Felicity’s obsequies had been celebrated with due pomp, and--fate still
continuing in her ironic vein--Lady Bletchley’s first visit to the most
imposing of her new country houses--there were half a dozen of them--was
made under circumstances which precluded all enjoyment of its beauties.
As Miss Ransome noted the throng of delegates and journalists who
crowded round Felicity’s grave, and glanced at the inscriptions on
gigantic wreaths sent by societies and institutions, she repeated to
herself with less of cynicism than sincere compassion, “Poor thing, how
she would have enjoyed it!”
And now the mourners were back again in Hill Street, and feeling the
dull relief that ensues after an ended ordeal.
Edward, who had been with the widower, had just received and obeyed a
summons to Camilla. He found her lying on the sofa in her dressing-room.
She was doing it thoroughly, as she did everything; that is to say, she
lay perfectly flat, with her head resting on a cushion; but her
attitude managed to express a protest which proclaimed that its adoption
was due solely to doctor’s orders, and as little as possible to any
inclination towards self-indulgence.
“How is he now?”
“Oh, he’ll be all right.”
“Is he calmer?”
“Yes, now and then. He has just been telling me of a new man whom his
keeper has heard of to get pheasants’ eggs from.”
Mrs. Tancred looked at her husband with penetrating surprise. She had
never known Edward intolerant before; yet there was not much warmth of
compassion in his tone. To one of Edward’s nature, noise and grief were
impossible companions, and his brother-in-law’s uncontrolled
demonstration at the graveside had, as Camilla was aware, been almost
intolerable to her husband.
“Sorrow affects people in different ways,” she said, with a rebuke which
was gently meant, though it sounded, as her mildest utterances always
did, severe and didactic.
“Yes, I know; but he made such an exhibition of himself.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“You will be glad to get back to Stillington?”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“We must take Bonnybell with us.”
At that he gave--not a stage start, but one of those almost invisible
movements for which stage starts are meant to stand.
“We cannot, of course, leave her here.”
There was no form of ejaculation or assent in the whole range of
language strong enough to express Mr. Tancred’s acquiescence in this
impossibility, so he said only--
“No.”
“I have not yet talked to her about her plans; if she has made any--and
I doubt her having gone even so far--they are probably perfectly
irrational and chimerical.”
“I dare say.”
“I do not even know--the intercourse between us has been so slack of
late--whether--under your sister’s auspices--she has made any friends
that could be useful or helpful to her.”
Any one but Camilla would at such a moment have prefixed a “poor” to
Felicity’s name; but Mrs. Tancred would have scorned to employ the
adjective to any him or her simply because they were dead. To her it
seemed a very doubtful ground for compassion.
Edward shook his head.
“Under the circumstances, I think there is no doubt that it is our duty
to have her back, at all events, for a while.”
This time the hearer gave at first no sign of either acquiescence or
dissent; then he spoke--not easily.
“But _you_? how about _you_?”
“_How about me?_” she repeated. “You know that for the present my malady
seems to be at a standstill; whether owing or not to the treatment I
have been undergoing I cannot tell; personally I believe it to be only
what I suppose would be called a _reprieve_, and that the operation,
which lately seemed imminent, is only deferred for a more or less brief
period. Anyhow, the fact remains, that I have no longer an excuse for
avoiding duties disagreeable or otherwise; and I believe the case we are
discussing comes under one or other of those heads.”
There could be no doubt in the husband’s mind under which head the
return of Miss Ransome was mentally classed by his wife, though she
magnanimously refrained from specifying it.
“It is like you to propose it,” he answered slowly; but more laggingly
still, “I cannot see why you should embitter your life for the sake of a
person who, after all, has no real claim upon you.”
Camilla looked at him with a calm compassion, accurately gauging what an
utterance in such absolute discord with his own clearly divined
inclinations had cost him.
“My life is not so easily embittered,” she rejoined quietly, “and I have
never wished or expected personal enjoyment to have a very prominent
part in my programme--you need not feel any disquiet on that head--and
besides”--her usual rigid truthfulness combining with a wish to meet her
companion’s self-sacrificing utterance in a like spirit to produce the
concluding, “and besides, there is much about the girl as an inmate that
is not disagreeable to me.”
If he had followed his impulses, he would have broken out into emphatic
expressions of gratitude; but realizing just in time what a frightful
lapse from taste and seemliness it would involve to accept as a personal
kindness done to himself the contemplated step, he refrained.
“It shall be, of course, as you wish,” he said, and so left the room.
