CHAPTER XXVIII

“The sun has gone in. He was shining quite brightly half an hour ago,” Bonnybell said with a slight but meaning glance at the clock, and an accent of very gentle reproach.

The time for setting out on the weekly Sunday walk had been overpassed by forty minutes, and Miss Ransome was found, when at last joined by her tardy companion, fidgeting up and down the hall, with a look of upbraiding punctuality. Invariably hitherto it had been she that had kept him waiting, yet the strange thing was that even now he offered her no apology. He was too busy thinking what an unconscious aptitude there was in her words, “The sun has gone in.”

Edward would have much preferred to have intermitted the Sunday habit, which had grown so sweet, and which must shortly be abandoned for ever. It seemed an impossible feat in mental gymnastics to twist and wrench his thoughts away from the horrible coil of shocked pain and self-reproach which the last half-hour had wound round them, and turn them and his ears to the little trifling or doubtful topics on which alone Bonnybell’s tongue frisked along with such gay glibness. He had come into the hall with the intention of asking her to let him off, of framing some excuse which would give him freedom to face the tidings of a hideous probability in the solitude which could alone steel him to meet it. But when he saw the girl his intention melted away. There was such obvious relief and pleasure in her little bright face, clearly following upon annoyance and puzzled misgiving, that he saw that his defection would cause her real disappointment--a disappointment, too, for which he could give her no reason.

It was always difficult to Edward to run counter to any one’s wishes; and, after all, what hurry was there for him to realize his wretchedness? He would, in Camilla’s showing, have weeks and months to do it in. Camilla--his poor, valiant, smitten Camilla!

“You need not look so miserable about it,” came a pretty little reassured voice in his ear; “it was only a passing cloud. He will be out again by the time we reach the bridge, and the days are so much longer now; we need not hurry home.”

“_Only a passing cloud!_” Into how deep an irony the aptitude of her former sentence had turned!

They walked almost in silence till the copse beyond the wooden bridge into the park was reached. There they paused to mark the progress made since last Sunday by the still small low snowdrops beginning to pierce the rain-softened earth. Such advance in the knowledge and appreciation of Nature had been made by Miss Ransome that she had actually perceived them without their being pointed out to her.

“How pretty they are!” she cried with perhaps rather more enthusiasm than the humble blossoms really inspired in her. “I think their French name is prettier still--_perce-neige_. They always remind me of my old French nurse, Babette; she used to put them on her daughter’s grave in Mont Martre. The poor girl had been unlucky, had a baby and died of it; and Claire bought her a grave _en perpétuité_. Claire was very kind in those ways.”

The effort to induce Miss Ransome to drop the use of her mother’s Christian name in their _tête-à-têtes_ had long been pusillanimously abandoned by Edward, and he now listened with a dull reflection how harmoniously immoral the surroundings of poor Bonnybell’s infancy and childhood had been, not even her nurse’s daughter having been able to refrain from having an illegitimate baby.

“I never could have believed that I could have grown to love the country so dearly,” pursued Bonnybell, inwardly wondering at the unaccountably occupied air of Edward, and determining to be even more endearingly rural than usual.

“And yet you would rather be in London, wouldn’t you?”

It was the first question he had put to her since their walk began, and she smiled inwardly at its superfluousness. Of course she had rather be in London. Who but a fool wouldn’t? London or Paris! Were there any other places where a sane person who was not fifty, and had not a young husband whom she wanted to keep an eye upon, _could_ wish to live? The only fear was lest her answer should let pierce through too much of the internal radiance kindled by the suggestion.

“Are we going up, after all? Has Mrs. Tancred changed her plans?”

Edward’s answer lagged. He had not meant to tell his companion of the imminent change in their lives, yet now he felt that he was going to do so.

“Why should it be ‘we’?” he asked presently, with an exaggeration of his suggestive and querying manner. “Would not it do as well if _you_ were going up?”

