In the height of a simoom it seems incredible that the face of Nature
should ever recover from its distortion and resume its smiles and
dimples, yet a few hours effect this marvellous restoration. In the case
of the Stillington simoom it took less than a week to remove the more
obvious signs of the devastation it had caused in its destructive
passage. In less than a week the Aylmers had not only ceased to be the
only subject of conversation, but by tacit consent had been banished
from it as too painful a topic for even incidental allusion. In less
than a week the distracted Toby, having thought better of--if, indeed,
he had ever really entertained the idea of--self-slaughter, had actually
set off on that globe-circling voyage which his cruel fair one had
prescribed to him, and the rest of the Aylmer family were in mid-process
of indignantly bundling out of the Dower House, to await inconveniently
on the shores of the Riviera the completion of their rebuilding house.
“They are punishing themselves more than me,” was Mrs. Tancred’s sole
comment upon the announcement that her quondam friends could no longer
bear to lie under the obligation of a roof-tree to her. But Edward,
conscious of the strong hold of habit upon his wife’s mind, conscious
also of her small power of making new friends, and of the tenacity with
which she clung to ancient ties, recognized with pitying sorrow the cut
which so painful and abrupt a severance of an old and pleasant relation
gave her.
Only one sentence from that final interview’s stormy end which Miss
Ransome’s well planned and timed hysterics had saved her from witnessing
ever leaked out to the curious little public around. It had been
addressed by Catherine Aylmer to Camilla, and must have been repeated in
a species of triumph at its point and fitness, and have filtered through
who knows what channel of confidential Barnacre or eavesdropping
servants back to the ears of Bonnybell.
“We can only hope that you will not have _personal_ cause to regret your
championship!”
“What a cat!” was Miss Ransome’s inward comment upon this innuendo. “I
am glad that she does not know how little difficulty I have in keeping
dear Edward at arm’s length. But it is a word to the wise. I must be
additionally careful.”
By Christmas everything at Stillington was to all appearances as it had
been. Life ran in its accustomed grooves, and not even the yearly
hospitalities, largely understood by and still more largely carried out
by Mrs. Tancred, as regarded the surrounding poor, were allowed to
interfere with the resolutely resumed and ruthlessly adhered-to
education of Bonnybell. Her eager offers to help in the dispensing of
her hostess’s gifts, and arranging of her entertainments, were received
with a curt and modified acquiescence. But a cautiously slidden out
suggestion that a reprieve from study would help her to throw herself
with more heart and soul into the work of benevolence met with a decided
negative. To it was due the one sigh of regret ever breathed by Miss
Ransome for her broken engagement. “If I had married Toby, I need never
again have opened a book! It would have been impossible to know less
than he did, and bad taste to know more.”
But, despite the considerable drawback of having to waste so much time
on the improvement of her mind, the spirits of Miss Ransome rose, on the
removal of the incubus laid upon them, to a height that often gave her
grave uneasiness as to how to bridle and conceal them--spirits whose
ebullition had to be worked off in low singings and childish skippings
about her own room, before they could be tamed to the chastened
sorrowfulness and veiled heartbreak which beseemed their supposed
condition. Even with the nicest care a spurt of young joyousness would
go nigh to betray her, but, happily, in each case Edward had been the
sole witness, and Miss Ransome had never felt quite sure that Edward had
found the evidences of her affliction personally convincing. How soon
might she begin to be cheerful again? Earnestly she wished that she had
some one to consult on that head; and sometimes the grotesque notion of
taking Edward’s opinion darted across her mind; the hypothetical idea of
what would happen supposing she were to put to him the question how
soon--in case he were bereaved of Camilla--he would think it seemly to
dress his countenance again in smiles? But, after all, it would not be a
parallel case, since Edward never suffered from high spirits, and the
experiment would probably blow the hospitable floor that carried her
from under her feet. And, meanwhile, her inconvenient gaiety stood the
shock not only of the rigorously pursued cultivation of her
intelligence--for, after all, it was astonishing how little one need
learn if one put one’s mind to it--but the information conveyed to her,
without any explanation of its reason, that the family’s yearly habit of
migrating to London after Christmas was this year to be intermitted.