He left the house too, the confinement of walls and roof seeming
unbearable. He must have open air and solitude in which to bring himself
face to face with the new prospect, at which in his wife’s presence he
had trusted himself to give only a glance. What right had he to think it
so fair? He must call mightily upon Reason and Honour to cudgel him, if
necessary, out of so mad and ruinous a belief. But they might cudgel him
as they would--and they did belabour him soundly during the next
hour--nothing could hinder him from looking at the Great Scheme of
Things from a different standpoint to that with which he had regarded it
as he remorsefully followed his too-little-loved sister’s hearse! Since
those moments of woolly despair what had happened to better his lot or
brighten his prospects? What had happened, but that a young girl of
vicious origin and upbringing, standing upon a hopelessly low plane of
thought and action, a young girl who had brought discomfort and scandal
into his home, alienated his friends, and poisoned his wife’s peace, was
to be given the opportunity of pursuing and completing her work of
disintegration! What but this had happened to make “the March sun shine
like May,” to turn the dry easterly blast into a zephyr? Reason and
Honour combined to answer emphatically, “Nothing, less than nothing!”
but another voice out-shouted them, _dumbing_ them with its insistent
joyous asseveration, “Everything!” This voice was so impossible to
silence, that at last he was reduced to listening to it, to asking it
what it had to say for itself; and it began lengthily to explain. There
were, certainly, disadvantages inseparable from the girl’s resumption of
her place at his fireside--he tried to school himself into treating her
in his innermost thoughts merely as “the girl”--but there would be good
to be extracted from it too, if it was taken in the right way. Never
could she hope to be under such wholesome and elevating an influence as
his wife’s; and he himself might do something too, if he took the
relation in the right way. Everything depended on taking it in the right
way! He would begin at once--the very next time that they met--to set it
upon a safe basis; to give the keynote of their future intercourse, and,
with her extraordinary quickness and brightness, she would at once catch
the right tone and keep it. God knows he had tried to do his best for
her; to give her some notion of honour and truth, and decent living; and
he _had_ made _some_ progress. She lied still, but she said fewer
indecent things; and she tried with such sweet docility to see his point
of view, when she managed to grasp what it was.
Thank God, he had nothing to reproach himself with, nothing, that is,
that was visible or audible to any human eye or ear; but sometimes the
ground had seemed to be crumbling into sand under his feet. Henceforth
the foundation on which he and she were together to stand was to be of
granite; and if, by-and-by, he were to succeed--he and his wife
together--in leading her on and up, till her mind and moral nature more
nearly matched her exquisite body, what an entrancing little friend she
would make for them both! how she would soothe and brighten their waning
years!
To be quite on the safe side, he framed to himself the fiction that
Camilla and he were coeval. That there should be any delay in embarking
on this halcyon plan seemed unendurable, and he began at once to reflect
upon the earliest train by which he and his augmented party might return
to Stillington on the morrow.
It was in the highest degree unseemly to suspect Tom, at such an infant
stage of his loud sorrow and early widowhood; but Edward knew his
brother-in-law well enough to be quite sure that the lapse of a very few
days would see him--if Bonnybell wore an apron--drying his eyes upon a
corner of it. So Mr. Tancred wondered whether his wife would think the
8.50 train too early.
Meanwhile, the cause of Mr. Tancred’s self-schoolings was in no danger
of incurring a remorse like his for being too cheerful. She was alone in
a sitting-room, which had been occupied by her during the last two or
three days, because, since it looked to the back, its blinds had not
needed to be pulled down, and she was sitting in an attitude of, for
once, entirely unstudied dejection. Since no one was likely to intrude
upon her, she might be and look just as miserable or as little miserable
as she felt inclined. The quantum of grief expressed by her whole person
was enough to have satisfied even the claims of Tom’s gluttonous demands
upon his friends for a sorrow as vociferous as his own.
For once Miss Ransome’s philosophy was quite out of gear, and her
spirits had descended below the soles of her feet, and abode there. She
had cried a good deal, though not in public--a thing which she always
disliked. Private weeping could serve no purpose of cajoling,
persuading, or mollifying, and was likely to be damaging to that stock
in trade of which her eyes formed so valuable an item; and she had hated
the funeral. It had reminded her of poor Claire’s, though, except in the
main fact, no other functions could ever have differed more widely; and
for “Claire” in her small, cool heart, there always lingered a remnant
of rueful pity, though it never ran to the length of wishing to have her
back again.
Tom’s deportment and appearance at the ceremony had been as repulsive to
her as to his brother-in-law. Why, in Heaven’s name, if he were so
overwhelmed with grief at the loss of a wife, his tenderness to whom
while in life had been eked out by so many fond by-plays with others,
could not he control it as an English gentleman of his class and
breeding was bound to do? Why, in the face of that large and reverent
gathering, need he have roared like a bull and blubbered like a whipped
schoolboy? And why, oh, why need Edward and he have stood side by side,
so as to bring into monstrous prominence the contrast between them? Not
even grief had succeeded in paling Tom, and the image of his rubicund
face defaced by tears, of his bulky outline and shining bared head
beside the silent pale dignity of Edward’s sorrow, filled Bonnybell with
physical disgust.
