CHAPTER XXV

The visitors, arriving ten minutes before their appointed hour, were welcomed--though that is scarcely the word to express the profoundly grave and fully armed civility of Mrs. Tancred’s attitude--by Camilla alone.

“She will not see us?”

The primal emotions had, in one respect, acted upon Mrs. Aylmer in the same manner as upon her son. Gentle and suave-mannered as she usually was, to-day she had evidently forgotten, or at least brushed aside, all the conventions. What place had they in the map of such a calamity as hers?

“Of course, she will see you,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a dignified acquiescence in the abolishing of all preliminaries, and ready, as usual, to go direct to the heart of the matter; “that is to say, if, after what I have to tell you from her, you still think it advisable.”

“What have you to tell us?”--coming a pace or two nearer, as if to snatch the answer more quickly--“that she is ready to renew her engagement? Oh, it _must_ be that.”

“She is _not_ ready to renew it,” replied Camilla, coldly; “why should she be?”

For a moment the other was too knocked out of time by this answer to do anything more purposeful than give a sort of stagger, and the combatants looked at each other in silence, Camilla noting, with a rather grudging, yet not shallow compassion, how dreadfully ill and aged her friend looked. She and her daughter were both dressed in black, as Volumnia and Virgilia had been on their mission, and though Mrs. Aylmer was as little like Volumnia as Bonnybell was like Coriolanus, the motive of their dusky habit was the same.

“I am sure that you would be the last person to encourage her in such a revengeful spirit,” Catherine said presently, speaking for the first time, and with a good deal less of heartbreak and a good deal more of resentment in her voice than had found place in her mother’s. “Of course, we had never wished to be connected with her. How could we? And when this hideous accusation came, we naturally waited for an explanation of it, but she would give none. She simply walked out of the house.”

“And in my judgment it was the only course of action open to a decent woman after such an insult,” replied Camilla, incisively. Mrs. Tancred had never been very fond of Miss Aylmer, but her conscience, alarmed now at the pleasure she was aware of deriving from snubbing her, drove her into an admission of the justice of a part, at least, of Catherine’s contention. “I perfectly agree with you in your unwillingness to be connected with Miss Ransome, and congratulate you sincerely on having escaped so very real a peril.”

“But we have not escaped it; we do not want to escape it! You must not call it a peril,” cried Mrs. Aylmer, incoherently, distracted at the injury which was evidently being done to the cause she had come prepared to spend her heart’s blood in pleading. “I dare not go back without her. You have no conception of the state he is in. He has renounced us all. He swears he will never see one of our faces again. He has said things that I could not have believed possible to me--his own mother. Oh, if you had children of your own, you would understand, but of course you cannot; how should you?”

Mrs. Tancred met the half-unconscious cruelty of this tearing open of one of the two lifelong raws of her life with Lacedæmonian fortitude. If she suffered she showed it only by a slight addition to the cold kindness in the controlled and measured words of her next speech.

“I am extremely sorry for his and your sufferings; even my naturally defective sympathy tells me how acute they are. My concern is the deeper as they have been inflicted by a member of my household.”

“Oh, we do not blame you for _that_!” put in Catherine, resuming the _rôle_ of spokeswoman with something like eagerness. “We are not so unjust. Of course, when you took her in you had as little knowledge as we of what she really was.”

Camilla turned upon her apologist with a frosty rebuke in her keen eyes.

“I have no wish to be exonerated from blame for doing what I--mistakenly, perhaps--conceived to be my duty. Nor, since you need no longer lie under any apprehension of nearer connection with her, can it concern you what Miss Ransome really is or is not.”

“Oh, Catherine, what a false impression you are giving,” broke in Mrs. Aylmer, with something of the distraught readiness of the real mother in the Judgment of Solomon to say anything or do anything that would save her son. “It is no question of what she is or is not, and we are sure that she is everything that is nice and right, and we ought never to have taken any notice of that abominable letter. It was against my judgment that we did it.”