There was, therefore, nothing visibly ahead of her but the monotonous
life she was at present pursuing. Of course, it was _assommant_ as to
dullness; and the only wonder was that she felt its oppression so
little. She supposed that she must be kept up by the little fillip of
Edward’s daily return; and the--as daily--effort to present herself
convincingly to his mind as a very nice and thoroughly truthful young
girl! The enduring doubt as to what progress--if any--she made in this
praiseworthy task kept her zest for it keen.
As for Edward, if his estimate of his guest still held any elements of
uncertainty, it was not for want of thought upon the subject. How could
he help thinking of her? Was not she the one scarlet thing that stood
out saliently from the iron-grey background of his life? How could he
help, when on his daily downward journey from Paddington his evening
paper was finished, and even whilst “Telegrams” and “Stop Press” were
writing themselves on his retina--how could he help the ever-repeated
question asking itself, “Has she got into any fresh mischief to-day? If
she has, how can I hinder her telling me lies about it? Has she any more
glimmer of a sense of the existence of such things as truth and honour
than when she came to us?”
For the first week or two after the angry flitting of the Aylmer family
had been accomplished, Mr. Tancred had anxiously watched his wife,
partly in an intensifying of the compassion he always felt for her,
partly in a fear that the irritation of nerves caused by the break with
the inmates of the Dower House might wreak itself upon Bonnybell,
instead of--as he devoutly hoped it might, in pursuance of a habit of
fifteen years--upon himself. But he found with relief that his fears on
this head were groundless. Camilla, it is true, continued to snub her
pupil with unstinted liberality, and ruthlessly pruned away the little
fripperies with which Miss Ransome tried cautiously to qualify the
morose black of her mourning garb; but a smile forced its way oftener
than she was aware into her hard eyes when the girl entered the room;
and she never failed--whatever her effort to the contrary--to break into
that laugh of hers, so rare, hitherto, as to be almost terrifying, over
Bonnybell’s games and idiocies with Jock.
But to do Miss Ransome justice, her worst enemy could not deny that at
this period of her history she was a very agreeable inmate. The extreme
unpleasantness of her late experience, the fright it had caused her, and
the entire absence of an opportunity for a temptation to new errors,
combined to make her “conduct as the noonday clear.” It is not the
highest qualities which make men or women _facile à vivre_! The tender
conscience, the high ideal, the strong affections, when brought into
friction with the wrongnesses, the basenesses, the coldnesses of
everyday life, produce rubs to the temper which are avoided by the cool
heart, which does not care enough for anything to ache; the pliant
temper, which gives in because nothing matters much; the absence of
aspiration, which acquiesces pleasantly in the actual.
Bonnybell was, as her housemates more and more realized, a shining
instance of the value of small virtues in daily intercourse. She was
immovably good-tempered, invariably civil, always on the look-out for
opportunities for paying little attentions, light-hearted even beneath
the pressure of the severe affliction under which she was at present
labouring, yet subdued in her mirth as in her graceful movements. Even
her efforts to avoid her studies were made with the most shrinking
delicacy, and their frustration met with the quickest, sweetest
acquiescence; and lastly, her skill in applying antiseptic to Jock’s
wounds when the latter’s lifelong feud with the second coachman’s yellow
Irish terrier culminated in a battle, which, like Waterloo, “with
Cannae’s carnage vied,” was beyond praise. Now and again, indeed, but
more and more rarely in Camilla’s presence, some all too intimate trait
relating to the habits and haunts of a class never to be recognized as
existing by Mrs. Tancred’s school--some startling theory, fact, or
opinion, concerning population or the relations of the sexes, would slip
out. But these were but tiny blemishes upon the else spotless white of
her life and conversation.
So January passed, questionably enlivened by a few stiff
shooting-parties, during which the modestly proffered attentions of Miss
Ransome to the least attractive among the guests were patent to all
eyes, and reaped an immediate harvest of approbation; while her one or
two unlucky lapses from _jeune-fille-ism_ in conversation did not
transpire till long afterwards.
