CHAPTER XVII

It was a source of mixed wonder and thankfulness to Miss Ransome on the succeeding day that she got off so cheaply when the discovery of the extent to which she had neglected her studies was made. The rebuke incurred was so inexplicably gentle, that though by this time Bonnybell was pretty well acquainted with the directness of her instructress’s methods, she at first suspected that a trap must lie beneath it. She did not know that she had been saved by her usual means, a lie; only that in this case it was an innocent and unintentional one, the lie, namely, of the piled books at her bedside. She escaped with a more sorrowful than indignant expression of opinion from Camilla as to the slenderness of her intellect and her inability to grasp any subjects other than those appertaining to the cult of the frivolous and the trashy.

Insults to her intellect left Miss Ransome perfectly calm. She had long believed the truth of the saying that “Hard words break no bones,” having been dieted upon expletives and adjectives both vigorous and varied whenever “poor Claire” was “not quite right.” Were her mind furnished as Camilla would have it, she might become a second Miss Barnacre, and all that she would know of men would be the banging of doors by them, in hastening from her presence whenever she lifted up her voice in the odious terminology of science and philosophy.

Snubs to her appearance, occasionally administered on hygienic principles by Mrs. Tancred, left her equally good-humoured, though from another cause. Having grown up with her beauty from babyhood, she was as sure of possessing it as she was of possessing hands or a palate. Any one who did not think her pretty must be either blind or jesting. It was valued highly by her, as being the only means of escape she had from the sordid darkness of her outlook. But it was not the source of pleasure to her which their good looks afforded to most handsome women. It had been associated with too many disagreeables; had obliged her to struggle against too many imminent degradations, for her to have much fondness for it, apart from its commercial value as a matrimonial asset.

The serenely sweet acquiescence with which Miss Ransome received the information given as to the unusual smallness of the mind power with which she had been endowed still further increased her teacher’s leniency.

“She thinks that I am half-witted,” said Miss Ransome to herself, “and it will certainly be wiser to encourage her in the idea, as she will expect less of me. In her present mood I might safely finish ‘L’Enigme du Péché’ without fear of detection, but”--with a slight sense of unwonted repulsion--“I don’t think I care to; it is too like Charlie.”

To escape the odious memory evoked, Bonnybell diverted her thoughts into another channel. “What induced her to come up to my room last night? I felt sure it was because she had found me out, and I thought it safer to sham being asleep till I could make up my mind what excuse to offer. And why, in Heaven’s name, did she kiss me?”

The girl lost herself in contradictory solutions of this enigma. Was it in order to test the reality of her slumbers or to break them that Camilla had inflicted that astounding caress? Or was it humanly possible that the poor old lady was growing a little fond of her, and treated her as she would have done a young Camilla? The notion, to her own surprise, touched her oddly at first, but she shook off the sensation almost indignantly. How likely! She drove away her own inchoate softness by exchanging it for the ridiculous thought of what a hideous object a sleeping young Camilla would have been, and how impossible that in wildest fancy she could have been mistaken for such an imaginary monster.

“I always knew that Camilla would be easier to take in than Edward,” pursued Miss Ransome, a rather anxious wrinkle furrowing her brow; “and it is unlucky that just as I had brought him round, his belief in me should have received this fresh shock. With him now I have, I am afraid, my work cut out.”

The ensuing days justified this forecast. There could be no doubt that Edward was in possession of the fact that she had taken “the key of the fields.” “He must have heard it at the stables,” was Bonnybell’s conclusion; “but how could I ward off that? How could I ask all the grooms and helpers after their colds, or offer them anti-kamnia for their wives’ neuralgias? In this case I am not to blame. It is my misfortune, not my fault.”

Misfortune or fault, the result remained the same; Edward did not betray her. It did not surprise her that he refrained from doing so, though it was only doubtfully that she attributed his silence to loyalty to that promise of friendship which she had extracted from him.

Loyalty to given promises was not a quality with which she had ever had more than a bowing acquaintance. In all probability it was a taste for peace, coupled with the knowledge of what a terrific household storm his communication would arouse, that sealed his lips. Doubtless during the last fifteen years he had had frequent need of reticences and concealments on his own account. But whatever the cause of his conduct, Miss Ransome had regretfully to own that it was not due to any of that lurking partiality for herself, with which she had, up to yesterday evening, credited him. If his eye met hers--a rencounter apparently neither sought nor avoided--no grain of admiration was to be detected in its cold beam. A repelled curiosity, a sort of frosty wonder was all that was to be read in it.

However, a philosophic mind is able to see the good derivable from even the least propitious set of circumstances. There was an advantageous side even to Edward’s objectionable attitude. She would never be in the least afraid of being left alone in the same room with him. The fears apparently were all on the other side. She laughed to herself jeeringly. Would any one believe it? And yet it was true, that without overtly seeming to seek that end, her host undoubtedly avoided her.

She set herself with all the power of the wits her benefactress held so cheaply to propitiate him. But it was a path beset with pitfalls. His ideas, springs of action, standards were so radically different from those she had been used to find in the men of her acquaintance, that experience lent no candle to light her steps. She had learnt, indeed, by the process of burning her fingers at the flame kindled at one taper, that any discussion of Camilla’s body or mind, any comments on her actions, however mendaciously flattering, were to be shunned like the plague. But even thus much of progress was negative, and held out little hope, as a method of rebuilding his good opinion. What were his weak spots? And what chance had she of finding them out, if he never indulged her in any enlightening talk about himself? It was chiefly interest and the desire for a valuable ally in her arduous life battle that prompted her efforts to bring him round, but mixed with it was a worthier regret at having forfeited the only chance of a pure and honourable friendship with a man that her short ignoble life had yet offered her.

