The moon unexpectedly lighted Mr. Tancred home. As if she had something
agreeable to show him, she had shoved and elbowed aside the
smoke-coloured curtains, drawn so closely across the sky when he
arrived, and though still vapourish and a little sickly, gave radiance
enough by which to distinguish objects. At first her lamp seemed
officious. He could find his way home blindfolded along the familiar
path, but before the end of his walk he discovered a use for it.
The evening air was mild and mawkish, and it was not because he was
chilly that he covered the ground quickly. It was unlikely--scarcely
possible--that anything untoward could have happened during his hour’s
absence; yet he had heard something at the Dower House which made him
eager to verify by his own eyesight the fact that the terrible charge
committed to him was still safe, that he should surprise her as he did
last Sunday, sampling his best cigarettes over the fire in the
smoking-room, to which he had betaken himself earlier than her
calculations had led her to expect, and where the austerity of his own
manner had routed her, not in repentance for her theft, which at this
moment she was probably repeating, but in confusion at its discovery.
His wife had no toleration for female smokers. How, then, did he
reconcile it to his conscience that, before leaving that wife’s house
this afternoon, he had placed the box of cigarettes, of the brand of
Miss Ransome’s predilection, where she could not possibly miss it? Yes,
undoubtedly he would find his little lazy, lying inmate, with her
depraved instincts and her seraphic eyes, stretched disconsolately on an
armchair, scheming some false new wheedlings by which to undermine his
principles and cajole him out of his just displeasure.
His reason was convinced that there was no need for haste, and yet he
hastened. The moon was getting the better of the vapours as she walked
higher up the low sky; and at even some distance off he could see not
only the dark bodies of the deer moving in the open spaces between the
dead bracken, but could distinguish the branched heads of the stags.
Presently other objects made themselves out against the steel-washed
dusk. Neither were they unfamiliar, since a right-of-way, which for a
century had vexed the souls of the owners of Stillington, intersected at
about halfway between the Dower House and the Manor the path he was
pursuing. The objects in question were the figures of a man and woman
standing in the middle of the public footway, which held a transverse
course across the park, and just outside the shade of a copse.
There was no reason why the couple should not be any pair of village
lovers--of his own servants taking loitering farewell at the crossing of
the ways. Yet Edward quickened his pace. The added proximity of fifty
yards told him that the man’s figure was elderly and bulky, and that he
was holding the wrists of his slender companion against her will. Both
were talking with such vehemence and concentration of gesture as to be
absolutely unconscious of anything outside themselves.
A horrible suspicion, with the strength of almost a certainty, first
stopped the observer’s feet stock still, then fevered them into a run.
At the same moment a little voyaging cloud, thick enough momentarily to
hide her, wholly covered the moon, and when it had swept past the man
had disappeared, and the girl was running away in the direction of the
Manor, with all the fleetness of which a very light body and longish
legs were capable.
In two minutes her pursuer had overtaken her. She stopped, panting, and
said gaspingly--
“Oh, it is _you_! I _am_ thankful to see you! I--I--have--had--_such_ a
fright!”
For once he could not doubt that she was speaking truth. Her eyes were
full of terror, and her breath came in little dry sobs.
“Yes?”
“I--I had taken Jock out for a run--you--you know how he teases one.
By-the-by, where is he? He must have run after a rabbit.”
Alas! she was off the lines again. Her hearer knew perfectly that the
innocent Jock had not shared her mysterious evening promenade. His
heart turned to stone against her, or at all events he thought so, and
she had to continue her lame narrative unhelped by any expression of
interest or belief in it.
“I had just reached that cross-path, when a man--you saw that a man was
talking to me--jumped out of the trees. I had never seen him before,
and--and--began to--to beg of me.”
She paused, her invention for the moment spent, apparently. It would be
humane to give some sign of a pretence of credulity, but none came.
“I suppose,” she resumed with regathered pluck, though still trembling
all over from the evidently very bad fright she had had, “that when he
saw I had nothing to give--I told him I had no purse with me--he got
angry, and----”
A voice at last broke in--an icy voice. Why should he allow her to sink
deeper into her abyss of lies?
