CHAPTER XX

After all, Edward was better than his word, doing what he had at first wisely declined to do, “breaking” the news to Camilla, and receiving on his own devoted head the first rush, the deadliest Levin bolts of the thunderstorm of her wrath. The skirt of the deluge was quite enough for poor Miss Ransome. The interview opened with an amenity which gave the keynote.

“Had a scullery-maid in my service,” Mrs. Tancred said, framing each word with such slow care, as if she feared even one of her pearls of speech should be lost--“had a scullery-maid in my service conducted her courtship in the way you have, I should have made my housekeeper dismiss her at once without a character.”

No etiquette book or guide to polite conversation having provided a suitable reply to such an address, Miss Ransome took it in acquiescent silence, not attempting to put up the umbrella of any useless palliative against the hurricane.

“It would be a mockery to hope that any blessing could attend a marriage resulting from an acquaintance so disgracefully made and scandalously cultivated. It is a gratifying reflection for me that it is I who have brought such a calamity upon my friends! I pity them; I pity him, poor deluded fool, from the bottom of my heart.”

It was in vain for the young creature so agreeably apostrophized to hug her favourite maxim that “hard words break no bones.” It began at this point to escape from her rather convulsive embrace. Two salt drops hung unshed on the lengthy eyelashes--one of her most uncommon beauties--of her lower lids.

“Do not you pity _me_ a little too?” she said with half a sob.

“You!”

The lightning must have struck her that time. She felt as if she were black all down one side. The tears dried up on her lids.

“I had only just begun to lessen your and Mr. Tancred’s dislike for me,” she said, not as if in complaint, but with humble acquiescence in an accepted fact; “and now I have to face a whole hostile family, all of whom dislike and disapprove me more than even you can do!”

Nothing could be less civil than the “That would be difficult!” here interjected; but Miss Ransome had a closer acquaintance with her judge’s character than when once before she had stood a criminal at that judge’s awful bar, and an instinct telling her that the rudeness of the ejaculation possibly had its rise in the suspicion of a temptation to leniency under her own disarming oratory, encouraged her to proceed.

“Don’t you think I am to be pitied for knowing that, if I were to search high and low, I could never in the whole length and breadth of the land find a family who would be ready to welcome me into it?”

“They would certainly be very oddly constituted if they were.”

The comment was even more stinging than its predecessor; yet Bonnybell’s fine ear detected a little uncertainty in its brutality.

“Yes,” she answered, with a little ring of miserable humiliation in her tone, “you are right. Wherever I go, I must force myself; nobody in their senses would hold open their arms to _me_.”

* * * * *

That night Miss Ransome begged to be excused from appearing at dinner, not unwilling that it should be known that her eyes were too extinguished with crying for her to be decently visible; and, as she reflected, “When you are in disgrace a _consommé_ and the wing of a pheasant are better enjoyed beside your dressing-room fire than under the eyes of your exasperated patrons.”

The husband and wife faced each other in the gravity of their original _tête-à-tête_. Only such a thin rivulet of remarks irrigated the drought of their silence as saved them from provoking among their servants the comment that they must have had a “row.” Facing the Spartan abstinence of his companion, Edward was compelled to eat almost entirely alone, and even he had to force an appetite. When the men had finally retired--

“I suppose that you were”--he paused to reject one adjective and pick another--“rather severe to her?”

“I told her the truth.”

“Yes?”

“Do you wish to hear the exact words I used?”

“If you do not mind.”

“I told her that if a scullery-maid in my employment had behaved as she had done, I should have had her discharged on the spot without a character.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks? What for?”

“For gratifying my idle curiosity.”

To himself he said, “How inconceivably barbarous women are to one another!” and the thought was coupled with an ignoble wonder, which had often assailed him in the earlier days of their wedded life, as to whether there was any end at all to Camilla’s forehead, or whether it had really gone to look for the back of her head? But his voice was well under control before he asked--

“And she? How did she take it?”

“_How did she take it?_” repeated his wife, with a sombre wrath in her tone that testified to the intensity of the annoyance that the transaction discussed had caused her. “How does she always take slaps in the face? With turned-up eyes and turned-down mouth, and a Sainte Nitouche air that would almost convince one in the teeth of one’s senses that she was the innocent lamb and one’s self the butcher.”

