CHAPTER XIV

A week had elapsed, and a morning came on which Edward set off for London accompanied by his wife, instead of, as usual, alone! The result was obvious: freedom--temporary, indeed! but still freedom for Miss Ransome. But of what use was that noblest of God’s gifts to one who had no means of employing it?

“Don’t get into mischief if you can help it,” was Camilla’s parting benediction; and the smiling humility of Bonnybell’s “I will try not,” took an ambiguous meaning as she turned it over afterwards in the leisure and liberty of her own mind. “Try not to get into mischief?” or “Try not to help getting into mischief? How can I help helping? What mischief could I get into if I tried?”

This problem set her pondering. If she were to borrow Camilla’s cutting-out scissors from her work-basket, she might cut snips in the canvases of those dismal _primitifs_. If she were to employ the aid of a poker, she might break the nose of the young Augustus coldly glimmering at her from his pedestal in the centre of the little circular vestibule at the stairs’ foot. But in neither of these, nor in any analogous crimes, would there be much point nor any enjoyment.

In her total destitution of all opportunities for evil, the poor young creature snatched eagerly at the one sin--though it was only a paltry one of omission--open to her; the entire neglect of the tasks assigned her by her departed tyrant. It relieved her to kick the instruments of her intended elevation and enlightenment into a corner, and when “L’Enigme du Péché”--a work whose very title would make Camilla’s straight hair break into horrified curls--was produced from its hiding-place; when the little shoes lately employed in propelling Greene, Bryce, etc., were hoisted to the top of the nursery fender, which still stood in long-unneeded precaution before the generous grate, Bonnybell’s conscience grew clear. Her power of doing wrong in her present surroundings was infinitesimal, but she had done what she could. To do what one could!--this was a standard beyond which Mrs. Tancred herself did not attempt to rise. At the ingenious perversity of this reflection, Bonnybell laughed delightedly.

She had been in the enjoyment of her illicit pleasures for an hour and a half, and had begun to suspect that the solution of the “Enigma” would form a _plat_ too highly spiced for even her seasoned palate, when the door opened. She whisked her feet down from their dizzy height and sat up, to find a salver, a note, and a footman at her elbow.

“Any answer?” she asked, taking the note and looking at its superscription curiously. The handwriting was at once familiar and unfamiliar; known, but not lately known.

“The chauffeur wished to know how soon you would like the motor to come round?”

“The chauffeur? The motor?” repeated she, staring; then, bethinking herself that the best way to solve this new enigma would be the same as that which she had been employing on the other, she tore open the envelope and read--

“MY DARLING LITTLE BONNYBELL,--

(The unaccountable warmth of this opening took her eye to the signature, “Flora.”

“Of course! How stupid not to have remembered Flora Tennington’s scrawls and flourishes!”)

“I have just heard from Harrington” (so Harrington is still with Flora, is he?) “that he had seen your ugly old gaoler and her _souffre douleur_ at the station and off to London, so I have sent the motor to fetch you to spend the day. If it comes back without you I shall _go on sending it_ until it brings you, dead or alive. I have _millions_ of things to say and ask.

“Your loving “FLORA.

“P.S.--You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”

Miss Ransome’s decision must be immediate. The expectant footman was still at her elbow awaiting orders. She threw her cap over the mill.

“I shall be ready in ten minutes.”

The decision--given the deep disgrace from which she had so lately emerged--sounded like madness; but a streak of reason ran through it. Her host and hostess had announced their intention of returning by a later train than the one that usually brought Edward; the servants would, in all probability, not tell upon her. Camilla’s own lifelong maid, a young lady of fifty-five, had, shortly before Bonnybell arrived, yielded to the urgencies of a bridegroom, become too pressing to be longer resisted, to crown by marriage an engagement of thirty years. Her present attendant was a young person whom she had employed because nobody else would, and in order to make her a character. But what decided Miss Ransome to take the plunge was the postscript, “You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”

“An old friend!” This by itself would act as a deterrent. It must be a man, since Claire and she never had any women friends after Flora dropped them, and of the men who formed her circle, there was not one concerning whom her most ardent wish was never to hear of or meet him again. But “a new friend!” Who could it be but Toby?

It was, perhaps, a stretch of language to give that name to a person, the sole evidence of whose meriting it was that he looked black when she entered the room, remained churlishly silent during the few minutes of their joint occupancy of it, and left it with a bang of discourteous haste to escape her. But, at all events, it was well worth trying, and in twenty minutes from her first reception of the proposition she was flying along between the tree-stems of the park, on her way to accept it.

The motor was, to her relief, a brougham. To arrive touzled and stained--and she had not a proper motoring costume with her--would be to prejudice her chance of success at the outset. She must be pretty before all things. Whether her prettiness was to be further ornamented by a sweet innocence or a daring raciness of conversation must depend upon what a further acquaintance with Toby’s tastes and methods might reveal. If he were an _habitué_ of Flora’s, the latter of the two alternatives was the one more likely to please. But her deep-seated and universal distrust of man--falsified though it had been in the case of Edward by a fortnight’s acquaintance--made her finally resolve to temper her raciness, if she was racy, with caution.

