CHAPTER XVIII

The moon unexpectedly lighted Mr. Tancred home. As if she had something agreeable to show him, she had shoved and elbowed aside the smoke-coloured curtains, drawn so closely across the sky when he arrived, and though still vapourish and a little sickly, gave radiance enough by which to distinguish objects. At first her lamp seemed officious. He could find his way home blindfolded along the familiar path, but before the end of his walk he discovered a use for it.

The evening air was mild and mawkish, and it was not because he was chilly that he covered the ground quickly. It was unlikely--scarcely possible--that anything untoward could have happened during his hour’s absence; yet he had heard something at the Dower House which made him eager to verify by his own eyesight the fact that the terrible charge committed to him was still safe, that he should surprise her as he did last Sunday, sampling his best cigarettes over the fire in the smoking-room, to which he had betaken himself earlier than her calculations had led her to expect, and where the austerity of his own manner had routed her, not in repentance for her theft, which at this moment she was probably repeating, but in confusion at its discovery.

His wife had no toleration for female smokers. How, then, did he reconcile it to his conscience that, before leaving that wife’s house this afternoon, he had placed the box of cigarettes, of the brand of Miss Ransome’s predilection, where she could not possibly miss it? Yes, undoubtedly he would find his little lazy, lying inmate, with her depraved instincts and her seraphic eyes, stretched disconsolately on an armchair, scheming some false new wheedlings by which to undermine his principles and cajole him out of his just displeasure.

His reason was convinced that there was no need for haste, and yet he hastened. The moon was getting the better of the vapours as she walked higher up the low sky; and at even some distance off he could see not only the dark bodies of the deer moving in the open spaces between the dead bracken, but could distinguish the branched heads of the stags.

Presently other objects made themselves out against the steel-washed dusk. Neither were they unfamiliar, since a right-of-way, which for a century had vexed the souls of the owners of Stillington, intersected at about halfway between the Dower House and the Manor the path he was pursuing. The objects in question were the figures of a man and woman standing in the middle of the public footway, which held a transverse course across the park, and just outside the shade of a copse.

There was no reason why the couple should not be any pair of village lovers--of his own servants taking loitering farewell at the crossing of the ways. Yet Edward quickened his pace. The added proximity of fifty yards told him that the man’s figure was elderly and bulky, and that he was holding the wrists of his slender companion against her will. Both were talking with such vehemence and concentration of gesture as to be absolutely unconscious of anything outside themselves.

A horrible suspicion, with the strength of almost a certainty, first stopped the observer’s feet stock still, then fevered them into a run. At the same moment a little voyaging cloud, thick enough momentarily to hide her, wholly covered the moon, and when it had swept past the man had disappeared, and the girl was running away in the direction of the Manor, with all the fleetness of which a very light body and longish legs were capable.

In two minutes her pursuer had overtaken her. She stopped, panting, and said gaspingly--

“Oh, it is _you_! I _am_ thankful to see you! I--I--have--had--_such_ a fright!”

For once he could not doubt that she was speaking truth. Her eyes were full of terror, and her breath came in little dry sobs.

“Yes?”

“I--I had taken Jock out for a run--you--you know how he teases one. By-the-by, where is he? He must have run after a rabbit.”

Alas! she was off the lines again. Her hearer knew perfectly that the innocent Jock had not shared her mysterious evening promenade. His heart turned to stone against her, or at all events he thought so, and she had to continue her lame narrative unhelped by any expression of interest or belief in it.

“I had just reached that cross-path, when a man--you saw that a man was talking to me--jumped out of the trees. I had never seen him before, and--and--began to--to beg of me.”

She paused, her invention for the moment spent, apparently. It would be humane to give some sign of a pretence of credulity, but none came.

“I suppose,” she resumed with regathered pluck, though still trembling all over from the evidently very bad fright she had had, “that when he saw I had nothing to give--I told him I had no purse with me--he got angry, and----”

A voice at last broke in--an icy voice. Why should he allow her to sink deeper into her abyss of lies?