Her thoughts moved on a little from the funeral to a scene that followed
the return from it. “Poor old woman, she really did not do it badly,
considering how little practice she has had in pretending. I could have
given her a few hints, but it really was a very creditable performance;
and in a way I think it was a disappointment to her to forego continuing
my education. Never again can she hope to have a pupil who set off by,
and meant to go on, knowing as little as I!”
Upon the hitherto unlightened gloom of her spirits there played a little
ray of cynic mirth, but the gust of a heavy sigh blew it out. “But what
a relief too! I saw a sort of shining come into her poor old eyes--they
are not nearly so hard and horny as they were when first I knew
them--and when she at last took in that I was in earnest, that the
Slammers’ invitation was not one of my tasteful embroideries, how hard
she tried not to beam too flagrantly!”
A pause, and then a still heavier sigh than the last. “I was right,
undoubtedly I was right. It would have been madness. It may be all very
well for people who have a high level, and think they can keep up to
it--it would still remain to be proved if they could--but as for me, I
never had any level to speak of, and I do not possess that confidence in
myself which I once had. I believe I am quite capable of committing a
_sottise_ if I put myself in the way of it; and at this time of the year
I suppose all those horrid birds in the copse would be love-making, and
it might have been catching.”
As she spoke, the door gently opened; and, since the sitting-room was a
general one there was nothing strange in the fact, the object of her
thoughts came in.
“I was looking for you.”
“Were you?”
“My wife will have told you that we hope, unless you have any objection
to the plan, to take you back to Stillington with us to-morrow, and I
have come to ask you if the 8.50 from Paddington would be too early for
you.”
He had got the right key, hospitable and courteous, erring perhaps a
little on the side of excess in the way of formality, but that was a
fault on the safe side.
Before he spoke, Bonnybell had known that he had not yet heard, and that
it would be her task to tell him. She saw also, with a slight tinge of
bitter amusement, his anxiety not to let their point of departure for
the long ordeal ahead of them be one of too great intimacy. (“Reassure
yourself, my poor Edward; you may set your mind at rest.”)
The lack of her usual civil promptness in acknowledging a courtesy
caused him a slight surprise, but it was so far not coupled with any
misgiving. It did not need any of that self-esteem in which Edward was
so singularly lacking to feel sure that his hearer could have no
alternative plan which she would think preferable to the one now offered
her, so he added, still with that _soupçon_ of formality--
“I ought to apologize for suggesting such an unreasonable hour.”
Consciousness of his endeavour to keep her at arm’s length gave her the
strength to show him the needlessness of his precautions, though her
mode of opening the subject was misleading.
“You always thought me rather a sluggard,” she said softly; “do you
remember?”
But no “do you remembers” were to enter into his programme, and though
more against the grain than he liked to own, he cut this one short.
“I never could understand why there is a virtue _per se_ in getting up
early.”
“No,” she answered, acquiescing sweetly in the lopping off the head of
her bud of reminiscence; “there are enough real virtues and vices,
aren’t there, without loading us with mock ones?”
He had led the talk to a safe abstraction, yet already he felt the
strain.
“It is settled, then?”--taking for granted with unconscious
arbitrariness what she had _not_ said--“8.50.”
To his intense surprise and alarm her answer was to rise from the depths
of her chair--what a little slip of a thing she looked in her new
mourning! Launce’s description of his sister, “White as a lily and small
as a wand,” darted across Edward’s mind--and drawing near him, she laid
her hand upon his coat-sleeve. Evidently the keeping at arm’s length
would be a harder task than he had promised himself.
“No, it is not settled,” she said; “nothing about it is settled except
that you have made one poor creature even more everlastingly your debtor
than she was before by proposing it.”
He looked back at her aghast, yet only half believing, unconscious of
what at any other moment he would have been tinglingly aware, the clasp
of her fingers on his arm. He knew her to be so complete a liar, that
the mere fact of her announcing that she did not purpose to return to
Stillington was, as likely as not, to mean that she had every intention
of doing so. Was this refusal one of her infinite wiles to lure him into
cajoling and caressing her into compliance?
“Am I to understand that you have made other plans?” His voice was
frosty; too frosty, perhaps, or it seemed so to himself, for he added
more in his own manner, “I beg your pardon for what may sound like an
impertinent intrusion, but you have taken me by surprise.”
