Of the three denizens of Stillington its owner took by far the easiest
mind to bed with her. She had accepted the presence of Bonnybell, with
all its attendant ills, in the same spirit as she would have accepted
the loss of her fortune, an infidelity of Edward’s, or some dire blain
or boil upon her own body. Bonnybell had been sent here by the same
Unerring Wisdom that would have sent her any of the other possible
afflictions, and she had only to adjust her back to the burden.
Miss Ransome had no such consciousness to support her as, with an
inexpressible yearning for the soothing properties of tobacco, she sat
in the huge chintz chair by her bedroom fire, taking stock of her
errors, and their probable consequences.
“I shall bring him round in time, I suppose,” she reflected. “But what a
surprise! Who would have thought he would have taken up the cudgels for
his old lady’s juvenility so violently? Violent is not the word. I
should not think he could ever be violent; and yet those lackadaisical
eyes gave a fine flash when I suggested that she was not quite a slip
of a girl! I must pretend for the future that she looks sixteen,
or”--more shrewdly--“I had better not meddle with the subject again
at all to him.” A lugubrious stare into the fire, with inky hair
still unbuilt for the night, and hands clasped round slender
lace-and-satin-clad knees. (Bonnybell’s _peignoir_ would not own
Camilla’s, even as a poor relation.) “After all, I believe the old camel
will prove the easier of the two to get round. I did not half dislike
her when she stood glowering over me as I grovelled on the floor, and
told me I should have a chance--it will be an uncommonly disagreeable
chance”--with a backward glance thrown by memory at her hours of evaded
study in the dull schoolroom, ending in the grisly ordeal of
confrontation with her accusers--“but such as it is, I must hold on to
it until something better turns up.”
When will that be? Not, certainly, on the morrow of her exposure; that
brought only a dictation lesson, which threw Röntgen rays of unexampled
brutality upon her orthography; brought also a bluntly worded inquiry
from Camilla, in allusion to a slight tinting which her late paling
experiences had made seem admissible, as to whether she had “forgotten
to wash her face?” A still less delicately worded hope followed, in
answer to Miss Ransome’s explanation that the wind must have caught her
cheeks, a caustic hope that the “zephyr” in question might remain
prisoned in its cave during her stay in her present quarters. A further
piece of advice to commit it to the flames with the least possible
delay displayed the discourtesy of an entire disbelief in Miss Ransome’s
interpretation of her heightened roses.
The charge and its feeble parry took place in Edward’s presence; but he
did not attempt the smallest share in the engagement. Not a rustle of
the paper he was reading; not the least fidgeting on his chair, not an
eye-glance nor a lip-biting gave evidence of any inward protest against
the “baiting” that was being undergone by one whom he had yesterday
seemed inclined to shield and pity. Throughout the day--or rather
throughout that small part of it when he was at home and in her
presence--he treated her with a perfect but distant courtesy, and so
through the next and the next.
“Oh, how careful one ought to be!” she sighed to herself ruefully. “One
would have thought that the one perfectly safe thing to do was to laugh
at a wife to a husband, or at a husband to a wife, but in this dreadful
place there are no rules, only exceptions!”
When the third day showed no sign of a relaxation of her host’s gentle
austerity, Miss Ransome grew desperate. She was returning in drag-footed
boredom from a walk in the shrubberies to the extreme end of which she
had been lured by the distant sound of guns. It was unlikely that the
park should be shot in its master’s absence; but triggers were being
pulled somewhere within hearing, and one of them might be by Toby! It
was on neutral ground alone that she could now have a chance of pursuing
that chase which she was so loth to abandon. It was possible that if
she walked far enough into the park in the direction of the Dower House,
she might intercept him on his homeward way. Her intention to make the
attempt held out while she followed a long walk that wound with the slow
midland rivulet, that it was long ago cut to accompany on its sluggish
course through the pleasure-grounds, until a little bridge across the
stream, and a rustic gate on its further side giving access to a copse
that led into the Park, were reached. But, having attained this point,
her resolution failed. The light was thickening. Some one had told her
that this was the season when the stags--heard even from here belling
loudly--were dangerous to meet. Even the very off-chance of being
rescued by Toby from hoofs and antlers made it scarcely worth while to
incur the probability of being tossed by the one and trampled by the
other. She turned sadly away, wafting a sigh in the direction of the
renounced prize, and breathing the silent, pensive ejaculation, “Oh, you
great lout, if you only knew what was good for you!”
She retraced her steps through the humid gloom of the laurels, and by
the dimming, dull water. Near the house--but not very near--just where
two giant cedars stood on each side of the path, making twilight into
midnight beneath their shade, she met Edward.
“You thought I was lost!” cried her little voice in trepidating
pleasure. “You came to look for me! How _more_ than kind!”
“I am afraid that I did not even know you were out,” he answered,
stepping hastily out of the patch of darkness and throwing away the
end--or a good deal more than the end--of his cigarette. Both actions
seemed to her unnecessary and undesirable. She commented only upon the
last.
