CHAPTER XXI

A steady fine rain had set in, which had lasted with scarcely any daylight intermission, though, as often in wet weather, the nights were fine, since Bonnybell’s absorption into the bosom of her future family. Three days had passed since that event, and from inside the walls of her prison-house had come no sign of how things were going with her there. Sometimes Edward felt Darius’s wish to go to the edge of the lion’s den and cry out “in a lamentable voice” to a little modern Daniel to know how she was faring there. The only difference was that he did not indulge it.

Mr. Tancred had returned to find his guest already gone, and told himself at once that he was relieved. That there might be no mistake about it, he repeated the statement several times.

“She is absolutely indifferent to the young man,” Camilla said, using the generic term for humanity instead of the colloquial, on the same principle as she always spoke of Jock as “the dog” when he was in disgrace. “She went off in a flood of tears.”

“With such an ordeal before me, I think I should have done the same,” he answered.

“I reminded her that she would have the support of her accomplice; but that did not seem to give her much confidence.”

For not the first time in his life Edward wished that his wife would give him a holiday from the dry irony whose use had become a second nature to her, but he did not, it is needless to say, tell her so, and Mrs. Tancred continued in the same strain--

“She repeated what a noble character he was; but said that in this case it was some woman-friend whom she needed to cling to. I was unable to advise her to cling to”--“Catherine Aylmer” was on her tongue, but she substituted--“the ladies of the Aylmer family in their present frame of mind.”

Edward suggested weakly, “Meg, perhaps?”

“Meg was sent away this morning.”

“And Miss Barnacre?”

“No, they have kept her. They think that she will be invaluable to them.”

He gave a slight shudder, and glanced at the clock. It pointed to 10.30. For five mortal hours the lions had been crunching the tender bones of the little new Daniel.

“It seems,” continued his wife, “that she has always liked women better than men.” An arid little laugh showed how much credit Camilla attached to the statement. “I wonder, while she was about it, that she did not add that her mother had done the same.” After a pause, “She must indeed have been in sore need of some one to cling to, for she tried to cling to _me_!”

There was an angry ring in the voice that uttered the last clause, which showed Mr. Tancred that his wife had not been so untouched by poor Miss Bonnybell’s frantic gymnastics as she wished it to be believed; and for the first time he felt less intolerably grated upon by her tone.

“Are you determined to make her always carry that unfortunate mother upon her back?” he asked, rather wearily. “The poor creature will have enough to do through life to get away from her without your help.”

The rejoinder tarried, but when it came there was a tinge of compunction in it.

“You are quite right. I do not think that the Aylmers will let her forget her parentage in a hurry.”

Both fell silent.

* * * * *

Three days had passed; and during them the married pair seemed to themselves to be always falling silent. A tacit convention prevented their perpetual discussion of one subject; yet none other seemed to present itself, and the eschewed theme kept cropping up continually, like gout weed in a garden. The house seemed to both extraordinarily silent. Their late guest had never been noisy, and it would have seemed impossible that the removal of so small and soundless a presence could have made any difference in a great house’s contribution to the noise of the world. Yet the absence of so--as one would have thought--imperceptible a footfall on the deep-carpeted stairs; the extinction of such tiny trills of song and wafts of laughter made the rooms seem void, as if uninhabited, and hushed as if one lay dead in them. It was strange that this deliverance from a little adventuress, of whose existence they had six months earlier been ignorant, should have made the woman feel the bitter curse of her barrenness, and the man the contemptible vacuity of his self-murdered life more acutely than ever before.

It was under a variety of aspects that the subject reared its shunned head. Camilla was always the one to introduce and then curtly dismiss it.

“I imagine,” she said one evening, after having been observing for some moments the idle flutter and dip of the leaves of the book her husband was ostensibly reading, “that you are feeling as if all the little colour that was in them had been withdrawn from our somewhat grey lives; is it not so?”

There was no anger nor even surprise, only a sort of compassion in her tone, as of one gauging anew the drabness of an existence in which such an illumination could be felt as a loss.