For several days she cast her little cautious nets in vain. Not a worthless sprat did the meshes enfold when drawn to land. He must be vulnerable somewhere, if only it were given her to discover the spot. The days passed in the fruitless search, and by the time the second Sunday came round since the disaster of her falsehood--or, as she would have it, the disaster of its discovery--she was almost desperate of success. On that day an idea struck her, which she hastened to put into execution. Luncheon was just over. Camilla had retired to her weekly stock-taking of her spiritual condition, and Edward was in the act of withdrawing himself, as he had done on the previous Sunday, for the whole afternoon. This self-effacement of his might have had its advantages, by leaving her free to carry out any innocent project of her own, but the motive that prompted it was at once too obvious and too distressing in its results not to demand one more urgent effort for its renewal. He had the door-handle already in his hand, when she addressed him so pointedly that politeness--and in that, at all events, he had never been lacking--compelled him to pause a moment to listen.

“I noticed,” she said, with what sounded like the painful diffidence of one making a great effort over herself, “that you did not go to the Dower House last Sunday.”

“No.” There was a slight inflection of chilly surprise in his monosyllable.

“I do not think that you have been there since the day you kindly took me to tea?”

“No?” The monosyllable was interrogative this time, and seemed discouragingly to ask what the drift of these idle remarks might be.

“I think I have understood that you always used to go there every Sunday afternoon?”

It was on the edge of his lips to say carelessly that he believed he did call on the Aylmers now and then; but with a timely realization of the necessity of giving her the example of a rigid truthfulness he answered, still with that daunting air of cold wonder as to her purpose in putting the question, that such had been his weekly habit.

“You will forgive me if I am mistaken,” she said, with a half-frightened meekness that would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear,” “but I have sometimes been afraid that I had come between you and your friends.”

She had hit the nail so exactly on the head, that the nearest approach to denial of her suggestion within his reach was a “You?” that sounded to himself a contemptible paltering with the truth, and to her a cold snubbing of her presumption.

“I am not so silly as to dream that any liking for me was your motive,” Bonnybell went on with an exquisite humility. “Why _should_ you like me? What is there to like in me?” (The question was accompanied by a sorrowful smile which evoked within its executor the reflection, “If that harrowing contortion does not fetch him, I may as well shut up shop!”) “But I feared that perhaps your generosity had resented their unnecessarily harsh treatment of such a forlorn creature!”

Answer to this speech would in any case have been difficult, and apparently Edward found it more than difficult, impossible, for he made none; and with a more dragging tone and a heavier spirit Miss Ransome took up her apparently useless little parable.

“If I am mistaken, I can only ask you to forgive me--I am always having to ask people to forgive me--but I could not bear the idea of coming between you and--people you are fond of.”

“Thank you; but indeed you need not distress yourself. I am going to the Dower House to-day,” he answered, with his usual gentle intonation, perhaps a little hurried from its wonted leisureliness, and so left the room, giving her no opportunity for a rejoinder.

Bonnybell, left to herself thus cursorily, walked to the Venetian mirror nearest her, carrying with her as nearly as possible the expression her face had worn during this last successless venture, in order to judge of what ought to have been its efficacy; and then, exhaling a large sigh, soliloquized, “H’m! I might as well have saved my eloquence, my magnanimity, the tremble in my voice (I am afraid that I am not quite sparing enough in the use of that), and my heartbroken smile, which really was a masterpiece in its way. Bah! and all for one poor harmless indispensable fib! What a ridiculously warped view to take!” She gave a little snort of indignation, but the place where her heart ought to be, and as she had always supposed was not, felt oddly sore.

Neither had Edward’s heart much leap about its actions as he took his way--the way weekly trod by his Sunday feet--to the house where until a fortnight ago he had found pleasant, if not excessive, entertainment for his spirit. It shocked him to find how laggardly that spirit guided him to-day. There was nothing changed in the reciprocal attitude of the Aylmers and himself. Mrs. Aylmer would give him the geniality of her matter-of-course welcome, and to whomsoever Catherine was talking at the moment of his entrance, he would find her--for it was an unwritten law of their recognized comradeship--by his side in as many or as few moments as civility--for Catherine was nothing if not civil--demanded to rid her of her interlocutor. He was always treated like one of the family, but to-day the kind imitation of kinship offered had no charm for him; and he felt a dead reluctance towards the occupation of that wainscoted recess, with none of the secretiveness of a corner, yet all its privacy, where in the course of a good many consecutive Sundays his gentle friend with the candid if not quite straight eyes had made him the happy master of her sentiments about some of the greatest themes upon which our poor intelligences turn the dark lanterns of their groping speculations, and, pleasanter still, had lured some of his own shy imaginings out of him. Cart-ropes should not drag him to that friendship-hallowed window-seat this afternoon. And yet he must not hurt the feelings of his comrade! Why shouldn’t he? The question rose rather brutally in his mind. He had had no scruples as to hurting the feelings of another person, of one whose wretched circumstances claimed a much tenderer handling than the full-blown prosperity of Miss Aylmer.

He stopped in his walk to look up as if in interrogation to the ash-coloured sky, hung so low over his head, that it seemed as if touchable by an uplifted hand.

“How long can I keep up the pretence of harshness with the poor little creature? Why should I be angrier with her than I was with Jock for killing rats in the barn yesterday? Both follow their nature; she her shifty lying one. She is a liar! Yes, but am I not one too? Is not my whole life an actual lie? If it had only been one or two”--his thoughts harping in exasperated pain on Bonnybell’s delinquencies--“they might have been accidents, the result of that abject fear she evidently feels towards us both. But the dreadful glibness of it! the plausibility! the circumstantiality!” The circumstantiality brought him to the Dower House door, and rang the bell for him.