CHAPTER XIII

Of the three denizens of Stillington its owner took by far the easiest mind to bed with her. She had accepted the presence of Bonnybell, with all its attendant ills, in the same spirit as she would have accepted the loss of her fortune, an infidelity of Edward’s, or some dire blain or boil upon her own body. Bonnybell had been sent here by the same Unerring Wisdom that would have sent her any of the other possible afflictions, and she had only to adjust her back to the burden.

Miss Ransome had no such consciousness to support her as, with an inexpressible yearning for the soothing properties of tobacco, she sat in the huge chintz chair by her bedroom fire, taking stock of her errors, and their probable consequences.

“I shall bring him round in time, I suppose,” she reflected. “But what a surprise! Who would have thought he would have taken up the cudgels for his old lady’s juvenility so violently? Violent is not the word. I should not think he could ever be violent; and yet those lackadaisical eyes gave a fine flash when I suggested that she was not quite a slip of a girl! I must pretend for the future that she looks sixteen, or”--more shrewdly--“I had better not meddle with the subject again at all to him.” A lugubrious stare into the fire, with inky hair still unbuilt for the night, and hands clasped round slender lace-and-satin-clad knees. (Bonnybell’s _peignoir_ would not own Camilla’s, even as a poor relation.) “After all, I believe the old camel will prove the easier of the two to get round. I did not half dislike her when she stood glowering over me as I grovelled on the floor, and told me I should have a chance--it will be an uncommonly disagreeable chance”--with a backward glance thrown by memory at her hours of evaded study in the dull schoolroom, ending in the grisly ordeal of confrontation with her accusers--“but such as it is, I must hold on to it until something better turns up.”

When will that be? Not, certainly, on the morrow of her exposure; that brought only a dictation lesson, which threw Röntgen rays of unexampled brutality upon her orthography; brought also a bluntly worded inquiry from Camilla, in allusion to a slight tinting which her late paling experiences had made seem admissible, as to whether she had “forgotten to wash her face?” A still less delicately worded hope followed, in answer to Miss Ransome’s explanation that the wind must have caught her cheeks, a caustic hope that the “zephyr” in question might remain prisoned in its cave during her stay in her present quarters. A further piece of advice to commit it to the flames with the least possible delay displayed the discourtesy of an entire disbelief in Miss Ransome’s interpretation of her heightened roses.

The charge and its feeble parry took place in Edward’s presence; but he did not attempt the smallest share in the engagement. Not a rustle of the paper he was reading; not the least fidgeting on his chair, not an eye-glance nor a lip-biting gave evidence of any inward protest against the “baiting” that was being undergone by one whom he had yesterday seemed inclined to shield and pity. Throughout the day--or rather throughout that small part of it when he was at home and in her presence--he treated her with a perfect but distant courtesy, and so through the next and the next.

“Oh, how careful one ought to be!” she sighed to herself ruefully. “One would have thought that the one perfectly safe thing to do was to laugh at a wife to a husband, or at a husband to a wife, but in this dreadful place there are no rules, only exceptions!”

When the third day showed no sign of a relaxation of her host’s gentle austerity, Miss Ransome grew desperate. She was returning in drag-footed boredom from a walk in the shrubberies to the extreme end of which she had been lured by the distant sound of guns. It was unlikely that the park should be shot in its master’s absence; but triggers were being pulled somewhere within hearing, and one of them might be by Toby! It was on neutral ground alone that she could now have a chance of pursuing that chase which she was so loth to abandon. It was possible that if she walked far enough into the park in the direction of the Dower House, she might intercept him on his homeward way. Her intention to make the attempt held out while she followed a long walk that wound with the slow midland rivulet, that it was long ago cut to accompany on its sluggish course through the pleasure-grounds, until a little bridge across the stream, and a rustic gate on its further side giving access to a copse that led into the Park, were reached. But, having attained this point, her resolution failed. The light was thickening. Some one had told her that this was the season when the stags--heard even from here belling loudly--were dangerous to meet. Even the very off-chance of being rescued by Toby from hoofs and antlers made it scarcely worth while to incur the probability of being tossed by the one and trampled by the other. She turned sadly away, wafting a sigh in the direction of the renounced prize, and breathing the silent, pensive ejaculation, “Oh, you great lout, if you only knew what was good for you!”

She retraced her steps through the humid gloom of the laurels, and by the dimming, dull water. Near the house--but not very near--just where two giant cedars stood on each side of the path, making twilight into midnight beneath their shade, she met Edward.

“You thought I was lost!” cried her little voice in trepidating pleasure. “You came to look for me! How _more_ than kind!”

“I am afraid that I did not even know you were out,” he answered, stepping hastily out of the patch of darkness and throwing away the end--or a good deal more than the end--of his cigarette. Both actions seemed to her unnecessary and undesirable. She commented only upon the last.