“Beggars do not usually wear fur coats and motoring caps.”
He saw a new and different fear born in her eyes; but in a second she
was trying to conceal it.
“Was he--dressed like that? I was too frightened to notice! Was
he--anybody that--that--you knew? that--that you recognized?”
The temptation to lead her into confession, by affecting to know more
than he did, was strong; but he resisted.
“No!” he answered, and instantly saw a light of relief spring into her
eyes. “I could not see his face clearly enough for recognition; but,” he
added, with stern gentleness, “I cannot believe that he was equally
unknown to you!”
By this time she was recovering, and her weapons were getting into order
again, the bodily terror that had for the moment floored her giving way
to a moral fear.
“I cannot think why you are always so ready to distrust me!” she sighed.
“What motive could I have for deceiving you?”
“I do not presume to judge of your motives,” he replied; “I go only upon
facts.”
If she had not been very much flurried, she would have abstained from
the question she now put.
“What facts?”
“Since you force me into incivility,” he answered, with grave sadness,
“I must remind you that ten days ago you told an elaborate falsehood, or
rather series of falsehoods, to disguise the fact that you had spent the
afternoon of my wife’s absence in London, in motoring to Tennington.”
Here was a facer. Yet it did not produce the effect he expected, and in
an instant he realized that she had been aware of his knowledge all
along.
“So that is why you have been so cruel to me all this weary time?” she
cried, astute in softness, and trying with nice strategy to turn a
position which it was quite impossible to face.
A suspicious tendency to grow lenient, recognized in time and rebutted,
hardened his voice.
“You do not deny it?”
“Why should I?”--her look taking a surprised unbraiding. “I meant no
harm! I only did it because I was afraid of giving pain to either of
you. I knew that you did not approve of Lady Tennington; and
yet”--anxiously watching to see the good effect of the next
utterance--“I could not bear to neglect an old friend who is down in the
world.”
She had so deftly changed the ground of conflict, and confused the
issues, that he could only repeat stupidly--
“Down in the world?”
“Yes; isn’t she? Isn’t she very _mal vue_? And I am so down in the world
myself, that it is not for me, of all people, to be hard on her!”
Perhaps the whole success of Miss Ransome’s not very artistic falsehoods
lay in the poignant flashes of truth that she unintentionally lit up
their darkness with, here and there. No hearer could doubt the reality
of her desolate fellow-feeling for the social outcast with the golden
wig, concerning whom Mr. Tancred had just been hearing something that
made him feel that flaying alive would be too lenient a fate for her.
“It is no question of Lady Tennington,” he interrupted with a cold
severity, “but of the person who left you so suddenly as soon as he saw
me.”
“Did not I tell you--I thought I had--that he was a perfect stranger to
me? that I had never seen him before? He jumped out of the trees, as I
was passing! Oh, how frightened I was!”
A perfectly unaffected shudder told the listener that here again was a
stratum of unalloyed truth.
“You do believe me, don’t you?”
“I believe that you were frightened.”
Had poor Miss Ransome remembered a certain fact, she would not here have
lifted her clasped hands, nor would Edward have had the pain of seeing
the glint of unfamiliar diamonds on one of them, showing her up by
moonlight.
“Thank you so much! Of course I know that appearances are against me;
and if, as you say, that man”--another shudder--“wore a fur coat, I
suppose he could not have been a real beggar. But if you believe me----”
“Pardon me! my belief was limited to your being frightened! I can’t
believe that the person to whom you were talking with so much animation
and intimacy was a stranger to you, nor that you mistook him for a
beggar.”
She drew her breath heavily, and to his relief did not repeat her
asseveration.
“Whom do you suppose that he was? Have you any idea?”
“I am afraid that I have a very good one.”
The gravity of his answer was tinged with such a disgusted reluctance,
that Bonnybell’s heart, not really at all recovered from its late
intensity of fear, stood still. Loathsome old Charlie! She had always
known that he would be the death of her! Would it be better to tell the
truth now? No! the truth was always a mistake for people like her, who
had to live by their wits. The truth was, like motors and tiaras, only
for the well-off! But she must express some curiosity; put the question
to which she already knew the answer so fatally well.