“Please don’t!” she pleaded eagerly. “You know that I was brought up
upon cigarettes--I mean, of course, upon their smell. You do not know
how I love it!”
The _Heimweh_ in her tone shocked and startled him. _Heimweh!_ Good
Heavens, for what a _Heim_!
“Do not walk quite so fast,” she said, entreatingly. “I want, if you
will let me, to get right with you. I know that I have been all wrong
since Sunday.”
He slackened his pace--as what else could he do, so besought?--but it
was with an unwillingness that she divined through his civil
acquiescence; and he did not answer quite immediately. To deny that she
had been “wrong with him” since Sunday would be to take a leaf out of
that Liar’s Book, of which he had already begun to be afraid that she
was a steady peruser; to assent would be certain to be followed by a
re-opening of the _casus belli_, and there was nothing in the world that
he wished less. To refuse to listen to the explanation, which it was but
too evident that she had invented and was bent on uttering, would be to
give it importance. He tried to carry the thing off lightly.
“My memory refuses to go back as far as Sunday. This is Thursday. Let us
start a new reckoning from to-day.”
But Bonnybell was not to be put off. She got a little nearer to him,
partly in real anxiety, partly because she reckoned upon her face as her
best ally in the work of propitiation, and in this scant light proximity
was indispensable for him to feel its value.
“You were quite under a misapprehension the other night, when you were
so displeased with me,” she began, with rapid deprecation. “Is it likely
that, friendless as I am, I should want to alienate my
best--a--a--well-wisher?” (She had hesitated over the last word, as if
her humility had replaced by it the more presuming “friend.”) “I never
meant to say or imply that Mrs. Tancred was really old.” (Oh, Miss
Ransome!) “Fifty! what is fifty nowadays? Many women of fifty do not
look a day over five-and-thirty. With a little touching up, Mrs. Tancred
would not look a day over thirty.”
He would give his ears to stop her. There seemed to him something at
once shocking and ludicrous, firstly in her brazen mendacity, and
secondly in the indelicacy of her determination to discuss his wife; but
she ran on so fast in the eagerness of self-exculpation that he could
not find a chink in which to put a protest.
“What I meant to say was that Mrs. Tancred _intended_ to look old, that
it was a _parti-pris_ in her case. I thought it must be so by the way
she scratches her hair off her forehead.”
But here, chink or no chink, he broke in. “Stop!” he said,
authoritatively, “I must beg of you to change the subject.”
Through the damp mistiness she looked up at him, snubbed and frightened,
her pomegranate-flower lips apart, and with the stream of explanatory
eloquence that had been issuing from them frozen at its source.
“I see that I am making bad worse,” she said presently, her glibness
fled, and in a very crestfallen little pipe.
He could not command himself to speak again yet; still sorely angry and
chafed, yet with a half-relenting feeling that he had been too harsh to
this wicked little waif that had been tossed on his shore.
“I am a very great trial to you both,” presently came sighingly in his
direction--sighingly, and he half-suspected showerily too; “but it is
far worse for Mrs. Tancred than for you.”
“Worse for Mrs. Tancred than for me!” repeated he, echoing her words in
a tone of alarm.
Was she going to be guilty of some new monstrosity against good taste?
Was she going to force him to a fresh rebuke? This latter was perhaps
the most urgent form that his fear took. But her next words reassured
him.
“Yes, because she has to see so much more of me than you have. _You_ are
away all day, and need never cast a thought towards me between sunrise
and sunset, but I am always before her eyes, shocking her every time
that I open my mouth by my gross ignorance, or by saying something
impossible without knowing it; and now that she has undertaken my
education----”
She paused dramatically. A wholesome and welcome inclination to laugh
came over him, but he checked it; he must not allow himself to decline
into triviality, or she might at once resume her terrible
confidentialness.
“It is not that I am not _most_ anxious to learn. Oh, do not
misunderstand me on that point! I have had enough of misunderstandings
the last three dreadful days.”
Through the dusk he could see that her little black orphaned hands were
tightly clasping each other, but he did not know that their anxious grip
was a matter of calculation, nor that the penitent before him was saying
to herself, “I am really very touching. The odd thing is that I am
rather touched myself too.”
“If I thought I should ever do her any credit,” she continued, inserting
a slight quaver into her tone; “but I have no natural aptitude for
learning, and I am beginning so late. I cannot bear to think of what
uphill work it will be for her.”
“That is an aspect of the question that will never present itself to
her,” replied he, with what might be a shade of dryness in his voice;
and the anxious Bonnybell divined that she was not even yet quite on the
right tack.
(“I am overdoing it; I must not be too angelic. He is beginning to
suspect that I embroider a little.”)
“Perhaps it was one word for Mrs. Tancred and two for myself”--allowing
a tinge of self-rallying playfulness to creep into her words. “Perhaps I
am only a born dunce, and want an excuse for remaining one.”