“Did she give any explanation--make any palliating statement?”

The question was inspired, not by the idle curiosity of which Edward had accused himself, but by the forlorn hope that, since she was presumably making a clean breast of it, Miss Ransome might have added to her confession an explanation of the still uncleared-up mystery of her meeting in the park with that other person, whose moonlit outline had worn such an ominous resemblance to Colonel Landon’s.

“Explanation! Not she; she was far too shrewd. No, her line was an appeal to the feelings. She addressed herself to the wrong quarter for _that_!”--with a short laugh of scorn.

Edward’s was naturally a questioning spirit, and he was still asking himself whether, after all, Miss Ransome’s guns _had_ been so ill laid and pointed when Camilla spoke again.

“It is criminal to rejoice in one’s friends’ calamities, more especially when one has brought those calamities upon them; but, at least, we are the gainers.”

“Yes.”

“We have learnt the mortifying lesson that no influences we can bring to bear have any power against hereditary depravity.”

At that something in him rose and cavilled.

“_Depravity!_ That is scarcely the right word! There is no _depravity_ in an engagement to marry between two free people, however brought about.”

Engagements to marry had always been subjects for wincing to Camilla ever since her own, and the phrase “however brought about,” though uttered without the slightest _arrière-pensée_, was perhaps not happily chosen. She fell silent, and later in the evening, after a prolonged pause, evidently given to painful reflection, said--

“I thought I had never seen a path more plainly indicated to me as the right one, never taken a step more unmistakably under guidance; but I now see that I was misled by that exaggerated value for physical attractions which has led me into all the gravest errors of my life.”

Edward was no coxcomb; yet it was impossible to mistake what the gravest of the grave errors of her life had, in his wife’s opinion, been.

* * * * *

Next morning Mrs. Tancred came down to breakfast in her bonnet.

“You are coming to London with me?” asked her husband, looking up from his coffee.

“No.”

The negative was naked, and did not seem to invite further questioning; but Mrs. Tancred presently volunteered the unasked information.

“I am going to the Dower House.”

Neither of her auditors hazarded a comment, but the sinking heart of one of them inquired of itself, “Does she mean to take me with her?” There was a pause as of Nature between two thunderbolts.

“I am going to ask pardon of my friends.” Edward was apparently run out of his stock of “yeses,” and the white face of the object of Camilla’s apologies dropped towards its heaving chest. The whiteness was partly artificial, due to an annoyed comment by the artist on her own carmines at an earlier period of the morning. (“I am incorrigibly rosy! One ought never to be pink at a crisis! I can do it so that even _without_ her spectacles she will not be able to detect it!”) “And, moreover, I wish to find out what their attitude will be towards----”

She paused before the name of Bonnybell, as before an unclean word with which she was unwilling to sully her lips. The unclean word lifted up its little pitiful voice.

“Will you ask them just to give me a chance?”

Instinct dictated to her the phrase in its undefended humility; and though the ungracious “It is no part of my mission to be your messenger!” could hardly be said to be encouraging, Miss Ransome felt that she had struck the right note. She was alone with Edward for one moment in the hall before his diurnal departure.

“How I wish you were back!” she cried in such a subdued plaint, as seemed forced out of her maiden reticence in spite of her.

“Do you?” He could only hope that the surprise he tried to throw into his words was more perceptible to her ear than the emotion that entered into them without any throwing.

“Yes, I do. I suppose that, in my dire need, I catch at straws.”

The phrase went with him through the day.

* * * * *

Mrs. Tancred’s absence was prolonged enough to give its cause ample time to consider her situation in every light and from every angle. The season of suspense was passed, like all ordinary mornings, in the schoolroom, but Miss Ransome gave herself a whole holiday in honour of her betrothal, and also because, as she sensibly reflected, an equipment of elegant learning would be wasted upon the mate of Toby.