January was drawing to its close, when to the uneventful household at
Stillington the post brought one morning a piece of news which was
received and commented upon according to their different characters by
the three persons who learnt it. The news in question was communicated
by Mrs. Glanville, and announced the fact that, by the perfectly
unexpected accidental death of the head of his family, an unmarried
cousin less than half his age, her husband had come into possession of a
barony and a rent roll of thirty thousand a year.
“What a nuisance for the poor chap!” was Edward’s heartfelt exclamation.
Camilla said, dryly, that she hoped the command of so much money--since,
of course, given the weakness of Tom’s character, the whole disposition
of it would lie with her--might not lead Felicity into chimerical
schemes, like her Guild of St. Swithin, the members of which were to
devote half of every wet day to intercession for their erring sisters in
society.
Bonnybell’s contribution, though made half under her breath, was
unfortunately audible--
“They really ought to try to manage to set up an heir now!”
She was a little off her guard, suddenly dazzled by the brilliant
accession of consequence and fortune that had come to her former--nay,
as she had reason to know--her present admirer, and wondering whether or
not she had been wise in so firmly, though sweetly and sadly, refusing
the surreptitious correspondence that poor silly old Tom had pressed
upon her. Her ruminations were broken in upon by a short--
“You have a happy knack of giving an indelicate turn to what you say,”
Camilla said severely; “and if you have no more valuable contribution to
the subject to make, I think you would do well to be silent.”
Bonnybell bowed her head, and one shining tear dropped in her lap. It
was due less to the rebuke than to an inward reflection of what luck
some people had, and how it was thrown away upon them. Even better than
Felicity she could have turned old Tom round her finger; but to what a
different tune would she have set his gyrations!
The subject was not afterwards much discussed in the little circle, nor
did it at first appear to have much bearing on the three lives of which
that restricted circle was composed.
A wily hint from Miss Ransome as to the propriety of her paying a visit
of congratulation to the late Mrs. Glanville, now Lady Bletchley, in
acknowledgment of former hospitalities, was not taken up. It might so
easily have been combined with one of those trips to London which since
Christmas had been of bi-weekly occurrence. They were undertaken under
the strict surveillance of Camilla’s maid, and had for object the
receiving of lessons from masters, in addition to the private teaching
at home. As pleasures they were, in Bonnybell’s opinion, better than
nothing, but what a mockery in comparison of what they might have been!
Generally Edward returned by the same train, but as he invariably
travelled in a smoking-carriage, and drove himself home in a dog-cart,
her opportunities for those _tête-à-tête_ talks with him, for which her
zest was daily growing, were confined to a very few minutes’ pacing of
the Paddington platform together. There was the Sunday walk, indeed,
which had become a habit, and to which she looked forward with an
eagerness which she was obliged generally to explain away to herself.
“There is not really the slightest risk; he has himself well in hand;
and as for me, the only reason why I am fond of him is that he is not
like a man--at least, not like the bestial men I have known.”
Their course was almost always about the park, and through the whims and
variations of an English winter Bonnybell, had her senses ever been much
open to the sweet surprises of Nature, might have learnt how much beauty
even January holds in her hard lap; what wild fantasies of ice-flowers
on oak and beech, when sudden frost had surprised their wet boughs; what
pensive dignity of mist-enfolded coppice and spinney! She was generally
much too busy talking to be aware of any difference in the effects
presented to her eyes. One is happily not expected to admire in winter,
and so as the north wind did not succeed in piercing the astrachan fur
under her chin, nor the crisp grass wet too much the thick boots which
Camilla compelled her to wear, she asked no more of the outside world of
Stillington.
