CHAPTER XXIII

The morning had come, and with it Toby. As Bonnybell, propitiatingly punctual, appeared at the exactly nine-o’clock breakfast-table, she was informed by the butler, whose tone--the really perfectly colourless one of a well-trained servant--seemed to her ear vibrating with the compassion which all creation must feel for her, that Mr. Aylmer had been waiting for an hour and a half in the morning-room, and would be glad to speak to her as soon as she was at liberty.

The object of this very morning call cast a dismayed glance at her protectors.

“At home he is never down till long past ten!”

“An extremely bad habit, and a very good thing that he should be broken of it,” answered Camilla, unable, even at so dramatic a moment, to refrain from lifting up her voice in testimony against the vicious indulgence alluded to; but her hand rattled the cups of tea which, in contempt of servants and sideboards, she always made herself.

“I suppose I ought not to keep him waiting any longer,” said Bonnybell, turning with extreme reluctance from the tempting, gleaming table, with its beautiful old green dragon china and its Queen Anne silver, towards the door of doom.

“You had better have a cup of coffee and something to eat first,” Camilla said peremptorily. “A painful scene should never be faced upon an empty stomach.”

The homely common sense of the advice came to the aid of its imperativeness, and Bonnybell eagerly drank the offered coffee, and with some difficulty swallowed a scrap of toast. But still she lingered. The entrance of a servant with a lengthy message for Mrs. Tancred gave the girl the opportunity for a word with Edward, who had not yet sat down to the table.

“You would not come too, I suppose, to back me up?” she asked with low precipitation, casting a glance out of the corner of her eyes towards Camilla. But her alarm in that direction was unnecessary, as it was one of the rules of Mrs. Tancred’s life always to give her whole attention to the subject that at the moment engaged her; and though her interest in Miss Ransome’s love affair was undoubtedly keener than that she felt for the third housemaid’s quinsy, the latter, while she was being informed of it, entirely swept the former from her attention.

At the strange request made him, Edward’s features took on an expression which the petitioner at once recognized as not one of acquiescence.

“Poor chap, don’t you think he has a right to his last chance?”

“Very well,” she rejoined, with a hysteric laugh, and half holding out a hand. “Good-bye, if you never see me again.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that when a person is in the state of mind he is, poor fellow, one does not know what may happen.”

Her face was white as a magnolia, and yet contradictorily lovelier for the very absence of those reds which had seemed, when present, to make up half its beauty, and her eyes were full of a valedictory solemnity; facts of which, for once, she was all but quite unconscious.

“Do you mean to say that you are afraid of his being personally violent; if so----”

To her disordered fancy there sounded an echo of contempt in the form of the question.

“I am not much apt to be afraid,” she answered quietly, and a something in her tiny face, for all its blanching, confirmed the assertion. “I do not much mind if he does shoot me. What have I to lose now?”

“Do you care as much as that?”

There was a horrified astonishment in his tone, as if remorseful for some former incredulity, and for once Nature was too strong for Bonnybell. She saw in the mirror of Edward’s face that there must be a scornful denial of his accusation on her own. But in a flash she had again taken hold of herself and of her part. Not for a second must she forget, or let others forget, that she was broken-hearted at the loss of Toby.

“It would be a solution; and--and--it is not easy to have _two_ people to fight, myself as well as him! Wish me well through it!” She was gone.

* * * * *

The engagement had lasted three hours, so the clock told the watchers, who--not together, for Camilla had rigorously forced herself to her daily desk--were awaiting the issue of the duel.

“I am glad that you let yourself be persuaded by me not to go to London to-day,” Edward’s wife had said to him before withdrawing.

“I do not quite know what good I do by staying,” he answered restlessly.

“In the case of two such perfectly undisciplined natures one never knows what developments may arise,” she rejoined.

With this imperfect consolation for his wasted morning, she left him. Since then, against his will, chidden by his common sense--for was not the smoking-room that held his uneasy idleness miles away from the morning-room?--he had been listening, asking himself whether, although unquestionably out of reach of any ordinary sound, the noise of--say a pistol or revolver shot might not penetrate to his straining ears? In vain to argue down the ludicrous idea. Did the danger seem real to her, or was the suggestion only thrown out to give herself a heightened interest in his eyes? She was quite capable of it. Not frightened either. Seldom as--he now realized--she spoke truth, she had spoken it then. Blanched with excitement, not fear.

