CHAPTER XIX

It was impossible that such an experience, or group of experiences, should not leave traces on the complexion; yet it had to be left to its fate, Camilla’s eye for paint being as the nose of the truffle dog for truffles. Nor, if the cause of her pallor were inquired into, would Miss Ransome have the harbour of invention to steer her dismasted vessel into. Invention, however harmless, had in her present circumstances, standing at the bar of Edward’s judgment, to be shunned like the plague. But Camilla’s questions were fortunately diverted to her husband rather than her guest.

“You went to the Dower House?”

“Yes.”

“I am glad.”

A pause long enough for Bonnybell to say to herself that Edward had begun by jibbing at the attention to her foes alluded to.

“Did you see them all?”

“All but Toby; he was out.”

“Were they well?”

“Catherine had a bad cold.”

“The result of a pneumonia blouse, I suppose! As long as girls strip themselves naked in January they cannot be surprised at their chests and lungs resenting it.”

“Certainly not.”

“The following such a fashion is the solitary lapse from common sense I have ever detected in Catherine.”

The _amende_ was honourable, and in consonance, as Edward felt, with Camilla’s principles, and the line she had adopted with regard to the woman whom she contemplated as her probable successor.

“Did they tell you any news?”

The question was unlike Camilla, habitually severe upon gossip and incurious of her neighbours’ affairs. It was evidently born of that Sunday serenity of mind which made her wish to keep up the cheerful trickle of family talk which her own grim paucity of words and severity of aspect quenched.

Edward hesitated for a moment, and Bonnybell gasped. Too well was she acquainted with the piece of news communicated to Mr. Tancred by his friend with the cold in her head, or more probably by that mother whom she had before utilized as a cat’s-paw.

“News? Did they? Oh yes, by-the-by, they told me that Lady Tennington is leaving Tennington at once. She has had such heavy losses at bridge lately that she wants to let it on a long lease.”

“I wish her sincerely success.”

That dry comment closed the subject, and dinner passed without any nearer approach to peril.

But it was a wakeful Miss Ransome who surveyed that night, from a bed where sleep was for a long time not even sought, the dangers of the past and the perplexities of the future. Thankfulness, deep and pure, at the tidings conveyed at dinner by Edward took the first place. If Flora left the country, her abhorred guest would have no excuse remaining for frequenting it, since no other house in the neighbourhood was open to him; and not even for the pleasure of persecuting herself would Charlie face the discomforts of a country inn. What a dirty trick, and how like him, to have her _shadowed_! to waylay her as soon as he saw her alone and unprotected! to try to frighten her into unjustifiable promises of giving up what he knew would be the making of her, by threats and reminders! If she _had_ been compelled to promise, if Edward had not appeared in the nick of time, much she would have kept to it! She laughed among her pillows. One advantage of her enemy’s disreputability was that, whatever he said no one would believe him! But if she had not been a fool she would have consented to the other man’s urgent entreaties to be allowed to escort her as far as the bridge, to see her safely inside the pleasure-grounds. In the dread of incurring one risk she had run head foremost into another and far more serious one. Though now safe as in the heart of a cloister, a shiver of disgusted fear at the remembrance of that hated rencounter ran over her.

Well, “All’s well that ends well.” Of course, it--the other thing--must come out now. She would have preferred that the announcement, with its attendant clamour--she gave an anticipatory chuckle of enjoyment at the thought of the Dower House faces, as she had last seen them, sitting in awful judgment upon her--should have followed, instead of preceding, Charlie’s departure from the neighbourhood. But, of course, it must come out now. Edward had behaved well on the whole, but he had not pretended to believe her cock-and-bull story.

“If I had had time, I could have made up a better one. Time is everything,” she reflected regretfully. “Charlie said one true thing. I shall be bored to death! Bored will not be the word for it! And how I hate being kissed! If I could only persuade him that I am so excessively modest that I cannot bear it just yet! The diamonds! I wonder, are they really fine, or only the usual sort of thing? The stones in the ring were good, but they are frightfully set.” Here she fell asleep.

* * * * *

It was on her return next day from a perfectly legitimate and safe constitutional within the limits of the garden that Miss Ransome was met by the announcement that Mr. Tancred would be glad to speak to her in the library. With no preliminary preening of her feathers, she followed the servant’s lead. Her heart rather dumped down, not from fear of the unknown, since she knew pretty well what was coming, but from a failure of exhilaration at the prospect.

