CHAPTER XXII

The hour was late before the junta that sat upon Miss Ransome’s affairs of the heart separated for the night.

“_Not marry him_,” Camilla had repeated, with a terrible trenchancy, “after all that has happened--after the way in which you pursued him?”

Miss Ransome waived, with wise magnanimity, discussion of the unflattering phrase.

“It is for _his_ sake,” she said, in sweet renunciation. “There can be no happiness in married life without confidence, as you have often told me, and since I seem to have enemies who stab me in the dark, this thing may happen again; and though he does not believe _now_, he may gradually grow to suspect that there may be something in it, and his people will work upon him till they persuade him that I am--what they think me.”

Her voice was broken, and her air so much that of the widowed dove, that it took her hearers a minute or two to disentangle the cool common sense of her utterances from its emotional fringes and tags.

“You seem to be ready to give up rather easily what you stuck at nothing to secure,” Camilla said, in a voice of vexed puzzledom; and Edward’s voice raised itself for almost the first time in one of those tentative utterances that always gave the impression of his thinking everybody’s opinion more valuable than his own--

“It does not strike you that it is rather hard on Toby?”

Miss Ransome turned on this diffident new interlocutor eyes glorified by a lofty self-abnegation.

“He will think so now,” she said, “but in ten years he will thank me.”

“I have known more unlikely things than that happen,” Camilla said caustically, “and there is more sense and rationality in what you say than what I have hitherto thought you capable of; but still, if you are sincerely attached to the man--and I suppose that, after having sacrificed so much in the way of delicacy to gain his affections, you must at least be fond of him?”

She paused, leaving her sentence unbalanced, with an evident intention of obtaining an answer to its first half before proceeding to the second.

Bonnybell hesitated a moment. Even if she had been enamoured of her Toby, she would have much preferred not to say so before Edward, and things being as they were---- However, she got out of the dilemma fairly well.

“Need I answer that question?” she asked, with virgin reticence.

Camilla received this graceful parry with a puzzled “Humph!” adding presently--

“It does not seem to strike you that there is an injustice in punishing the man for what he has not done.”

“Punishing him!” repeated Miss Ransome, in a tone of startled anguish. “Oh no, I am only giving him a little pain now, to save him a great deal of pain later.”

The baffled keenness on Camilla’s face grew more acute, and its young object was also made aware by some sixth sense that Edward’s acumen was also at fault through this new double in a course that had never run particularly straight.

“You must have had an uncommonly unpleasant three days,” Mrs. Tancred remarked, after a ruminating space, “to be so anxious to loose what before you were so determined to grasp.”

Bonnybell could have spared these repeated allusions to the methods by which her conquest had been achieved, but she took it beautifully, and with gentle head drooped.

“That is true. Whatever happens to me in the future, I do not think I can well have a bitterer cup to drink than what they have held to my lips for the last three days.”

A caught breath in one direction and a fidgeted foot in another here assured Miss Ransome that her simple oratory had told, and she hastened to go on striking while the iron was hot.

“It was not only this last blow,” she said, with a long shuddering sigh, “but all along they took pleasure in humiliating me, in showing up my ignorance and my foolishness--Heaven knows it was easy enough--and they were glad and ready to believe evil--even such unbelievable evil as this--of me!”

A mental gloss followed this last statement. “I am speaking truth, in a way; it _is_ unbelievable that any mother could have taken her daughter to M----’s; and even poor Claire would not have done it if she had not been even less herself than usual that night.”

A distinctly emotional pause ensued, which Camilla, with a movement of the shoulders as of one shaking off an unwelcome burden, broke.

“Come,” she said brusquely, “this will not do. You must not try to work upon our feelings. For once in your life you have been the aggrieved person. I own that I cannot myself comprehend”--drawing up her bony figure with a scornful dignity that for once made it seem beautiful in Bonnybell’s eyes--“stooping to notice any accusation that took so low a form as an anonymous letter; but we must not allow ourselves to be led away into an exaggeration of feeling. After all, the whole thing rests upon a misconception. They are good and conscientious people.” (Miss Ransome was glad to verify that to make this admission cost Camilla what is vulgarly called a “swallow.”) “When your innocence is proved, they will be the first to own themselves in the wrong.”

“How _can_ it be proved?” answered Bonnybell, dejectedly. “How can any one rebut a charge that comes one does not know whence, and one does not know why?” The falsehood came more easily this time, but prudence and something, too, of authentic feeling bid it not stand alone. “I would not thank them for believing in me when my innocence was proved. The people I love and bless are those who believe in me first, and do without proof.”

The description, though perhaps not quite accurately fitting her present audience, was obviously meant to cover them, and it was not very harshly that Camilla repressed this new excursion into the realms of the emotional.

“If it is false,” she said, not unkindly, though without any direct acknowledgment of Bonnybell’s magnificent compliment to her own and her husband’s credulity, “you have only to wait, and it will die of itself. It is the essence of the false to perish.” (“That is a bad look-out for me,” thought Bonnybell, humorously, but she only bowed her head.) “The very monstrousness of the accusation”--indignation gave an unwonted quiver to the speaker’s voice--“will kill it the more quickly, and even if it takes time, you can well afford to wait. A year, two years, might make you a little less grossly unfit for the duties of a wife and mother than you are now.”