Her face told him that it would not. Half the light of glad expectation went out of it, and he was guiltily aware of the first sensation of pleasure that had touched him since Camilla’s communication.

“Are you only teasing me,” she asked, with a not artificial _tremolo_ in her voice, “or do you really mean that I am to be sent away, after all? I--I--hoped that I had not done anything fresh lately.”

Her fallen countenance, the trembling diffidence of her accents, the cloud that, settling on her face, contrasted with the sunbeam which had shot through the leafless twigs to dance there, made him heartily repent of the undertaking on which he had embarked. Why could not he have left it to Camilla? Then a knife of self-reproach turned in the fresh wound in his heart. Had not he always left everything disagreeable to Camilla? Was not it time--the time of which probably so little would be left to him--to take some share of the burden he had for fifteen years been shifting on to those enduring shoulders?

“Done anything fresh!” he repeated, trying to give an accent of lightness to the repetition of her fear. “Nothing beyond being more delightfully kind and helpful and spoiling to us with every week you have given us.” (Miss Ransome’s brow did not clear. Edward was not in the habit of complimenting her, and instinct told her that the enumeration of her merits had something ominous in it. He was leaning against a tree-trunk, and she noticed that there was a false nonchalance in the way in which he was stirring the dead leaves with his stick, and that he did not look at her, as he added a finishing clause to his civilities.) “But we cannot be so selfish as to hope to keep you always to ourselves!”

It was such a bolt out of the blue, that no wonder if a sort of darkness settled on Bonnybell’s vision. “I am bound to go to the dogs if they kick me out, as they are going to do,” she said to herself crudely, “and I shall have no more Sunday walks.” The collocation of two future events of such unequal consequence had something ludicrous in it, but for the moment the misfortunes prophesied counted to her as about equal.

“It has been wonderfully good of you to put up with me so long,” she said after a pause; and even in this crisis of feeling she could not help thinking how infinitely better the natural tremble in her voice was than any of the many artificial ones she had executed. Its success was, as she at once felt, proportionate to its superiority. Edward forgot himself just a little.

“Put up with,” he repeated, in a key of low emphasis--“put up with sunshine and wonderful temper and tact! Has it been so great a credit to us to put up with these?”

Her quick ear caught the plural pronoun, and set her wondering whether Mr. Tancred was joining his old wife with him only for the sake of euphony? or, if her opinion of the temper and tact alluded to, and which she had put to the test so very much more severely than he had ever done, was as high as his, why this imminent expulsion?

His voice, recovered and recontrolled, broke upon her anxious speculation.

“But because you have been infinitely good and forbearing to a cranky old couple is no reason why they should stand in your light!”

She could not even compass another tremble now, it would have broken into a sob, and it was too soon, as the tact he had praised taught her, to use that ultimate weapon. But something of the blank cold wonder that was icing her heart sat in her desolate orphan eyes as they looked in meek expectancy of her doom at him who had taken upon himself to pronounce it.

“I am making a stupid bungle,” he said, averting his own eyes. If he did not fix them on some other object, he should have to close them, so unendurable to him was the sight of her little darkened face, unalterably sweet in its expectation of an imminent blow. “I am going on the supposition that you know what I am talking about, which of course you cannot do. Camilla has not yet had an opportunity of telling you, but this morning she received an invitation for you which she does not think it fair to you to refuse.”

No assenting comment.

“Camilla heard this morning from my sister Felicity, begging us to spare you to her. It seems that you made yourself so helpful and indispensable when you stayed with her last autumn that she has missed you grievously ever since. She wrote so urgently--Felicity is one of those people who always manage to get what they want--that my wife did not think it right to refuse her, more especially as she thought it would be doing you a good turn--giving you a pleasant change.”

His voice died away into an indistinct murmur. Every word uttered by him had been strict truth--to offer untruth to Bonnybell would have been, as has been already observed, sending coals to Newcastle. Yet in his own ears his statement sounded like a bad, bald lie.

