All was safe. There had been no change of plan on the part of Miss
Ransome’s protectors, as, drawing a long breath, she realized on
reaching home, and joyfully found the house as destitute of its masters
as she had left it. To begin at once the attack upon the servants’
clemency was her next care. Bonnybell had always been charming in her
manner towards all dependants; but the tone in which she now asked the
butler after a sick wife whom Camilla had been doctoring, and told the
housemaid, whom she found lighting her bedroom fire, how concerned she
was to hear her still coughing, would have wiled “the savageness out of
a bear.”
Her neglected studies were her next thought, but an unconquerable
distaste towards resuming them made her persuade herself that it would
be unsafe to run the risk of being found studying at so unusual an hour,
and would lead to the inference that she had been playing the truant
earlier. It would be better to take the least evadable books up to bed
with her, and make what scrambling preparation she could before going
to sleep. While collecting her authors, the young student became aware
of “L’Enigme du Péché” lying in tell-tale openness on the floor, where
it had evidently lain since it fell off her lap in the hurry of her
departure. Another sigh of relief, almost as deep as the first,
signalized this timely discovery.
* * * * *
Camilla was in unusually good spirits at dinner that night. Her day,
though she was strictly silent upon that part, had been tiring, boring,
self-sacrificing. It had been devoted wholly to the unhealthy, the
unprosperous, and the ungrateful. But apparently it had had a tonic
effect, and she ate her slender allowance of food with more apparent
enjoyment, and talked more and more cheerfully, than usual. Perhaps it
was because she talked more that Edward seemed to talk less than his
never garrulous custom.
Bonnybell could wish that Mrs. Tancred’s inclination to converse would
have led her in another direction than inquiries as to the mode in which
she, Bonnybell, had disposed of her solitary day, though those inquiries
were made almost genially, and in the spirit of neither a
school-mistress nor a spy. It was not that the girl was conscious of any
new or even nascent disinclination for fibbing; but when the whole field
of invention lay open before her, it was so difficult to know which lie
to choose. Lie she must, from beginning to end of the catechism that
ensued, but she had no wish to be excessive, nor to daub where one coat
of paint would serve her purpose. It was a pity that the servants had to
hear her, as, of course, they must be laughing in their sleeves; but the
tips to be administered doubled themselves in her intention, and she
tried to forget the silent presences that might become so ruinously
vocal.
“Did you make up your mind to tear yourself from the fireside at all
to-day?”
“Oh yes; I was out a good deal.”
So far truth carried her, but nervousness made her add an unnecessary
gloss, which was the falsest of falsehoods--in implication, at least--
“I knew that you would wish me to take some exercise.”
“H’m! how far did you go? I dare say not farther than the houses. I know
that the stove house is the kind of atmosphere you really like.”
Camilla was in wonderfully good tune; there was even an attempt at
genial raillery in her tone.
“Oh, but I did. I went _much_ further.”
Truth again reappeared. It was as well to give that seldom-invoked
goddess a look-in now and then.
“To the summer-house?”
“Further still.”
“You did not, I am sure, risk those ridiculous little shoes of yours in
the wet grass of the park?”
“Oh yes, I did; they are stronger than they look. But I was sorry
afterwards that I had. Jock got among the rabbit-holes, and though I
whistled and called for ten minutes, I am sure, I could not persuade him
to come out.”
There was a noise as of a small object falling on the floor. Edward, who
was not generally clumsy, had whisked a fork, with his coat-cuff
apparently, on to the carpet. A footman picked it up, and the
conversation proceeded. But Miss Ransome had caught a glimpse of her
host’s face, and a cold sweat broke out inside her. Was it possible that
Edward knew of her escapade? There was nothing for it but to hope for
the best, and to go on boldly, since she was already too far immersed in
the sea of fancy to withdraw. And besides, what she had been relating of
Jock’s perversity was strictly true, only that it was post-dated by
twenty-four hours, having happened yesterday.