Again Bonnybell bowed her head, and across Edward’s memory there flashed in ludicrous incongruity the recollection of Miss Ransome’s views on maternity, as slightly but graphically sketched for his own benefit a few days earlier.

“I have always heard that there is nothing so wearing as a long engagement,” suggested Miss Ransome, presently, with much hesitancy--“nor so ruinous to the appearance,” she was about to add, but thought better of it.

The severity, singularly absent from her latest utterance, here showed signs of returning to Camilla’s eye and tone.

“I do not quite understand the drift of your remark. You cannot be suggesting the advisability of thrusting yourself into a family which would receive you in the spirit that characterizes the Aylmers’ present attitude towards you.”

“No,” replied Bonnybell, with a little heartbroken gesture of renunciation. “I meant that there is nothing for me but to give him up.”

She held to the same text through the hour and a half during which the debate lasted, although listening with the most attentive and sorrowing mildness to all the arguments that could be adduced on the other side.

Arrived at the haven of her own room, she cast herself on the bed, and kissed it hysterically. “Was ever any one so glad to be back anywhere as I am to be here?” she sighed out. “Oh, _what_ a three days! Did ever any one before go through three such days? I thought at the beginning of them that I had as tough a hide as most people. But oh, in five minutes they were through it. Barnacre, Catherine, shall I ever get their needles out of my skin?”

She turned over on her face for a moment or two to bury the memory of those poisoned pricks in the soothing softness of that hospitable pillow, then sat up on the edge of the bed, with her legs dangling, while her reflections took a less painful turn. “I suppose there is some truth in what poor Claire used to say, that all respectable women are ill-natured.”

She ruminated awhile upon this wise, witty, and tender saying of her departed parent. Then her thoughts returned to fact, from their excursion into theory. “And to think that _Charlie_ should have turned out a blessing in disguise! Without the help of his blackguardly letter--what an unspeakable sweep he is--how could I ever have got out of the _impasse_? Toby would never have let me go. Even now I should not be surprised at his putting a bullet into me to-morrow, as one is always seeing in the papers that grooms do to faithless kitchen-maids, when I give him his final _congé_. Well, that would be the end, and the dear old camel and Edward would be rid of their incubus. Poor Toby! How sea-sick the mere thought of him makes me! How very sincerely I dislike men!”

By this time she had jumped down from the bed and strolled to the cheval-glass. “I ought to do better--much better--than Toby,” she said, appraising her reflection. “Of course, the last three days have ravaged me and added five years to my age, but that is only temporary. I shall probably go on improving up to twenty-five, and Toby has so very much less in his power to settle than I at first understood, and he unwisely let me see that he meant to keep me ten months of the year in the country. I am sorry to play into the hands of that detestable Barnacre, but it is really all for the best.”

With this piously optimistic reflection on her lips, she fell sweetly asleep. It was not the winter dawn, nor the voice of the tea-bearing housemaid, that awoke her. The electric light full on her eyes, shot her back from the land where all things are forgotten, into a consciousness that was at first but semi. Some one was standing over her, and a voice was in her ears, uttering sounds which presently resolved themselves into words.

“You need not pretend to be asleep; I was taken in once, but it is useless to try and deceive me a second time.”

Bonnybell sat up, hazily blinking, still only half outside the gateway of sleep, and gradually realized that the form towering above her in the grimness of its snuff-coloured toga, and the inexorability of its dragged-back grey hair, was no other than Camilla.

“Is there anything wrong?” she asked, rubbing her sleepy eyes with her knuckles--a delicious gesture for once perfectly natural. “Is it a fire, or burglars, or what?” The empire of slumber was still too strong for there to be anything but misty indifference to the calamities suggested in the speaker’s tone. Then, with a spring back into full consciousness, and a frightened opening wide of the startled eyes, “Toby cannot have come already?”

“My conscience would not let me rest,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a ruthless lack of apology for her intrusion, and a still incomplete belief in the genuineness of the drowsiness so ably presented. “Reflecting afterwards on the lightness with which you spoke of ‘throwing over’ and ‘giving up’ what you had sacrificed so much to win, I felt you could not realize that you were sacrificing what may never be offered to you again, the disinterested, protecting, shared devotion of an honourable English gentleman. To love and be loved worthily, perfectly--the most aspiring of us cannot hope to get nearer heaven on this side the grave than this!”

Camilla spoke the last sentence more as if to herself than to her auditor, and left the room immediately afterwards, as if ashamed. The dignity and solemnity of her utterance dispersed the ridicule attendant on such a Priestess of Eros, even in the trivial and hopelessly flippant mind of Bonnybell, and converted her mirth into a more human compassion.

“Poor dear old woman! I wish Edward could bring himself to be a little more demonstrative to her; but it would never do to give him a hint. So I am never to have another Toby! Well”--chuckling and yet shuddering too--“that is a deprivation I can well bear.”