CHAPTER XII

“Well, what have you to say for your _protégée_ now?”

“Who is my _protégée_? Have I got one?”

There was weariness in the voice that answered; but neither that quality nor the patience that accompanied and emphasized it had any influence in persuading the putter of the question to desist or delay the communication which it prefaced.

Edward had come home dispirited and out of tune. It had been a bad day on the Stock Exchange, even the gilt-edged securities tumbling down; a rumour of the suicide of a member had been confirmed, and the sense of how little he himself risked, in comparison with the life-and-death struggle going on around him, which to many minds would have been a source of consolation, deepened Mr. Tancred’s gloom. He would have been glad to have been told something pleasant, however trivial, on his return.

But Camilla was not one of those wives who tactfully pick and choose the moments for imparting bad news. It would never have occurred to her that ill tidings told at night might probably rob the recipient of sleep, and that it would therefore be better to defer them till the morning. Such a reticence would have seemed to her to argue a want of moral courage on the part of both narrator and hearer. If anything untoward occurred to herself she wished to be told it at once, no matter whether she was sick or well, waking or sleeping; and she did as she would be done by.

“Miss Bonnybell has surpassed herself this time.”

“What has she done?” cried he, forgetting his pretence of not knowing to whom his wife was alluding, with a great heightening of his sense of out-of-tuneness, made up of fear of what he was going to hear and of exasperation with himself for minding so much what he ought to mind so little.

“Marian Aylmer and Catherine have been here to-day,” said Camilla, not falling into the procrastinating weakness which had been shown by the ladies alluded to, but going straight to the point.

“I thought Mrs. Alymer had an engagement in London?”

“So she had in the afternoon; but they came in the morning.” She paused, as if to let him absorb this fact, pregnant with significance of something abnormal and monstrous. “They came to make a formal complaint against”--“your _protégée_” was on the very edge of her lips, but perhaps some sudden impression of how fagged he looked prompted her at the very last moment to alter it to--“our guest.”

“What for?”

In his heart he knew that he was not very much surprised, recollecting the relieved tone of Bonnybell’s “That accounts for it!” in answer to his remark upon Meg Aylmer’s backwardness, on their homeward walk. He felt at the time with misgiving that it would be wiser not to ask what “it” was. Well, he was going to learn now.

“For corrupting Meg’s mind.”

“I did not know that Meg had a mind to corrupt,” he answered unwisely, and, with an instant awareness of his slip, added, “Miss Ransome must have been very quick about it, for she could not have been more than half an hour in the schoolroom, and the great and good Barnacre was there on guard all the time.”

“I only repeat the tale that was told me,” replied Camilla, with frosty impartiality. “She was overheard inoculating Meg with one of the worst of the current scandals of the day, dilating--no”--correcting herself with characteristic honesty--“there perhaps I am inexact; she probably had not time to dilate, but telling her how Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of ‘Waddy.’”

An odious inclination to vexed laughter assailed Edward: firstly at the ugly piquancy of the imputed criminal utterance as proceeding from such almost infantile lips, and secondly at the disproportion of such a pomp of disapproval as was implied by the “indignation meeting” alluded to. But the laughter impulse was a mere muscular contortion, and the annoyance killed it dead before he found words to comment on the charge. The accusation was grotesque--with the criminal’s antecedents, what else could they have expected?--but the peep given by it into her mind and its furniture hurt him all the same. The whole business, with its unnecessary parade and fuss, was a storm in a tea-cup, and yet it might have far-reaching consequences for the poor little culprit, and it was he that would have brought them on her. He knew that he ought to express abhorrence at the offence committed, and that the article which issued from the warehouse of his jaded mind was not the one expected.

“It is I that am to blame,” he said, a sharp self-reproach piercing through the natural languor of his tones. “I ought not to have introduced her to them; she had no wish for it.”

“She need not fear a repetition of the experience,” returned Camilla, folding her arms in that wrapper which she had assumed, having snatched ten minutes from the bare half-hour which she dedicated to dressing for dinner, in order to make an irruption with her Evangel into her husband’s quarters.

To Edward’s eye and mind that snuff-coloured _peignoir_ had something in common with the judge’s black cap. His wife seemed always to assume it when she pronounced sentence of death. Was she going to pronounce one now? If there was any chance of averting it, that chance would not lie in the direction of a too eager partisanship on his own part.