“Please don’t!” she pleaded eagerly. “You know that I was brought up upon cigarettes--I mean, of course, upon their smell. You do not know how I love it!”

The _Heimweh_ in her tone shocked and startled him. _Heimweh!_ Good Heavens, for what a _Heim_!

“Do not walk quite so fast,” she said, entreatingly. “I want, if you will let me, to get right with you. I know that I have been all wrong since Sunday.”

He slackened his pace--as what else could he do, so besought?--but it was with an unwillingness that she divined through his civil acquiescence; and he did not answer quite immediately. To deny that she had been “wrong with him” since Sunday would be to take a leaf out of that Liar’s Book, of which he had already begun to be afraid that she was a steady peruser; to assent would be certain to be followed by a re-opening of the _casus belli_, and there was nothing in the world that he wished less. To refuse to listen to the explanation, which it was but too evident that she had invented and was bent on uttering, would be to give it importance. He tried to carry the thing off lightly.

“My memory refuses to go back as far as Sunday. This is Thursday. Let us start a new reckoning from to-day.”

But Bonnybell was not to be put off. She got a little nearer to him, partly in real anxiety, partly because she reckoned upon her face as her best ally in the work of propitiation, and in this scant light proximity was indispensable for him to feel its value.

“You were quite under a misapprehension the other night, when you were so displeased with me,” she began, with rapid deprecation. “Is it likely that, friendless as I am, I should want to alienate my best--a--a--well-wisher?” (She had hesitated over the last word, as if her humility had replaced by it the more presuming “friend.”) “I never meant to say or imply that Mrs. Tancred was really old.” (Oh, Miss Ransome!) “Fifty! what is fifty nowadays? Many women of fifty do not look a day over five-and-thirty. With a little touching up, Mrs. Tancred would not look a day over thirty.”

He would give his ears to stop her. There seemed to him something at once shocking and ludicrous, firstly in her brazen mendacity, and secondly in the indelicacy of her determination to discuss his wife; but she ran on so fast in the eagerness of self-exculpation that he could not find a chink in which to put a protest.

“What I meant to say was that Mrs. Tancred _intended_ to look old, that it was a _parti-pris_ in her case. I thought it must be so by the way she scratches her hair off her forehead.”

But here, chink or no chink, he broke in. “Stop!” he said, authoritatively, “I must beg of you to change the subject.”

Through the damp mistiness she looked up at him, snubbed and frightened, her pomegranate-flower lips apart, and with the stream of explanatory eloquence that had been issuing from them frozen at its source.

“I see that I am making bad worse,” she said presently, her glibness fled, and in a very crestfallen little pipe.

He could not command himself to speak again yet; still sorely angry and chafed, yet with a half-relenting feeling that he had been too harsh to this wicked little waif that had been tossed on his shore.

“I am a very great trial to you both,” presently came sighingly in his direction--sighingly, and he half-suspected showerily too; “but it is far worse for Mrs. Tancred than for you.”

“Worse for Mrs. Tancred than for me!” repeated he, echoing her words in a tone of alarm.

Was she going to be guilty of some new monstrosity against good taste? Was she going to force him to a fresh rebuke? This latter was perhaps the most urgent form that his fear took. But her next words reassured him.

“Yes, because she has to see so much more of me than you have. _You_ are away all day, and need never cast a thought towards me between sunrise and sunset, but I am always before her eyes, shocking her every time that I open my mouth by my gross ignorance, or by saying something impossible without knowing it; and now that she has undertaken my education----”

She paused dramatically. A wholesome and welcome inclination to laugh came over him, but he checked it; he must not allow himself to decline into triviality, or she might at once resume her terrible confidentialness.

“It is not that I am not _most_ anxious to learn. Oh, do not misunderstand me on that point! I have had enough of misunderstandings the last three dreadful days.”

Through the dusk he could see that her little black orphaned hands were tightly clasping each other, but he did not know that their anxious grip was a matter of calculation, nor that the penitent before him was saying to herself, “I am really very touching. The odd thing is that I am rather touched myself too.”

“If I thought I should ever do her any credit,” she continued, inserting a slight quaver into her tone; “but I have no natural aptitude for learning, and I am beginning so late. I cannot bear to think of what uphill work it will be for her.”

“That is an aspect of the question that will never present itself to her,” replied he, with what might be a shade of dryness in his voice; and the anxious Bonnybell divined that she was not even yet quite on the right tack.

(“I am overdoing it; I must not be too angelic. He is beginning to suspect that I embroider a little.”)

“Perhaps it was one word for Mrs. Tancred and two for myself”--allowing a tinge of self-rallying playfulness to creep into her words. “Perhaps I am only a born dunce, and want an excuse for remaining one.”

