CHAPTER XXXIII

After all, if she had but known, it would not make much difference to Lady Bletchley what or what manner of assistants Mrs. Slammer would have at her stall at the Fancy Fair for All England Cataleptics, which was to be held under Distinguished Patronage in the Albert Hall at mid-May, since at that date she herself had already been two months dead. The sequence of events which led to that catastrophe was a now not uncommon one. A vital energy weakened by over-exertion, a chill, a consultation, a successful operation--in medical parlance, a successful operation is often one in which the patient dies next day, instead of immediately under the surgeon’s knife--followed two days later by a paragraph in all the morning papers: “We regret to announce the death, which took place at an early hour yesterday morning, from appendicitis, at her residence in Hill Street, of Lady Bletchley. The deceased lady, better known as Mrs. Glanville--her husband, Lord Bletchley, having succeeded to the title by the death of the fourth Lord only in January last--was a wellknown figure in social and philanthropic circles, where her loss will be long and deeply deplored. She was----” Then followed a lengthy list of societies, associations, organizations, of hospitals, institutions, and institutes, in connection with which Lady Bletchley had cut a more or less prominent figure.

Bonnybell read the flaming obituary notices carefully to the end, and then laid down the papers--her eyes felt tired--with a sigh. “Poor dear thing, how she would have enjoyed them!”

Miss Ransome still felt rather stunned from the effects of the tragic haste with which the dreadful events of the last two or three days had followed on each other’s heels--from the moment when she had left Felicity sitting up, flushed, in bed, adjuring her not to play her false in the matter of the bazaar. There had, indeed, been haste, strange haste, on the dead woman’s part to leave a world so full of a double relish and savour since her accession to fortune; such haste that she had not even waited to say a farewell word to the husband whose anxiety to “have her” to himself had been the motive for Bonnybell’s ejection.

Tom had not returned in time to see his wife alive. Though she had now been twenty-four hours dead, he had not yet returned. Camilla and Edward were in the house. They had come at once. How widely all the many ways in which Bonnybell had figured to herself the manner of her next meeting with Edward had differed from the real one! Camilla? No, there was no change in Camilla. If anything, she looked perhaps a shade less haggard than when Miss Ransome had parted from her. Camilla’s face was one that matched a house of mourning. It needed no dressing to harmonize with gloom. On looking back, Miss Ransome seemed dimly to remember that she herself had been voluntarily embraced with an only half-smothered kindness, but at the time of the Tancreds’ arrival, when poor Felicity’s fate still hung in the balance, her own mind was in such a state of strained tension and grisly surprise that impressions came but blurred to it.

Now that the power of observation was coming back to her, the extreme wretchedness of Edward’s air struck her with a sense of excess. Of course, the whole affair was terrible in its suddenness; but Edward had never seemed to be very fond of his sister. Miss Ransome’s knowledge of human nature was not yet deep enough to teach her that the death of a person to whom one has owed and not given love sometimes brings with it a bitterer pang than that of one to whom has been given our poor best of tenderness.

Now that the thing was impossible, Edward was telling himself what an innocent pretence it would have been to have feigned a little interest in his sister’s unpractical schemes, a little admiration for her sincere, if wasted, humanity. The lesson that life dins into our ears with such ceaseless iteration that it seems impossible that any of us could ever fail to hear it is, _To make haste to be kind_! Edward felt that he had not made haste, and that now the opportunity had for ever escaped him.

For a whole day and night Felicity had been dead, and Tom had not yet returned. The telegrams sent after had missed him, owing to a change in his quarters from one remote fishing village to another. More and more urgent ones had been sent in every direction, and to every one who might possibly be in communication with him, but so far he had not appeared. There could be no doubt that he would arrive to-day. After all Felicity’s precautions against their meeting, it would be Bonnybell that would receive him, and not she. Nothing ever affected Miss Ransome very deeply, but at this reflection a profounder sense than ever before of the grim quality of Fate’s sense of humour penetrated her.

She was sitting idle, in the room which had been the scene of so many of her mornings’ labours for Felicity. Evidence of the dead woman’s interrupted toils lay strewn all over the large brass-bound writing-table, bulging out of pigeon-holes in the bureau, occupying in their varied multiplicity even a part of the carpet. Poor Felicity! how astonishing it was of her to die! A quite sincere compassion, and even a small contraction of the heart, slid off into painful speculation as to how yesterday’s catastrophe would affect the speculator’s future? Would the Slammer plan still hold good? Perhaps, now that there was no longer a socially influential Lady Bletchley to oblige, it would be allowed by its entertainer to damp off. And if it did not--if it became action, how much more dismal a future it involved than it had done, even in its original dreary conception! Had poor Felicity lived, she would always have been a resource, a refuge, an antidote! She would have been always joyfully grateful for as much of her society as Miss Ransome could spare; as much, that is, as would have been consistent with keeping her well separated from Tom. _Tom!_

Bonnybell’s thoughts came to a full stop upon the name. Irony, irony! Who was there to prevent her meeting Tom now? Poor Felicity! She was going to meet him that very minute, meet him _tête-á-tête_! His footfall was inaudible upon the thickly carpeted stairs; but the turning of the door-handle gave her an instant of preparation. It was as well that she had expected, since otherwise she would scarcely have recognized him! Where was the rubicund, pink-clean, amorously smiling Tom of her recollection? Could this livid, staring-haired, unshorn stranger, whose eyes were wild with misery, and mouth twitched with pain, be indeed he?