Edward regained a firmer grip of his paper-knife.

“Are you judging me by yourself?” he asked, with a smile not more melancholy than, and as calmly kind as usual. “Are you sure that it is not _you_ who are missing our patch of scarlet?”

“I should miss a blister when it was taken off,” she answered, and the subject dropped.

It rose again, however, and yet again, impossible apparently quite to submerge. On the third evening it came up suddenly, emerging from silence in a fresh dress.

“It would be difficult to find a worse way for disposing of money,” Camilla said, her rather grating voice breaking on the absolute stillness of her surroundings--Jock never snored and Edward never cleared his throat--“but I suppose we must give her a trousseau.”

“It would be like you,” he answered, carefully dissociating himself, as he invariably did, from any share in her generosities.

She must have grown too much used to this habit of fifteen years to be annoyed by it; so perhaps it was some warmth in his acquiescence that ruffled her, or simply that her stock of amiability had run low, but her rejoinder was certainly not amiable.

“She shall have no voice in the choice of it.”

Ten minutes more must have elapsed before Jock pricked his ears, the finer dog-sense out-running human hearing. Camilla looked with wondering tenderness at him over the pins on which her philanthropic sweater was growing into fleecy life.

“What does he think he hears?”

Edward shook his head, and Jock jumped out of his basket and made for the door, which opened as he reached it to admit a figure racing in at the top of its speed.

Before the astounded couple realized its presence, the figure whose flexibility of knee-joint had often been a trial to its female patron had flung itself in an attitude of prayer between them.

“I have come back to you! Do not drive me away!”

“You have been turned out?”

The ejaculated inquiry was Camilla’s. The same idea had occurred to Edward, yet his wife’s outspoken wording of it gave him a galvanic shock at her brutality.

The kneeling angel gave pause to the pants which were heaving her black chiffon breast, to gasp out, with a reproachful look from one to the other of her listeners--

“Turned out! Oh no, I turned myself out.”

The extreme improbability of this statement entirely “dumbed” that one of Miss Ransome’s hearers who was never much addicted to speech, but the other cried out in a key from which no great pains had been taken to extract the incredulity--

“You ran away? at this time of night?”

“I did not run away; I asked them to send me----” She made a dramatic pause. “I was going to say _home_.”

It was not quite at once that Camilla could bring out her curt query--

“And why, pray?”

By this time the slender darkness had risen to its feet, and was drawing itself up, not without a touch of unfamiliar dignity.

“When I found that they believed something that they had heard about me, I felt that I could not spend another night under the same roof with them.”

For a moment the vague “something” remained with no demand for an explanation of it, Edward’s silence being due to a dreadful suspicion that whatever the accusation that had been brought against Bonnybell it was in all probability true; Camilla’s to a fear of hearing a fact or facts about her _protégée_ even more shocking than those that had already wounded her ears. But as a shrinking from the disagreeable was certainly no part of Mrs. Tancred’s character, she pulled herself together, and asked brusquely--

“What was it? and was it true?”

“True!” repeated the other in a heart-wrung voice. “Oh, if you, too, are going to believe it!” She threw her hands out before her with a gesture at once of finality and desperation.

“I should have a better chance of disbelieving it if I knew what it was.”

“They received an anonymous letter about me. It came by this evening’s post.”

“H’m!”

“It accused me”--there was worldly wisdom in bringing out the accusation with difficulty; but the difficulty was real too--“the writer said he thought that the man whom I was going to marry ought to know that he had seen me one night last year in Paris at M----’s.”

The confession seemed at first to fall flat; at least, with regard to the person to whom it was directly addressed.

“M----’s!” replied Camilla, with the unconscious ease with which an innocent young girl might pronounce an improper word. “What is M----’s?”

Bonnybell’s distraught orbs rolled with involuntary confidence towards Edward.

“You know, don’t you?”

“I have heard of it.”

“I suppose it is some very disreputable haunt of vice,” said Camilla; “but I am thankful to say I never heard of it.”