“It seemed right to give her an opportunity of clearing herself,” replied Miss Aylmer, in a crestfallen voice, and with a suspicion of nearing tears; “at least, so it seemed to a valuable outside opinion.”

“You are alluding to Miss Barnacre, I presume?”

There was such a belligerent note in the query that Mrs. Aylmer’s alarm at the adverse way in which her battle was going rose to panic.

“Send for Bonnybell!” she cried, with hysterical imperativeness. “I must and will see her. If she is not a fiend--if she has not the heart of a _stone_, she _cannot_ help relenting, when she sees to what a state she has brought us all.”

Thus it came about that two or three minutes later Miss Ransome, who had been kept in readiness by Camilla’s order, to be produced if her presence were insisted on, appeared on the scene. As she stole in mouse-quiet, snowdrop-pale, the recollection of the last occasion on which she had been summoned to the same room to meet the same two persons darted into her mind. She saw herself frisking up to Mrs. Aylmer, confident of an excellent reception; and the scene of ignominy and disgrace for her that had followed upon that ludicrous accusation of having corrupted stupid Meg’s mind. She was in a better position now; arbiter of the destinies of a whole highly respectable family, she, Bonnybell, poor Claire’s daughter! A spasm of unforgivable laughter seemed likely for a moment to choke her; but the disagreeables of a situation out of which it would take all her ingenuity to wriggle herself conjured it.

“We have come to beg you to forgive us!” Mrs. Aylmer said, precipitating herself to meet the object of her entreaties, and speaking with a trembling eagerness of humility which in its reversal of their natural attitude towards each other gave even Bonnybell a shock.

Before entering the room she had been putting to herself the humorous suggestion, “Shall I make them walk round the room on their knees to me, as poor Toby volunteered that they should?” That question now received a decided negative. “It really would not give me any pleasure!” The ravages it was impossible not to verify on the smooth middle-aged fairness of her would-be mother-in-law’s face gave Miss Ransome anew the measure of the mischief she had done. “Poor creature! she looks nearly as bad as Toby did! I am afraid that I have given her a couple of crow’s-feet that she will never get the better of!”

“We do not blame you for a moment; it was perfectly natural that you should do it, but perhaps it was a little hasty to leave us all in a minute, without a word.”

This plea was poured forth with such painful velocity that its utterer had to stop to draw breath, and Bonnybell felt that she must speak. She would far rather have stood silent in her impregnable fortress of injured maiden weakness.

“I supposed that you could not wish to keep such a--wicked girl--any longer under your roof!”

There was not the slightest tinge of vindictiveness in her tone, as indeed she felt none; the desire to come with flying colours out of a tight place, coupled with a very sincere if cool pity for the victims before her, leaving no place for any less amiable feeling in her mind.

“But we do not think you a wicked girl; it was all a misapprehension, and we quite see that we ought never to have shown you that--that disgraceful letter, or taken any notice of it. It was contrary to my opinion that it was shown you. No doubt the person whose idea it was, meant well, and we have got into a way of depending on her judgment; but it will be a long time before I can forgive her for the harm she has done.”

“She always means well,” Catherine interjected, casting a reproachful glance out of tear-brimmed eyes at her mother for thus throwing the family oracle to the wolves.

“I suppose that you are alluding to Miss Barnacre,” Bonnybell said mildly, and glad to escape from the main issue into any side alley of the subject, “but please do not blame her; from her point of view she was perfectly right.”

“It is very generous of you to say so”--giving a final push overboard to the family sage--“and she will be as ready as we are to beg your pardon. She shall do it as soon as we get home. I am come to take you home with us.”

There was a quivering asseveration in the announcement of this intention that tried to exclude all possibility of question from it, but Bonnybell only gently shook her head.

“I dare not go back without you! I dare not face him! I do not know what you have done to him, but--oh no”--hurriedly correcting her phrase, in fear of its giving offence, “I do not mean that you have done anything; but--the--possibility of losing you--not that there is any danger of it now that everything is explained--has almost unhinged his reason.”

