CHAPTER XXXIV

Felicity’s obsequies had been celebrated with due pomp, and--fate still continuing in her ironic vein--Lady Bletchley’s first visit to the most imposing of her new country houses--there were half a dozen of them--was made under circumstances which precluded all enjoyment of its beauties.

As Miss Ransome noted the throng of delegates and journalists who crowded round Felicity’s grave, and glanced at the inscriptions on gigantic wreaths sent by societies and institutions, she repeated to herself with less of cynicism than sincere compassion, “Poor thing, how she would have enjoyed it!”

And now the mourners were back again in Hill Street, and feeling the dull relief that ensues after an ended ordeal.

Edward, who had been with the widower, had just received and obeyed a summons to Camilla. He found her lying on the sofa in her dressing-room. She was doing it thoroughly, as she did everything; that is to say, she lay perfectly flat, with her head resting on a cushion; but her attitude managed to express a protest which proclaimed that its adoption was due solely to doctor’s orders, and as little as possible to any inclination towards self-indulgence.

“How is he now?”

“Oh, he’ll be all right.”

“Is he calmer?”

“Yes, now and then. He has just been telling me of a new man whom his keeper has heard of to get pheasants’ eggs from.”

Mrs. Tancred looked at her husband with penetrating surprise. She had never known Edward intolerant before; yet there was not much warmth of compassion in his tone. To one of Edward’s nature, noise and grief were impossible companions, and his brother-in-law’s uncontrolled demonstration at the graveside had, as Camilla was aware, been almost intolerable to her husband.

“Sorrow affects people in different ways,” she said, with a rebuke which was gently meant, though it sounded, as her mildest utterances always did, severe and didactic.

“Yes, I know; but he made such an exhibition of himself.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“You will be glad to get back to Stillington?”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“We must take Bonnybell with us.”

At that he gave--not a stage start, but one of those almost invisible movements for which stage starts are meant to stand.

“We cannot, of course, leave her here.”

There was no form of ejaculation or assent in the whole range of language strong enough to express Mr. Tancred’s acquiescence in this impossibility, so he said only--

“No.”

“I have not yet talked to her about her plans; if she has made any--and I doubt her having gone even so far--they are probably perfectly irrational and chimerical.”

“I dare say.”

“I do not even know--the intercourse between us has been so slack of late--whether--under your sister’s auspices--she has made any friends that could be useful or helpful to her.”

Any one but Camilla would at such a moment have prefixed a “poor” to Felicity’s name; but Mrs. Tancred would have scorned to employ the adjective to any him or her simply because they were dead. To her it seemed a very doubtful ground for compassion.

Edward shook his head.

“Under the circumstances, I think there is no doubt that it is our duty to have her back, at all events, for a while.”

This time the hearer gave at first no sign of either acquiescence or dissent; then he spoke--not easily.

“But _you_? how about _you_?”

“_How about me?_” she repeated. “You know that for the present my malady seems to be at a standstill; whether owing or not to the treatment I have been undergoing I cannot tell; personally I believe it to be only what I suppose would be called a _reprieve_, and that the operation, which lately seemed imminent, is only deferred for a more or less brief period. Anyhow, the fact remains, that I have no longer an excuse for avoiding duties disagreeable or otherwise; and I believe the case we are discussing comes under one or other of those heads.”

There could be no doubt in the husband’s mind under which head the return of Miss Ransome was mentally classed by his wife, though she magnanimously refrained from specifying it.

“It is like you to propose it,” he answered slowly; but more laggingly still, “I cannot see why you should embitter your life for the sake of a person who, after all, has no real claim upon you.”

Camilla looked at him with a calm compassion, accurately gauging what an utterance in such absolute discord with his own clearly divined inclinations had cost him.

“My life is not so easily embittered,” she rejoined quietly, “and I have never wished or expected personal enjoyment to have a very prominent part in my programme--you need not feel any disquiet on that head--and besides”--her usual rigid truthfulness combining with a wish to meet her companion’s self-sacrificing utterance in a like spirit to produce the concluding, “and besides, there is much about the girl as an inmate that is not disagreeable to me.”

If he had followed his impulses, he would have broken out into emphatic expressions of gratitude; but realizing just in time what a frightful lapse from taste and seemliness it would involve to accept as a personal kindness done to himself the contemplated step, he refrained.

“It shall be, of course, as you wish,” he said, and so left the room.

