CHAPTER XXIV
“She would, I should think, be glad if you let her have luncheon sent up to her.”
“I have no opinion of food eaten in bedrooms. If people are well enough to eat, they are well enough to come downstairs; but she is probably not fit to be seen, so for once I will relax my rule.”
These two remarks, to which it would be superfluous to assign their respective ownerships, were all the comment upon the recent melodrama at first possible to the reluctant managers upon whose stage it had been played. They ate their luncheon in ruffled silence.
The revolt in Camilla’s Puritan soul against the orgy of ungoverned passion which had chosen her house for its scene was incongruously mixed with an angry compassion, which suspected itself of being something even more lenient towards the cause of the whole uproar, while a very sincere annoyance at the unavoidable and imminent split between herself and her nearest and most congenial neighbours threw in its pinch of bitterness to the distasteful brew.
Edward’s feelings on the subject were even more complicated and less agreeable. Vexation at his own folly in allowing himself to be persuaded to forego his day’s work on the chance of a needless intervention in what no wise concerned him, a compassion even keener than his wife’s, but in his case dedicated chiefly to Toby, coupled with a dim but still existing satisfaction in his discomfiture, and that again with a biting self-disgust for being capable of such a sensation,--these ingredients composed no pleasant potion.
“It is to be hoped that, at all events, this will end the affair,” Camilla said, when at length they were alone, with a sigh of stretched endurance.
“I suppose that the length of the interview looks like it,” he answered.
“Does it?” she rejoined, her nervous irritation wreaking itself, as it had so often done before in their married life, in causelessly stinging words upon him. “I dare say you know more about these kind of extravagant love scenes than I do. You certainly cannot know less.”
He smiled a little sadly. “Mine was a very simple deduction; if she had relented, Toby would not have foregone his luncheon.”
“That is true,” she said, mollified by his gentleness, a gentleness that yet never prevented the recurrence of her stings, “and I was unnecessarily snappish, as you must often find me. Poor little wretch! She has shown more principle and grit than I gave her credit for, if she has kept to her renunciation of him.”
Edward was silent. The having lived in the house with Bonnybell for several weeks had possibly made him more attached to rigid truth than ever before; and the motive of her heroic abandonment was still too obscure to him for him to be able to join as cordially as he would have liked in encomiums of it.
“It is, of course, a severe trial to have her returned upon our hands, when we had thought our responsibility nearly ended; but we must try not to let her see it--a needless caution to you, whose tendency is always towards over-indulgence--but in this case I should be in agreement with you; in a mind like hers, the first germs of good cannot be too carefully fostered.”
Edward’s acquiescence in this plan of campaign, though really a fervent one, was indicated only by a slight nod, and Mrs. Tancred went on, the leniency and forbearance of her first proposal sliding into a withering sarcasm.
“Our friendship with the Aylmers is, of course, at an end; and doubtless this is only the beginning. An easy calculation will tell us how soon we shall be deprived of all acquaintances who number an unmarried male member among their family; perhaps”--the edge of her weapon growing keener, and fancy taking a bitter flight--“perhaps, indeed, the limitation to _un_-married male members is superfluous!”
Was it a happy moment for the object of this philippic to appear in person to answer it? Happy or unhappy, there she was. Scarcely had the climax of her forebodings as to the ultimate result of her hospitality passed Camilla’s lips when Bonnybell stood before her. But what a Bonnybell! What a blurred, dimmed, dishevelled, altogether lamentable Bonnybell! A drowned toy terrier is the only image that for wretchedness, smallness, dilapidation, and pathos, could at all convey the idea of the figure that now presented itself to its protectors.
“I do not want any luncheon,” the dim ghost said in a voice that matched its face, “and I know that you do not approve of people eating things in their rooms; but thank you so much, all the same, for thinking of it! Oh, if I once begin to thank you, when shall I stop?” She ended with a low wail.
“Don’t be hysterical,” replied Camilla, hastily. “Edward, go and fetch her a glass of port wine and a biscuit. The servants must not see her. There, lie down and go to sleep. What is the use of crying yourself into a jelly just because for once in your life you have behaved properly?”
Edward departed on his errand with the greatest alacrity, glad to escape from the horrible yearning of angry pity that the sight of Bonnybell in her distorted misery inspired him with, and from the grating severity of his wife’s voice. Yet he took with him a feeling more subtly unpleasant than those from which he fled--the suspicion, namely, that the very abandonment of Miss Ransome’s woe was in itself partly a pose. “She might have washed her face and combed her hair,” he said to himself wrathfully; but the wrath, if not quite the suspicion, died down, swallowed in an immense pity as her trembling hand took the offered glass from his, and her sunk and diminished eyes lifted themselves in mute gratitude. “Poor little soul! It can be no _parti pris_ that has dwindled her to half her size; and even if she has tried to make a bid for the compassion of the only friends left to her in the world by intentional accentuation of a forlornness real enough in all conscience without accenting, isn’t she even for that poor deceit the more an object of the profoundest, most lenient sympathy?”
By this time Love’s victim had been ordered to a sofa; and Camilla’s knuckly hands were arranging a crocheted shawl of their own manufacture over the little shivering body with an air of protest that was yet not ungentle.
“You may go now,” she said, addressing her husband brusquely in a key that, though also protesting, yet seemed to convey the impression that her unwonted occupation was not altogether disagreeable to her; “there is nothing to make a fuss about. She will have quite recovered from this silly lapse from self-control by teatime.”
