CHAPTER III

“I cannot think why she is coming by such an early train,” said Mrs. Tancred, referring to a note less blackly bordered than she thought it ought to be.

“Perhaps Tom has put his foot down,” returned her husband.

“She spells brougham phonetically, as if it were a besom.” After a moment, “What on earth shall I do with her between tea and dinner time?”

“Tell her to ‘rest.’ Is not that the proper thing?”

“Pooh! at eighteen they never want to rest.”

“Shall you only _send_ to meet her at Swinston, or go yourself?”

He had tried to make the question as colourless as possible, but had not been able quite to keep out of his tone a slight indication of bias towards the more welcoming course.

“I shall send. I have no wish to be seen by any chance member of my acquaintance who may happen to be on the platform with a young member of the _demi-monde_ sobbing in my arms.”

Edward Tancred received this fiat in silence; even the shrug with which he greeted it was an inward one of the spirit alone, and in which the shoulders took no part. Perhaps the rebuke implied in his muteness or the stings of her own conscience might have suggested to Camilla that she had rather overdone the brutality of her last speech, for though her next utterance was not amiable, the key in which it was pitched was distinctly less trenchant than its predecessor’s.

“I hope she will not think it necessary to kiss me. Of course she will not _wish_ to do so”--Mrs. Tancred had no illusion as to her own destituteness in the matter of charm; her husband sometimes thought that life would be rather easier if she had--“but she may think I expect it.”

“If she does, and it happens indoors, so that nothing compromising is involved, I hope you will be equal to the occasion.”

There was that something of lightly mocking in his tone which, as Camilla knew, implied the nearest approach to disapproval he ever permitted himself of any of her words or actions.

“Perhaps you would like to go to meet her in the brougham yourself?”

“I shall not be back from London.”

The matter-of-fact answer to a question intended to be a scoff took the wind out of Mrs. Tancred’s sails, which for a moment or two flapped idly against her masts. But presently a new zephyr swelled them.

“It is a leap in the dark, if ever there was one; and at my age the taste for such agilities is pretty well extinct.”

There was such a sombre misgiving in her tone, that his own changed at once to that of the kindest, patientest reasoning.

“Don’t you think you are making rather a mountain out of a molehill? The girl comes as an ordinary visitor. Supposing the worst, that you--we” (correcting himself) “do not care much about her, the visit ends, she goes, and whose bones are broken?”

Mrs. Tancred shook her head. “Having once undertaken her, I shall put it through, unless, of course”--with her little dry laugh--“you set your foot down, like Tom.”

“The comparison jarred upon him. She had meant it to do so, as a relief to her own ill humour, but not being one of those fortunate people who can indulge in pet vices, like indigestible dainties, without after ill effects, she expiated her ebullition by an instantaneous remorse, which, being unexpressed, did neither of them any good.

“Felicity gave one absolutely no data to go upon”--drawing from her pocket the brief note inserted in Miss Ransome’s letter by the warranter of that young lady’s general soundness. “‘Gay as a lark.’” She paused after the quotation, and Edward had a nervous dread that she was going to add the oft-repeated gloss, “When her mother died three months ago,” but for once she abstained. “‘Gay as a lark, and has been of invaluable assistance to me in my “Happy evenings.”’ Not a word else! not a hint as to her character, her tastes, her faults!”

“Perhaps she will be of invaluable assistance to us in our happy evenings.”

It was said in a perfectly innocent voice, as offering a plausible suggestion; but his wife knew that it was his revenge for Tom’s foot.

“B-r-o-o-m! Yes, there can be no mistake about it!” said Mrs. Tancred, recurring to and carefully verifying poor Miss Ransome’s stumble upon the path of orthography, and forcing her husband to verify it too.

He laughed with contemptible male leniency. “Do you think she will arrive riding upon it, like a witch?” His slight mirth was not infectious.

“I think that to our other treats we shall have to add that of educating her.”

“Oh, I would not bother about that!” replied he, departing from his golden rule of never offering advice to that consort, who had had so much longer a time to learn wisdom in than had been his portion. “I would not bother about that. Let her ride through life upon her broom, if it amuses her.”

“That may be your happy-go-lucky way,” replied she, crisply, “but it is not mine.”

Happy-go-lucky! He repeated the epithet over to himself several times, in the dogcart, as he sent his horse along the flat old coach road, liberal of margin, to Swinston station; while the idle question put itself to his intelligence, whether a compound word, of which neither of the component parts was true, could be true as a whole? Happy-go-lucky. He was neither “happy” nor “lucky.” Could he, therefore, be truly said to be happy-go-lucky?

