CHAPTER XVI

All was safe. There had been no change of plan on the part of Miss Ransome’s protectors, as, drawing a long breath, she realized on reaching home, and joyfully found the house as destitute of its masters as she had left it. To begin at once the attack upon the servants’ clemency was her next care. Bonnybell had always been charming in her manner towards all dependants; but the tone in which she now asked the butler after a sick wife whom Camilla had been doctoring, and told the housemaid, whom she found lighting her bedroom fire, how concerned she was to hear her still coughing, would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear.”

Her neglected studies were her next thought, but an unconquerable distaste towards resuming them made her persuade herself that it would be unsafe to run the risk of being found studying at so unusual an hour, and would lead to the inference that she had been playing the truant earlier. It would be better to take the least evadable books up to bed with her, and make what scrambling preparation she could before going to sleep. While collecting her authors, the young student became aware of “L’Enigme du Péché” lying in tell-tale openness on the floor, where it had evidently lain since it fell off her lap in the hurry of her departure. Another sigh of relief, almost as deep as the first, signalized this timely discovery.

* * * * *

Camilla was in unusually good spirits at dinner that night. Her day, though she was strictly silent upon that part, had been tiring, boring, self-sacrificing. It had been devoted wholly to the unhealthy, the unprosperous, and the ungrateful. But apparently it had had a tonic effect, and she ate her slender allowance of food with more apparent enjoyment, and talked more and more cheerfully, than usual. Perhaps it was because she talked more that Edward seemed to talk less than his never garrulous custom.

Bonnybell could wish that Mrs. Tancred’s inclination to converse would have led her in another direction than inquiries as to the mode in which she, Bonnybell, had disposed of her solitary day, though those inquiries were made almost genially, and in the spirit of neither a school-mistress nor a spy. It was not that the girl was conscious of any new or even nascent disinclination for fibbing; but when the whole field of invention lay open before her, it was so difficult to know which lie to choose. Lie she must, from beginning to end of the catechism that ensued, but she had no wish to be excessive, nor to daub where one coat of paint would serve her purpose. It was a pity that the servants had to hear her, as, of course, they must be laughing in their sleeves; but the tips to be administered doubled themselves in her intention, and she tried to forget the silent presences that might become so ruinously vocal.

“Did you make up your mind to tear yourself from the fireside at all to-day?”

“Oh yes; I was out a good deal.”

So far truth carried her, but nervousness made her add an unnecessary gloss, which was the falsest of falsehoods--in implication, at least--

“I knew that you would wish me to take some exercise.”

“H’m! how far did you go? I dare say not farther than the houses. I know that the stove house is the kind of atmosphere you really like.”

Camilla was in wonderfully good tune; there was even an attempt at genial raillery in her tone.

“Oh, but I did. I went _much_ further.”

Truth again reappeared. It was as well to give that seldom-invoked goddess a look-in now and then.

“To the summer-house?”

“Further still.”

“You did not, I am sure, risk those ridiculous little shoes of yours in the wet grass of the park?”

“Oh yes, I did; they are stronger than they look. But I was sorry afterwards that I had. Jock got among the rabbit-holes, and though I whistled and called for ten minutes, I am sure, I could not persuade him to come out.”

There was a noise as of a small object falling on the floor. Edward, who was not generally clumsy, had whisked a fork, with his coat-cuff apparently, on to the carpet. A footman picked it up, and the conversation proceeded. But Miss Ransome had caught a glimpse of her host’s face, and a cold sweat broke out inside her. Was it possible that Edward knew of her escapade? There was nothing for it but to hope for the best, and to go on boldly, since she was already too far immersed in the sea of fancy to withdraw. And besides, what she had been relating of Jock’s perversity was strictly true, only that it was post-dated by twenty-four hours, having happened yesterday.

With unconscious inhumanity, Camilla went on--

“Jock must have had two walks to-day, then, for Gillett told me she had taken him out.”

Bonnybell’s heart quailed. Suppose that Camilla next inquired at what hour her promenade with Jock had taken place, and that she herself in answer hit upon the same one as that already claimed by the maid?

“It must have been in the morning, then, that you took him out,” continued Camilla, still perfectly unsuspicious, adding, with a sternness that was more affected than real, “You must have given him time that was filched from your reading.”

“He looked so wistful,” replied Bonnybell, post-dating Jock’s expression of emotion, as she had done his iniquities. “It is so difficult to resist him when he looks wistful.”

This was a thrust directed at the one weak spot in Camilla’s armour, and it penetrated at once.

“What a bad dog!” she said, in a ridiculously pseudo-angry voice. How different, as Bonnybell ruefully reflected, from that employed to herself, for the far smaller crime of her attempt to educate Meg Aylmer! “No biscuits to-night.”

In the execution of this threat Jock did not even affect credulity, but wagged a short black tail, which was in piquant contrast to the rest of his white body, and Bonnybell heaved her slender shoulders in a deep inspiration of relief, once again involuntarily stealing a look at Edward. She found him looking straight and full back at her, in the security of Camilla’s occupation with the dog; read in that look that he knew; that since he had promised her his friendship he would not betray her, and that he despised her from the bottom of his heart. In point of fact, Edward was not much in the habit of despising any one but himself, but he might have made an exception in Bonnybell’s favour.

The belief that he had done so, at all events, depressed that young woman to such a degree as to impart an inattentive languor to her nightly dancing lesson to Jock. That unworthy animal took a base advantage of her absent-mindedness, and executed his part of the performance on all four feet, in a shabby, ambling run, which, not even by his partial mistress, could be classified as a “trick.”