With unconscious inhumanity, Camilla went on--
“Jock must have had two walks to-day, then, for Gillett told me she had
taken him out.”
Bonnybell’s heart quailed. Suppose that Camilla next inquired at what
hour her promenade with Jock had taken place, and that she herself in
answer hit upon the same one as that already claimed by the maid?
“It must have been in the morning, then, that you took him out,”
continued Camilla, still perfectly unsuspicious, adding, with a
sternness that was more affected than real, “You must have given him
time that was filched from your reading.”
“He looked so wistful,” replied Bonnybell, post-dating Jock’s expression
of emotion, as she had done his iniquities. “It is so difficult to
resist him when he looks wistful.”
This was a thrust directed at the one weak spot in Camilla’s armour, and
it penetrated at once.
“What a bad dog!” she said, in a ridiculously pseudo-angry voice. How
different, as Bonnybell ruefully reflected, from that employed to
herself, for the far smaller crime of her attempt to educate Meg Aylmer!
“No biscuits to-night.”
In the execution of this threat Jock did not even affect credulity, but
wagged a short black tail, which was in piquant contrast to the rest of
his white body, and Bonnybell heaved her slender shoulders in a deep
inspiration of relief, once again involuntarily stealing a look at
Edward. She found him looking straight and full back at her, in the
security of Camilla’s occupation with the dog; read in that look that he
knew; that since he had promised her his friendship he would not betray
her, and that he despised her from the bottom of his heart. In point of
fact, Edward was not much in the habit of despising any one but himself,
but he might have made an exception in Bonnybell’s favour.
The belief that he had done so, at all events, depressed that young
woman to such a degree as to impart an inattentive languor to her
nightly dancing lesson to Jock. That unworthy animal took a base
advantage of her absent-mindedness, and executed his part of the
performance on all four feet, in a shabby, ambling run, which, not even
by his partial mistress, could be classified as a “trick.”
“You seem to have tired yourself with your walk,” observed Camilla,
noticing the limp air of relief with which Miss Ransome subsided into a
chair at the end of a display which was generally a source of unmixed
enjoyment to her. “Of course, I have no wish that you should overdo
yourself; there is never any sense in extremes.”
Bonnybell drooped her head in silent acquiescence. Circumstances
prevented her defending herself from the charge of over-exercise by
stating the fact that the longest walk she had to-day taken had been
from one end of Lady Tennington’s conservatory to the other, and she
felt unequal for the moment to the framing of new inventions, which one
of her hearers would be perfectly aware to be such.
“Perhaps it is because the wind has not caught your face to-day,”
continued Mrs. Tancred, in caustic but not hostile allusion to
Bonnybell’s former explanation of her excess of bloom, “but you look
pale to-night. Neither Edward--I think I may answer for you,” with a
scarcely inquiring spectacled glance at her husband--“nor I will take it
amiss if you feel inclined to go to bed.”
The girl accepted, with apologetic courtesy, which she tried not to
make too eager. Not even the sight of the piled books by her bedside,
heaped there with an intention of midnight study, could lessen the sense
of relaxed tension in being alone. She _was_ tired, dispirited, anxious,
with sore disquiet for the future.
Edward knew that she was a liar, and hated her for being one. More shame
for him! If he had been in her grievous straits, he would have lied too.
It was very unsympathetic and _borné_ of him not to understand that! Now
that Charlie Landon was aware that she was in the neighbourhood, he
would never leave her in peace. Did she not read an intention of
persecution in the baffled anger of his face when it was made clear to
him by Flora that his escort was to be dispensed with?
Yes, the future was heavy with clouds, and she regarded it, as has been
said, with some disquiet. Yet her repentance for the past was by no
means complete. If Edward and Charlie--unnatural alliance of
names!--weighed down one scale of the balance, did not Toby in the other
make it greatly out-dip them? The campaign against Toby--hitherto
existing only in aspiration and intention--had passed into the domain of
fact. It had really and seriously opened, and how artistically too, by
that sudden inspiration or an appeal for help. A stroke of such genius
had enabled her to skip over at least a dozen preliminary steps, and
rushed him into the propitious situation of benefactor and rescuer
before he knew where he was.
