“Well, what have you to say for your _protégée_ now?”
“Who is my _protégée_? Have I got one?”
There was weariness in the voice that answered; but neither that quality
nor the patience that accompanied and emphasized it had any influence in
persuading the putter of the question to desist or delay the
communication which it prefaced.
Edward had come home dispirited and out of tune. It had been a bad day
on the Stock Exchange, even the gilt-edged securities tumbling down; a
rumour of the suicide of a member had been confirmed, and the sense of
how little he himself risked, in comparison with the life-and-death
struggle going on around him, which to many minds would have been a
source of consolation, deepened Mr. Tancred’s gloom. He would have been
glad to have been told something pleasant, however trivial, on his
return.
But Camilla was not one of those wives who tactfully pick and choose the
moments for imparting bad news. It would never have occurred to her that
ill tidings told at night might probably rob the recipient of sleep, and
that it would therefore be better to defer them till the morning. Such
a reticence would have seemed to her to argue a want of moral courage on
the part of both narrator and hearer. If anything untoward occurred to
herself she wished to be told it at once, no matter whether she was sick
or well, waking or sleeping; and she did as she would be done by.
“Miss Bonnybell has surpassed herself this time.”
“What has she done?” cried he, forgetting his pretence of not knowing to
whom his wife was alluding, with a great heightening of his sense of
out-of-tuneness, made up of fear of what he was going to hear and of
exasperation with himself for minding so much what he ought to mind so
little.
“Marian Aylmer and Catherine have been here to-day,” said Camilla, not
falling into the procrastinating weakness which had been shown by the
ladies alluded to, but going straight to the point.
“I thought Mrs. Alymer had an engagement in London?”
“So she had in the afternoon; but they came in the morning.” She paused,
as if to let him absorb this fact, pregnant with significance of
something abnormal and monstrous. “They came to make a formal complaint
against”--“your _protégée_” was on the very edge of her lips, but
perhaps some sudden impression of how fagged he looked prompted her at
the very last moment to alter it to--“our guest.”
“What for?”
In his heart he knew that he was not very much surprised, recollecting
the relieved tone of Bonnybell’s “That accounts for it!” in answer to
his remark upon Meg Aylmer’s backwardness, on their homeward walk. He
felt at the time with misgiving that it would be wiser not to ask what
“it” was. Well, he was going to learn now.
“For corrupting Meg’s mind.”
“I did not know that Meg had a mind to corrupt,” he answered unwisely,
and, with an instant awareness of his slip, added, “Miss Ransome must
have been very quick about it, for she could not have been more than
half an hour in the schoolroom, and the great and good Barnacre was
there on guard all the time.”
“I only repeat the tale that was told me,” replied Camilla, with frosty
impartiality. “She was overheard inoculating Meg with one of the worst
of the current scandals of the day, dilating--no”--correcting herself
with characteristic honesty--“there perhaps I am inexact; she probably
had not time to dilate, but telling her how Lady Cressida Beaulieu was
‘run’ by a man of the name of ‘Waddy.’”
An odious inclination to vexed laughter assailed Edward: firstly at the
ugly piquancy of the imputed criminal utterance as proceeding from such
almost infantile lips, and secondly at the disproportion of such a pomp
of disapproval as was implied by the “indignation meeting” alluded to.
But the laughter impulse was a mere muscular contortion, and the
annoyance killed it dead before he found words to comment on the
charge. The accusation was grotesque--with the criminal’s antecedents,
what else could they have expected?--but the peep given by it into her
mind and its furniture hurt him all the same. The whole business, with
its unnecessary parade and fuss, was a storm in a tea-cup, and yet it
might have far-reaching consequences for the poor little culprit, and it
was he that would have brought them on her. He knew that he ought to
express abhorrence at the offence committed, and that the article which
issued from the warehouse of his jaded mind was not the one expected.
“It is I that am to blame,” he said, a sharp self-reproach piercing
through the natural languor of his tones. “I ought not to have
introduced her to them; she had no wish for it.”
“She need not fear a repetition of the experience,” returned Camilla,
folding her arms in that wrapper which she had assumed, having snatched
ten minutes from the bare half-hour which she dedicated to dressing for
dinner, in order to make an irruption with her Evangel into her
husband’s quarters.
To Edward’s eye and mind that snuff-coloured _peignoir_ had something in
common with the judge’s black cap. His wife seemed always to assume it
when she pronounced sentence of death. Was she going to pronounce one
now? If there was any chance of averting it, that chance would not lie
in the direction of a too eager partisanship on his own part.
