A week had elapsed, and a morning came on which Edward set off for
London accompanied by his wife, instead of, as usual, alone! The result
was obvious: freedom--temporary, indeed! but still freedom for Miss
Ransome. But of what use was that noblest of God’s gifts to one who had
no means of employing it?
“Don’t get into mischief if you can help it,” was Camilla’s parting
benediction; and the smiling humility of Bonnybell’s “I will try not,”
took an ambiguous meaning as she turned it over afterwards in the
leisure and liberty of her own mind. “Try not to get into mischief?” or
“Try not to help getting into mischief? How can I help helping? What
mischief could I get into if I tried?”
This problem set her pondering. If she were to borrow Camilla’s
cutting-out scissors from her work-basket, she might cut snips in the
canvases of those dismal _primitifs_. If she were to employ the aid of a
poker, she might break the nose of the young Augustus coldly glimmering
at her from his pedestal in the centre of the little circular vestibule
at the stairs’ foot. But in neither of these, nor in any analogous
crimes, would there be much point nor any enjoyment.
In her total destitution of all opportunities for evil, the poor young
creature snatched eagerly at the one sin--though it was only a paltry
one of omission--open to her; the entire neglect of the tasks assigned
her by her departed tyrant. It relieved her to kick the instruments of
her intended elevation and enlightenment into a corner, and when
“L’Enigme du Péché”--a work whose very title would make Camilla’s
straight hair break into horrified curls--was produced from its
hiding-place; when the little shoes lately employed in propelling
Greene, Bryce, etc., were hoisted to the top of the nursery fender,
which still stood in long-unneeded precaution before the generous grate,
Bonnybell’s conscience grew clear. Her power of doing wrong in her
present surroundings was infinitesimal, but she had done what she could.
To do what one could!--this was a standard beyond which Mrs. Tancred
herself did not attempt to rise. At the ingenious perversity of this
reflection, Bonnybell laughed delightedly.
She had been in the enjoyment of her illicit pleasures for an hour and a
half, and had begun to suspect that the solution of the “Enigma” would
form a _plat_ too highly spiced for even her seasoned palate, when the
door opened. She whisked her feet down from their dizzy height and sat
up, to find a salver, a note, and a footman at her elbow.
“Any answer?” she asked, taking the note and looking at its
superscription curiously. The handwriting was at once familiar and
unfamiliar; known, but not lately known.
“The chauffeur wished to know how soon you would like the motor to come
round?”
“The chauffeur? The motor?” repeated she, staring; then, bethinking
herself that the best way to solve this new enigma would be the same as
that which she had been employing on the other, she tore open the
envelope and read--
“MY DARLING LITTLE BONNYBELL,--
(The unaccountable warmth of this opening took her eye to the
signature, “Flora.”
“Of course! How stupid not to have remembered Flora Tennington’s
scrawls and flourishes!”)
“I have just heard from Harrington” (so Harrington is still with
Flora, is he?) “that he had seen your ugly old gaoler and her
_souffre douleur_ at the station and off to London, so I have sent
the motor to fetch you to spend the day. If it comes back without
you I shall _go on sending it_ until it brings you, dead or alive.
I have _millions_ of things to say and ask.
“Your loving
“FLORA.
“P.S.--You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”
Miss Ransome’s decision must be immediate. The expectant footman was
still at her elbow awaiting orders. She threw her cap over the mill.
“I shall be ready in ten minutes.”
The decision--given the deep disgrace from which she had so lately
emerged--sounded like madness; but a streak of reason ran through it.
Her host and hostess had announced their intention of returning by a
later train than the one that usually brought Edward; the servants
would, in all probability, not tell upon her. Camilla’s own lifelong
maid, a young lady of fifty-five, had, shortly before Bonnybell arrived,
yielded to the urgencies of a bridegroom, become too pressing to be
longer resisted, to crown by marriage an engagement of thirty years. Her
present attendant was a young person whom she had employed because
nobody else would, and in order to make her a character. But what
decided Miss Ransome to take the plunge was the postscript, “You will
meet two friends, a new and an old one.”
“An old friend!” This by itself would act as a deterrent. It must be a
man, since Claire and she never had any women friends after Flora
dropped them, and of the men who formed her circle, there was not one
concerning whom her most ardent wish was never to hear of or meet him
again. But “a new friend!” Who could it be but Toby?
It was, perhaps, a stretch of language to give that name to a person,
the sole evidence of whose meriting it was that he looked black when she
entered the room, remained churlishly silent during the few minutes of
their joint occupancy of it, and left it with a bang of discourteous
haste to escape her. But, at all events, it was well worth trying, and
in twenty minutes from her first reception of the proposition she was
flying along between the tree-stems of the park, on her way to accept
it.
The motor was, to her relief, a brougham. To arrive touzled and
stained--and she had not a proper motoring costume with her--would be to
prejudice her chance of success at the outset. She must be pretty before
all things. Whether her prettiness was to be further ornamented by a
sweet innocence or a daring raciness of conversation must depend upon
what a further acquaintance with Toby’s tastes and methods might reveal.
If he were an _habitué_ of Flora’s, the latter of the two alternatives
was the one more likely to please. But her deep-seated and universal
distrust of man--falsified though it had been in the case of Edward by a
fortnight’s acquaintance--made her finally resolve to temper her
raciness, if she was racy, with caution.