He left the house too, the confinement of walls and roof seeming unbearable. He must have open air and solitude in which to bring himself face to face with the new prospect, at which in his wife’s presence he had trusted himself to give only a glance. What right had he to think it so fair? He must call mightily upon Reason and Honour to cudgel him, if necessary, out of so mad and ruinous a belief. But they might cudgel him as they would--and they did belabour him soundly during the next hour--nothing could hinder him from looking at the Great Scheme of Things from a different standpoint to that with which he had regarded it as he remorsefully followed his too-little-loved sister’s hearse! Since those moments of woolly despair what had happened to better his lot or brighten his prospects? What had happened, but that a young girl of vicious origin and upbringing, standing upon a hopelessly low plane of thought and action, a young girl who had brought discomfort and scandal into his home, alienated his friends, and poisoned his wife’s peace, was to be given the opportunity of pursuing and completing her work of disintegration! What but this had happened to make “the March sun shine like May,” to turn the dry easterly blast into a zephyr? Reason and Honour combined to answer emphatically, “Nothing, less than nothing!” but another voice out-shouted them, _dumbing_ them with its insistent joyous asseveration, “Everything!” This voice was so impossible to silence, that at last he was reduced to listening to it, to asking it what it had to say for itself; and it began lengthily to explain. There were, certainly, disadvantages inseparable from the girl’s resumption of her place at his fireside--he tried to school himself into treating her in his innermost thoughts merely as “the girl”--but there would be good to be extracted from it too, if it was taken in the right way. Never could she hope to be under such wholesome and elevating an influence as his wife’s; and he himself might do something too, if he took the relation in the right way. Everything depended on taking it in the right way! He would begin at once--the very next time that they met--to set it upon a safe basis; to give the keynote of their future intercourse, and, with her extraordinary quickness and brightness, she would at once catch the right tone and keep it. God knows he had tried to do his best for her; to give her some notion of honour and truth, and decent living; and he _had_ made _some_ progress. She lied still, but she said fewer indecent things; and she tried with such sweet docility to see his point of view, when she managed to grasp what it was.

Thank God, he had nothing to reproach himself with, nothing, that is, that was visible or audible to any human eye or ear; but sometimes the ground had seemed to be crumbling into sand under his feet. Henceforth the foundation on which he and she were together to stand was to be of granite; and if, by-and-by, he were to succeed--he and his wife together--in leading her on and up, till her mind and moral nature more nearly matched her exquisite body, what an entrancing little friend she would make for them both! how she would soothe and brighten their waning years!

To be quite on the safe side, he framed to himself the fiction that Camilla and he were coeval. That there should be any delay in embarking on this halcyon plan seemed unendurable, and he began at once to reflect upon the earliest train by which he and his augmented party might return to Stillington on the morrow.

It was in the highest degree unseemly to suspect Tom, at such an infant stage of his loud sorrow and early widowhood; but Edward knew his brother-in-law well enough to be quite sure that the lapse of a very few days would see him--if Bonnybell wore an apron--drying his eyes upon a corner of it. So Mr. Tancred wondered whether his wife would think the 8.50 train too early.

Meanwhile, the cause of Mr. Tancred’s self-schoolings was in no danger of incurring a remorse like his for being too cheerful. She was alone in a sitting-room, which had been occupied by her during the last two or three days, because, since it looked to the back, its blinds had not needed to be pulled down, and she was sitting in an attitude of, for once, entirely unstudied dejection. Since no one was likely to intrude upon her, she might be and look just as miserable or as little miserable as she felt inclined. The quantum of grief expressed by her whole person was enough to have satisfied even the claims of Tom’s gluttonous demands upon his friends for a sorrow as vociferous as his own.

For once Miss Ransome’s philosophy was quite out of gear, and her spirits had descended below the soles of her feet, and abode there. She had cried a good deal, though not in public--a thing which she always disliked. Private weeping could serve no purpose of cajoling, persuading, or mollifying, and was likely to be damaging to that stock in trade of which her eyes formed so valuable an item; and she had hated the funeral. It had reminded her of poor Claire’s, though, except in the main fact, no other functions could ever have differed more widely; and for “Claire” in her small, cool heart, there always lingered a remnant of rueful pity, though it never ran to the length of wishing to have her back again.

Tom’s deportment and appearance at the ceremony had been as repulsive to her as to his brother-in-law. Why, in Heaven’s name, if he were so overwhelmed with grief at the loss of a wife, his tenderness to whom while in life had been eked out by so many fond by-plays with others, could not he control it as an English gentleman of his class and breeding was bound to do? Why, in the face of that large and reverent gathering, need he have roared like a bull and blubbered like a whipped schoolboy? And why, oh, why need Edward and he have stood side by side, so as to bring into monstrous prominence the contrast between them? Not even grief had succeeded in paling Tom, and the image of his rubicund face defaced by tears, of his bulky outline and shining bared head beside the silent pale dignity of Edward’s sorrow, filled Bonnybell with physical disgust.

