years giving a piquancy, if any of her present hearers were in a
condition to appreciate it, to her scandalous words. “I thought that
everybody knew it. Why, people always ask them to their houses together;
quite _good_ people do.”
There was a horrid silence, broken at first only by Miss Aylmer’s long
breath of relief at the accomplishment of a hateful duty, and its
immediately following justification. To the eye of faith, Camilla might
have been almost seen lifting her bludgeon. It fell.
“Because a blatant indecency is nowadays the key-note of a certain
section of society,” she said with an eye-flash that literally scorched
its unlucky object, “there is no need for you to introduce its pollution
into our midst; if you have the misfortune to possess a mind full of
unsavoury knowledge, I must at least request you to keep it within the
bounds of that mind.”
The young girl stood shivering with bowed head under the blast of this
blizzard. She could not help shivering a little, but had still presence
of mind enough to shiver even more than she _could_ help, particularly
as a restless movement and a sort of sigh coming from the direction of
Mrs. Aylmer gave her a faint hope that to one at least of her accusers
the punishment that had overtaken her seemed excessive in its severity.
“I was brought up a good deal abroad,” Bonnybell whispered faintly. “I
am afraid that I do not yet quite understand English ways.”
“That is nonsense,” replied Camilla, very harshly, but yet not quite
with the awful voice-quality of her former Philippic--“sheer nonsense.
The standard for the behaviour of young girls in France is a far
stricter one than ours.”
“Then I can say nothing!” rejoined the poor child in a voice of despair,
folding her slight hands, and really not for the moment noticing how
advantageously the ink-stain on the middle finger of the right hand was
introduced to notice by this gesture. But Camilla saw the tell-tale
spot--tell-tale of obedience and honest effort, and it caused her an odd
qualm of pity.
Probably the accusers found the situation too poignantly unpleasant for
further endurance, which was also, since their work was done, needless.
A murmured proposition to depart from the mother was followed by a
murmured consent from the daughter. There was a little natural
difficulty about their farewells, and in the moment of hanging back
which resulted, and before this problem was solved by Camilla’s shaking
hands with them and saying in a hard, conscientious voice, “You were
perfectly right. I am glad that you had the courage to tell me. You
shall have no cause for further complaint,” Bonnybell realized that
before the clock had ticked thirty times she would be left alone with
her judge and executioner to hear what awful sentence of hopeless doom?
With an impulse which had less of calculation in it than in any of her
actions, words, or gestures, since her first entry, though even here
there was a little, she slipped across the intervening space to the one
person in whom she had divined some bowels of compassion, _i.e._ Mrs.
Aylmer, and spoke tremblingly, yet not without a forlorn dignity.
“I am very, _very_ sorry for having made such a bad return for your
goodness in giving me so kind a welcome; but indeed, indeed I did it in
ignorance!”
“I am quite sure you did,” replied the other precipitately, conquering
her desire to throw her arms round the criminal and give her several
hearty kisses only by a very fast retreat to the door; “and I would have
given anything that--that _this_ had not happened!”
Mrs. Aylmer must be a foolish woman, for she cried the whole way back to
the Dower House.
There remained the executioner and the gallows bird. Camilla had sat
down. Judges always sit, but, on the other hand, hangmen always stand. A
grotesque wonder flitted through Bonnybell’s mind as to how a person who
united the two functions could harmonize this discrepancy in practice?
There followed an absolute silence. Camilla did not even look at her.
She sat with the “starers” she had taken off lying in her lap, absently
rubbing their glasses with her pocket-handkerchief. Was her wrath too
deep for even further vituperation? Would it be satisfied only by a dumb
ejection from her house and protection?
As the moments passed this seemed to the girl waiting the pronouncement
of her doom the only possible solution, and after a time she lifted up,
if such a phrase can apply to anything so low and faint, her little
pathetic voice.
“Must I go to-day, or will you let me stay till to-morrow--to make
arrangements?”
Camilla lifted her eyes, out of which the fire and sword had gone, but
whose expression was inscrutable to the quaking would-be reader of their
meaning.
“Where would you go to?”
The cool common sense of the inquiry brought home to Miss Ransome more
strongly than ever before the sense of her own waifness. She threw out
her hands hopelessly in front of her.
“Where indeed?”
The action once more brought the inky ensign of her studiousness into
prominence, and this time it really served as a lifebuoy. Not that
Camilla said anything that spoke of relenting; but some indefinable
change in the atmosphere that surrounded the rigid figure in the
armchair, still rubbing its goggles, emboldened the poor sinner to put
up a quivering plea in her own defence.
“I have not had many advantages; it was not poor Claire’s fault”--with a
hasty recurrence of that feeling that it was against the rule of the
game to impute blame to the helpless dead. “She was too ill latterly to
understand about anything--but--I have not had much of a chance.”
For once--except in that pardonable gloss upon the habits of her late
mother--the girl was speaking God’s truth, and so strong and immediate
was the effect of her appeal that neither Mrs. Tancred nor herself
perceived that she had used the tabooed Christian name.
When the answer came, Bonnybell knew that neither to-day nor to-morrow
would find her _sur la pavé_, as she herself would have worded it.
“You shall have a chance now; it will lie with yourself to profit by
it.”
There was both dignity and kindness of a severe sort in voice and mien;
and to the reprieved criminal the relief was so immense that she fell
incontinently on the floor at her benefactress’s feet. Mrs. Tancred left
her there, and hurried out of the room, in evident distaste for the
prostration.
No sooner was she gone, than Miss Ransome picked herself up.
“That was another mistake,” she said. “Will there be no end to them? Oh,
how did I live through it? Oh, what a near squeak! Oh for a cigarette!”