Once again a very profound regret for the completeness of her own handiwork occupied Miss Ransome’s mind, and for one second the idea of yielding to the frantic entreaties of the poor mother before her, who had got hold of her hands, and was unconsciously but painfully grinding their little knuckles together, presented itself. One “yes” would end this odious scene--odious since the humiliation of her humiliators gave her none of the gratification she had faintly anticipated from it; and, after all, marriage with Toby would still be, in a sense, the harbour of refuge she had once thought it. But before she had taken any false step, a head much stronger than her heart and a poignant recollection of the horrors of yesterday came to her rescue. The anchorage was not nearly so good as she had believed, and how could any union be endurable between two persons whose views of matrimony differed so diametrically as hers and Toby’s? Hers a cool commercial bargain, sweetened by _camaraderie_ and lightened by indifference; his--a sick qualm passed over her at the recollection, only twenty-four hours old, of yesterday’s agony of balked animalism; and the knowledge, relieved by no maiden ignorance, that the detested experience was only the porch to the mansion which Toby had prepared for her to dwell in.

But the instant of hesitation gave the crushed Catherine time and opportunity to throw in a phrase of exaggerated humility.

“Would you mind telling us what _else_ we can do?”

Bonnybell gave a slight groan. In her nature there was no vindictiveness, and the sight and sound of the absolute abasement of her enemies before her was for the moment undoubtedly disagreeable to her; though a reflex action of her mind suggested that by-and-by she might find some matter for complacency in it. But meanwhile she must find something to say that would be noble and magnanimous and, above all, _final_; and, what is more, not overdo it. “I must say something very beautiful,” she reflected, “and where on earth am I to lay my hands upon it?”

“What _else_ can you say?” she ended by sighing out, as if crushed under the weight of so enormous a suggestion. “Oh, nothing, _nothing_! You have said a great deal too much already; more--oh, how much more!--than I am worth.”

“This is waste of time,” said Camilla, striking in for the first time; and something in the sound of her harsh voice gave the sorely bested heroine a sense of being backed up which nothing in the unbiassed words justified. “These ladies have asked you categorically two questions; and you must answer them in the same way. Will you, or will you not, return with them to the Dower House, and resume your engagement to their son and brother?”

“No, a thousand times no,” replied Bonnybell, dropping upon those pliant knees, on which in any emergency she was ever ready to fall--“not while I lie under this dreadful cloud. I would far sooner die than bring a slur on his honoured name!” (“Bad and stagey,” was her own impartial inward comment on this flight. “Oh, how thankful I am that Edward did not hear it! He has such good taste. How it would have disgusted him!”)

“That being the case,” continued Camilla, in an arid voice, whose matter-of-fact dryness did not give the impression of having been much affected by Bonnybell’s magnanimous outburst, and thereby confirmed its author’s own ill opinion of her achievement--“such being the case, there is no use in prolonging this painful scene. You had better leave the room; that is to say, if you are quite sure that your answer is final.”

“But it cannot be final!” cried Mrs. Aylmer, with almost a shriek, losing all self-control, and pouring out her words in a boiling strain of incoherent violence. “I will not hear of its being final! You cannot have understood what I was saying. I must have expressed myself ill. I tell you that I dare not go back without you. You do not realize what a state you have brought him to. I could not have believed it myself if I had not seen it with my own eyes. If I do not bring you back he will blow his brains out! Do you understand _that_? Oh, what am I saying? I am only setting you more against me. But just think what a case I am in! Only one son, and he hating and cursing me! You will have a son yourself some day”--Bonnybell gave an imperceptible shudder; maternity played but a small and unhandsome part in her life’s programme--“and some one will rob you of him, and then you will feel as I do towards you!”

She broke off, suffocated, and flinging the girl’s hands from her with a gesture of despair and rage.

“I _must_ go into hysterics,” Bonnybell said to herself, “there is nothing else for it, and I do feel very miserable and upset. I had better make as much noise as I can. I shall be the sooner sent out of the room.” She was as good as her word.