A steady fine rain had set in, which had lasted with scarcely any
daylight intermission, though, as often in wet weather, the nights were
fine, since Bonnybell’s absorption into the bosom of her future family.
Three days had passed since that event, and from inside the walls of her
prison-house had come no sign of how things were going with her there.
Sometimes Edward felt Darius’s wish to go to the edge of the lion’s den
and cry out “in a lamentable voice” to a little modern Daniel to know
how she was faring there. The only difference was that he did not
indulge it.
Mr. Tancred had returned to find his guest already gone, and told
himself at once that he was relieved. That there might be no mistake
about it, he repeated the statement several times.
“She is absolutely indifferent to the young man,” Camilla said, using
the generic term for humanity instead of the colloquial, on the same
principle as she always spoke of Jock as “the dog” when he was in
disgrace. “She went off in a flood of tears.”
“With such an ordeal before me, I think I should have done the same,” he
answered.
“I reminded her that she would have the support of her accomplice; but
that did not seem to give her much confidence.”
For not the first time in his life Edward wished that his wife would
give him a holiday from the dry irony whose use had become a second
nature to her, but he did not, it is needless to say, tell her so, and
Mrs. Tancred continued in the same strain--
“She repeated what a noble character he was; but said that in this case
it was some woman-friend whom she needed to cling to. I was unable to
advise her to cling to”--“Catherine Aylmer” was on her tongue, but she
substituted--“the ladies of the Aylmer family in their present frame of
mind.”
Edward suggested weakly, “Meg, perhaps?”
“Meg was sent away this morning.”
“And Miss Barnacre?”
“No, they have kept her. They think that she will be invaluable to
them.”
He gave a slight shudder, and glanced at the clock. It pointed to 10.30.
For five mortal hours the lions had been crunching the tender bones of
the little new Daniel.
“It seems,” continued his wife, “that she has always liked women better
than men.” An arid little laugh showed how much credit Camilla attached
to the statement. “I wonder, while she was about it, that she did not
add that her mother had done the same.” After a pause, “She must indeed
have been in sore need of some one to cling to, for she tried to cling
to _me_!”
There was an angry ring in the voice that uttered the last clause, which
showed Mr. Tancred that his wife had not been so untouched by poor Miss
Bonnybell’s frantic gymnastics as she wished it to be believed; and for
the first time he felt less intolerably grated upon by her tone.
“Are you determined to make her always carry that unfortunate mother
upon her back?” he asked, rather wearily. “The poor creature will have
enough to do through life to get away from her without your help.”
The rejoinder tarried, but when it came there was a tinge of compunction
in it.
“You are quite right. I do not think that the Aylmers will let her
forget her parentage in a hurry.”
Both fell silent.
* * * * *
Three days had passed; and during them the married pair seemed to
themselves to be always falling silent. A tacit convention prevented
their perpetual discussion of one subject; yet none other seemed to
present itself, and the eschewed theme kept cropping up continually,
like gout weed in a garden. The house seemed to both extraordinarily
silent. Their late guest had never been noisy, and it would have seemed
impossible that the removal of so small and soundless a presence could
have made any difference in a great house’s contribution to the
noise of the world. Yet the absence of so--as one would have
thought--imperceptible a footfall on the deep-carpeted stairs; the
extinction of such tiny trills of song and wafts of laughter made the
rooms seem void, as if uninhabited, and hushed as if one lay dead in
them. It was strange that this deliverance from a little adventuress, of
whose existence they had six months earlier been ignorant, should have
made the woman feel the bitter curse of her barrenness, and the man the
contemptible vacuity of his self-murdered life more acutely than ever
before.
It was under a variety of aspects that the subject reared its shunned
head. Camilla was always the one to introduce and then curtly dismiss
it.
“I imagine,” she said one evening, after having been observing for some
moments the idle flutter and dip of the leaves of the book her husband
was ostensibly reading, “that you are feeling as if all the little
colour that was in them had been withdrawn from our somewhat grey lives;
is it not so?”
There was no anger nor even surprise, only a sort of compassion in her
tone, as of one gauging anew the drabness of an existence in which such
an illumination could be felt as a loss.