Of its _un_-veracity not the slightest doubt traversed the girl’s mind. “What a much better story I could have made up,” she said to herself, with an artist’s pity for a _croûte_. Across the unaffected quiver of her lips a slight sigh of relief stole. “There’s not a word of truth in it! As long as old Tom was alive, Felicity would never have asked me to stay with her again; but they are somehow going to force her to take me.”

Miss Ransome’s philosophy here began to return to her aid. “It is better than the streets, anyhow, and five minutes ago I did not see any other outlet. But I certainly am sorrier to leave Edward than a wretched little adventuress like me ought ever to let herself be about anything.”

These reflections did not lend themselves to utterance, and after all, as he had evidently made no effort to run counter to Camilla’s _fiat_ for her dismissal, it was as well to make him feel as uncomfortable as an attitude of submissive but heartbroken silence could render him. Bonnybell’s heart was not of those that break, but there was quite enough of true stuff in the mixed woof of real and counterfeit which went to make up her attitude of sacrificial lamb bound to the altarhorns, to make it inimitably touching.

“The only wonder is that you should have kept me so long,” she murmured at last, with the most submissive figurative kissing of the hand that smote her, yet, in the turmoil of her spirits, forgetting to feign any belief in the supposed fiction of Felicity’s summons. “You will laugh at me, but I had begun to hope that I was becoming a little useful to Mrs. Tancred, that she was growing to be just a very little fond of me.”

Her slight, desolate smile at the fatuity of having hoped to reap a small crop of that affection which to most girls of her age was a banal matter of course, reduced her hearer to a state of wretchedness far deeper than her mild aspiration after vengeance had wished.

“Laugh at you!” he said in a choked voice. “Laugh at you for believing what falls so far short of the real truth! You have been like a most kind and dear daughter to my wife--to us both.”

This last clause, with its evident effort to set the rickety situation on four strong straight legs, provoked so acute a mirth in Bonnybell’s spirit, sore as it was, that she had much ado to disguise it. “The poor dear is so determined to be my ‘papa,’ and he looks and feels so unlike it!” she said to herself. She drew a long, patient sigh.

“Thank you for saying so! I am glad that I am not being sent away in disgrace.”

He caught up the phrase with an intonation of acute distress.

“_In disgrace?_ How can you misunderstand me so lamentably as to suggest such an idea?” Then, ruth and pity carrying him, like runaway horses, quite beyond the limits of his self-imposed commission, “Why, I cannot think how my wife will get on without you.”

At that a tiny smile stole to the drooped corners of her sad mouth. “He has always suspected me of telling lies, but my imagination has never run to such a big one as his!” Aloud she said, while the least tinge of malice, which she was unable to get rid of, coloured the plaintive innocence of her speech--

“It is you, then, who have come to the end of your patience! you who, like Tom--Lord Bletchley, I mean--have _put down your foot_!”

At the pseudo-naïveté of this reproach Mr. Tancred’s pale face grew suddenly suffused with a hot flush, but he looked his interlocutor full in the eyes as he answered with a steady dryness--

“I do not think there is any analogy between the cases.”

The response showed her that he was as perfectly aware as she herself of the reason of her ejectment from the Glanville household; and also that he repudiated any kinship with Tom’s amorous weakness. The--in her experience--unexampled severity of his tone, coupled with the consciousness of having made a deplorably false step, combined to overset her. “It is time to begin to cry,” she said to herself, yielding by policy to what was a very real breakdown of self-control, and at once the obedient tears welled into and blurred the meek lustre of her eyes.

“It is hard that when we are going to part so soon we should keep misunderstanding each other!” she murmured, with just enough and not too much of a sob. “I never dreamed that you would think that I could imply that there was any likeness between such a person as poor Lord Bletchley and--_you_!”

