CHAPTER XI

Thus it was not the task-mistress, but a mere footman, whose approaching tread struck compunctious fear into the breast of the pseudo-student in the east gallery--a footman who simply requested her presence in the morning-room, coupling with his message the information that Mrs. and Miss Aylmer were there.

This ambiguous piece of news was enough to drive Jutes and Angles from a mind on which they had a firmer clutch than could be said of Miss Ransome’s. Mrs. and Miss Aylmer calling at half-past eleven in the morning! What could the infringement of what had been already impressed upon her as an iron law of Mrs. Tancred’s life portend? With a sinking heart the vision of pig-tailed Meg making her abrupt exit from the Dower House schoolroom upon an obviously vamped-up errand presented itself once more to her inward sight. Had they come to complain of her for corrupting that gaping goose’s mind?

The footman was gone, and she laughed out loud and clear. _Impossible!_ What had she said that was not matter of common knowledge to all the world? A brighter possibility suggested itself. Perhaps--Mrs. Aylmer’s manner to herself had been friendly, almost caressing--perhaps they had taken a fancy to her, had pitied her sore bondage, had come to rescue her, to propose some pleasant plan--a plan that would include Toby, or leading up to others that would include him!

“I look more young and innocent with my hair a little dishevelled,” she said, carefully pulling out a strand and letting it amble down the back of her neck.

Having smeared a drop or two of ink on the middle finger of her right hand to give the idea of past obedience to Camilla’s suggestion of taking notes as she read, Miss Ransome, having wasted only two minutes on her preparations, flew along the endless passages and down the slippery polished stairs in prompt and cheerful obedience. Short as had been the interval between her being sent for and her arrival, it had seemed phenomenal in length to the three people making forced conversation during it--conversation all the harder for being so out of character with their usual easy intimacy.

Bonnybell, on her downward flight, had quickly decided that it would be wisest to come in impulsively, and with no hint of a suspicion that the motive for her production could be other than a pleasant one. She carried her intention out admirably, and the graceful, young cordiality of her greeting to the visitors, with its respectfully grateful stage aside to Mrs. Tancred, “How good of you to let me know!” could not be improved upon. But the first touch of the visitors’ limp hands, the first glance at their overset countenances, told her that her earliest and worst supposition was the true one, and that the object of their coming was not to invite her to gambols with Toby, but to arraign her for some crime against their stupid and unintelligible code. The accusing forms of Waddy and Cressida rose before her, and she said to herself with an inward groan, “What an ass I was to cast my pearls before such swine!”

Meanwhile the “swine” might provoke pity in their worst enemy; and Camilla allowed a moment or two to elapse, perhaps with a touch of malice, perhaps only while gathering herself to strike, before she relieved them from their cruelly false position.

“I do not think you need be so very glad to see Mrs. Aylmer,” she said with a dryness in comparison of which the desert sand was juicy. “She has come upon an errand that is not particularly pleasant for either herself or you.”

The light died out of Miss Ransome’s face; she was careful that it should do so gradually, to keep up the impression of complete unsuspiciousness. With the little escaped tendril of hair straying over her white _nuque_, and her immense and gentle eyes widely opened, she looked like a child whom some ruffian had with unexplained brutality hit and hurt. (“I am sure that I cannot be looking a day over fifteen.”) She made no protest, deciding to be too stunned for that, but only turned from one to another in innocent astonished alarm.

“Mrs. Aylmer has come to lay a very grave charge against you,” continued Camilla, in an awful voice. “She will explain to you.”

There was nothing in the world that Mrs. Aylmer at the present moment relished less than the task thus imposed upon her. In her angriest moments she had never contemplated having to bring the accusation with this horrible publicity against the poor child herself. “She looks such a mere child! not a day more than fifteen!” A quiet remonstrance with Camilla upon the subject had been all she had bargained for; and now to be suddenly summoned to stick a knife into this pretty, fragile, motherless creature who had run up to her with such a sweet sureness of welcome, such pretty open pleasure,--this poor little waif whom she felt so much more inclined to take into her warm motherly arms! No, it was more than human nature could stand.

“It was Catherine who heard. Catherine knows better than I; she will tell you,” was all that Catherine’s mother was able to produce.

Miss Aylmer, to do her justice, had no zest for the deputed duty, but as she had in the first instance been less attracted than her parent by the young sinner, so was it less impossible to her to be “faithful” in the discharge of the unpleasant feat they had come expressly to perform.

“I could not help overhearing what you were saying to Meg.”

The great eyes opened wider in a helpless lack of comprehension, and there was an air of painful puzzledom about the delicate brows knit in the effort to recall any utterance that could have given offence.

“What--I said--to Meg?”

Happen what might, she would not make it easier for this squinting prude, who had given her away. It was in these harsh terms that her own distress of mind made her qualify the very nearly invisible cast in Miss Aylmer’s left eye.

“You were telling her things that I thought--that I knew--my mother would think she had better not hear.”

“I am very, _very_ sorry!”--in a low key of meek apology that was yet completely at sea as to the ground of that apology. “But what sort of things?”

“You told her that Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of Waddy.”

The colour died out of Bonnybell’s cheek, a feat which not even she would have been able to perform, but which a very real dismay executed for her. Good-bye, Toby! Good-bye, probably the very roof that now covered her! Here lies would avail her nothing. Here innocence, penitence, and brass must go hand-in-hand; and it was too likely that not even that trio would be strong enough to drag her out of the swamp into which she had fallen neck-deep.