The chill in his tone had loosened her clasp upon his sleeve, and they
stood near but apart from one another.
“I am going to stay with the Slammers.”
“The Slammers?”
There was such hopeless bewilderment in his repetition of the name that
she felt the need of enlightening him.
“I am stupid to-day; probably you have never heard of them. I was
forgetting how little you know of the life here of late.”
“You need not remind me that I was a neglectful brother,” he answered,
in a key of such profound regret that she took refuge from her dangerous
pity of him in explanation.
“They are, in a way, connections of mine--at least, he is; his name was
Ransome before he married her. He was, like the rest of the family, not
a very shining light, I believe, but now he has ranged himself, I
suppose, and she is very philanthropic and platformy and religious.”
He received the blow in total silence, being not one of those who cry
out when they are hurt. When at last he spoke, it was with a measured
impartiality, which sounded to himself grossly overdone.
“I suppose that you are the best judge of what makes for your
happiness.”
“One ought not to think of one’s own happiness,” she answered, in her
“nicest” manner; then with a flash of self-ridicule for serving up so
coarsely dressed a dish of “goodness” to one who knew her much too well
to swallow it, she added with a laugh, whose hysteric quality, if half
affected, was also half natural--“at least, so Mrs. Slammer tells her
husband when she whips off her _cordon bleu_ half an hour before dinner
to see the Monument.”
Her mental comment on her own speech--for she was not one with whom
thought and word ever flowed parallel--ran thus: “What atrocious taste
to be making bad jests to poor Felicity’s brother on the day of the
funeral! but if I am not flippant, God knows what I may say or do!”
He stood before her absolutely still, not moving a muscle at her dull
pleasantry.
“Have you thought it well over? Are you quite sure that it would not be
better for you to come back with us to Stillington to-morrow?”
Once again the calm aloofness of his tone sounded overdone to Edward’s
ear, but it did not for a moment take in his hearer. (“Poor fellow, how
hard he is trying to be good! I suppose it is a beautiful sight, and I
must not be outdone.”) There was the gentlest rebuke in her sorrowful
little voice as she answered--
“I know that you are not likely to be joking to-day; but when you ask
that you seem to be mocking me.”
“Then why do you refuse?”
She dropped her eyes to the carpet, and gave him the opportunity of
verifying that the large white lids were a little swollen and
discoloured with weeping. He had to count thirty clock-beats before her
answer came. (“If I give in now, I am done for,” she was saying to
herself. “At the present moment I feel as if Edward would make up for
everything; as if nothing in the world would be of any value without
him, but _I know all the while that I do not really think so_.”) She
raised her eyes slowly, as if tears made them difficult to lift.
“It would be better for me; but would it be better for Camilla?”
In the tension of the moment neither of them noticed Bonnybell’s
unwonted use of Mrs. Tancred’s Christian name. (She must have been
mistaken in thinking that Edward looked white as he stood by his
sister’s grave. If he was white then, what was he now?)
“Do not misunderstand me,” she went on, almost under her breath, but
quite distinctly; “what I mean to say is that I do not see how things
are changed since I was sent away because she was too ill to have the
worry and anxiety of me.”
If Bonnybell’s eyes had found it hard to raise themselves, Edward’s lips
found it harder still to frame the few words of his response.
“She is in stronger health than she was then.”
“For the moment, yes; but it may be only a reprieve. She told me herself
that she looked upon it only as a reprieve.”
In the eagerness and real emotion with which she was putting forth her
apology, Miss Ransome forgot for the moment to postulate the supposable
regret which she had always believed to be non-existent in the mind of
the husband at the probability of his wife’s death; yet for a moment
that oversight gave the husband an acute revulsion of feeling.
“God grant she may be wrong!” he said with a low fervency which, as his
hearer felt, could not have been put on. She saw her error, and
hastened to repair it.
“I was going to say you cannot wish it more than I do!”--with a slight
low laugh at the exaggeration of her own expression--“but I do wish it
with all my heart! I should be a monster of ingratitude if I did not.”
It was very nearly true. Since Camilla’s death could in no wise profit
her, and the memory of her solid kindliness was fresh and vivid, Miss
Ransome did wish, with as much sincerity as she was capable of, that
Camilla should live, and not die, if she thought such a life as hers
worth having.
After that there was not much more to be said, and in a few moments he
left her. Neither by the 8.50 nor by any other train was she to return
to his hearth’s side. As he reached the door she called softly after
him; since she was quite safe now she might give herself that slight
indulgence--
“Give my love to the birds. I hope that your next pupil will be quicker
in learning your lessons about them.”
He answered, “I shall never have another pupil;” and it was to his
credit that this was the nearest he ever went to a declaration.