Her thoughts moved on a little from the funeral to a scene that followed the return from it. “Poor old woman, she really did not do it badly, considering how little practice she has had in pretending. I could have given her a few hints, but it really was a very creditable performance; and in a way I think it was a disappointment to her to forego continuing my education. Never again can she hope to have a pupil who set off by, and meant to go on, knowing as little as I!”

Upon the hitherto unlightened gloom of her spirits there played a little ray of cynic mirth, but the gust of a heavy sigh blew it out. “But what a relief too! I saw a sort of shining come into her poor old eyes--they are not nearly so hard and horny as they were when first I knew them--and when she at last took in that I was in earnest, that the Slammers’ invitation was not one of my tasteful embroideries, how hard she tried not to beam too flagrantly!”

A pause, and then a still heavier sigh than the last. “I was right, undoubtedly I was right. It would have been madness. It may be all very well for people who have a high level, and think they can keep up to it--it would still remain to be proved if they could--but as for me, I never had any level to speak of, and I do not possess that confidence in myself which I once had. I believe I am quite capable of committing a _sottise_ if I put myself in the way of it; and at this time of the year I suppose all those horrid birds in the copse would be love-making, and it might have been catching.”

As she spoke, the door gently opened; and, since the sitting-room was a general one there was nothing strange in the fact, the object of her thoughts came in.

“I was looking for you.”

“Were you?”

“My wife will have told you that we hope, unless you have any objection to the plan, to take you back to Stillington with us to-morrow, and I have come to ask you if the 8.50 from Paddington would be too early for you.”

He had got the right key, hospitable and courteous, erring perhaps a little on the side of excess in the way of formality, but that was a fault on the safe side.

Before he spoke, Bonnybell had known that he had not yet heard, and that it would be her task to tell him. She saw also, with a slight tinge of bitter amusement, his anxiety not to let their point of departure for the long ordeal ahead of them be one of too great intimacy. (“Reassure yourself, my poor Edward; you may set your mind at rest.”)

The lack of her usual civil promptness in acknowledging a courtesy caused him a slight surprise, but it was so far not coupled with any misgiving. It did not need any of that self-esteem in which Edward was so singularly lacking to feel sure that his hearer could have no alternative plan which she would think preferable to the one now offered her, so he added, still with that _soupçon_ of formality--

“I ought to apologize for suggesting such an unreasonable hour.”

Consciousness of his endeavour to keep her at arm’s length gave her the strength to show him the needlessness of his precautions, though her mode of opening the subject was misleading.

“You always thought me rather a sluggard,” she said softly; “do you remember?”

But no “do you remembers” were to enter into his programme, and though more against the grain than he liked to own, he cut this one short.

“I never could understand why there is a virtue _per se_ in getting up early.”

“No,” she answered, acquiescing sweetly in the lopping off the head of her bud of reminiscence; “there are enough real virtues and vices, aren’t there, without loading us with mock ones?”

He had led the talk to a safe abstraction, yet already he felt the strain.

“It is settled, then?”--taking for granted with unconscious arbitrariness what she had _not_ said--“8.50.”

To his intense surprise and alarm her answer was to rise from the depths of her chair--what a little slip of a thing she looked in her new mourning! Launce’s description of his sister, “White as a lily and small as a wand,” darted across Edward’s mind--and drawing near him, she laid her hand upon his coat-sleeve. Evidently the keeping at arm’s length would be a harder task than he had promised himself.

“No, it is not settled,” she said; “nothing about it is settled except that you have made one poor creature even more everlastingly your debtor than she was before by proposing it.”

He looked back at her aghast, yet only half believing, unconscious of what at any other moment he would have been tinglingly aware, the clasp of her fingers on his arm. He knew her to be so complete a liar, that the mere fact of her announcing that she did not purpose to return to Stillington was, as likely as not, to mean that she had every intention of doing so. Was this refusal one of her infinite wiles to lure him into cajoling and caressing her into compliance?

“Am I to understand that you have made other plans?” His voice was frosty; too frosty, perhaps, or it seemed so to himself, for he added more in his own manner, “I beg your pardon for what may sound like an impertinent intrusion, but you have taken me by surprise.”