At first Edward had tried to open her perceptions to the phenomena
around her, attributing her obtuseness to the defectiveness of her
training; since the eye, strangely enough, has to be told what to see,
and the ear what to hear, quite as much as the brain what to admit and
assimilate. But a short time sufficed to show him the uselessness of the
attempt. Miss Ransome was, and was likely to remain, Nature-deaf and
Nature-blind! There was something even pathetic, or so it seemed to her
companion, in her efforts to do what was expected of her in the way of
appreciation; and though among what seemed to her the shivery
drearinesses of the winter snow it was difficult to guess what one was
expected to admire, yet her quick tact prevented her from falling into
any very gross error. She even, during a spell of hard weather, got up
quite a successful show of interest in tracking on the snow the
footsteps of some little animal which puzzled Edward; and though her
suggestion that perhaps it was a _loup garou_ did not help him much,
none the less was he grateful for the good fellowship shown by her aid
in the investigation.
At first, by a tacit united agreement, they had avoided the Dower House,
but one day, because it lay in the direction preferred by Jock, they
found themselves half-accidentally in its neighbourhood. It was on one
of the two showery Sundays that they found themselves looking up at its
gables and dormer-windows from the closed gates. The dead eyeless look
of a house whence the dwellers have departed was accentuated by the cold
layer of white that hid the beauty of the old grey slates of its
high-pitched roof, and by the many humps that indicated the whereabouts
of its garden-beds. A small but piercing air blew in their faces, chill
as the liking of the self-ejected friends, that had been wont to give so
warm a welcome to one of the two persons who peered silently through the
iron-work of the fine old gates.
“Let us come away,” Bonnybell said softly. “This must make you feel
bad.”
“And you?”
He turned and looked full at her, which he did not often do, and she
felt or imagined a glint of irony in his eye. It was not a happy moment,
perhaps, for the bringing up of the fable of her affliction. The snow
had had the exhilarating effect it mostly has upon dogs, and had made
Jock forget his years, and sent him plunging through little drifts and
scattering the frozen powder flying about his rejuvenated heels.
Bonnybell had no years to speak of to forget, and she had plunged and
frolicked too; and now stood betrayingly rosy and radiant, surveying the
casket of her lost treasure. Something in the tone as well as the eyes
of her companion in putting his apparently sympathetic question, sobered
her at once.
“You think that I ought not to be so cheerful?” she asked in a troubled
tone.
“I am very glad that you should be.”
The answer was not quite up to Edward’s usual standard of amiability;
nor could Bonnybell divine that it was irritation with himself at the
discovery of how little he really missed the Catherine of past Sundays
that gave a touch of ill-nature to his response. She took the faint
snub, as she always took all snubs, in unresenting silence; but when
they had turned away from the house, and were walking homewards, she
meekly took up her own defence.
“Do not you think that one is right, for the sake of the people one
lives with, not to show too plainly when one is unhappy?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And perhaps, in a way, it is not as great a blow to me as it might have
been to some one else, because I have no temperament.” She made this
singular confidence quite glibly and without any consciousness of its
being unusual. But, used as he now was to her, it startled Edward so
much that she was able to add thoughtfully, “Toby has a good deal.”
The shyness resulting from the reception of this obliging revelation was
on Mr. Tancred’s side, and it kept him dumb.
“The kind of love I should like to inspire,” continued Miss Ransome,
forgetting to kick the snow as she had been doing with childish
pleasure, “is the nice quiet sort that would look after me, and keep
disagreeable things and people away from me, and never expect anything
beyond; but”--with pensive regret, yet not the slightest
hesitation--“that is just the kind I never get; what I am offered is
always the other--the horrid sort.”
The winter dusk, though nearly due, was, owing to the snow-shine, a
little deferred; and it would have been impossible for any one looking
at him not to see that Mr. Tancred was growing very much out of
countenance. He wished he could stop her, but nothing came to him in
time to arrest the still more embarrassing revelation that followed.
“I am going to tell you something that will make you laugh,” she said in
a tone of frank and gently mirthful confidence. “Do you know that when
first I knew you, I thought that, of course, you would be like all the
rest! _I was afraid to be left alone in the room with you!_” She ended
with a glance at him of expectant enjoyment of his enjoyment of the
joke.
Exhilaration was not quite the leading characteristic of his
half-strangled answer.
“May I ask how soon you were undeceived?”