The unvarnished truth of her last sentence did her far more service with
her hearer, as she in a moment felt, than the high varnish of her
preceding ones.
“There are worse things in life than a dunce,” he answered, in a tone of
unmistakable indulgence, and for which he contemned himself.
“Then we are friends again,” rejoined she, softly sliding out, with
carefully studied impulsiveness, four little humble fingers and a
hesitating thumb to meet his clasp.
“Yes,” he answered, accepting her hand with a frank comradeship, in
which even her expert palm could detect no attempt at a squeeze, “by all
means let us be friends; only”--with a return to his habitually
tentative, non-assertive manner--“would not it be a good plan for us to
remember that even in the most intimate friendships there are
reticences?”
Miss Ransome’s education proceeded, despite all her struggles, with
inexorable regularity. “Apace” is hardly the word to apply to its
progress, since her own resolution to learn as little as possible
rescued her from all danger of its course being a rapid one. It was
impossible to peruse a contraband novel from across the Channel, or
enjoy a ribald little Parisian journal, smuggled to her by a foreign
admirer, during the whole time of her incarceration in the schoolroom,
as detection must inevitably have followed upon an entire neglect of the
imposed tasks. But her intelligence was quick, and she was able to
assimilate enough surface knowledge of the subjects in which she would
have to undergo an examination by her tormentor without absolute
disgrace, and yet have a good margin of time to bestow upon “L’Enigme du
Péché” and _Le Petit Journal_.
A discovery that her reading of her native tongue was on a par with, if
not upon an even lower plane of accomplishment than her spelling, led to
the imposition of a _corvée_ more hated by its victim, as less able to
be shirked or scamped than any of its fellows. In an evil hour, it
occurred to Camilla that to make her pupil read aloud the daily
newspapers to herself would be the best method by which at once to
discover and correct the extent of her ignorance. Through foreign
intelligences, leaders, money-markets the unhappy girl ploughed with
stumbles and jibs. Once a gleam of possible relief came to her.
“Would you care for me to read you the Racing intelligence?”
“You might as well read me a page of Coptic.”
“I could explain it a little to you, if you cared to hear”--with a
delicate bashfulness at this proposal to reverse their respective
relations and turn instructor.
Camilla brushed away the proposal as with a new-twigged besom.
“I know nothing in the world that I wish less! Read the review of the
new ‘Life of Schopenhauer.’”
But if Miss Ransome was an unsuccessful and unwilling pupil, she was, as
Jock soon learnt to his cost, a relentless and successful teacher. He
disliked being educated almost as much as she did herself--it would be
impossible to do so more--yet that perseverance on her part which, if
exerted in another direction, would have made her a profound and
eloquent scholar, and his own vanity, of which he had as large a share
as most dogs--and that is saying a good deal--combined to enable him to
reach a very high standard of unnatural accomplishments.
“If I ever get round her, it will be _viâ_ Jock!” Bonnybell said to
herself astutely, seeing the unwilling laughter that wrinkled the mouth
of Jock’s mistress, and hearing the latent enjoyment that pierced
through the superficial snub of her words.
“What a fool you are making of the dog!”
“He may not enjoy being educated, but, like me, he knows that it is good
for him,” replied Bonnybell, with pretty insincerity, throwing a glance,
as she delivered herself of her fib, at Edward, to see how he took
it--whether with approbation of her sweet docility, or with that grain
of distrust which she had uneasily surmised several times lately in his
reception of her statements both as to fact and sentiment?
She could read no expression of either approval or disapproval in his
eyes; but he broke out into one of his rare laughs, as she capered off
again down the long room, whirling Jock along in an ambling waltz,
against which his dragging hind legs made a bored protest. There was
calculation and consciousness in the childish frisking gaiety of Jock’s
partner; but yet there was real young enjoyment too. One might be a
little Mayfair mudlark, obliged to earn one’s bread by currying favour
with one’s patrons in any way that seemed most likely to succeed; but
one was only eighteen, and it took but a very little to make one’s heart
feel uncommonly light.
Having landed Jock in front of his mistress, and by judicious pressure
upon his stomach forced him to execute an angry bow to that lady as a
finale to his performances, Miss Ransome, forsaken by her good genius,
lapsed into ruinous reminiscence.
“When we were at Deauville there was a poodle at the hotel who could
walk as well on his forelegs, with his hind ones in the air, as on all
four. My mother was so pleased with him that she wanted to buy him; but
the lady to whom he belonged--she was not quite a lady; she was with the
Prince de Compiègne--would not hear of parting with him. Claire could
never bear not getting what she wished; so we had a scene about it one
night on the stairs.”
This interesting trait was followed by absolute silence.
* * * * *
“There is nothing for it but patience, I suppose!” said Mrs. Tancred, a
little later, when Bonnybell, not enjoying the atmosphere which she had
created, expressed herself tired and went to bed; and Edward answered,
with brief acquiescence--
“I suppose not.”