CHAPTER XXVI

In the height of a simoom it seems incredible that the face of Nature should ever recover from its distortion and resume its smiles and dimples, yet a few hours effect this marvellous restoration. In the case of the Stillington simoom it took less than a week to remove the more obvious signs of the devastation it had caused in its destructive passage. In less than a week the Aylmers had not only ceased to be the only subject of conversation, but by tacit consent had been banished from it as too painful a topic for even incidental allusion. In less than a week the distracted Toby, having thought better of--if, indeed, he had ever really entertained the idea of--self-slaughter, had actually set off on that globe-circling voyage which his cruel fair one had prescribed to him, and the rest of the Aylmer family were in mid-process of indignantly bundling out of the Dower House, to await inconveniently on the shores of the Riviera the completion of their rebuilding house.

“They are punishing themselves more than me,” was Mrs. Tancred’s sole comment upon the announcement that her quondam friends could no longer bear to lie under the obligation of a roof-tree to her. But Edward, conscious of the strong hold of habit upon his wife’s mind, conscious also of her small power of making new friends, and of the tenacity with which she clung to ancient ties, recognized with pitying sorrow the cut which so painful and abrupt a severance of an old and pleasant relation gave her.

Only one sentence from that final interview’s stormy end which Miss Ransome’s well planned and timed hysterics had saved her from witnessing ever leaked out to the curious little public around. It had been addressed by Catherine Aylmer to Camilla, and must have been repeated in a species of triumph at its point and fitness, and have filtered through who knows what channel of confidential Barnacre or eavesdropping servants back to the ears of Bonnybell.

“We can only hope that you will not have _personal_ cause to regret your championship!”

“What a cat!” was Miss Ransome’s inward comment upon this innuendo. “I am glad that she does not know how little difficulty I have in keeping dear Edward at arm’s length. But it is a word to the wise. I must be additionally careful.”

By Christmas everything at Stillington was to all appearances as it had been. Life ran in its accustomed grooves, and not even the yearly hospitalities, largely understood by and still more largely carried out by Mrs. Tancred, as regarded the surrounding poor, were allowed to interfere with the resolutely resumed and ruthlessly adhered-to education of Bonnybell. Her eager offers to help in the dispensing of her hostess’s gifts, and arranging of her entertainments, were received with a curt and modified acquiescence. But a cautiously slidden out suggestion that a reprieve from study would help her to throw herself with more heart and soul into the work of benevolence met with a decided negative. To it was due the one sigh of regret ever breathed by Miss Ransome for her broken engagement. “If I had married Toby, I need never again have opened a book! It would have been impossible to know less than he did, and bad taste to know more.”

But, despite the considerable drawback of having to waste so much time on the improvement of her mind, the spirits of Miss Ransome rose, on the removal of the incubus laid upon them, to a height that often gave her grave uneasiness as to how to bridle and conceal them--spirits whose ebullition had to be worked off in low singings and childish skippings about her own room, before they could be tamed to the chastened sorrowfulness and veiled heartbreak which beseemed their supposed condition. Even with the nicest care a spurt of young joyousness would go nigh to betray her, but, happily, in each case Edward had been the sole witness, and Miss Ransome had never felt quite sure that Edward had found the evidences of her affliction personally convincing. How soon might she begin to be cheerful again? Earnestly she wished that she had some one to consult on that head; and sometimes the grotesque notion of taking Edward’s opinion darted across her mind; the hypothetical idea of what would happen supposing she were to put to him the question how soon--in case he were bereaved of Camilla--he would think it seemly to dress his countenance again in smiles? But, after all, it would not be a parallel case, since Edward never suffered from high spirits, and the experiment would probably blow the hospitable floor that carried her from under her feet. And, meanwhile, her inconvenient gaiety stood the shock not only of the rigorously pursued cultivation of her intelligence--for, after all, it was astonishing how little one need learn if one put one’s mind to it--but the information conveyed to her, without any explanation of its reason, that the family’s yearly habit of migrating to London after Christmas was this year to be intermitted.