“You seem to have tired yourself with your walk,” observed Camilla, noticing the limp air of relief with which Miss Ransome subsided into a chair at the end of a display which was generally a source of unmixed enjoyment to her. “Of course, I have no wish that you should overdo yourself; there is never any sense in extremes.”

Bonnybell drooped her head in silent acquiescence. Circumstances prevented her defending herself from the charge of over-exercise by stating the fact that the longest walk she had to-day taken had been from one end of Lady Tennington’s conservatory to the other, and she felt unequal for the moment to the framing of new inventions, which one of her hearers would be perfectly aware to be such.

“Perhaps it is because the wind has not caught your face to-day,” continued Mrs. Tancred, in caustic but not hostile allusion to Bonnybell’s former explanation of her excess of bloom, “but you look pale to-night. Neither Edward--I think I may answer for you,” with a scarcely inquiring spectacled glance at her husband--“nor I will take it amiss if you feel inclined to go to bed.”

The girl accepted, with apologetic courtesy, which she tried not to make too eager. Not even the sight of the piled books by her bedside, heaped there with an intention of midnight study, could lessen the sense of relaxed tension in being alone. She _was_ tired, dispirited, anxious, with sore disquiet for the future.

Edward knew that she was a liar, and hated her for being one. More shame for him! If he had been in her grievous straits, he would have lied too. It was very unsympathetic and _borné_ of him not to understand that! Now that Charlie Landon was aware that she was in the neighbourhood, he would never leave her in peace. Did she not read an intention of persecution in the baffled anger of his face when it was made clear to him by Flora that his escort was to be dispensed with?

Yes, the future was heavy with clouds, and she regarded it, as has been said, with some disquiet. Yet her repentance for the past was by no means complete. If Edward and Charlie--unnatural alliance of names!--weighed down one scale of the balance, did not Toby in the other make it greatly out-dip them? The campaign against Toby--hitherto existing only in aspiration and intention--had passed into the domain of fact. It had really and seriously opened, and how artistically too, by that sudden inspiration or an appeal for help. A stroke of such genius had enabled her to skip over at least a dozen preliminary steps, and rushed him into the propitious situation of benefactor and rescuer before he knew where he was.

“Never in my life have I managed to get hold of anything good or pleasant without having to pay heavily for it,” she said to herself in bitter retrospect, “and I suppose that it will always be so; but, at all events, this time I have something to show for my efforts! ‘Quite safe to walk anywhere between the belt of firs on the left of the big covert and the group of Spanish chestnuts near the gazebo.’ Quite safe for _me_, I suppose he meant! I would not swear that it was quite as safe for _him_!”

She fell asleep with an angelic smile on her parted lips at the thought of Toby’s insecurity, the pile of unopened books forgotten beside her.

An hour later a figure, who had carefully chosen that one of the electric burners to turn up whose light would not fall on the sleeper’s face, stood by Bonnybell’s bedside.

“I do not think that that child is well,” Camilla had said, after an interval of silence, addressing her husband; “she seemed unnaturally depressed. Depression under such circumstances as hers would be natural and proper in any thinking being, but as she certainly does not come under that head, there must be some other cause.”

As she spoke Mrs. Tancred left her chair and the room. Her absence lasted for a quarter of an hour, and towards the end of it Edward grew restless; that is to say, inwardly, for he allowed himself no change of posture that would recognize or indulge his uneasiness. Was she ill? and if so, was hers the kind of constitution upon which illness would take much hold? Both her parents had died when well under forty, but as neither of their deaths could be called natural ones, their shortlivedness could not be held to lend probability to hers, unless her mother’s tendencies were hereditary.

Camilla’s re-entrance interrupted the shudder caused by the last supposition.

“I was mistaken,” she said calmly, though his eye noted the sign of an emotion of some kind on her harsh face; “she was sleeping quite quietly.”

Both settled down again to their occupations, and a few minutes elapsed before Camilla, bringing out the words as one forced to make an admission against the grain, said--

“I am afraid that my tendency is to judge people too severely; and I believe that in the case of this unfortunate girl I may have done so.”

She paused, and he had time for an inwardly interjected wish that she had used some other adjective than that which, employed as a noun, had such an unsavoury significance when applied to a woman!

“I am led to think that some glimmer of a sense of right and wrong is awakening in her; that I trace some germ of a desire for better things!”

Again she halted, and he threw in a “Yes?”

“You heard at dinner to-day how she had conquered her dislike to leaving the fireside in deference to my wishes; it came out quite unostentatiously--not as if she were making a merit of it.”

Perhaps it was surprise at the change in his wife’s tone that hindered Tancred from expressing that pleased acquiescence in their joint incubus’s improvement which might have been expected; but neither did he give any sign of dissent.

“And though she could not have expected a visit from me to-night--I have never before gone near her,” continued Camilla, in the key of one resolved to make her amends for possible former injustice handsome and complete--“she had evidently taken to heart my reproach of having wasted the time, that should have been devoted to study, upon the dog.” (When Camilla occasionally tried to make her family believe that she was indifferent to Jock, she spoke of him as “the dog.”) “The poor girl had evidently been at work until overtaken by sleep, for the books were piled at her bedside.”

Edward must make some comment now, and must try not to let it be too stony; but the “Indeed! how very creditable!” which he at last brought out sounded to himself so coldly ironical that it must rouse his wife’s suspicions by its contrast with his former championship. To his relief, he soon perceived that she was occupied by a train of thought, and stirred by an emotion which blunted her powers of observation.

“She looked very sweet and innocent,” Mrs. Tancred said, in a softened tone, as one recalling a gentle, dreamy vision; “all traces of her terrible heredity wiped away by sleep!” After a short pause in a lower key, “The All Wise gave one more proof of All Wisdom in denying me the blessing of children, for I should have made idols of them.”