The first moment that their looks crossed, Bonnybell saw that the sight of her gave him a shock of surprise. Poor Felicity! It flashed through the girl’s mind in a moment that Tom’s wife had hidden from him all along the fact of her being a guest in his house. The look of surprise vanished, as it had come, instantaneously. It was clear that in his whole being there was no room for any feeling but one. (Perhaps, after all, Felicity had spoken the truth! Perhaps, after all, he would have liked to have her to himself!)

“So I am too late?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Yesterday morning, at twenty minutes to eight.”

“Did she leave any message for me?”

“She was unconscious.”

At that answer it seemed as if there could be nothing more of any consequence to him on earth. He asked no further questions, but sat down heavily on a chair--a business-like, green-leather-seated one--which had so often held the form of Felicity as she dictated her circulars, notices, and leaflets.

Bonnybell stood beside him, a slender, silent image of sympathy. How very much sorrier he was than she had expected! What sort of things ought she to say to him? A vague idea of having heard that people sinking into a stunned state from grief ought to be roused crossed her mind. How was he to be roused?

“As long as she was conscious she was always talking of you.”

At that he broke into loud weeping. “If I could have heard her speak just once again--just to tell me that she forgave me!”

“I am sure that she did not think there was anything to forgive.”

“Oh, but there was--_plenty_.”

He was so evidently going over in acute remorse his past peccadilloes, that Bonnybell fell silent again, divided between a repelled pity--his noisy grief reminded her of Toby, never a pleasing memory--and an uncomfortable wonder whether, in his present frame of mind, she herself might not be a somewhat unwelcome object to him? How curiously tender some men’s consciences were! After all, what had poor old Tom to reproach himself with?--some sly and invariably baffled attempts at caresses, and a few silly letters!

“She said over and over again to me how kind and indulgent you always were to her!”

“_Kind, indulgent!_” he repeated, from between his hard sobs. “Was that the way she put it? Good God! But it was just like her! There never was such an angel of goodness and gentleness and forbearance! Married five and twenty years--we should have kept our silver wedding this year--and I never had a cross word from her all that time!”

“I know you had not.”

It was not in the least true. Many were the pungent snubs that, on her first visit, Miss Ransome had heard administered by Felicity to her mate, and many the nettled retorts with which he had answered. But she saw that he believed in the perfect truth of his statement, and that it gave him a sort of relief from his misery to raise his lost wife to the clouds and depress himself to the pit.

“Just look round,” he went on, turning his streaming and reddened eyes about the room upon the evidences of Felicity’s labours. “This was her life--always working for others; never giving a thought to herself; working herself to death for other people; but all on the quiet! You never would have known it from her! Never a word of boasting; just doing it for the love of the thing, not wanting any credit or glory for herself!”

He paused, not because his _Cornucopia_ of praises was empty, but because tears strangled him. Bonnybell listened in covert wonder. Was it possible that he believed all that? Could not he have found something a little nearer the truth to say of her?

“And there was I all the time, in my beastly selfishness, thinking of nothing but my own amusements; shirking everything disagreeable; laying everything on her shoulders; never profiting in the least by her example; disregarding her advice; wasting my time in doing things that I knew she disapproved of!”

The picture was to the full as overcharged as the companion portrait had been, but it was not yet highly coloured enough to suit the painter’s fancy; and since it gave a little relief to the poor man’s remorse, Bonnybell took care not to interrupt him.

“I often hurt her feelings by the things I did, even making much of other people under her very eyes! She never took the least notice, or gave me one word of reproach; but I am sure it hurt her, though she must have known how little I cared about them, about anybody, or anything, in comparison of her!”

In the bewildered agony of his mind, poor Tom had evidently clean forgotten how prominent a place in the group alluded to the lady before him had taken; but she herself was somewhat acutely conscious of it, and since she had always been able to laugh at her own expense, a dreadful sense of amusement tinged the distress and awkwardness of the situation.

“She was a wonderfully handsome woman to her last day, wasn’t she? I never went into a room with her that she was not the best-looking woman there; but you have no conception what she was when I married her; her beauty was quite--quite--_unearthly_.”

“I can well believe it!”

Truth had once again returned to the bottom of her well. Felicity’s somewhat buxom charms had never struck Bonnybell as of so overpowering a character either in the present or the past. But if ever there was a pardonable fiction it lay in her acquiescence in his flights of remorseful fancy.

For another half-hour he went on piling up encomiums, some partially merited, some grossly undeserved, upon his departed wife, and heightening the whiteness of her portrait by additional strokes of lampblack added to his own, until at last he stopped, exhausted, there being no more glory left in memory or imagination to pile upon her, nor any further disgrace with which to daub himself. But the exercise had done him good.