“You must remember,” he said with a cool gentleness of reminder, “that
when you undertook this task you braced yourself to the making of
discoveries that would more surprise than please you.”
“That is true,” she answered after a moment’s reflection. “If you had
asked me, I should have told you that I was prepared for anything--bad
habits, objectionable phrases, idleness, ignorance--her ignorance is
_stupendous_.”
“I am sure it is.”
“I put her through a few elementary questions upon English history this
morning. There were not many facts that she was sure of, but she was
quite sure that King Richard II. had married Philippa of Hainault. I
tried to explain to her that in the fourteenth century men did not marry
their grandmothers, although it has become a very common practice
to-day.”
The shaft went home, as it was intended. What had he done to deserve it?
Did she suspect him of an intention, by servile acquiescence in her
subsidiary charges, to lead her away from the main point at issue?
“But that is not the question now. What we are primarily concerned
with--what was the object of Mrs. Aylmer’s visit--is to prevent a person
for whom we have made ourselves answerable from spreading the infection
of her own corruption to healthier households.”
The husband and wife were standing opposite to each other, but in their
respective grace and ungrace, still in morning dress; a trivial
irritation with her for making him late for dinner forming the warp of
that annoyance of which her communication was the woof.
“Don’t you think that the whole thing is grossly exaggerated?” he asked
with an accent where a lifelong habit of courtesy proved its value by
helping him to an apparently quite good-tempered air of deference--“the
pompous embassy, the inconsiderate breaking of your rules.
No!”--recapitulation of his friend’s errors against good taste leavening
the “sweet reasonableness” of his words with a perceptible indignation.
“The whole way of setting about it was wrong, and not what I should have
expected of an old friend like Mrs. Aylmer.”
“She was perfectly right,” rejoined Camilla, standing bolt upright under
an electric burner, which made her look taller and scraggier than usual.
“If a woman is granted the inestimable blessing of children, her first
duty is to them, and besides----”
She paused. Should she tell him, as it was on the edge of her lips to
do, what was the strict truth, that both the original idea of the
indictment against Bonnybell and the vigour to carry it out had belonged
to Catherine Aylmer and not to her mother? Should she or should she not?
The neighbourhood was right. Catherine Aylmer would have made Edward a
fit and congenial wife in the event of her own death, and Camilla was
aware that her life was not a good one. The girl might still fill that
office. Why, then, should the present tenant say anything calculated to
prejudice Edward against her?
“Besides what?”
Mrs. Tancred had no powers of inventing, nor wish to invent, an altered
utterance.
“I have thought better of what I was going to add,” she answered.
Silence followed. He had forgotten that she was making him late for
dinner. All desire to check the flow of her communication had ceased,
replaced by an awful curiosity for details.
“I suppose that they did not meet?”
“You are mistaken there; it was only fair to her that she should be
confronted with them.”
The hearer hoped that the slight shudder he could not repress at the
idea of this display of equity escaped detection.
“What happened?”
“Oh, she came bounding in, so delighted to see them. I explained to her
at once that she had no great cause for elation at this visit. They must
have felt rather like fools under her demonstration; they certainly
looked it.” She stopped with a fierceish smile, as if the memory of her
friend’s discomfiture were not at all disagreeable to her.
The picture rose in sharpest realism before Edward’s vision. The lovely
little gay gladness coming frisking in, and its reception!
“And--and how did Miss Ransome take it?”
“She made no attempt to deny the charge.” After a moment, “Her excuse,
if it can be called one, was that she had supposed every one to be
acquainted with the ugly story. Perhaps every one is!” Another slight
pause. “To do her justice, I do not think that she had any glimmering
of a suspicion that there was any difference between ‘decent’ and
‘indecent’ in conduct or conversation.”
He bit his lip; protestation or extenuation would be fatal, and he
attempted neither.
“And then?”
“Then--why, then they went. I do not think I ever saw people in quite
such a hurry to be off.”
Again her tom-cat smile reappeared, and she went off wearing it, when
she at length left him to his belated toilet.
* * * * *
“You have heard, I suppose?”
“Heard what?”
It was disingenuous of Edward to pretend ignorance of the subject of
Bonnybell’s question, but though guiltily conscious of an acute
curiosity as to the criminal’s version of the story, a grave doubt as to
whether it would not be the wiser course to let such sleeping dogs lie,
drove him into as much prevarication as was implied by his “Heard what?”
“If you have not heard, I think it would be a relief to me to tell you,
if you would allow me.”