“It would be absolutely out of the question for any _femme du monde_ to be seen there if she wished to keep a rag of character; and as to a _jeune fille_!”

“It was not true, then?”

The question was point-blank, as was the searching eye-beam that lit it, and Bonnybell felt that the answer must be to match.

“_True!_” she repeated, with an anguish of upbraiding in her voice. “Oh, I cannot have explained properly! How can you ask me? I know that poor Claire was not careful enough in the places she took me to; but M----’s! and I never went anywhere without her!”

If Mrs. Tancred here had to struggle with some difficulty in suppressing her opinions of the chaperonage thus waved in her face, she came off conqueror; and “poor Claire’s” laurels, and even the objectionable pet name itself, went unimpugned.

“Have you any idea who wrote it?”

“Not the slightest!”--with wounded emphasis. “How should I? I did not know”--with innocent sorrow--“that I had an enemy in the world.”

A diversion was here effected by the fact that Edward, usually so quiet and noiseless, by some awkward movement of his foot displaced one of the fire-irons, which fell rattling from its andiron on to the hearth, before which the master of the house was standing.

Bonnybell’s heart, though in a certain sense a stout one, sank. “He knows that it was Charlie!” she said internally. “I was afraid that he must connect the letter with that unlucky episode in the park! Well, since I have begun, I must go on--‘in for a penny, in for a pound;’ and, after all, it is nearly all truth that I am telling.”

“It came by the afternoon post,” she continued, confining the appealing tragedy of her eyes to her female auditor for the present, as being the easier field of action. “I saw at dinner-time that something must have happened, they were so cold to me; not”--in plaintive, though not accusatory parenthesis--“that they have ever been anything else. Miss Barnacre kept talking all the time about--_adventuresses_”--the speaker’s sunk voice made a slight shamed pause before the last word--“and Catherine was like _ice_!”

A long sighing breath bore on its wings this last cruel reminiscence; no other sound broke upon it, and it was with a heartened sense that the air was getting warmer that the narrator presently went on with her narrative.

“Toby did all he could to prevent their showing it to me; he at least believed in me. I am afraid their doing it in spite of him will make a sad quarrel between them”--another sigh--“but they thought it right I should know; perhaps it was.”

Miss Ransome paused on the meek acquiescence in injury of this note.

“I suppose that they thought it their duty to give you an opportunity of clearing yourself,” Camilla said, in a voice whose chronic severity was tempered by some unusual relaxing of its harshness, “but for myself I should have put such a thing into the fire.”

“They gave it to me in the drawing-room after dinner. There were only Mrs. Aylmer, and Catherine, and Miss Barnacre there. I thought they need not have had Miss Barnacre; but you know how she always gives her opinion about everything, even about your religious views.” Bonnybell sank her voice at this last proof of the Barnacre’s presumption, and was rewarded by hearing a muffled snort of contempt from the direction of Mrs. Tancred. “I could not make anything of it at first, never having seen the handwriting before.” (O Bonnybell! why the inartistic superfluity of this touch?) “I asked what it meant.”

“Yes?”

“When at last I made out what I was accused of, and saw that they--I am not quite sure about Mrs. Aylmer, but the other two did not even attempt any disguise--believed it, I--I did not say anything at all. I just gave them--gave Catherine, I think it was, but I did not seem to see very well--gave Catherine back the letter and left the room.”

The foot of the figure on the hearthrug must have been on this particular night out of its owner’s control. A while ago it was the fire-irons that innocently suffered, now it was Jock; and, to his intense astonishment, nobody apologized.

Camilla said, “Well?”

“I knew that I should find Toby in the smoking-room, so I went there, and asked him to send to the stables and order something to take me--I am afraid I said,” with a humbly apologetic smile, “_home_!”

The wronger of Jock and of the fire-irons spoke at last, though his voice was not quite what he could have wished.

“And he let you go?”