There was, therefore, nothing visibly ahead of her but the monotonous life she was at present pursuing. Of course, it was _assommant_ as to dullness; and the only wonder was that she felt its oppression so little. She supposed that she must be kept up by the little fillip of Edward’s daily return; and the--as daily--effort to present herself convincingly to his mind as a very nice and thoroughly truthful young girl! The enduring doubt as to what progress--if any--she made in this praiseworthy task kept her zest for it keen.

As for Edward, if his estimate of his guest still held any elements of uncertainty, it was not for want of thought upon the subject. How could he help thinking of her? Was not she the one scarlet thing that stood out saliently from the iron-grey background of his life? How could he help, when on his daily downward journey from Paddington his evening paper was finished, and even whilst “Telegrams” and “Stop Press” were writing themselves on his retina--how could he help the ever-repeated question asking itself, “Has she got into any fresh mischief to-day? If she has, how can I hinder her telling me lies about it? Has she any more glimmer of a sense of the existence of such things as truth and honour than when she came to us?”

For the first week or two after the angry flitting of the Aylmer family had been accomplished, Mr. Tancred had anxiously watched his wife, partly in an intensifying of the compassion he always felt for her, partly in a fear that the irritation of nerves caused by the break with the inmates of the Dower House might wreak itself upon Bonnybell, instead of--as he devoutly hoped it might, in pursuance of a habit of fifteen years--upon himself. But he found with relief that his fears on this head were groundless. Camilla, it is true, continued to snub her pupil with unstinted liberality, and ruthlessly pruned away the little fripperies with which Miss Ransome tried cautiously to qualify the morose black of her mourning garb; but a smile forced its way oftener than she was aware into her hard eyes when the girl entered the room; and she never failed--whatever her effort to the contrary--to break into that laugh of hers, so rare, hitherto, as to be almost terrifying, over Bonnybell’s games and idiocies with Jock.

But to do Miss Ransome justice, her worst enemy could not deny that at this period of her history she was a very agreeable inmate. The extreme unpleasantness of her late experience, the fright it had caused her, and the entire absence of an opportunity for a temptation to new errors, combined to make her “conduct as the noonday clear.” It is not the highest qualities which make men or women _facile à vivre_! The tender conscience, the high ideal, the strong affections, when brought into friction with the wrongnesses, the basenesses, the coldnesses of everyday life, produce rubs to the temper which are avoided by the cool heart, which does not care enough for anything to ache; the pliant temper, which gives in because nothing matters much; the absence of aspiration, which acquiesces pleasantly in the actual.

Bonnybell was, as her housemates more and more realized, a shining instance of the value of small virtues in daily intercourse. She was immovably good-tempered, invariably civil, always on the look-out for opportunities for paying little attentions, light-hearted even beneath the pressure of the severe affliction under which she was at present labouring, yet subdued in her mirth as in her graceful movements. Even her efforts to avoid her studies were made with the most shrinking delicacy, and their frustration met with the quickest, sweetest acquiescence; and lastly, her skill in applying antiseptic to Jock’s wounds when the latter’s lifelong feud with the second coachman’s yellow Irish terrier culminated in a battle, which, like Waterloo, “with Cannae’s carnage vied,” was beyond praise. Now and again, indeed, but more and more rarely in Camilla’s presence, some all too intimate trait relating to the habits and haunts of a class never to be recognized as existing by Mrs. Tancred’s school--some startling theory, fact, or opinion, concerning population or the relations of the sexes, would slip out. But these were but tiny blemishes upon the else spotless white of her life and conversation.

So January passed, questionably enlivened by a few stiff shooting-parties, during which the modestly proffered attentions of Miss Ransome to the least attractive among the guests were patent to all eyes, and reaped an immediate harvest of approbation; while her one or two unlucky lapses from _jeune-fille-ism_ in conversation did not transpire till long afterwards.