Edward regained a firmer grip of his paper-knife.
“Are you judging me by yourself?” he asked, with a smile not more
melancholy than, and as calmly kind as usual. “Are you sure that it is
not _you_ who are missing our patch of scarlet?”
“I should miss a blister when it was taken off,” she answered, and the
subject dropped.
It rose again, however, and yet again, impossible apparently quite to
submerge. On the third evening it came up suddenly, emerging from
silence in a fresh dress.
“It would be difficult to find a worse way for disposing of money,”
Camilla said, her rather grating voice breaking on the absolute
stillness of her surroundings--Jock never snored and Edward never
cleared his throat--“but I suppose we must give her a trousseau.”
“It would be like you,” he answered, carefully dissociating himself, as
he invariably did, from any share in her generosities.
She must have grown too much used to this habit of fifteen years to be
annoyed by it; so perhaps it was some warmth in his acquiescence that
ruffled her, or simply that her stock of amiability had run low, but her
rejoinder was certainly not amiable.
“She shall have no voice in the choice of it.”
Ten minutes more must have elapsed before Jock pricked his ears, the
finer dog-sense out-running human hearing. Camilla looked with wondering
tenderness at him over the pins on which her philanthropic sweater was
growing into fleecy life.
“What does he think he hears?”
Edward shook his head, and Jock jumped out of his basket and made for
the door, which opened as he reached it to admit a figure racing in at
the top of its speed.
Before the astounded couple realized its presence, the figure whose
flexibility of knee-joint had often been a trial to its female patron
had flung itself in an attitude of prayer between them.
“I have come back to you! Do not drive me away!”
“You have been turned out?”
The ejaculated inquiry was Camilla’s. The same idea had occurred to
Edward, yet his wife’s outspoken wording of it gave him a galvanic shock
at her brutality.
The kneeling angel gave pause to the pants which were heaving her black
chiffon breast, to gasp out, with a reproachful look from one to the
other of her listeners--
“Turned out! Oh no, I turned myself out.”
The extreme improbability of this statement entirely “dumbed” that one
of Miss Ransome’s hearers who was never much addicted to speech, but the
other cried out in a key from which no great pains had been taken to
extract the incredulity--
“You ran away? at this time of night?”
“I did not run away; I asked them to send me----” She made a dramatic
pause. “I was going to say _home_.”
It was not quite at once that Camilla could bring out her curt query--
“And why, pray?”
By this time the slender darkness had risen to its feet, and was drawing
itself up, not without a touch of unfamiliar dignity.
“When I found that they believed something that they had heard about me,
I felt that I could not spend another night under the same roof with
them.”
For a moment the vague “something” remained with no demand for an
explanation of it, Edward’s silence being due to a dreadful suspicion
that whatever the accusation that had been brought against Bonnybell it
was in all probability true; Camilla’s to a fear of hearing a fact or
facts about her _protégée_ even more shocking than those that had
already wounded her ears. But as a shrinking from the disagreeable was
certainly no part of Mrs. Tancred’s character, she pulled herself
together, and asked brusquely--
“What was it? and was it true?”
“True!” repeated the other in a heart-wrung voice. “Oh, if you, too, are
going to believe it!” She threw her hands out before her with a gesture
at once of finality and desperation.
“I should have a better chance of disbelieving it if I knew what it
was.”
“They received an anonymous letter about me. It came by this evening’s
post.”
“H’m!”
“It accused me”--there was worldly wisdom in bringing out the accusation
with difficulty; but the difficulty was real too--“the writer said he
thought that the man whom I was going to marry ought to know that he had
seen me one night last year in Paris at M----’s.”
The confession seemed at first to fall flat; at least, with regard to
the person to whom it was directly addressed.
“M----’s!” replied Camilla, with the unconscious ease with which an
innocent young girl might pronounce an improper word. “What is M----’s?”
Bonnybell’s distraught orbs rolled with involuntary confidence towards
Edward.
“You know, don’t you?”
“I have heard of it.”
“I suppose it is some very disreputable haunt of vice,” said Camilla;
“but I am thankful to say I never heard of it.”