“He had no choice, poor fellow!” replied the girl, with an unpretending dignity which made it seem to her hearer as if he saw her for the first time. “He was in a dreadful state. I never saw any one in such a dreadful state; but I was firm. I said, ‘If it is true, I am not fit to be here; and if it is not true, I ought never to speak to them again.’”

“And he acquiesced?”

“When I said _that_, oh, he _was_ in a dreadful state!”--with a, for once, not manufactured shudder at the recollection. “He answered that, for his part, he had every intention of speaking to them again, and he did not think that they would forget what he meant to say in a hurry.”

The narrative, pregnant though it was, had not taken long, and now it was ended.

“If your statement is true----” Camilla began with a judicial slowness.

But Bonnybell, contrary to the humble politeness of her wont, broke in with a little cry.

“True? Would it be much use my telling an untruth when ‘they’ are so close by to show me up if I did?”

The logic was as sound as the veracity of the appeal was obvious, and the little cry was, and did the work of, more than a rhetorical flourish.

“If, as I am induced to think, you have stated the facts as they occurred,” began Mrs. Tancred again, with no apparent resentment of the interruption, “I confess that I do not think there was any course open to you but the one you adopted. For once in your life you seem to have behaved with decency and dignity.”

The concession, though not very graciously worded, was an enormous one, and the relief consequent upon it proportionately great, for poor Miss Ransome had been very, very far from sure of her reception.

“Then I may _stay_?” she faltered.

“_Stay!_” repeated her hostess, with an energy of scorn which warmed the inmost core of her silent husband’s heart towards her. “Do not ask preposterous questions.”

Thereupon the returned waif flung herself incontinently upon the rigid neck whose stiff ruffles and frills no fond daughter-arms had ever disarranged. The action bulked colossal to the executor of it in retrospect. “How _could_ I have done it?” she asked herself in a cooler after-hour, looking back upon her feat as the man who in youth has mounted a cannon-swept, bayonet-bristling breach into a burning town may regard the feat from the armchair of placid old age. Of course, I had had a good deal to upset me, but I must have been off my head.

The embrace, if so one-sided a transaction could merit the name, did not last long. Bonnybell was curtly told to sit down and not make a fool of herself, and Camilla began almost at once to scold her; but yet it was with a sense of extreme well-being that the little gutter-snipe, as in frank soliloquy she often called herself, settled her lithe body into a familiar armchair. Edward had sat down too, and Jock, making up his mind that reparation for his wrongs was unaccountably not forthcoming to-night, stepped into his basket, which stood raised on its accustomed tripod to keep him from imaginary draughts. The girl might never have been away. Yet to herself what odious æons seemed to have rolled between her last and her present occupancy of the Hepplethwaite chair that now held her!

To a casual observer all would have seemed as before, but a nicer eye would have detected that Mrs. Tancred had not resumed her labours on the nightly sweater. She sat looking straight before her with knit brows for some good while before she at last opened her mouth to utter slow and evidently well-weighed words.

“If you have told me the truth”--oh, why that cruel preamble?--“I think, as I have already said, that your course was the abstractly right one. Worldly wisdom would, of course, have dictated a more conciliatory line of action. To be on terms of open hostility with your husband’s family will not conduce to the happiness of your married life.”

At the beginning of this harangue Bonnybell had sat straight up in her chair to mark her respect by an attitude of close attention. Her hands now clutched the arms till her knuckle-bones stood out through the white skin.

“But I shall not have any married life,” she sighed in a trembling tone that yet seemed to mean what it said.

“_Not have any married life!_” repeated Mrs. Tancred, with such an accent as made Miss Ransome wonder whether the words could indeed be her own. “I am quite at a loss. I thought I understood you to say that your _fiancé_” (never since his clandestine courtship had the young man been Toby)--“that your _fiancé_ did not share his family’s suspicions?”

“He does not, he does not!” cried Bonnybell, in a sort of half-real, half-bogus rapture. “He is absolutely stanch. He would marry me to-night if he could. Oh, it is something to have _one_ person believe in you like that; but it is _I_ who, after what has happened, will not marry him.”