Arrived, after a quarter of an hour’s whirl, Bonnybell found Flora in a
hot room, crammed with flowers and _bric-à-brac_, whose very atmosphere
brought back, with a rush of startled repulsion, to the girl’s memory
the atmosphere that she had breathed through her own childhood and early
youth. During the last period of her mother’s life it had been further
improved by the continual perfume of champagne and drugs; but the
present one, though free from these ingredients, was like enough to make
her realize how far she had travelled from what it represented, and to
wish that she had not come, particularly as no vestige of a redeeming
Toby showed on the naked horizon.
Flora was too much occupied at the moment of her guest’s arrival to
spare time for any greeting. She was sitting on the floor, as was
Harrington, the broken-down gentleman who was coeval with Flora in
Bonnybell’s acquaintance with that lady; the broken-down gentleman who,
beginning by being her lover, had ended by being her major-domo.
Upon Flora’s lap sat the little old dachshund Lisa, down whose throat
Harrington was trying to drive a pill. By holding her mouth tight shut,
and stroking her throat, the object was supposed to have been, after
many previous failures, attained. The fallacy of the deduction was
proved an hour later by the pill being found intact on the front stairs,
showing that the wily Lisa had, after all, bested her physicians; but
for the present, lulled in a false security, Lisa’s mistress was able to
remember her visitor’s presence.
“Wasn’t it fortunate that Harrington should have happened to be at the
station just in time to see your old monster get into the train? I said
to myself, ‘Now is my time.’ I had been puzzling my head as to how I was
going to get at you. I could not come after you. You know I am tolerably
_facile à vivre_, but I _cannot_ stand that old woman.”
Truth is truth, even if inverted, and Bonnybell did not think it
necessary to point out that in this case it was standing on its head;
since, in point of fact, it was “that old woman” who had never been
able to “stand” Lady Tennington.
“I had scarcely a word with you at the Aylmers’,” continued Flora,
raising her rather bulky form from the floor by the aid of Harrington,
whom she immediately afterwards sent out of the room. “You were packed
off to Meg and that odious prig of a governess for fear that I should
corrupt your mind, I suppose.”
She laughed, both with cosmetic-ed lips and with eyes that, though
brazenly bistered, were jolly and good-natured, at the humour of such a
thing being possible; and Bonnybell laughed too, though with a surprised
sense of annoyance at the unlimited knowledge of evil attributed to her.
“I corrupted theirs instead,” she replied, with a humorous gloom.
“The governess’s and Meg’s?” with an accent of delighted interest. “Oh,
how it must have improved them!”
As she spoke, she held out an expensive and floridly coronetted
cigarette-case to the girl, who pounced upon it as the camel upon a
desert pool.
“Oh, how delicious! how I have longed and thirsted for one! Savory?”
“Yes, I always stick to them.”
There was a short silence of rapturous enjoyment on Bonnybell’s part.
Flora had pushed her into a luxurious chair, and the smoke was going up
to heaven from her pink nostrils. She was beginning to be glad of her
iniquity, even though the Toby for whom it was committed had proved to
be but a mirage.
“How did you corrupt their minds?” The question shared Lady Tennington’s
mouth with a cigarette; but, though a little inarticulate from this
cause, the relish in it was unmistakable.
“I got into a dreadful scrape. They came and complained of me next day.”
The interest aroused by this statement vanquished material enjoyment,
and Lady Tennington took the “Savory” from between her rosy lips, and
sat up.
“What did you say?”
“Will you believe it?” replied Bonnybell, sitting up too, her eyes
sparkling intensely in the relief and enjoyment of having at length
found a confidant certain to sympathize in the grievous wrong done her.
“All that I said was--I was looking at a silly little newspaper with
Meg, and I happened to mention--we had come to a picture of Cressida
Beaulieu and her Schipperkes--that Waddy ran her. Could you imagine that
there was any one in the world so ignorant as not to know that Waddy ran
Cressida?”
“It is inconceivable,” replied Flora, in an almost awed tone; and there
was a moment or two of wondering and compassionate silence on the part
of both.
“They came and laid a formal complaint against me next day, and I was
sent for down from my studies--I was at my studies, if you please”--with
a delightful little grimace.
“Your studies!” laughing significantly. “I should have thought that you
knew as much as most people.”
At this ambiguous compliment something in Bonnybell once again felt
jarred.
“Oh, _what_ a time I had of it!” she exclaimed, gliding with only
half-unconscious distaste from the subject of her own discreditable
omniscience. “What a scolding!”
“From that hateful old prude?”
“Yes, from Camilla. But she is not quite all hateful. I thought she was
at first, but she isn’t. After having ground me to powder--while those
two women looked on--oh, I should like to be even with them!--she told
me she would give me another chance! It doesn’t sound any great catch,”
beginning to laugh heartily; “but I can assure you that I was very much
relieved, as I felt certain that I was going to be turned out then and
there, neck and crop.”
“I wish you had. I should have got you for good then.”
The phrase, in one sense, was scarcely a happy one, since it could not,
by any stretch of language, be considered a good thing for any young
woman to be taken under the soiled and tarnished wing of Lady
Tennington.
Bonnybell’s heart did not in the least echo the aspiration, but her lips
brought out their “It would have been too delightful for words!” with
their accustomed lying glibness.
She looked with pretty, grateful affection at her hostess as she spoke,
asking herself alternately whether it was that she had forgotten Flora,
or that the latter had lost her eye and donned a greenlier gold wig than
of yore, imparted a more sealing-waxy red to her mouth, and laid the
powder on her nose, thick as snow on the summit of the Jung Frau,
without knowing it.
“Tell me some more,” said the unconscious object of these silent
queries, in the delighted voice of a child asking for the repetition of
a favourite fairy tale. “Ah, here is Charlie Landon? I told you you
would meet an old friend. You must begin all over again for him.”