“It would be absolutely out of the question for any _femme du monde_ to
be seen there if she wished to keep a rag of character; and as to a
_jeune fille_!”
“It was not true, then?”
The question was point-blank, as was the searching eye-beam that lit it,
and Bonnybell felt that the answer must be to match.
“_True!_” she repeated, with an anguish of upbraiding in her voice. “Oh,
I cannot have explained properly! How can you ask me? I know that poor
Claire was not careful enough in the places she took me to; but M----’s!
and I never went anywhere without her!”
If Mrs. Tancred here had to struggle with some difficulty in suppressing
her opinions of the chaperonage thus waved in her face, she came off
conqueror; and “poor Claire’s” laurels, and even the objectionable pet
name itself, went unimpugned.
“Have you any idea who wrote it?”
“Not the slightest!”--with wounded emphasis. “How should I? I did not
know”--with innocent sorrow--“that I had an enemy in the world.”
A diversion was here effected by the fact that Edward, usually so quiet
and noiseless, by some awkward movement of his foot displaced one of the
fire-irons, which fell rattling from its andiron on to the hearth,
before which the master of the house was standing.
Bonnybell’s heart, though in a certain sense a stout one, sank. “He
knows that it was Charlie!” she said internally. “I was afraid that he
must connect the letter with that unlucky episode in the park! Well,
since I have begun, I must go on--‘in for a penny, in for a pound;’ and,
after all, it is nearly all truth that I am telling.”
“It came by the afternoon post,” she continued, confining the appealing
tragedy of her eyes to her female auditor for the present, as being the
easier field of action. “I saw at dinner-time that something must have
happened, they were so cold to me; not”--in plaintive, though not
accusatory parenthesis--“that they have ever been anything else. Miss
Barnacre kept talking all the time about--_adventuresses_”--the
speaker’s sunk voice made a slight shamed pause before the last
word--“and Catherine was like _ice_!”
A long sighing breath bore on its wings this last cruel reminiscence; no
other sound broke upon it, and it was with a heartened sense that the
air was getting warmer that the narrator presently went on with her
narrative.
“Toby did all he could to prevent their showing it to me; he at least
believed in me. I am afraid their doing it in spite of him will make a
sad quarrel between them”--another sigh--“but they thought it right I
should know; perhaps it was.”
Miss Ransome paused on the meek acquiescence in injury of this note.
“I suppose that they thought it their duty to give you an opportunity of
clearing yourself,” Camilla said, in a voice whose chronic severity was
tempered by some unusual relaxing of its harshness, “but for myself I
should have put such a thing into the fire.”
“They gave it to me in the drawing-room after dinner. There were only
Mrs. Aylmer, and Catherine, and Miss Barnacre there. I thought they need
not have had Miss Barnacre; but you know how she always gives her
opinion about everything, even about your religious views.” Bonnybell
sank her voice at this last proof of the Barnacre’s presumption, and was
rewarded by hearing a muffled snort of contempt from the direction of
Mrs. Tancred. “I could not make anything of it at first, never having
seen the handwriting before.” (O Bonnybell! why the inartistic
superfluity of this touch?) “I asked what it meant.”
“Yes?”
“When at last I made out what I was accused of, and saw that they--I am
not quite sure about Mrs. Aylmer, but the other two did not even attempt
any disguise--believed it, I--I did not say anything at all. I just gave
them--gave Catherine, I think it was, but I did not seem to see very
well--gave Catherine back the letter and left the room.”
The foot of the figure on the hearthrug must have been on this
particular night out of its owner’s control. A while ago it was the
fire-irons that innocently suffered, now it was Jock; and, to his
intense astonishment, nobody apologized.
Camilla said, “Well?”
“I knew that I should find Toby in the smoking-room, so I went there,
and asked him to send to the stables and order something to take me--I
am afraid I said,” with a humbly apologetic smile, “_home_!”
The wronger of Jock and of the fire-irons spoke at last, though his
voice was not quite what he could have wished.
“And he let you go?”