There was another traveller on the same line of railway, in the afternoon of that day, who made the hour’s journey from Paddington in a train that preceded the express which brought Mr. Tancred back from the City, and whose reflections, despite the lark-quality with which she was credited, were not much more rosy-tinted than his own.

“I wonder,” she said to herself, as her great eyes, that were no longer under any compulsion to look grateful, or affectionate, or docile, in the matchless freedom of an empty railway-carriage, followed the yellow-brick squalors of the sliding slums. “I wonder how long it will be before Edward puts his foot down in the same way that Tom did? Will it be a matter of months or weeks? Judging from the portrait good old Felicity drew of her sister-in-law, I should say it might be minutes! If old Tom had not been such an ass, I might have stayed with them for ever and a day, and it was not a bad berth! What asses most men are! and _all_ what brutes! No, not _all_! Old Tom is not a brute! _How_ kind he was on the day of the funeral during that horrible drive to Kensal Green! But _what_ an ass! ‘I shall be at Paddington before you! God bless you, dear!’”

She chuckled a little, and the lark--a very sophisticated town lark--began to re-awake in her.

Presently, having the carriage to herself, she left her seat and flitted to the opposite window, then back again, standing up to command the landscape better. Not that she had any taste for landscape, an appreciation of the beauties of Nature being as much a matter of education as spelling or ciphering, and possessed as little by the peasant as the dog. She knew that Italy or Switzerland expect to be admired; but that the tame, Alpless, templeless Berkshire, through which the G.W.R. was carrying her, could command any approbation would never have occurred to her, even though November seemed reluctant yet to tear from the pleasant countryside its red and sombre garment of autumn.

But though gifted with no love of the picturesque, Miss Ransome was endowed with plenty of alert curiosity, which grew sharper as the little diamond-set watch at her wrist told her that she must be nearing her destined station, and caused her to scan with a keener interest the “country seats”--in advertisement phrase--which here and there were indicated by a lodge visible from the line, or a gable peeping through red woods. She had not been informed as to the distance from Swinston to Stillington Manor. Any one of those half or quarter revealed houses might therefore prove to be her future home. If not, it might prove to be the home of a neighbour and acquaintance. Any one of those neighbours might possess an eldest son.

“Marriage is the only possible outlet for me,” she said to herself, relapsing into gloom, as her eye rested appraisingly upon the brand-new machicolations of a pretentious mansion on a low hillside. “It is an odious one, yet there is no other; but whatever old Felicity may say, I will not have more than two children. If I have not a very good settlement, I will have none. Why should I bring any poor creature into the world to be a wretched little adventurer like myself?”

* * * * *

“Miss Ransome.”

Never had the voice of her butler made an announcement less grateful to Mrs. Tancred’s ears. They were prepared for it, as the sound of the horses’ hoofs had penetrated to the morning-room, where she sat alone before her tea-table. But that sound had not been permitted to lift her spectacles--the pair most hated of Edward’s soul, with the thickest rims and the largest goggles--from her book. She would do her duty by the expected imposition when once it was laid on her shoulders, but that she should manifest _empressement_ or pleasure in assuming the burden so brazenly shifted by Felicity from her own to Camilla’s back would be an offence at once against truth and decency.

Though Bonnybell had heartily dreaded and disliked the idea of her change of _milieu_, it had never occurred to her that the introduction to her new patroness would make her feel shy. Felicity kissed her upon arriving. _A fortiori_, Camilla would wish to kiss her, since in Miss Ransome’s experience the less attractive a human countenance was, the more anxious it was to approach itself to one’s own. She must be prepared for this, must appear willing, if possible more than willing, to be embraced.

This had been her plan of campaign during the five-mile drive in the brougham, while clanking under the stone portico of the hall door, while passing through the evidently much-sat-in large hall, and being ushered into the morning-room opening out of it; but no sooner had her feet crossed the threshold of this latter, and seen the tall gauntness that faced her slowly rising from its seat and deliberately replacing its spectacles in their leather case, and awaiting her without one conciliatory inch of advance towards her, then, with lightning speed, she realized the impossibility of her project. Attempt to kiss that icy mask! Her buoyant step faltered, her ideas grew confused, only a hazy notion that her plan was a good one, and that she must carry out as much of it as was possible, still occupying her brain.

With merely this dim guide for her conduct, and becoming aware that she was now quite close to the grey-haired iceberg ahead, she dropped a little French curtsey, and laid a small, respectful, butterfly kiss upon the bony fingers held grudgingly out to her.