“Beggars do not usually wear fur coats and motoring caps.”

He saw a new and different fear born in her eyes; but in a second she was trying to conceal it.

“Was he--dressed like that? I was too frightened to notice! Was he--anybody that--that--you knew? that--that you recognized?”

The temptation to lead her into confession, by affecting to know more than he did, was strong; but he resisted.

“No!” he answered, and instantly saw a light of relief spring into her eyes. “I could not see his face clearly enough for recognition; but,” he added, with stern gentleness, “I cannot believe that he was equally unknown to you!”

By this time she was recovering, and her weapons were getting into order again, the bodily terror that had for the moment floored her giving way to a moral fear.

“I cannot think why you are always so ready to distrust me!” she sighed. “What motive could I have for deceiving you?”

“I do not presume to judge of your motives,” he replied; “I go only upon facts.”

If she had not been very much flurried, she would have abstained from the question she now put.

“What facts?”

“Since you force me into incivility,” he answered, with grave sadness, “I must remind you that ten days ago you told an elaborate falsehood, or rather series of falsehoods, to disguise the fact that you had spent the afternoon of my wife’s absence in London, in motoring to Tennington.”

Here was a facer. Yet it did not produce the effect he expected, and in an instant he realized that she had been aware of his knowledge all along.

“So that is why you have been so cruel to me all this weary time?” she cried, astute in softness, and trying with nice strategy to turn a position which it was quite impossible to face.

A suspicious tendency to grow lenient, recognized in time and rebutted, hardened his voice.

“You do not deny it?”

“Why should I?”--her look taking a surprised unbraiding. “I meant no harm! I only did it because I was afraid of giving pain to either of you. I knew that you did not approve of Lady Tennington; and yet”--anxiously watching to see the good effect of the next utterance--“I could not bear to neglect an old friend who is down in the world.”

She had so deftly changed the ground of conflict, and confused the issues, that he could only repeat stupidly--

“Down in the world?”

“Yes; isn’t she? Isn’t she very _mal vue_? And I am so down in the world myself, that it is not for me, of all people, to be hard on her!”

Perhaps the whole success of Miss Ransome’s not very artistic falsehoods lay in the poignant flashes of truth that she unintentionally lit up their darkness with, here and there. No hearer could doubt the reality of her desolate fellow-feeling for the social outcast with the golden wig, concerning whom Mr. Tancred had just been hearing something that made him feel that flaying alive would be too lenient a fate for her.

“It is no question of Lady Tennington,” he interrupted with a cold severity, “but of the person who left you so suddenly as soon as he saw me.”

“Did not I tell you--I thought I had--that he was a perfect stranger to me? that I had never seen him before? He jumped out of the trees, as I was passing! Oh, how frightened I was!”

A perfectly unaffected shudder told the listener that here again was a stratum of unalloyed truth.

“You do believe me, don’t you?”

“I believe that you were frightened.”

Had poor Miss Ransome remembered a certain fact, she would not here have lifted her clasped hands, nor would Edward have had the pain of seeing the glint of unfamiliar diamonds on one of them, showing her up by moonlight.

“Thank you so much! Of course I know that appearances are against me; and if, as you say, that man”--another shudder--“wore a fur coat, I suppose he could not have been a real beggar. But if you believe me----”

“Pardon me! my belief was limited to your being frightened! I can’t believe that the person to whom you were talking with so much animation and intimacy was a stranger to you, nor that you mistook him for a beggar.”

She drew her breath heavily, and to his relief did not repeat her asseveration.

“Whom do you suppose that he was? Have you any idea?”

“I am afraid that I have a very good one.”

The gravity of his answer was tinged with such a disgusted reluctance, that Bonnybell’s heart, not really at all recovered from its late intensity of fear, stood still. Loathsome old Charlie! She had always known that he would be the death of her! Would it be better to tell the truth now? No! the truth was always a mistake for people like her, who had to live by their wits. The truth was, like motors and tiaras, only for the well-off! But she must express some curiosity; put the question to which she already knew the answer so fatally well.