“If they refuse to entertain the idea at all--and I _am_ a pill for them”--she laughed maliciously--“and Camilla insists on my giving him up to oblige them, I suppose we shall have to be tied up at once in some hugger-mugger way at a Registry Office. Pah! how can any one marry who has any other means of subsistence? I may give up living by my wits, but I shall have Toby _pour tout potage_ for all eternity!”

The thought was so unexhilarating that it stemmed the current of her ruminations for a time, while she dwelt upon it, her eyes resting on the trees which masked her windows, but through which, owing to the fall of their leaves, little loopholes into the beyond had become apparent.

“It is ridiculous--deadly dull as it has been--but I believe I shall be sorry to go. One cannot enjoy the old camel’s pummellings, but I do not dislike her as much as I ought, and Edward, dear, courteous, hesitating, incredible Edward, who has never once tried to kiss me! Oh that I could say the same of Toby!”

The last and most grotesquely fervent of Miss Ransome’s aspirations was drowned in the sound of wheels, and all her being passed into her ears as she listened to hear her fate. She had not long to wait. Camilla herself--no messenger footman--opened the schoolroom door, and shut it carefully behind her.

“They will have nothing to say to me?” The just-enough-panted inquiry was accompanied with a little rush forward.

“They have no choice,” replied Camilla, dryly; “Toby is his own master.”

“I know that he is independent of his father in money matters,” rejoined Bonnybell, with an excursion into the realities of truth as injudicious as unusual, “but----”

“You would not have risked your patent-leather shoes in the park in pursuit of him if he had not been.”

The girl drew up her head with a meek air of hurt self-respect.

“I was going to say that it was not the money question that I cared about. What I want to know is whether they can bring themselves--by-and-by--in time--to look upon me as a daughter and sister.”

“They will try.” The tone in which Mrs. Tancred uttered the sentence plainly showed what, in her opinion, the upshot of the effort would be.

“That is all I can ask of them.”

“And to show that they are in earnest and are willing to give you the chance you asked for, they have generously invited you to stay at the Dower House; I am to send you over this afternoon.”

Perhaps it was excess of joy at this news of her acceptance into the bosom of the Aylmer family that caused half a minute to elapse before Bonnybell was able to ejaculate, with quite the proper emphasis--

“What have I done to deserve such goodness?”

And after the matter-of-fact frankness of Camilla’s answer, “Nothing,” there was another pause.

“Was--the news a great shock to them?”

“Yes.”

“Will they”--there was nothing spurious this time about the quailing accent--“be very severe to me?”

“You must remember that it takes time for decent people to become acclimatized to your methods, but they will do their best.”

Miss Ransome’s heart--though, in its wrong, shifty way, not uncourageous--gave a dull thud of dismay. To accept with disarming humility the admission thus cordially offered, and go with smiling readiness to meet the buffets in store for her, was plainly the only wise course to pursue, and no one was better aware of it than herself. Yet at the awful ordeal ahead of her the flesh jibbed.

“Is not this afternoon rather soon?” she asked diffidently.

“What is there to wait for?”

The trenchant question could have but the same answer as Bonnybell’s own inquiry as to what she had done to deserve such goodness had elicited from Mrs. Tancred. After a moment the latter resumed--

“I cannot pretend to you that your visit will be a pleasant one, but, as I said, they will do their best.”

At the terrific view thus conjured up of Catherine and Miss Barnacre’s best, Bonnybell’s artifices fell away from her, and in a spasm of most real consternation she dropped down on her knees beside Camilla, in the attitude most reprobated by that lady, and cried out--

“Oh, I do not think I can bear it! They will put their fingers on all my weak spots, and I have so many--many!”

Mrs. Tancred’s answer was to twitch the gown clutched by the bride-elect’s convulsive fingers out of them, and say--

“They cannot well be more uncomplimentary to you than I am.”

“That is true,” replied the other, sobbing; “but when you are down upon me I know that it is for my good. Unworthy and wretched as I am, I have always known that you did not really hate me, since that night when you came up to my bedroom and kissed me when you thought I was asleep.”

Bonnybell’s wet eyes were cast down, but she heard her benefactress give a start at this masterly communication.

“It was of a piece with the rest of your conduct to pretend that you were asleep,” she said harshly.

But the poor innocent knew that her shot had told.