“Never in my life have I managed to get hold of anything good or
pleasant without having to pay heavily for it,” she said to herself in
bitter retrospect, “and I suppose that it will always be so; but, at all
events, this time I have something to show for my efforts! ‘Quite safe
to walk anywhere between the belt of firs on the left of the big covert
and the group of Spanish chestnuts near the gazebo.’ Quite safe for
_me_, I suppose he meant! I would not swear that it was quite as safe
for _him_!”
She fell asleep with an angelic smile on her parted lips at the thought
of Toby’s insecurity, the pile of unopened books forgotten beside her.
An hour later a figure, who had carefully chosen that one of the
electric burners to turn up whose light would not fall on the sleeper’s
face, stood by Bonnybell’s bedside.
“I do not think that that child is well,” Camilla had said, after an
interval of silence, addressing her husband; “she seemed unnaturally
depressed. Depression under such circumstances as hers would be natural
and proper in any thinking being, but as she certainly does not come
under that head, there must be some other cause.”
As she spoke Mrs. Tancred left her chair and the room. Her absence
lasted for a quarter of an hour, and towards the end of it Edward grew
restless; that is to say, inwardly, for he allowed himself no change of
posture that would recognize or indulge his uneasiness. Was she ill? and
if so, was hers the kind of constitution upon which illness would take
much hold? Both her parents had died when well under forty, but as
neither of their deaths could be called natural ones, their
shortlivedness could not be held to lend probability to hers, unless her
mother’s tendencies were hereditary.
Camilla’s re-entrance interrupted the shudder caused by the last
supposition.
“I was mistaken,” she said calmly, though his eye noted the sign of an
emotion of some kind on her harsh face; “she was sleeping quite
quietly.”
Both settled down again to their occupations, and a few minutes elapsed
before Camilla, bringing out the words as one forced to make an
admission against the grain, said--
“I am afraid that my tendency is to judge people too severely; and I
believe that in the case of this unfortunate girl I may have done so.”
She paused, and he had time for an inwardly interjected wish that she
had used some other adjective than that which, employed as a noun, had
such an unsavoury significance when applied to a woman!
“I am led to think that some glimmer of a sense of right and wrong is
awakening in her; that I trace some germ of a desire for better things!”
Again she halted, and he threw in a “Yes?”
“You heard at dinner to-day how she had conquered her dislike to leaving
the fireside in deference to my wishes; it came out quite
unostentatiously--not as if she were making a merit of it.”
Perhaps it was surprise at the change in his wife’s tone that hindered
Tancred from expressing that pleased acquiescence in their joint
incubus’s improvement which might have been expected; but neither did he
give any sign of dissent.
“And though she could not have expected a visit from me to-night--I have
never before gone near her,” continued Camilla, in the key of one
resolved to make her amends for possible former injustice handsome and
complete--“she had evidently taken to heart my reproach of having wasted
the time, that should have been devoted to study, upon the dog.” (When
Camilla occasionally tried to make her family believe that she was
indifferent to Jock, she spoke of him as “the dog.”) “The poor girl had
evidently been at work until overtaken by sleep, for the books were
piled at her bedside.”
Edward must make some comment now, and must try not to let it be too
stony; but the “Indeed! how very creditable!” which he at last brought
out sounded to himself so coldly ironical that it must rouse his wife’s
suspicions by its contrast with his former championship. To his relief,
he soon perceived that she was occupied by a train of thought, and
stirred by an emotion which blunted her powers of observation.
“She looked very sweet and innocent,” Mrs. Tancred said, in a softened
tone, as one recalling a gentle, dreamy vision; “all traces of her
terrible heredity wiped away by sleep!” After a short pause in a lower
key, “The All Wise gave one more proof of All Wisdom in denying me the
blessing of children, for I should have made idols of them.”