Edward was standing, his graceful height seeming to be even better in keeping with the grave stateliness of the room, warmly red and brown with book-backs gently redolent of Russia leather, than usual, when contrasted with the rather fleshy and extremely agitated young man beside him.

“I have taken the liberty of sending for you,” Tancred said, addressing Bonnybell with a cold perfection of politeness, “because Mr. Aylmer tells me that you have authorized him to give me a piece of news about you.”

Miss Ransome’s only immediate answer was to direct her beautiful eyes successively towards the faces of the two men who confronted her. Happily the thought behind them could not be read upon those pupils: “If it must be, I wish it could have been the other one.”

“It has rather taken me by surprise, as I did not know that you were acquainted.”

The tone in which the implied reproach was conveyed was of the gentlest, yet it bent the head of one of the culprits in a not wholly calculated expression of shame on her breast. It drove the other into blurted speech.

“The fault was entirely mine. Our first meeting in the park was purely accidental, wasn’t it?”

“Purely,” replied she, still keeping her head down, and wondering whether, considering the very minute instructions as to the direction of her walks, instilled into her by him at Tennington, her suitor could possibly be such a fool as to believe what he said.

“And after that--after that”--floundering a little, but still stout in defence of a cause of whose badness even he must be aware, “she was afraid of my people. No wonder, after the way they had treated her!”

At that she lifted an eye-beam of meek gratitude towards her advocate’s face, but it ended its journey on the other’s.

“If you had taken my wife and me into your confidence we might have helped you a little.”

Behind the perfect restraint and courtesy of his words, Bonnybell detected the profundity of his contempt for her methods. Had they been alone she would have tried to cajole him into a more lenient view of her, but the presence of that stodgy pillar of defence--_beefy_ was, to speak truth, the epithet that his love internally applied to him--which would henceforth for ever be interposed between her and all assailants, kept her silent.

Edward had by this time turned away from her--she looked upon the action as typical--and was directing a grave question to the scarlet Toby.

“You have not yet told your people?”

“Why should I? I am absolutely independent of my father. I owe none of them anything after the way in which they behaved to _her_.”

The red god of war spoke through his sullen voice, and Miss Ransome saw and grasped her opportunity.

“Whatever else happens to me, do not let me be a cause of quarrel between you and yours,” she said angelically. “If I thought I was going to be a firebrand I would run away and hide myself somewhere where no one would find me.”

Then she pulled herself up. “I must not be melodramatic, he would see through it in a moment.” The _he_ did not refer to her future husband. Her inspiration took a wiser form. Going up to her _fiancé_, and laying her hand on his shoulder, she said with a calculated impulsiveness that had yet the curious one grain of truth in it which her lies, spoken and acted, so often held--

“Ask them just to tolerate me. I do not expect them to like me. Poor things, it would be too much to hope”--the corners of her mouth twitching with irresistible, if rather nervous, and happily not evident mirth at the picture that rose before her quick brain, of the imminent announcement and its effect--“but if they would give me just a chance! Every one has a right to ask to be given a chance.”

Of the two pairs of eyes towards which her own rolled in a lovely candour of appeal, one met her glance with a besotted ecstasy of approbation. The other pair fell. Oh, if she could only get Toby out of the room, out of the house! Her situation between the two men was fast becoming intolerable to her. If only Toby was out of sight and hearing, she could manage Edward so far better. And the contrast between their appearances was getting on her nerves.

“Go,” she said with a charming air of self-denying insistence, “go at once. I can’t bear you to delay a moment. Whatever they may have done to me--and indeed, _indeed_ you exaggerate--your first duty must always be to _them_.”

Metaphorically she pushed him out, entirely ignoring his distressed signals to her to accompany him to the hall door, on the very off-chance of snatching a moment of that privacy which was the last thing she desired. Her manœuvre did not at first seem to have achieved a particularly pleasant result.

“It was not Mr. Aylmer, I think, to whom you were talking in the park last night?”

“Have you been asking him?”

A certain scorn in his eyes at once set her mind at rest on the point, and made her sharply repent of the tell-tale rush of her question.

“If it was not Mr. Aylmer----”

“Why do you call him Mr. Aylmer? I thought to you he was always Toby.”

“If it was not he, who was it?”

“I thought I explained to you that I did not know. I took him for a tramp, but you said that he couldn’t be one, because he wore something--what was it?--that tramps do not wear. I suppose I was too frightened to notice. Anyhow, he was not anybody whom I had ever seen before.” She was lying with inartistic redundancy, and, she also felt, in vain.

“You must have lived with very credulous people,” he said slowly, the contempt in his tone veiled a little by courtesy, and tempered with pity, and so turned towards the door. She fled to intercept him.