“But he does!” she answered, her startled-fawn air and her apparent fifteen years giving a piquancy, if any of her present hearers were in a condition to appreciate it, to her scandalous words. “I thought that everybody knew it. Why, people always ask them to their houses together; quite _good_ people do.”

There was a horrid silence, broken at first only by Miss Aylmer’s long breath of relief at the accomplishment of a hateful duty, and its immediately following justification. To the eye of faith, Camilla might have been almost seen lifting her bludgeon. It fell.

“Because a blatant indecency is nowadays the key-note of a certain section of society,” she said with an eye-flash that literally scorched its unlucky object, “there is no need for you to introduce its pollution into our midst; if you have the misfortune to possess a mind full of unsavoury knowledge, I must at least request you to keep it within the bounds of that mind.”

The young girl stood shivering with bowed head under the blast of this blizzard. She could not help shivering a little, but had still presence of mind enough to shiver even more than she _could_ help, particularly as a restless movement and a sort of sigh coming from the direction of Mrs. Aylmer gave her a faint hope that to one at least of her accusers the punishment that had overtaken her seemed excessive in its severity.

“I was brought up a good deal abroad,” Bonnybell whispered faintly. “I am afraid that I do not yet quite understand English ways.”

“That is nonsense,” replied Camilla, very harshly, but yet not quite with the awful voice-quality of her former Philippic--“sheer nonsense. The standard for the behaviour of young girls in France is a far stricter one than ours.”

“Then I can say nothing!” rejoined the poor child in a voice of despair, folding her slight hands, and really not for the moment noticing how advantageously the ink-stain on the middle finger of the right hand was introduced to notice by this gesture. But Camilla saw the tell-tale spot--tell-tale of obedience and honest effort, and it caused her an odd qualm of pity.

Probably the accusers found the situation too poignantly unpleasant for further endurance, which was also, since their work was done, needless. A murmured proposition to depart from the mother was followed by a murmured consent from the daughter. There was a little natural difficulty about their farewells, and in the moment of hanging back which resulted, and before this problem was solved by Camilla’s shaking hands with them and saying in a hard, conscientious voice, “You were perfectly right. I am glad that you had the courage to tell me. You shall have no cause for further complaint,” Bonnybell realized that before the clock had ticked thirty times she would be left alone with her judge and executioner to hear what awful sentence of hopeless doom?

With an impulse which had less of calculation in it than in any of her actions, words, or gestures, since her first entry, though even here there was a little, she slipped across the intervening space to the one person in whom she had divined some bowels of compassion, _i.e._ Mrs. Aylmer, and spoke tremblingly, yet not without a forlorn dignity.

“I am very, _very_ sorry for having made such a bad return for your goodness in giving me so kind a welcome; but indeed, indeed I did it in ignorance!”

“I am quite sure you did,” replied the other precipitately, conquering her desire to throw her arms round the criminal and give her several hearty kisses only by a very fast retreat to the door; “and I would have given anything that--that _this_ had not happened!”

Mrs. Aylmer must be a foolish woman, for she cried the whole way back to the Dower House.

There remained the executioner and the gallows bird. Camilla had sat down. Judges always sit, but, on the other hand, hangmen always stand. A grotesque wonder flitted through Bonnybell’s mind as to how a person who united the two functions could harmonize this discrepancy in practice? There followed an absolute silence. Camilla did not even look at her. She sat with the “starers” she had taken off lying in her lap, absently rubbing their glasses with her pocket-handkerchief. Was her wrath too deep for even further vituperation? Would it be satisfied only by a dumb ejection from her house and protection?

As the moments passed this seemed to the girl waiting the pronouncement of her doom the only possible solution, and after a time she lifted up, if such a phrase can apply to anything so low and faint, her little pathetic voice.

“Must I go to-day, or will you let me stay till to-morrow--to make arrangements?”

Camilla lifted her eyes, out of which the fire and sword had gone, but whose expression was inscrutable to the quaking would-be reader of their meaning.

“Where would you go to?”

The cool common sense of the inquiry brought home to Miss Ransome more strongly than ever before the sense of her own waifness. She threw out her hands hopelessly in front of her.

“Where indeed?”

The action once more brought the inky ensign of her studiousness into prominence, and this time it really served as a lifebuoy. Not that Camilla said anything that spoke of relenting; but some indefinable change in the atmosphere that surrounded the rigid figure in the armchair, still rubbing its goggles, emboldened the poor sinner to put up a quivering plea in her own defence.

“I have not had many advantages; it was not poor Claire’s fault”--with a hasty recurrence of that feeling that it was against the rule of the game to impute blame to the helpless dead. “She was too ill latterly to understand about anything--but--I have not had much of a chance.”

For once--except in that pardonable gloss upon the habits of her late mother--the girl was speaking God’s truth, and so strong and immediate was the effect of her appeal that neither Mrs. Tancred nor herself perceived that she had used the tabooed Christian name.

When the answer came, Bonnybell knew that neither to-day nor to-morrow would find her _sur la pavé_, as she herself would have worded it.

“You shall have a chance now; it will lie with yourself to profit by it.”

There was both dignity and kindness of a severe sort in voice and mien; and to the reprieved criminal the relief was so immense that she fell incontinently on the floor at her benefactress’s feet. Mrs. Tancred left her there, and hurried out of the room, in evident distaste for the prostration.

No sooner was she gone, than Miss Ransome picked herself up.

“That was another mistake,” she said. “Will there be no end to them? Oh, how did I live through it? Oh, what a near squeak! Oh for a cigarette!”