This, as it turned out, was a slight over-statement of Miss Ransome’s powers of recuperation, and when Edward forced himself to reappear at five o’clock, mastering a strong spasm of æsthetic dread at the expected sight of the miserable little object that he had carried on the retina of his eyes throughout his ride, he found, to his relief, that she had asked leave to retire to bed.
“Would it be wise to send for the doctor?” Edward asked rather futilely, and received the withering response he deserved.
“The doctor? Why, Hutton would laugh in my face. She is simply sharing the necessity, common to us all, of enduring the consequences of her own actions. If she will lash up men by illicit means into the state to which she has reduced this headstrong and rather brainless young man, she must not complain of the result. One can only hope that it will be a lesson to her not to repeat the achievement. From what I can gather, I do not think that she had a very agreeable forenoon.”
* * * * *
The marks of the forenoon alluded to were still plainly visible on Miss Ransome’s face when, punctual to the moment, she placed herself next morning at the breakfast-table. Her eyes were still reduced to half their size, and the reds still absent from her cheek. She had regarded her own countenance in the glass before coming down to breakfast, with an artist’s regret at the prohibition laid on her by prudence to throw in the little repairs and improvements which might have been easily effected in the mirror before her. “I begin to be afraid,” she said to herself, thoughtfully, “that I shall ‘go off’ sooner than I expected. I depend very much upon colour, but it would be madness to touch up. I must try and keep pale, without whitening, for at least a week. I wonder when my spirits may begin to improve after such a blow?”
She chuckled a little, but not very heartily. “It _has_ shaken me a good deal, all the same. Poor devil, I wonder how he is feeling this morning! I would give a good deal--a safe offer, as I do not possess a sixpence--that I had let him alone. But how _is_ one to tell? He looked so stodgy.”
With a sigh of real regret for the accomplished mischief, she went downstairs with the springless step that her really shaken nerves and the maintenance of her supposed condition of spirits dictated. A fresh blow awaited her.
“I am afraid that you are not yet at the end of your difficulties,” Camilla said, and the rigidity of her tone revealed that some unpleasant new development of the situation had shown itself.
Miss Ransome gave a gasp. She had come down thinking that a little chastened demonstrativeness towards her benefactress might not, under the circumstances, come amiss, but Camilla’s tone froze the little rill of gush at its source.
“He has not come back?” The words would scarcely form themselves for the terror behind them.
The question was ignored, and Camilla, faithful to her principle of never blinking, veiling, or delaying the conveyance of bad news to its lawful owner, explained her announcement of yet unaccomplished calamity.
“Mrs. Aylmer has written to announce that she and her eldest daughter propose to be here at eleven o’clock this morning, for the purpose of begging you to reconsider your decision.”
The carefully matter-of-fact key in which this fact was delivered did not disguise from Bonnybell the profound annoyance underlying it. Her own stupefaction at it was so great as to restore her wholly to Nature.
“And is Miss Barnacre coming too?” was all that her white lips could stammer. A reassuring snort from Camilla--the war-horse snort which the name of the too progressive governess always evoked--reassured Bonnybell on this head, and she was presently able to add, “He has made them do it.”
“So Mrs. Aylmer says,” referring to a letter lying open before her, and relentlessly reading aloud the sentence alluded to. “I cannot, cannot lose my boy--my only boy! And the state he is in gives us well-founded fears for his life or reason.”
A flash of wondering contempt for a life so lightly forfeited and a reason so easily upset, darted across Bonnybell’s brain; but it is needless to say that no hint of such a feeling was to be read on her tiny woe-wrung visage.
“Oh, how little worth enduring so much for I am!” she moaned.
“Very little indeed; but truisms will not help us.”
“What is the use of their coming?” continued the young creature, still with that moaning intonation, but gathering her wits about her, and seasoning pathos with common sense. “What is the use of my seeing them? Nothing is changed. It cannot be that in so short a time they have found out that they have wronged me--that--that the accusation they were so ready to bring against me was a false one?”
A pang of real apprehension nipped Miss Ransome at this supposed solution, but she was quickly reassured.
“Nothing is changed,” replied Mrs. Tancred, solemnly. “Least of all the immutable, eternal law, that we must abide the consequences of our own actions. You have made your bed, and you must lie on it. You had better be in the morning-room by eleven to receive them.”
There was no need for artificial face-whitening now.
“You will be there too?”
“Why should I? It is not I who have brought discord and disunion among them.”
A transient--very transient--gleam of amusement shot through Bonnybell’s brain at the idea of Camilla’s charms working havoc in any happy home, but it was gone, engulfed in gloom before she had realized its presence.
“I know that I have no right to ask it,” she said, throwing all she knew of humility, deference, and desperate beseechment into her voice, “but the knowledge that you were near me--that you thought I was in the right--it is so seldom that you have been able to think me in the right--would be the one thing that could enable me to go through with it. I--I feel rather shaken, after yesterday, and--and as if--I could not bear much more.”
There was a pause. Perhaps the appeal, borne on its helpless low wail, went straight to the ever-empty mother heart of Mrs. Tancred. The girl before her was an ill-conducted little adventuress, but if everything about her, except that clinging attitude of prayer for help and belief in her power to aid, had been different, it would have been sweet to have called her daughter.