Had Mr. Tancred’s eye been able to verify or correct the notions upon the current melodrama presented by his imagination, he would have seen the object of his speculations in even sorer straits than he had pictured her. The end of those dire hours left her and her antagonist exactly where it found them. From the engulfment of the initial embrace her spirit had cried out to itself, “This is exceedingly disagreeable, but I suppose it will end some time. How glad I am that I drank dear Camilla’s coffee! I do not think I could have gone through with it if I had not! His tears are taking all the curl out of my fringe. Poor devil, if he only knew how little worth while it all is!”

The same inward ejaculations were pouring themselves forth in her inmost soul at the end of the three hours, when her situation was no further amended than that she was sitting on a chair--a simulated swoon had gained her this concession--with Toby kneeling before her, his uninvited head rolling about upon her knees--while between loud sobs he formulated, with the iteration of a jay or a pie, his simple thesis: “You said you loved me! You promised to marry me! I have done nothing to make you change your mind! You cannot, and shall not chuck me.”

Against the rock of this unanswerable logic her rhetoric had for one hundred and eighty minutes broken in vain. There was not a single weapon in her not ill-furnished armoury that she had not employed; and all with a like result. “Wounded honour?” His family _en bloc_ or severally should follow her round the room on their knees, imploring her pardon, and eating their words. “Tears?” He beat her hollow at them. “A vow never to love any one else?” This in her present nausea of endearments seemed a vow easy indeed to keep, but it was received with frenzy at the mere suggestion of such a possibility. The offer to be a sister to him and to be god-daughter to his eldest child when he was happily married to some one else were not up to her usual level of cleverness, and would not have been put forward had her mind been in its normal condition. Their effect was terrifying!

Physically exhausted, she leaned back in her chair, quite at her wits’ end, mechanically stroking with some dim hope of keeping it quiet the distraught head which, rolling about in sandy abandonment on her lap, pinned her to her seat. Never did a more poignant regret at the success of its own handiwork fill a human mind. “I ought to have known more about him before I went in for him so thoroughly, but who would have guessed that under that stodgy outside there was anything like _this_?”

Another hour had passed, and yet another, and still the situation remained at the same hopeless deadlock. Occasionally the head lifted itself and the mouth repeated its pitiful parrot cry, and once, twice, thrice again, Miss Ransome went through the weapons of her armoury. In her desperation she tried a new one; offered--in utter hopelessness of ever ridding herself of him on cheaper terms--a compromise. If he would go away for a year, round the world--every one went round the world nowadays--in a year she might be cleared and made more worthy of him; and at the end----

He interrupted her with the brutal directness of one who had got through the civilized surface of things to the bed-rock of mere Nature, while a sort of cunning flashed into his dimmed and bloodshot eyes.

“I should find you waiting for me?”

“That you undoubtedly would not!” was the reply made by herself to herself, but for him there was a little tired sigh, and an “Ah! if you cannot trust me----”

At that he went off into extravagances, incoherent assertions of the impossibility of any one seeing without longing to possess her; of the madness of leaving her as a mark for other men’s desires.

She collapsed into silence. “Will no one ever arrive to rescue me?” The answer seemed to come in a loud whirring familiar sound, the prosaic boom of the gong.

“It is luncheon!” she cried. “You must not keep me!”

“You can think of luncheon _now_!”

“They are very particular, very strict about hours,” she answered, casting wildly about for the rope that even now seemed to dangle just out of her reach, “and--and--dreadful, agonizing as it is to part thus, I must not--now of all times--do anything to alienate my only friends.”

He had lifted his head to make his protest, and she had nimbly taken advantage of the fact to slide eel-like away from him, and make for the door. He was there before her. But just as he reached it the mahogany portal swung open, and in the aperture stood a tranquil black form.

“If you please, sir, Mrs. Tancred wished me to say that she hoped you would stay to luncheon.”

There was a moment’s pause while the full bathos of the situation made itself felt. Then civilization resumed her sway, the primæval instincts retired into the background, and the unfortunate Toby, averting his hideously disfigured face, and swallowing his last sob, answered thickly--

“Oh, thanks very much, but I am afraid I am engaged.”

This, however, in one sense was just what he was not.