“Whom?”
“I hardly like to insult you by saying so; but I believe the man to whom
you were talking to have been Colonel Landon.”
Her answer came without apparent delay; yet three alternatives had raced
through her head before she adopted it. “Shall I deny it flat? It is
impossible that by this light he could have recognized him; he owned
that he did not: it is just a trap to catch me! Shall I pretend never to
have heard of Charlie? By this time Edward knows that I am not very
innocent, so that will never do? Shall I just give a great start of
indignation, and begin to walk home very fast?”
The last project was adopted, and at once put into execution. So well
done was it, that it was a self-reproachful Edward, fearful of having
done a grave wrong, who came up alongside of the fleeing victim to
appearances.
“If I was mistaken, I can never ask your pardon enough. I was mistaken?”
The interrogation was so urgent, yet so apologetic, that somehow the
bang-out lie that she had ready died on the fugitive’s lips. Perhaps the
evasion to which she resorted was not much more really truthful.
“I do not know what I have done”--by this time art had advised, and
nature had readily supplied tears--“that you should accuse me of being
friends with such a man”--“as Charlie” was on the edge of her lips; but
the misleading diminutive was arrested just in time. “Of course, I do
not know what he has done, but I know that everybody, except Flora, cuts
him. How could you imagine that I could like such a detestable old
beast, or want to meet him?”
In the application of the strong noun applied to Flora’s _protégé_ there
was such intense heartiness that Edward’s relief deepened.
“If I have been mistaken, how can I ever beg your pardon enough?” he
said with a horrified accent of remorse, she posting along beside him,
sobbing in the moonlight. “I must have been the victim of a preconceived
idea and a fancied likeness. But I have just been hearing that that
person had been staying for the last fortnight or more at Tennington;
and I unhappily could not forget that you had been reduced to--to
invention to hide the fact of your visit there.”
The links in the chain of evidence were closely knit. Yet there was hope
as well as apology in his tone--hope of a denial as emphatic as her
expression of distaste had been.
But Miss Ransome had already begun to repent of an outspokenness so
foreign to her usual methods. “If Charlie ever heard that I called him a
detestable old beast, it would be all up with me.”
They had by this time crossed the plank bridge that parted park from
pleasure-grounds. The sluggish river, by which her bored feet had so
often stepped, gleamed beside the path ennobled by moonlight; and
Bonnybell began to feel safer. In this extremely tight place she must
invoke the subtlest diplomacy to her aid. The high line of injured
innocence which a few minutes ago had seemed out of the question, now,
thanks to Edward’s changed and humbled attitude, appeared more
practicable than any other, and without delay she adopted it.
“It is the want of trust,” she sighed, her head bowed on her chest, and
one brilliant tear deftly shaken off on to her muff--“the absolute want
of trust, that is what does the mischief.”
“Have you given me much cause to trust you?” he asked sadly.
To this question she found it not convenient to respond directly, but
she resumed her melancholy rhetoric.
“It is the readiness to believe evil of one, to put the worst
construction upon one’s words and actions, that takes the heart out of
one’s efforts to do right.”
There was silence for a minute, while they still speeded homewards under
the quiet trees that detached loose leaves to drop on their heads, and
while a painful conflict raged in Edward’s mind. Was she speaking truth?
It was just possible; as long as the music of her breaking voice was
falling on his ear it was even probable.
“If I have wronged you by my accusation,” he said in a voice as unlike
his usual air as her own, “I do not know any penance that I can do
heavy enough to wipe out the insult. If I have wronged you, can you ever
forgive me?”
“As I hope to be forgiven!” she answered, lifting a little saintly wet
face to heaven. It was a tag strayed out of some tale or rhyme which
came blessedly to her aid at the moment she most needed it.
It was not till some time after he had left her, and the emotion caused
by her angelic unresentingness had somewhat subsided, that Mr. Tancred
remembered that his young guest had given him no explanation which could
by any means be made to hold water of the equivocal situation in which
he had found her.