“You must remember,” he said with a cool gentleness of reminder, “that when you undertook this task you braced yourself to the making of discoveries that would more surprise than please you.”

“That is true,” she answered after a moment’s reflection. “If you had asked me, I should have told you that I was prepared for anything--bad habits, objectionable phrases, idleness, ignorance--her ignorance is _stupendous_.”

“I am sure it is.”

“I put her through a few elementary questions upon English history this morning. There were not many facts that she was sure of, but she was quite sure that King Richard II. had married Philippa of Hainault. I tried to explain to her that in the fourteenth century men did not marry their grandmothers, although it has become a very common practice to-day.”

The shaft went home, as it was intended. What had he done to deserve it? Did she suspect him of an intention, by servile acquiescence in her subsidiary charges, to lead her away from the main point at issue?

“But that is not the question now. What we are primarily concerned with--what was the object of Mrs. Aylmer’s visit--is to prevent a person for whom we have made ourselves answerable from spreading the infection of her own corruption to healthier households.”

The husband and wife were standing opposite to each other, but in their respective grace and ungrace, still in morning dress; a trivial irritation with her for making him late for dinner forming the warp of that annoyance of which her communication was the woof.

“Don’t you think that the whole thing is grossly exaggerated?” he asked with an accent where a lifelong habit of courtesy proved its value by helping him to an apparently quite good-tempered air of deference--“the pompous embassy, the inconsiderate breaking of your rules. No!”--recapitulation of his friend’s errors against good taste leavening the “sweet reasonableness” of his words with a perceptible indignation. “The whole way of setting about it was wrong, and not what I should have expected of an old friend like Mrs. Aylmer.”

“She was perfectly right,” rejoined Camilla, standing bolt upright under an electric burner, which made her look taller and scraggier than usual. “If a woman is granted the inestimable blessing of children, her first duty is to them, and besides----”

She paused. Should she tell him, as it was on the edge of her lips to do, what was the strict truth, that both the original idea of the indictment against Bonnybell and the vigour to carry it out had belonged to Catherine Aylmer and not to her mother? Should she or should she not? The neighbourhood was right. Catherine Aylmer would have made Edward a fit and congenial wife in the event of her own death, and Camilla was aware that her life was not a good one. The girl might still fill that office. Why, then, should the present tenant say anything calculated to prejudice Edward against her?

“Besides what?”

Mrs. Tancred had no powers of inventing, nor wish to invent, an altered utterance.

“I have thought better of what I was going to add,” she answered.

Silence followed. He had forgotten that she was making him late for dinner. All desire to check the flow of her communication had ceased, replaced by an awful curiosity for details.

“I suppose that they did not meet?”

“You are mistaken there; it was only fair to her that she should be confronted with them.”

The hearer hoped that the slight shudder he could not repress at the idea of this display of equity escaped detection.

“What happened?”

“Oh, she came bounding in, so delighted to see them. I explained to her at once that she had no great cause for elation at this visit. They must have felt rather like fools under her demonstration; they certainly looked it.” She stopped with a fierceish smile, as if the memory of her friend’s discomfiture were not at all disagreeable to her.

The picture rose in sharpest realism before Edward’s vision. The lovely little gay gladness coming frisking in, and its reception!

“And--and how did Miss Ransome take it?”

“She made no attempt to deny the charge.” After a moment, “Her excuse, if it can be called one, was that she had supposed every one to be acquainted with the ugly story. Perhaps every one is!” Another slight pause. “To do her justice, I do not think that she had any glimmering of a suspicion that there was any difference between ‘decent’ and ‘indecent’ in conduct or conversation.”

He bit his lip; protestation or extenuation would be fatal, and he attempted neither.

“And then?”

“Then--why, then they went. I do not think I ever saw people in quite such a hurry to be off.”

Again her tom-cat smile reappeared, and she went off wearing it, when she at length left him to his belated toilet.

* * * * *

“You have heard, I suppose?”

“Heard what?”

It was disingenuous of Edward to pretend ignorance of the subject of Bonnybell’s question, but though guiltily conscious of an acute curiosity as to the criminal’s version of the story, a grave doubt as to whether it would not be the wiser course to let such sleeping dogs lie, drove him into as much prevarication as was implied by his “Heard what?”

“If you have not heard, I think it would be a relief to me to tell you, if you would allow me.”

“Oh, but I _have_ heard!” he answered rather precipitately, uncomfortably aware that he was giving himself away by admitting knowledge of what he had a moment ago feigned ignorance of.