The chill in his tone had loosened her clasp upon his sleeve, and they stood near but apart from one another.

“I am going to stay with the Slammers.”

“The Slammers?”

There was such hopeless bewilderment in his repetition of the name that she felt the need of enlightening him.

“I am stupid to-day; probably you have never heard of them. I was forgetting how little you know of the life here of late.”

“You need not remind me that I was a neglectful brother,” he answered, in a key of such profound regret that she took refuge from her dangerous pity of him in explanation.

“They are, in a way, connections of mine--at least, he is; his name was Ransome before he married her. He was, like the rest of the family, not a very shining light, I believe, but now he has ranged himself, I suppose, and she is very philanthropic and platformy and religious.”

He received the blow in total silence, being not one of those who cry out when they are hurt. When at last he spoke, it was with a measured impartiality, which sounded to himself grossly overdone.

“I suppose that you are the best judge of what makes for your happiness.”

“One ought not to think of one’s own happiness,” she answered, in her “nicest” manner; then with a flash of self-ridicule for serving up so coarsely dressed a dish of “goodness” to one who knew her much too well to swallow it, she added with a laugh, whose hysteric quality, if half affected, was also half natural--“at least, so Mrs. Slammer tells her husband when she whips off her _cordon bleu_ half an hour before dinner to see the Monument.”

Her mental comment on her own speech--for she was not one with whom thought and word ever flowed parallel--ran thus: “What atrocious taste to be making bad jests to poor Felicity’s brother on the day of the funeral! but if I am not flippant, God knows what I may say or do!”

He stood before her absolutely still, not moving a muscle at her dull pleasantry.

“Have you thought it well over? Are you quite sure that it would not be better for you to come back with us to Stillington to-morrow?”

Once again the calm aloofness of his tone sounded overdone to Edward’s ear, but it did not for a moment take in his hearer. (“Poor fellow, how hard he is trying to be good! I suppose it is a beautiful sight, and I must not be outdone.”) There was the gentlest rebuke in her sorrowful little voice as she answered--

“I know that you are not likely to be joking to-day; but when you ask that you seem to be mocking me.”

“Then why do you refuse?”

She dropped her eyes to the carpet, and gave him the opportunity of verifying that the large white lids were a little swollen and discoloured with weeping. He had to count thirty clock-beats before her answer came. (“If I give in now, I am done for,” she was saying to herself. “At the present moment I feel as if Edward would make up for everything; as if nothing in the world would be of any value without him, but _I know all the while that I do not really think so_.”) She raised her eyes slowly, as if tears made them difficult to lift.

“It would be better for me; but would it be better for Camilla?”

In the tension of the moment neither of them noticed Bonnybell’s unwonted use of Mrs. Tancred’s Christian name. (She must have been mistaken in thinking that Edward looked white as he stood by his sister’s grave. If he was white then, what was he now?)

“Do not misunderstand me,” she went on, almost under her breath, but quite distinctly; “what I mean to say is that I do not see how things are changed since I was sent away because she was too ill to have the worry and anxiety of me.”

If Bonnybell’s eyes had found it hard to raise themselves, Edward’s lips found it harder still to frame the few words of his response.

“She is in stronger health than she was then.”

“For the moment, yes; but it may be only a reprieve. She told me herself that she looked upon it only as a reprieve.”

In the eagerness and real emotion with which she was putting forth her apology, Miss Ransome forgot for the moment to postulate the supposable regret which she had always believed to be non-existent in the mind of the husband at the probability of his wife’s death; yet for a moment that oversight gave the husband an acute revulsion of feeling.

“God grant she may be wrong!” he said with a low fervency which, as his hearer felt, could not have been put on. She saw her error, and hastened to repair it.

“I was going to say you cannot wish it more than I do!”--with a slight low laugh at the exaggeration of her own expression--“but I do wish it with all my heart! I should be a monster of ingratitude if I did not.”

It was very nearly true. Since Camilla’s death could in no wise profit her, and the memory of her solid kindliness was fresh and vivid, Miss Ransome did wish, with as much sincerity as she was capable of, that Camilla should live, and not die, if she thought such a life as hers worth having.

After that there was not much more to be said, and in a few moments he left her. Neither by the 8.50 nor by any other train was she to return to his hearth’s side. As he reached the door she called softly after him; since she was quite safe now she might give herself that slight indulgence--

“Give my love to the birds. I hope that your next pupil will be quicker in learning your lessons about them.”

He answered, “I shall never have another pupil;” and it was to his credit that this was the nearest he ever went to a declaration.