“Are you going to tell Mrs. Tancred?”

“No, I think it will be better that you should give her your own version.”

She threw all that she knew of entreaty into her voice.

“Will you let me give it to you first?”

He hesitated. What a walking lie she was! The black gown that she wore proclaimed an entirely non-existent grief. But, on the other hand, what a very, _very_ juvenile offender she looked! Would it be indulging a culpable curiosity, would it be leading her into fresh falsehoods, to hear by what ingenuity she could gloss over and whiten her abominable behaviour? She saw the momentary weakness of doubt, and plunged.

“You know that our first meeting was purely accidental?”

“Toby told me so.” The return to the familiar nickname was balm to her.

“I had just lost Jock, and he helped me to find him. It was all _en règle_. He had been presented to me that day--at Tennington.”

Edward did not in the least believe in the accidental meeting, though he did believe that the direct and truthful Toby had been the dupe of its fortuitous character, but all he said was--

“And then?”

“Then--we met again--perhaps not quite so accidentally. I would not let him come here, as he wanted me. I knew that Mrs. Tancred would think it her duty--as, of course, it would have been--to warn Mrs. Aylmer, and the whole thing would have been _blued_!”

There was a silence. He saw it all. For once she was speaking truth. The poor little waif, seeing the goal of toilettes, diamonds, automobiles ahead of her, and making for it, fighting with all her thief’s weapons of deceit and evasion to reach it before it was removed beyond her grasp. Her next sentence looked as if she had read a part of his thoughts.

“If I had been in any other position, the last thing I should have wished would be to marry. I think it a very repulsive institution.”

She said it with quiet conviction, and without the slightest suspicion of anything shocking, considering her present position, in the utterance. But it so completely tied her hearer’s tongue that she had to go on unhelped even by one of those half-doubtful yeses with which Edward had a trick of punctuating their talk.

“It was a far better provision than I had any right to expect, and it would free both of you from an incubus.”

The worldly wisdom of the first half of her sentence might have kept him still tongue-tied, but the uncertain voice and twitching lower lip that set off the last half drove him, as she knew it would, into speech. (“I must bring home to him _what_ an orphan I am, but I must not cry yet.”) She winked away a real tear.

“Is it possible,” he said, holding back with difficulty, as she triumphantly and yet tremblingly saw, the expression of an emotion far deeper than she had any suspicion of having been able to evoke--“is it possible that you have run your head into the noose because you have fancied yourself an unwelcome visitor here? How have we shown it? By what shameful lapse from courtesy and hospitality in us have you gathered such an idea?”

She put up her hands over her ears, hands whose affecting black Suèdeness gave no hint of Toby’s diamonds.

“I will not let you say such things!” she said with something nearing a little cry; “you who have been so astonishingly good to me. Even when you made me feel a little out in the cold of late, I know it was because you thought I deserved it; you did it for my good; but”--dropping her large white eyelids and making them quiver a little--“though I am not very clever, I could not suppose that you kept me here because I was a pleasure to you.”

Her words, though soft as a baby-zephyr in their gentle implication that his coldness, his Pharisaic want of charity in interpreting her, his inability to see things from her poor little point of view, had driven her to her present precipice seemed to hit him a blow full in the chest.

“If what you have done is owing to an extraordinary misapprehension,” he said in a penetrating low voice, “it is not yet too late to----”

But she did not let him finish his sentence, breaking in in real panic. “Good heavens! how I have overdone it! He is quite capable of sacking my Toby under the impression that he is delivering me.”

“Oh, you mistake me,” she cried with a bewitching gesture of irritation at herself for having so ill conveyed her meaning. “Though I dislike the idea of marriage--I have seen such unhappy marriages--yet I am quite incapable of accepting him from mercenary motives; he is far too fine a character.”

Then Miss Ransome pulled up rather abruptly, conscious of having struck a false note. (“I am on the wrong tack again. Toby has no more a fine character than I have.”) She took up her parable in another key.

“He will be very kind to me, and he can make excellent settlements. His father’s property must come to him, as it is entailed, and he can make ducks-and-drakes of the estate he inherited from his cousin. He told me yesterday that it could all be settled on me and the younger children.”

Was she quite on the right tack, even now? Did she hear a low gasp from Edward at the revelation of the delicate choice of topics discussed between Miss Ransome and her lover? Probably not, or she would not have added the rider which presently followed, uttered with nonchalant matter-of-factness.

“That is to say, if there _are_ any younger children!”