January was drawing to its close, when to the uneventful household at Stillington the post brought one morning a piece of news which was received and commented upon according to their different characters by the three persons who learnt it. The news in question was communicated by Mrs. Glanville, and announced the fact that, by the perfectly unexpected accidental death of the head of his family, an unmarried cousin less than half his age, her husband had come into possession of a barony and a rent roll of thirty thousand a year.

“What a nuisance for the poor chap!” was Edward’s heartfelt exclamation.

Camilla said, dryly, that she hoped the command of so much money--since, of course, given the weakness of Tom’s character, the whole disposition of it would lie with her--might not lead Felicity into chimerical schemes, like her Guild of St. Swithin, the members of which were to devote half of every wet day to intercession for their erring sisters in society.

Bonnybell’s contribution, though made half under her breath, was unfortunately audible--

“They really ought to try to manage to set up an heir now!”

She was a little off her guard, suddenly dazzled by the brilliant accession of consequence and fortune that had come to her former--nay, as she had reason to know--her present admirer, and wondering whether or not she had been wise in so firmly, though sweetly and sadly, refusing the surreptitious correspondence that poor silly old Tom had pressed upon her. Her ruminations were broken in upon by a short--

“You have a happy knack of giving an indelicate turn to what you say,” Camilla said severely; “and if you have no more valuable contribution to the subject to make, I think you would do well to be silent.”

Bonnybell bowed her head, and one shining tear dropped in her lap. It was due less to the rebuke than to an inward reflection of what luck some people had, and how it was thrown away upon them. Even better than Felicity she could have turned old Tom round her finger; but to what a different tune would she have set his gyrations!

The subject was not afterwards much discussed in the little circle, nor did it at first appear to have much bearing on the three lives of which that restricted circle was composed.

A wily hint from Miss Ransome as to the propriety of her paying a visit of congratulation to the late Mrs. Glanville, now Lady Bletchley, in acknowledgment of former hospitalities, was not taken up. It might so easily have been combined with one of those trips to London which since Christmas had been of bi-weekly occurrence. They were undertaken under the strict surveillance of Camilla’s maid, and had for object the receiving of lessons from masters, in addition to the private teaching at home. As pleasures they were, in Bonnybell’s opinion, better than nothing, but what a mockery in comparison of what they might have been!

Generally Edward returned by the same train, but as he invariably travelled in a smoking-carriage, and drove himself home in a dog-cart, her opportunities for those _tête-à-tête_ talks with him, for which her zest was daily growing, were confined to a very few minutes’ pacing of the Paddington platform together. There was the Sunday walk, indeed, which had become a habit, and to which she looked forward with an eagerness which she was obliged generally to explain away to herself. “There is not really the slightest risk; he has himself well in hand; and as for me, the only reason why I am fond of him is that he is not like a man--at least, not like the bestial men I have known.”

Their course was almost always about the park, and through the whims and variations of an English winter Bonnybell, had her senses ever been much open to the sweet surprises of Nature, might have learnt how much beauty even January holds in her hard lap; what wild fantasies of ice-flowers on oak and beech, when sudden frost had surprised their wet boughs; what pensive dignity of mist-enfolded coppice and spinney! She was generally much too busy talking to be aware of any difference in the effects presented to her eyes. One is happily not expected to admire in winter, and so as the north wind did not succeed in piercing the astrachan fur under her chin, nor the crisp grass wet too much the thick boots which Camilla compelled her to wear, she asked no more of the outside world of Stillington.