“Whom?”

“I hardly like to insult you by saying so; but I believe the man to whom you were talking to have been Colonel Landon.”

Her answer came without apparent delay; yet three alternatives had raced through her head before she adopted it. “Shall I deny it flat? It is impossible that by this light he could have recognized him; he owned that he did not: it is just a trap to catch me! Shall I pretend never to have heard of Charlie? By this time Edward knows that I am not very innocent, so that will never do? Shall I just give a great start of indignation, and begin to walk home very fast?”

The last project was adopted, and at once put into execution. So well done was it, that it was a self-reproachful Edward, fearful of having done a grave wrong, who came up alongside of the fleeing victim to appearances.

“If I was mistaken, I can never ask your pardon enough. I was mistaken?”

The interrogation was so urgent, yet so apologetic, that somehow the bang-out lie that she had ready died on the fugitive’s lips. Perhaps the evasion to which she resorted was not much more really truthful.

“I do not know what I have done”--by this time art had advised, and nature had readily supplied tears--“that you should accuse me of being friends with such a man”--“as Charlie” was on the edge of her lips; but the misleading diminutive was arrested just in time. “Of course, I do not know what he has done, but I know that everybody, except Flora, cuts him. How could you imagine that I could like such a detestable old beast, or want to meet him?”

In the application of the strong noun applied to Flora’s _protégé_ there was such intense heartiness that Edward’s relief deepened.

“If I have been mistaken, how can I ever beg your pardon enough?” he said with a horrified accent of remorse, she posting along beside him, sobbing in the moonlight. “I must have been the victim of a preconceived idea and a fancied likeness. But I have just been hearing that that person had been staying for the last fortnight or more at Tennington; and I unhappily could not forget that you had been reduced to--to invention to hide the fact of your visit there.”

The links in the chain of evidence were closely knit. Yet there was hope as well as apology in his tone--hope of a denial as emphatic as her expression of distaste had been.

But Miss Ransome had already begun to repent of an outspokenness so foreign to her usual methods. “If Charlie ever heard that I called him a detestable old beast, it would be all up with me.”

They had by this time crossed the plank bridge that parted park from pleasure-grounds. The sluggish river, by which her bored feet had so often stepped, gleamed beside the path ennobled by moonlight; and Bonnybell began to feel safer. In this extremely tight place she must invoke the subtlest diplomacy to her aid. The high line of injured innocence which a few minutes ago had seemed out of the question, now, thanks to Edward’s changed and humbled attitude, appeared more practicable than any other, and without delay she adopted it.

“It is the want of trust,” she sighed, her head bowed on her chest, and one brilliant tear deftly shaken off on to her muff--“the absolute want of trust, that is what does the mischief.”

“Have you given me much cause to trust you?” he asked sadly.

To this question she found it not convenient to respond directly, but she resumed her melancholy rhetoric.

“It is the readiness to believe evil of one, to put the worst construction upon one’s words and actions, that takes the heart out of one’s efforts to do right.”

There was silence for a minute, while they still speeded homewards under the quiet trees that detached loose leaves to drop on their heads, and while a painful conflict raged in Edward’s mind. Was she speaking truth? It was just possible; as long as the music of her breaking voice was falling on his ear it was even probable.

“If I have wronged you by my accusation,” he said in a voice as unlike his usual air as her own, “I do not know any penance that I can do heavy enough to wipe out the insult. If I have wronged you, can you ever forgive me?”

“As I hope to be forgiven!” she answered, lifting a little saintly wet face to heaven. It was a tag strayed out of some tale or rhyme which came blessedly to her aid at the moment she most needed it.

It was not till some time after he had left her, and the emotion caused by her angelic unresentingness had somewhat subsided, that Mr. Tancred remembered that his young guest had given him no explanation which could by any means be made to hold water of the equivocal situation in which he had found her.