The little subtle pause before the personal pronoun somehow gave a sense of so enormous a superiority in the person to whom it referred to his unlucky brother-in-law, that Edward felt his temporary anger melting back into the original mass of misery from which it had sprung. How could she tell what a hornet’s sting her perhaps unintended insinuation had gained from that news of Camilla’s, of which she could know nothing? How could she tell that her flippant shaft had struck a heart and conscience already writhing with remorse? In word and deed Edward had been absolutely faithful to his wife. But how about thought? Despite his Pharisaical attitude, was he in reality so very much Tom’s superior?

“You have misunderstood me too,” he said, his voice resuming its courteous gentleness. “No doubt through my fault--my muddled way of explaining a plan which we thought would be for your happiness--give you pleasure!”

The plural pronoun dried her tears, which had done their mollifying work, and were no longer either needed or easy.

“I shall be very glad to see the Bletchleys again,” she said, with a resigned acquiescence; and unostentatiously passing a small fine handkerchief over her eyes and cheeks. “It is very good of them--of _anybody_--to take me in.”

The forlorn orphan note in her voice was the one he could least bear. Already he was telling himself that he had been too harsh to her, to this friendless fragility, shortly to be driven so reluctantly--despite her meek consent, there could be no doubt about the reluctance--from his door. _His_ door! No, had it been _his_, she would never have been driven from it!

Then the pendulum swung back again; the image of Camilla, with her future of probable agony and lingering death, resumed its supremacy in his mind, and in shocked return to his allegiance he spoke with a cool matter-of-fact kindness.

“You will find only Felicity at first. Tom is gone to Scotland for fishing. You know he is always glad of an excuse to get out of London.”

Had Mr. Tancred been able to see under the large white lids that drooped over Miss Ransome’s eyes, he would have noticed in those eyes a glitter that would have surprised him. “I thought so,” was her inward comment. “Old Felicity has her head too well screwed on to ask me there when Tom is at home.” Aloud she said humbly--

“I must try to be a little useful to her.”

Bonnybell’s words carried a very delicately sad implication that her efforts to make herself acceptable in her present surroundings had been so unsuccessful as to prevent any sanguine hope of their flourishing better in another soil. Her inward ruminations proceeded a step farther on the path they had begun to tread. “Tom cannot fish for ever; and then?” Yet it was not the vista of future expulsions unfolding before her mental eyes that made her say to herself, “He _must_ feel it too, though he tries to carry it off.”

There was a silence, not the dull indoor silence broken only by a buzzing house-fly or a falling cinder, but the outdoor February silence invaded by the beginning melodies of new-wedded birds.

“I am afraid that I shall never now learn to distinguish the notes of the birds from each other, as you had promised to teach me to do,” Bonnybell said presently, with an exquisite modulation of chastened regret.

Her hearer had on other Sundays perfectly taken the measure of her ornithological curiosity, and was as aware as herself that it was got up only to gratify his own tastes, and had less than no existence out of his presence; yet something in the resigned yearning of her tone sent a look into his eyes which presently emboldened her to say--

“I must try not to think of these kind of things, mustn’t I?” adding a little later, with a tentative timidity, “I suppose you go to see Lady Bletchley now and then?”

But he had pulled himself together. “It is not much use looking up Felicity. As you are aware, female philanthropists are not often to be found at their own firesides.”

Her face fell, but presently regained a beam of hope. (“Of course, if he has not been in the habit of going to see her he could not begin now; she would smell a rat at once.”)

“Perhaps we may meet in the street accidentally some day,” Miss Ransome continued, with an affecting air of forced cheerfulness, yet feeling her way as she went along; “or, after all your kindness to me, it would be too dreadful to think of never seeing you again! I would try--to meet--you anywhere--that was convenient--to you--if you gave me notice in time.”

He shook his head resolutely and quickly. Never had he felt less mirthful; yet a bitter amusement crossed his mind at the thought of the distance which the young creature before him had traversed since the not distant date, when, according to her own avowal, she had been afraid to be left alone in the room with him!