The scene was the morning-room after dinner on the same day. From that dinner Camilla had been summoned away by a messenger of ill from the village. She had left that small and rigidly plain portion of her own excellent food which she ever allowed herself without hesitation or regret, and was still absent, now that the tea-table was being placed in its usual position. Edward had not long rejoined his guest, who was sitting rather out of sight behind a screen, from beyond which her voice came low and plaintive. The few glances at her that he had allowed himself during dinner had told him--or he thought so--that her eyelids were a little reddened, though not to the extent of disfigurement. “I am one of the few people who can cry becomingly,” was her own dispassionate dictum, “and it will be disarming to look as if I had wept, and I am sure”--the waif feeling returning in some strength--“it will come easily enough; no one can ever have had better reason to do it.”

“I was silly enough to hope I had made a good impression.”

“I, too, quite thought so,” he answered mournfully, touched by the gentle humility of her confession of mistake.

“I dare say I should have continued in my fool’s paradise if Miss Aylmer had not persuaded her mother to come and complain of me.”

Bonnybell had not the generosity of Camilla, and the immediate effect of her words upon Miss Aylmer’s ally and supposed admirer filled her with a sincere and tranquil joy.

“Miss Aylmer!” he echoed with an unmistakable start. “Catherine Aylmer! Oh, you surely must be mistaken.”

For answer, he saw a lovely little dusky head shaking itself sadly from its seclusion.

“She was perfectly right--oh, do not think I am blaming her!--quite, _quite_ right, if she thought I was doing her sister harm; but oh, it is all such a different _milieu_ from what I have been used to! If you knew, if you could only guess, how utterly at sea I feel among you all.”

There was something in the forlorn and well-justified pathos in her tone that might have melted a harder heart, and affected a nature less sensitive to others’ sufferings than Edward’s. He rose out of the armchair into which he had tiredly let himself down on his first entrance, as if seeking relief from his emotion in a change of posture. (“Good Heavens!” thought she, “I have overdone it. I have been too affecting. I thought I was safe with him. One is never safe.”) But he only went and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the garlands and grouped figures of the Adams chimney-piece, and took a coat-tail pensively under each arm.

“I am afraid that it was inevitable at first,” he said at length with a faltering reassurance in his voice. “The plunge was too sudden; but things will right themselves in time, don’t you think?”

His manner was always tentative, and he had never in his life felt less sure of the truth of any proposition than of the one he was now advancing.

“Do you really think so?” she asked, once more relieved and astonished that her new fears of his harbouring purposes of enterprise were as baseless as her former ones. She added hesitatingly. “You could help me a good deal if you would.”

“I!”

“If--when you saw that I was going to make one of my blunders, you would make some sign to me to stop.”

His head was bent a little. It gave her the opportunity to notice how thickly and with what a pretty tendency to curl at the ends his hair clothed its crown. Her proposition had not the effect of lifting it.

“I do not quite see how that can be managed,” he answered in a key whose reluctance to disappoint her and an indubitable disapproval of her project strove for mastery.

“We could agree beforehand upon a little code of signals,” she went on, pushing aside the screen that had hitherto partly hidden her in the eagerness of persuasion. “If you passed your hand across your forehead, it would mean ‘Stop at once.’ If you pulled out your shirtcuff, it would mean ‘Make your sentence end in some different way from what you are going to.’”

Still his eyes did not lift themselves, nor did he give any sign of acquiescence. An uncomfortable sense of the horrible glibness--speaking of long use of such methods--with which she developed her little underhand plan was very present to him.

“I am afraid I do not quite like the idea.”

“Don’t you?” she answered humbly and sadly. “Then I am sure it is not a good one, but if you do not consent to help me in some way--to give me some sort of rule to guide me--I shall always be getting into fresh disgrace with Mrs. Tancred; and--old people are so very easily shocked.”

He lifted the head whose well-furnished top she had been admiring now, and looked at her with a disapproval which, if gentle, was very unmistakable.

“I think, if you do not mind, that I had rather you did not speak of my wife quite like that.”

Her heart sank, and the flustered desire to repair her error led her into a far graver one.

“Now I have made an enemy of you too,” she said, “and Heaven knows that is the last thing I wish to do; but--but she looked so much more like your mother.”

Miss Ransome had touched the _raw_ of her host’s whole life.