“She would, I should think, be glad if you let her have luncheon sent up
to her.”
“I have no opinion of food eaten in bedrooms. If people are well enough
to eat, they are well enough to come downstairs; but she is probably not
fit to be seen, so for once I will relax my rule.”
These two remarks, to which it would be superfluous to assign their
respective ownerships, were all the comment upon the recent melodrama at
first possible to the reluctant managers upon whose stage it had been
played. They ate their luncheon in ruffled silence.
The revolt in Camilla’s Puritan soul against the orgy of ungoverned
passion which had chosen her house for its scene was incongruously mixed
with an angry compassion, which suspected itself of being something even
more lenient towards the cause of the whole uproar, while a very sincere
annoyance at the unavoidable and imminent split between herself and her
nearest and most congenial neighbours threw in its pinch of bitterness
to the distasteful brew.
Edward’s feelings on the subject were even more complicated and less
agreeable. Vexation at his own folly in allowing himself to be persuaded
to forego his day’s work on the chance of a needless intervention in
what no wise concerned him, a compassion even keener than his wife’s,
but in his case dedicated chiefly to Toby, coupled with a dim but still
existing satisfaction in his discomfiture, and that again with a biting
self-disgust for being capable of such a sensation,--these ingredients
composed no pleasant potion.
“It is to be hoped that, at all events, this will end the affair,”
Camilla said, when at length they were alone, with a sigh of stretched
endurance.
“I suppose that the length of the interview looks like it,” he answered.
“Does it?” she rejoined, her nervous irritation wreaking itself, as it
had so often done before in their married life, in causelessly stinging
words upon him. “I dare say you know more about these kind of
extravagant love scenes than I do. You certainly cannot know less.”
He smiled a little sadly. “Mine was a very simple deduction; if she had
relented, Toby would not have foregone his luncheon.”
“That is true,” she said, mollified by his gentleness, a gentleness that
yet never prevented the recurrence of her stings, “and I was
unnecessarily snappish, as you must often find me. Poor little wretch!
She has shown more principle and grit than I gave her credit for, if she
has kept to her renunciation of him.”
Edward was silent. The having lived in the house with Bonnybell for
several weeks had possibly made him more attached to rigid truth than
ever before; and the motive of her heroic abandonment was still too
obscure to him for him to be able to join as cordially as he would have
liked in encomiums of it.
“It is, of course, a severe trial to have her returned upon our hands,
when we had thought our responsibility nearly ended; but we must try not
to let her see it--a needless caution to you, whose tendency is always
towards over-indulgence--but in this case I should be in agreement with
you; in a mind like hers, the first germs of good cannot be too
carefully fostered.”
Edward’s acquiescence in this plan of campaign, though really a fervent
one, was indicated only by a slight nod, and Mrs. Tancred went on, the
leniency and forbearance of her first proposal sliding into a withering
sarcasm.
“Our friendship with the Aylmers is, of course, at an end; and doubtless
this is only the beginning. An easy calculation will tell us how soon we
shall be deprived of all acquaintances who number an unmarried male
member among their family; perhaps”--the edge of her weapon growing
keener, and fancy taking a bitter flight--“perhaps, indeed, the
limitation to _un_-married male members is superfluous!”
Was it a happy moment for the object of this philippic to appear in
person to answer it? Happy or unhappy, there she was. Scarcely had the
climax of her forebodings as to the ultimate result of her hospitality
passed Camilla’s lips when Bonnybell stood before her. But what a
Bonnybell! What a blurred, dimmed, dishevelled, altogether lamentable
Bonnybell! A drowned toy terrier is the only image that for
wretchedness, smallness, dilapidation, and pathos, could at all convey
the idea of the figure that now presented itself to its protectors.
“I do not want any luncheon,” the dim ghost said in a voice that matched
its face, “and I know that you do not approve of people eating things in
their rooms; but thank you so much, all the same, for thinking of it!
Oh, if I once begin to thank you, when shall I stop?” She ended with a
low wail.
“Don’t be hysterical,” replied Camilla, hastily. “Edward, go and fetch
her a glass of port wine and a biscuit. The servants must not see her.
There, lie down and go to sleep. What is the use of crying yourself into
a jelly just because for once in your life you have behaved properly?”
Edward departed on his errand with the greatest alacrity, glad to escape
from the horrible yearning of angry pity that the sight of Bonnybell in
her distorted misery inspired him with, and from the grating severity of
his wife’s voice. Yet he took with him a feeling more subtly unpleasant
than those from which he fled--the suspicion, namely, that the very
abandonment of Miss Ransome’s woe was in itself partly a pose. “She
might have washed her face and combed her hair,” he said to himself
wrathfully; but the wrath, if not quite the suspicion, died down,
swallowed in an immense pity as her trembling hand took the offered
glass from his, and her sunk and diminished eyes lifted themselves in
mute gratitude. “Poor little soul! It can be no _parti pris_ that has
dwindled her to half her size; and even if she has tried to make a bid
for the compassion of the only friends left to her in the world by
intentional accentuation of a forlornness real enough in all conscience
without accenting, isn’t she even for that poor deceit the more an
object of the profoundest, most lenient sympathy?”
By this time Love’s victim had been ordered to a sofa; and Camilla’s
knuckly hands were arranging a crocheted shawl of their own manufacture
over the little shivering body with an air of protest that was yet not
ungentle.
“You may go now,” she said, addressing her husband brusquely in a key
that, though also protesting, yet seemed to convey the impression that
her unwonted occupation was not altogether disagreeable to her; “there
is nothing to make a fuss about. She will have quite recovered from this
silly lapse from self-control by teatime.”