The unvarnished truth of her last sentence did her far more service with her hearer, as she in a moment felt, than the high varnish of her preceding ones.

“There are worse things in life than a dunce,” he answered, in a tone of unmistakable indulgence, and for which he contemned himself.

“Then we are friends again,” rejoined she, softly sliding out, with carefully studied impulsiveness, four little humble fingers and a hesitating thumb to meet his clasp.

“Yes,” he answered, accepting her hand with a frank comradeship, in which even her expert palm could detect no attempt at a squeeze, “by all means let us be friends; only”--with a return to his habitually tentative, non-assertive manner--“would not it be a good plan for us to remember that even in the most intimate friendships there are reticences?”

Miss Ransome’s education proceeded, despite all her struggles, with inexorable regularity. “Apace” is hardly the word to apply to its progress, since her own resolution to learn as little as possible rescued her from all danger of its course being a rapid one. It was impossible to peruse a contraband novel from across the Channel, or enjoy a ribald little Parisian journal, smuggled to her by a foreign admirer, during the whole time of her incarceration in the schoolroom, as detection must inevitably have followed upon an entire neglect of the imposed tasks. But her intelligence was quick, and she was able to assimilate enough surface knowledge of the subjects in which she would have to undergo an examination by her tormentor without absolute disgrace, and yet have a good margin of time to bestow upon “L’Enigme du Péché” and _Le Petit Journal_.

A discovery that her reading of her native tongue was on a par with, if not upon an even lower plane of accomplishment than her spelling, led to the imposition of a _corvée_ more hated by its victim, as less able to be shirked or scamped than any of its fellows. In an evil hour, it occurred to Camilla that to make her pupil read aloud the daily newspapers to herself would be the best method by which at once to discover and correct the extent of her ignorance. Through foreign intelligences, leaders, money-markets the unhappy girl ploughed with stumbles and jibs. Once a gleam of possible relief came to her.

“Would you care for me to read you the Racing intelligence?”

“You might as well read me a page of Coptic.”

“I could explain it a little to you, if you cared to hear”--with a delicate bashfulness at this proposal to reverse their respective relations and turn instructor.

Camilla brushed away the proposal as with a new-twigged besom.

“I know nothing in the world that I wish less! Read the review of the new ‘Life of Schopenhauer.’”

But if Miss Ransome was an unsuccessful and unwilling pupil, she was, as Jock soon learnt to his cost, a relentless and successful teacher. He disliked being educated almost as much as she did herself--it would be impossible to do so more--yet that perseverance on her part which, if exerted in another direction, would have made her a profound and eloquent scholar, and his own vanity, of which he had as large a share as most dogs--and that is saying a good deal--combined to enable him to reach a very high standard of unnatural accomplishments.

“If I ever get round her, it will be _viâ_ Jock!” Bonnybell said to herself astutely, seeing the unwilling laughter that wrinkled the mouth of Jock’s mistress, and hearing the latent enjoyment that pierced through the superficial snub of her words.

“What a fool you are making of the dog!”

“He may not enjoy being educated, but, like me, he knows that it is good for him,” replied Bonnybell, with pretty insincerity, throwing a glance, as she delivered herself of her fib, at Edward, to see how he took it--whether with approbation of her sweet docility, or with that grain of distrust which she had uneasily surmised several times lately in his reception of her statements both as to fact and sentiment?

She could read no expression of either approval or disapproval in his eyes; but he broke out into one of his rare laughs, as she capered off again down the long room, whirling Jock along in an ambling waltz, against which his dragging hind legs made a bored protest. There was calculation and consciousness in the childish frisking gaiety of Jock’s partner; but yet there was real young enjoyment too. One might be a little Mayfair mudlark, obliged to earn one’s bread by currying favour with one’s patrons in any way that seemed most likely to succeed; but one was only eighteen, and it took but a very little to make one’s heart feel uncommonly light.

Having landed Jock in front of his mistress, and by judicious pressure upon his stomach forced him to execute an angry bow to that lady as a finale to his performances, Miss Ransome, forsaken by her good genius, lapsed into ruinous reminiscence.

“When we were at Deauville there was a poodle at the hotel who could walk as well on his forelegs, with his hind ones in the air, as on all four. My mother was so pleased with him that she wanted to buy him; but the lady to whom he belonged--she was not quite a lady; she was with the Prince de Compiègne--would not hear of parting with him. Claire could never bear not getting what she wished; so we had a scene about it one night on the stairs.”

This interesting trait was followed by absolute silence.

* * * * *

“There is nothing for it but patience, I suppose!” said Mrs. Tancred, a little later, when Bonnybell, not enjoying the atmosphere which she had created, expressed herself tired and went to bed; and Edward answered, with brief acquiescence--

“I suppose not.”