Arrived, after a quarter of an hour’s whirl, Bonnybell found Flora in a hot room, crammed with flowers and _bric-à-brac_, whose very atmosphere brought back, with a rush of startled repulsion, to the girl’s memory the atmosphere that she had breathed through her own childhood and early youth. During the last period of her mother’s life it had been further improved by the continual perfume of champagne and drugs; but the present one, though free from these ingredients, was like enough to make her realize how far she had travelled from what it represented, and to wish that she had not come, particularly as no vestige of a redeeming Toby showed on the naked horizon.

Flora was too much occupied at the moment of her guest’s arrival to spare time for any greeting. She was sitting on the floor, as was Harrington, the broken-down gentleman who was coeval with Flora in Bonnybell’s acquaintance with that lady; the broken-down gentleman who, beginning by being her lover, had ended by being her major-domo.

Upon Flora’s lap sat the little old dachshund Lisa, down whose throat Harrington was trying to drive a pill. By holding her mouth tight shut, and stroking her throat, the object was supposed to have been, after many previous failures, attained. The fallacy of the deduction was proved an hour later by the pill being found intact on the front stairs, showing that the wily Lisa had, after all, bested her physicians; but for the present, lulled in a false security, Lisa’s mistress was able to remember her visitor’s presence.

“Wasn’t it fortunate that Harrington should have happened to be at the station just in time to see your old monster get into the train? I said to myself, ‘Now is my time.’ I had been puzzling my head as to how I was going to get at you. I could not come after you. You know I am tolerably _facile à vivre_, but I _cannot_ stand that old woman.”

Truth is truth, even if inverted, and Bonnybell did not think it necessary to point out that in this case it was standing on its head; since, in point of fact, it was “that old woman” who had never been able to “stand” Lady Tennington.

“I had scarcely a word with you at the Aylmers’,” continued Flora, raising her rather bulky form from the floor by the aid of Harrington, whom she immediately afterwards sent out of the room. “You were packed off to Meg and that odious prig of a governess for fear that I should corrupt your mind, I suppose.”

She laughed, both with cosmetic-ed lips and with eyes that, though brazenly bistered, were jolly and good-natured, at the humour of such a thing being possible; and Bonnybell laughed too, though with a surprised sense of annoyance at the unlimited knowledge of evil attributed to her.

“I corrupted theirs instead,” she replied, with a humorous gloom.

“The governess’s and Meg’s?” with an accent of delighted interest. “Oh, how it must have improved them!”

As she spoke, she held out an expensive and floridly coronetted cigarette-case to the girl, who pounced upon it as the camel upon a desert pool.

“Oh, how delicious! how I have longed and thirsted for one! Savory?”

“Yes, I always stick to them.”

There was a short silence of rapturous enjoyment on Bonnybell’s part. Flora had pushed her into a luxurious chair, and the smoke was going up to heaven from her pink nostrils. She was beginning to be glad of her iniquity, even though the Toby for whom it was committed had proved to be but a mirage.

“How did you corrupt their minds?” The question shared Lady Tennington’s mouth with a cigarette; but, though a little inarticulate from this cause, the relish in it was unmistakable.

“I got into a dreadful scrape. They came and complained of me next day.”

The interest aroused by this statement vanquished material enjoyment, and Lady Tennington took the “Savory” from between her rosy lips, and sat up.

“What did you say?”

“Will you believe it?” replied Bonnybell, sitting up too, her eyes sparkling intensely in the relief and enjoyment of having at length found a confidant certain to sympathize in the grievous wrong done her. “All that I said was--I was looking at a silly little newspaper with Meg, and I happened to mention--we had come to a picture of Cressida Beaulieu and her Schipperkes--that Waddy ran her. Could you imagine that there was any one in the world so ignorant as not to know that Waddy ran Cressida?”

“It is inconceivable,” replied Flora, in an almost awed tone; and there was a moment or two of wondering and compassionate silence on the part of both.

“They came and laid a formal complaint against me next day, and I was sent for down from my studies--I was at my studies, if you please”--with a delightful little grimace.

“Your studies!” laughing significantly. “I should have thought that you knew as much as most people.”

At this ambiguous compliment something in Bonnybell once again felt jarred.

“Oh, _what_ a time I had of it!” she exclaimed, gliding with only half-unconscious distaste from the subject of her own discreditable omniscience. “What a scolding!”

“From that hateful old prude?”

“Yes, from Camilla. But she is not quite all hateful. I thought she was at first, but she isn’t. After having ground me to powder--while those two women looked on--oh, I should like to be even with them!--she told me she would give me another chance! It doesn’t sound any great catch,” beginning to laugh heartily; “but I can assure you that I was very much relieved, as I felt certain that I was going to be turned out then and there, neck and crop.”

“I wish you had. I should have got you for good then.”

The phrase, in one sense, was scarcely a happy one, since it could not, by any stretch of language, be considered a good thing for any young woman to be taken under the soiled and tarnished wing of Lady Tennington.

Bonnybell’s heart did not in the least echo the aspiration, but her lips brought out their “It would have been too delightful for words!” with their accustomed lying glibness.

She looked with pretty, grateful affection at her hostess as she spoke, asking herself alternately whether it was that she had forgotten Flora, or that the latter had lost her eye and donned a greenlier gold wig than of yore, imparted a more sealing-waxy red to her mouth, and laid the powder on her nose, thick as snow on the summit of the Jung Frau, without knowing it.

“Tell me some more,” said the unconscious object of these silent queries, in the delighted voice of a child asking for the repetition of a favourite fairy tale. “Ah, here is Charlie Landon? I told you you would meet an old friend. You must begin all over again for him.”