This, as it turned out, was a slight over-statement of Miss Ransome’s
powers of recuperation, and when Edward forced himself to reappear at
five o’clock, mastering a strong spasm of æsthetic dread at the expected
sight of the miserable little object that he had carried on the retina
of his eyes throughout his ride, he found, to his relief, that she had
asked leave to retire to bed.
“Would it be wise to send for the doctor?” Edward asked rather futilely,
and received the withering response he deserved.
“The doctor? Why, Hutton would laugh in my face. She is simply sharing
the necessity, common to us all, of enduring the consequences of her own
actions. If she will lash up men by illicit means into the state to
which she has reduced this headstrong and rather brainless young man,
she must not complain of the result. One can only hope that it will be a
lesson to her not to repeat the achievement. From what I can gather, I
do not think that she had a very agreeable forenoon.”
* * * * *
The marks of the forenoon alluded to were still plainly visible on Miss
Ransome’s face when, punctual to the moment, she placed herself next
morning at the breakfast-table. Her eyes were still reduced to half
their size, and the reds still absent from her cheek. She had regarded
her own countenance in the glass before coming down to breakfast, with
an artist’s regret at the prohibition laid on her by prudence to throw
in the little repairs and improvements which might have been easily
effected in the mirror before her. “I begin to be afraid,” she said to
herself, thoughtfully, “that I shall ‘go off’ sooner than I expected. I
depend very much upon colour, but it would be madness to touch up. I
must try and keep pale, without whitening, for at least a week. I wonder
when my spirits may begin to improve after such a blow?”
She chuckled a little, but not very heartily. “It _has_ shaken me a good
deal, all the same. Poor devil, I wonder how he is feeling this
morning! I would give a good deal--a safe offer, as I do not possess a
sixpence--that I had let him alone. But how _is_ one to tell? He looked
so stodgy.”
With a sigh of real regret for the accomplished mischief, she went
downstairs with the springless step that her really shaken nerves and
the maintenance of her supposed condition of spirits dictated. A fresh
blow awaited her.
“I am afraid that you are not yet at the end of your difficulties,”
Camilla said, and the rigidity of her tone revealed that some unpleasant
new development of the situation had shown itself.
Miss Ransome gave a gasp. She had come down thinking that a little
chastened demonstrativeness towards her benefactress might not, under
the circumstances, come amiss, but Camilla’s tone froze the little rill
of gush at its source.
“He has not come back?” The words would scarcely form themselves for the
terror behind them.
The question was ignored, and Camilla, faithful to her principle of
never blinking, veiling, or delaying the conveyance of bad news to its
lawful owner, explained her announcement of yet unaccomplished calamity.
“Mrs. Aylmer has written to announce that she and her eldest daughter
propose to be here at eleven o’clock this morning, for the purpose of
begging you to reconsider your decision.”
The carefully matter-of-fact key in which this fact was delivered did
not disguise from Bonnybell the profound annoyance underlying it. Her
own stupefaction at it was so great as to restore her wholly to Nature.
“And is Miss Barnacre coming too?” was all that her white lips could
stammer. A reassuring snort from Camilla--the war-horse snort which the
name of the too progressive governess always evoked--reassured Bonnybell
on this head, and she was presently able to add, “He has made them do
it.”
“So Mrs. Aylmer says,” referring to a letter lying open before her, and
relentlessly reading aloud the sentence alluded to. “I cannot, cannot
lose my boy--my only boy! And the state he is in gives us well-founded
fears for his life or reason.”
A flash of wondering contempt for a life so lightly forfeited and a
reason so easily upset, darted across Bonnybell’s brain; but it is
needless to say that no hint of such a feeling was to be read on her
tiny woe-wrung visage.
“Oh, how little worth enduring so much for I am!” she moaned.
“Very little indeed; but truisms will not help us.”
“What is the use of their coming?” continued the young creature, still
with that moaning intonation, but gathering her wits about her, and
seasoning pathos with common sense. “What is the use of my seeing them?
Nothing is changed. It cannot be that in so short a time they have found
out that they have wronged me--that--that the accusation they were so
ready to bring against me was a false one?”
A pang of real apprehension nipped Miss Ransome at this supposed
solution, but she was quickly reassured.
“Nothing is changed,” replied Mrs. Tancred, solemnly. “Least of all the
immutable, eternal law, that we must abide the consequences of our own
actions. You have made your bed, and you must lie on it. You had better
be in the morning-room by eleven to receive them.”
There was no need for artificial face-whitening now.
“You will be there too?”
“Why should I? It is not I who have brought discord and disunion among
them.”
A transient--very transient--gleam of amusement shot through Bonnybell’s
brain at the idea of Camilla’s charms working havoc in any happy home,
but it was gone, engulfed in gloom before she had realized its presence.
“I know that I have no right to ask it,” she said, throwing all she knew
of humility, deference, and desperate beseechment into her voice, “but
the knowledge that you were near me--that you thought I was in the
right--it is so seldom that you have been able to think me in the
right--would be the one thing that could enable me to go through with
it. I--I feel rather shaken, after yesterday, and--and as if--I could
not bear much more.”
There was a pause. Perhaps the appeal, borne on its helpless low wail,
went straight to the ever-empty mother heart of Mrs. Tancred. The girl
before her was an ill-conducted little adventuress, but if everything
about her, except that clinging attitude of prayer for help and belief
in her power to aid, had been different, it would have been sweet to
have called her daughter.