At first Edward had tried to open her perceptions to the phenomena around her, attributing her obtuseness to the defectiveness of her training; since the eye, strangely enough, has to be told what to see, and the ear what to hear, quite as much as the brain what to admit and assimilate. But a short time sufficed to show him the uselessness of the attempt. Miss Ransome was, and was likely to remain, Nature-deaf and Nature-blind! There was something even pathetic, or so it seemed to her companion, in her efforts to do what was expected of her in the way of appreciation; and though among what seemed to her the shivery drearinesses of the winter snow it was difficult to guess what one was expected to admire, yet her quick tact prevented her from falling into any very gross error. She even, during a spell of hard weather, got up quite a successful show of interest in tracking on the snow the footsteps of some little animal which puzzled Edward; and though her suggestion that perhaps it was a _loup garou_ did not help him much, none the less was he grateful for the good fellowship shown by her aid in the investigation.

At first, by a tacit united agreement, they had avoided the Dower House, but one day, because it lay in the direction preferred by Jock, they found themselves half-accidentally in its neighbourhood. It was on one of the two showery Sundays that they found themselves looking up at its gables and dormer-windows from the closed gates. The dead eyeless look of a house whence the dwellers have departed was accentuated by the cold layer of white that hid the beauty of the old grey slates of its high-pitched roof, and by the many humps that indicated the whereabouts of its garden-beds. A small but piercing air blew in their faces, chill as the liking of the self-ejected friends, that had been wont to give so warm a welcome to one of the two persons who peered silently through the iron-work of the fine old gates.

“Let us come away,” Bonnybell said softly. “This must make you feel bad.”

“And you?”

He turned and looked full at her, which he did not often do, and she felt or imagined a glint of irony in his eye. It was not a happy moment, perhaps, for the bringing up of the fable of her affliction. The snow had had the exhilarating effect it mostly has upon dogs, and had made Jock forget his years, and sent him plunging through little drifts and scattering the frozen powder flying about his rejuvenated heels.

Bonnybell had no years to speak of to forget, and she had plunged and frolicked too; and now stood betrayingly rosy and radiant, surveying the casket of her lost treasure. Something in the tone as well as the eyes of her companion in putting his apparently sympathetic question, sobered her at once.

“You think that I ought not to be so cheerful?” she asked in a troubled tone.

“I am very glad that you should be.”

The answer was not quite up to Edward’s usual standard of amiability; nor could Bonnybell divine that it was irritation with himself at the discovery of how little he really missed the Catherine of past Sundays that gave a touch of ill-nature to his response. She took the faint snub, as she always took all snubs, in unresenting silence; but when they had turned away from the house, and were walking homewards, she meekly took up her own defence.

“Do not you think that one is right, for the sake of the people one lives with, not to show too plainly when one is unhappy?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“And perhaps, in a way, it is not as great a blow to me as it might have been to some one else, because I have no temperament.” She made this singular confidence quite glibly and without any consciousness of its being unusual. But, used as he now was to her, it startled Edward so much that she was able to add thoughtfully, “Toby has a good deal.”

The shyness resulting from the reception of this obliging revelation was on Mr. Tancred’s side, and it kept him dumb.

“The kind of love I should like to inspire,” continued Miss Ransome, forgetting to kick the snow as she had been doing with childish pleasure, “is the nice quiet sort that would look after me, and keep disagreeable things and people away from me, and never expect anything beyond; but”--with pensive regret, yet not the slightest hesitation--“that is just the kind I never get; what I am offered is always the other--the horrid sort.”

The winter dusk, though nearly due, was, owing to the snow-shine, a little deferred; and it would have been impossible for any one looking at him not to see that Mr. Tancred was growing very much out of countenance. He wished he could stop her, but nothing came to him in time to arrest the still more embarrassing revelation that followed.

“I am going to tell you something that will make you laugh,” she said in a tone of frank and gently mirthful confidence. “Do you know that when first I knew you, I thought that, of course, you would be like all the rest! _I was afraid to be left alone in the room with you!_” She ended with a glance at him of expectant enjoyment of his enjoyment of the joke.

Exhilaration was not quite the leading characteristic of his half-strangled answer.

“May I ask how soon you were undeceived?”