“He had no choice, poor fellow!” replied the girl, with an unpretending
dignity which made it seem to her hearer as if he saw her for the first
time. “He was in a dreadful state. I never saw any one in such a
dreadful state; but I was firm. I said, ‘If it is true, I am not fit to
be here; and if it is not true, I ought never to speak to them again.’”
“And he acquiesced?”
“When I said _that_, oh, he _was_ in a dreadful state!”--with a, for
once, not manufactured shudder at the recollection. “He answered that,
for his part, he had every intention of speaking to them again, and he
did not think that they would forget what he meant to say in a hurry.”
The narrative, pregnant though it was, had not taken long, and now it
was ended.
“If your statement is true----” Camilla began with a judicial slowness.
But Bonnybell, contrary to the humble politeness of her wont, broke in
with a little cry.
“True? Would it be much use my telling an untruth when ‘they’ are so
close by to show me up if I did?”
The logic was as sound as the veracity of the appeal was obvious, and
the little cry was, and did the work of, more than a rhetorical
flourish.
“If, as I am induced to think, you have stated the facts as they
occurred,” began Mrs. Tancred again, with no apparent resentment of the
interruption, “I confess that I do not think there was any course open
to you but the one you adopted. For once in your life you seem to have
behaved with decency and dignity.”
The concession, though not very graciously worded, was an enormous one,
and the relief consequent upon it proportionately great, for poor Miss
Ransome had been very, very far from sure of her reception.
“Then I may _stay_?” she faltered.
“_Stay!_” repeated her hostess, with an energy of scorn which warmed the
inmost core of her silent husband’s heart towards her. “Do not ask
preposterous questions.”
Thereupon the returned waif flung herself incontinently upon the rigid
neck whose stiff ruffles and frills no fond daughter-arms had ever
disarranged. The action bulked colossal to the executor of it in
retrospect. “How _could_ I have done it?” she asked herself in a cooler
after-hour, looking back upon her feat as the man who in youth has
mounted a cannon-swept, bayonet-bristling breach into a burning town may
regard the feat from the armchair of placid old age. Of course, I had
had a good deal to upset me, but I must have been off my head.
The embrace, if so one-sided a transaction could merit the name, did not
last long. Bonnybell was curtly told to sit down and not make a fool of
herself, and Camilla began almost at once to scold her; but yet it was
with a sense of extreme well-being that the little gutter-snipe, as in
frank soliloquy she often called herself, settled her lithe body into a
familiar armchair. Edward had sat down too, and Jock, making up his mind
that reparation for his wrongs was unaccountably not forthcoming
to-night, stepped into his basket, which stood raised on its accustomed
tripod to keep him from imaginary draughts. The girl might never have
been away. Yet to herself what odious æons seemed to have rolled between
her last and her present occupancy of the Hepplethwaite chair that now
held her!
To a casual observer all would have seemed as before, but a nicer eye
would have detected that Mrs. Tancred had not resumed her labours on the
nightly sweater. She sat looking straight before her with knit brows for
some good while before she at last opened her mouth to utter slow and
evidently well-weighed words.
“If you have told me the truth”--oh, why that cruel preamble?--“I
think, as I have already said, that your course was the abstractly right
one. Worldly wisdom would, of course, have dictated a more conciliatory
line of action. To be on terms of open hostility with your husband’s
family will not conduce to the happiness of your married life.”
At the beginning of this harangue Bonnybell had sat straight up in her
chair to mark her respect by an attitude of close attention. Her hands
now clutched the arms till her knuckle-bones stood out through the white
skin.
“But I shall not have any married life,” she sighed in a trembling tone
that yet seemed to mean what it said.
“_Not have any married life!_” repeated Mrs. Tancred, with such an
accent as made Miss Ransome wonder whether the words could indeed be her
own. “I am quite at a loss. I thought I understood you to say that your
_fiancé_” (never since his clandestine courtship had the young man been
Toby)--“that your _fiancé_ did not share his family’s suspicions?”
“He does not, he does not!” cried Bonnybell, in a sort of half-real,
half-bogus rapture. “He is absolutely stanch. He would marry me to-night
if he could. Oh, it is something to have _one_ person believe in you
like that; but it is _I_ who, after what has happened, will not marry
him.”