“Oh, but I _have_ heard!” he answered rather precipitately,
uncomfortably aware that he was giving himself away by admitting
knowledge of what he had a moment ago feigned ignorance of.
The scene was the morning-room after dinner on the same day. From that
dinner Camilla had been summoned away by a messenger of ill from the
village. She had left that small and rigidly plain portion of her own
excellent food which she ever allowed herself without hesitation or
regret, and was still absent, now that the tea-table was being placed in
its usual position. Edward had not long rejoined his guest, who was
sitting rather out of sight behind a screen, from beyond which her voice
came low and plaintive. The few glances at her that he had allowed
himself during dinner had told him--or he thought so--that her eyelids
were a little reddened, though not to the extent of disfigurement. “I am
one of the few people who can cry becomingly,” was her own dispassionate
dictum, “and it will be disarming to look as if I had wept, and I am
sure”--the waif feeling returning in some strength--“it will come easily
enough; no one can ever have had better reason to do it.”
“I was silly enough to hope I had made a good impression.”
“I, too, quite thought so,” he answered mournfully, touched by the
gentle humility of her confession of mistake.
“I dare say I should have continued in my fool’s paradise if Miss Aylmer
had not persuaded her mother to come and complain of me.”
Bonnybell had not the generosity of Camilla, and the immediate effect of
her words upon Miss Aylmer’s ally and supposed admirer filled her with a
sincere and tranquil joy.
“Miss Aylmer!” he echoed with an unmistakable start. “Catherine Aylmer!
Oh, you surely must be mistaken.”
For answer, he saw a lovely little dusky head shaking itself sadly from
its seclusion.
“She was perfectly right--oh, do not think I am blaming her!--quite,
_quite_ right, if she thought I was doing her sister harm; but oh, it is
all such a different _milieu_ from what I have been used to! If you
knew, if you could only guess, how utterly at sea I feel among you all.”
There was something in the forlorn and well-justified pathos in her tone
that might have melted a harder heart, and affected a nature less
sensitive to others’ sufferings than Edward’s. He rose out of the
armchair into which he had tiredly let himself down on his first
entrance, as if seeking relief from his emotion in a change of posture.
(“Good Heavens!” thought she, “I have overdone it. I have been too
affecting. I thought I was safe with him. One is never safe.”) But he
only went and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the garlands and
grouped figures of the Adams chimney-piece, and took a coat-tail
pensively under each arm.
“I am afraid that it was inevitable at first,” he said at length with a
faltering reassurance in his voice. “The plunge was too sudden; but
things will right themselves in time, don’t you think?”
His manner was always tentative, and he had never in his life felt less
sure of the truth of any proposition than of the one he was now
advancing.
“Do you really think so?” she asked, once more relieved and astonished
that her new fears of his harbouring purposes of enterprise were as
baseless as her former ones. She added hesitatingly. “You could help me
a good deal if you would.”
“I!”
“If--when you saw that I was going to make one of my blunders, you would
make some sign to me to stop.”
His head was bent a little. It gave her the opportunity to notice how
thickly and with what a pretty tendency to curl at the ends his hair
clothed its crown. Her proposition had not the effect of lifting it.
“I do not quite see how that can be managed,” he answered in a key whose
reluctance to disappoint her and an indubitable disapproval of her
project strove for mastery.
“We could agree beforehand upon a little code of signals,” she went on,
pushing aside the screen that had hitherto partly hidden her in the
eagerness of persuasion. “If you passed your hand across your forehead,
it would mean ‘Stop at once.’ If you pulled out your shirtcuff, it would
mean ‘Make your sentence end in some different way from what you are
going to.’”
Still his eyes did not lift themselves, nor did he give any sign of
acquiescence. An uncomfortable sense of the horrible glibness--speaking
of long use of such methods--with which she developed her little
underhand plan was very present to him.
“I am afraid I do not quite like the idea.”
“Don’t you?” she answered humbly and sadly. “Then I am sure it is not a
good one, but if you do not consent to help me in some way--to give me
some sort of rule to guide me--I shall always be getting into fresh
disgrace with Mrs. Tancred; and--old people are so very easily shocked.”
He lifted the head whose well-furnished top she had been admiring now,
and looked at her with a disapproval which, if gentle, was very
unmistakable.
“I think, if you do not mind, that I had rather you did not speak of my
wife quite like that.”
Her heart sank, and the flustered desire to repair her error led her
into a far graver one.
“Now I have made an enemy of you too,” she said, “and Heaven knows that
is the last thing I wish to do; but--but she looked so much more like
your mother.”
Miss Ransome had touched the _raw_ of her host’s whole life.