Mrs. Tancred snatched away her hand, though more in a sort of ferocious _mauvaise honte_ than from any more hostile motive. It was so very seldom, throughout her fifty years, that any one had kissed Camilla’s hand. Edward had done so, fifteen years ago, as a graceful unmarried lad of twenty, in innocent acknowledgment of long hospitalities, and she had thereupon straightway proposed marriage to him--that marriage which he had been too young, too grateful, and too much taken aback to decline.

Was it any wonder that, having such associations with the courtesy in question, Mrs. Tancred should mark her disapprobation of it with what, to the uninitiated, might seem needless emphasis?

To Bonnybell this miscarriage of her plan of action at its very outset brought a momentary paralysis, and she stood dumbfounded, while an awkward remorse for her reception of what, though silly and misplaced, might have been a well-meant civility, impelled Camilla to make a conciliatory remark to the effect that she was afraid the tea was cold.

“I like it cold,” replied Miss Ransome, with the sweetest promptitude and the most instantaneous rally.

“You like it cold?” repeated Camilla.

The repetition of the polite assertion was merely because that ferocious shyness of hers did not suggest to Mrs. Tancred any more original observation; but the tone in which it was conveyed made Miss Ransome say to herself that “the old woman was even more terrible than she had expected.” No sign of this reflection appeared, however, on the dial-plate of her innocent face.

“I mean that I do not _mind_ its being cold. I like to take it just as it comes.”

“Is that the way in which you like to take things generally?” asked the other, unstiffening into an involuntary smile.

It was difficult to look at anything so small, so dewy, so palpably made of rose-leaves as Bonnybell’s face without smiling; and in addition to this impulse shared by the generality of her species, Mrs. Tancred had for her own portion that extravagant admiration of beauty which, unmixed with any tincture of spite, is the doubtful appanage of the frankly ugly and really good among women.

“I think one has to, more or less, don’t you think?” replied the rose-leaf with a pretty diffidence, as one not competent to hold an opinion with any tenacity in the presence of a person so far superior in wisdom to herself.

With a passing shudder at the slipshodness of the grammar displayed in the answer, coupled with a slight sense of approbation of the deference of its tone, and an inward reflection--somewhat the reverse of that lately made by its object--that the new arrival was not quite so impossible as she had expected, Mrs. Tancred thawed a little further, and put an almost friendly question as to the welfare of the couple whom her visitor had just left.

“Mrs. Glanville has a slight cold,” replied the other, with the glad glibness of feeling herself on safe ground, “but taking care of it, and I do not think it will be much. She caught it as we were coming out of the ‘Happy Evening’ last Thursday.”

For a moment Mrs. Tancred hesitated. Should she seize this early opportunity for beginning the projected education of her charge, and point out to her that it is grammatically impossible to come out of a “Happy Evening,” or should she let the slip pass? Her rejoinder showed that she had chosen the weaker-minded alternative.

“Felicity tells me that you have been invaluable to her at the Recreation Hall.”

“I was so glad to be able to do any little thing to show my gratitude to her.”

The statement was certainly not untrue, but as certainly that was not the reason for its utterance. Veracity being a goddess who had never occupied a very high position in Bonnybell’s Pantheon, she said it because she thought that the _jeune fille_, up to whose character she was in these surroundings bound to try to live, should and would say it.

“Felicity would have liked you to prolong your visit to them indefinitely?”

There was a faint accent of asking in what would otherwise sound like the assertion of a fact, and Miss Ransome stole a wily glance at her hostess. Did she know about Tom, or was she trying to find out?

Twenty-four hours later the girl would not have put this question even to herself, having long ere the expiration of that time learnt how little the indirect or circuitous entered into Camilla’s methods. Here was need for wary walking.

“She said so.”

“Then the objection came from Tom?”--with an accent of very thinly veiled incredulity.

But the cautious young stranger was not to be surprised into any such admission, nor did the fact that Felicity’s version of the circumstances departed somewhat widely from strict accuracy make it at all less easy to her young _protégée_ to back it up.

“Of course, it must be a nuisance for any man to have a third person always _en tiers_ with him and his wife,” she replied with a judicious generality. Then, divining from something in Mrs. Tancred’s face that the ground was not very firm under her, she skipped off it with a masterly agility. “That was what made it so overwhelmingly kind of you and Mr. Tancred to let me be sent here.”

The humility of the wording, with its plain implication that the speaker could never be regarded except as a burdensome parcel to be transferred from one pair of reluctant hands to another, and the guilty feeling that such had been precisely her own attitude of mind towards her, combined to mollify yet further the person at whom they were aimed.

“Edward and I are too old married people to have Tom’s eagerness for a _tête-à-tête_,” she said, with a hint of what Bonnybell suspected to be irony, “but”--with a smile that, though, like everything else about her, was unbeautiful, was yet not hostile--“I think it _was_ kind of us!”