CHAPTER IV

“They must have a _chef_,” said Bonnybell after dinner to herself, as she and Camilla began to tread back their path through the long enfilade of rooms that led from the dining-room to the library, where, accompanied by ceiling-high books, the small family apparently spent its evenings. “The cuisine is better than the Glanvilles’. I fancy that philanthropic women very seldom have good cooks. Yes, they have a _chef_! What a fool he must be to spend two-thirds of the year in the country!”

As she and her hostess stood by the fire, Miss Ransome’s reflections took another turn.

“What a gloomy room! Not a single photograph about! How much better those old ancestors would look taken out of their frames and draped in light-blue velvet, as poor Claire did ours before she sold them!”

Mrs. Tancred, with an evident intention of industry, sat down by a green-shaded electric lamp, and drawing a roomy work-basket towards her, extracted from it a large piece of homely plain sewing.

“Ought I to set a footstool for her, or is she the kind of person who likes to do everything herself? Ah, it is as I thought,” as the diffidently offered support was rejected with the words--

“Thank you, my dear; but my legs are long, and I have no wish to have my knees knocking against my nose.”

“I am so sorry,” returned Bonnybell, humbly; “it is a silly habit that I have got into! Claire never could bear to be without a footstool!”

Mrs. Tancred’s seam remained suspended in mid air, the needle arrested in its journey, while through her spectacles her eyes, which looked far too penetratingly keen to need them, flashed in shocked displeasure at her visitor.

“Claire!” she repeated in an awful voice. “Who is Claire?”

“Claire was my mother,” replied the girl, quailing, and crying to herself in a passion of self-reproach that she had made a colossal blunder on the very threshold; that, of course, the _jeune fille_ does not allude to her mother by her Christian name.

“And you speak of her as Claire?”

“It was her own wish. She could not bear me to call her mother; she thought it dated her--of course, it did.”

Mrs. Tancred was silent for a minute or two. It would be unseemly to address to the daughter of the departed the vigorous epithets which alone sprang to her own lips in connection with that lady. Presently a suddenly risen hope set speech free again.

“If those were Lady Ransome’s views, she probably did not care to have you much with her.”

“Oh yes, she did--sometimes,” replied the girl, slowly, and with a painful weighing of each word by the _jeune fille_ standard. “She liked us to be taken for sisters; and when the light was not strong there really looked very little difference in age between us.”

Again there was a pause, the potent reasons of her deadness and her motherhood being scarcely potent enough to keep within the barrier of Mrs. Tancred’s lips the expression of her estimate of the scandalous author of Bonnybell’s being. Her next question in the constraint of its tone evidenced the violence done to her inclinations.

“You were educated at home? or were you sent to school?”

“I was at school in Paris for a while.”

“For long?”

Bonnybell hesitated slightly. In point of fact, her sojourn in the Pension de Demoiselles in question had not outlasted a month; but “Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.”

“For some time.”

“And then Lady Ransome found that she could not get on without you?”

Reprobation of the implied selfish disregard of her daughter’s welfare had forced itself unconquerably into Camilla’s voice; and Bonnybell, who, with all her numerous faults, was not devoid of generosity, found herself unable to leave her questioner in what would be for herself an advantageous error.

“It was not Cl--my mother’s fault,” she explained slowly; “Madame le Roy asked her to take me away.”

“_Asked her to take you away?_”

Again for a moment Bonnybell hesitated. Should she “give away” her parent, whom, after all, nothing could now harm, and tell the truth, seeing that it was on getting wind of that parent’s antecedents, and the estimate in which she was held by her countrymen and countrywomen, that Madame le Roy had requested the removal of her daughter? It was clear that at the present moment the girl’s new patroness was labouring under the perfectly natural error that it was for misconduct of her own that the young creature before her had been ejected.

“She thinks that I was kicked out for some _amourette_! Well”--the hesitation had not lasted more than five clock-ticks--“let her go on thinking so. If I had stayed another month, I dare say I should have been, and poor Claire is dead, and cannot take up the cudgels for herself.”

“_Asked her to take you away?_” Mrs. Tancred had laid down her spectacles; but though their glowering roundness had been frightening, the unshaded rebuke of the eyes behind them was distinctly more so.

The repetition of the sentence had taken so plainly interrogative a tone that it must needs be answered. In this case the _jeune fille_ idea was of no help. The _jeune fille_ could never have been turned out of a boarding school, and Miss Ransome must be guided by her own lights. Since truth was never a _sine quâ non_ with her, she might as well make out as good a case as she could for herself.

“I believe that Madame le Roy thought I was not making much progress--that another system of education might suit me better.”

A long practice in the art of fibbing had given Bonnybell a high degree of proficiency, and no one that heard this unhesitating utterance, and saw the unflinching though modest directness with which her eyes met those of her catechist, would guess how much larger a draft upon the girl’s imagination than her memory the explanation had made.

Camilla listened, uncomfortably puzzled. The reason given sounded ludicrously inadequate, yet the child’s whole air and manner was that of one telling the simple truth.

Mrs. Tancred had never had the advantage of living with a really good liar; and so dismissing all doubt of the unlikely fact recorded, her mind made a transition to the cynically amused speculation as to what the alternative system of education could be that taught its pupil to spell the word “brougham” as poor Miss Ransome had so lately been innocently guilty of doing.

Bonnybell’s thoughts meanwhile resolved themselves into the two distressed self-queries, “If she goes on like this much longer, shall I be able to help contradicting myself?” and, “Is it possible that Edward is going to have the brutality to leave us to ourselves for the whole evening?”

It was not possible; or, at least, the dreaded contingency did not happen, and Edward himself followed soon, though saunteringly, upon the heels of his guest’s fears.

He stood for a few minutes with his back to the fire, not looking particularly at either of his ladies, but rubbing his foot gently over Jock’s reverse, that dog sharing the belief of many of his race, that the really civil way to receive a friend is to roll over on your back, and flourish all your four legs in the air at once, like waved hands, at him.

Bonnybell drew a breath of relief. How much lighter the atmosphere had grown since he came in! and one might relax the strain to remember what one’s last sentence had been, and to be sure that it did not contradict one’s last but one! Yet it seemed destined to be an evening of _tête-à-têtes_. Though the one whose prolongation she had dreaded was happily at an end, Miss Ransome soon found herself involved in a second one with her host himself.

Mrs. Tancred having been given a low-voiced message by the butler, from which the words “water-bed,” “gratitude,” “invaluable” dimly emerged, a message whose tail was brusquely cut off by the recipient of it, but which resulted in her hastily leaving the room, a peril of a different kind from her former one must await the visitor.

“Of course, now that she is clear off, he will begin to make love to me! Was I ever alone in the room for five minutes with a man without his beginning to make love to me! Tom began the first evening. Happily I am a good way off!”

But apparently the manners and customs of the shady debauchees to whom Miss Bonnybell’s upbringing had acclimatized her, and from whom she generalized, formed no criterion for the conduct of the gentleman in whose company she now found herself. He did not change his attitude or his occupation by an inch, his foot still gently rolling the beatified Jock slowly to and fro, after the method that experience had taught him to be most acceptable. Neither did he speak.

Edward Ransome had never much flow of small talk, going mooning through that life whose circumstances forbade his ever giving open expression to his real feelings or true thoughts, in a sort of dreamy twilight of silence and self-suppression. He ought to say something to the dazzling anomaly that had seated itself by his dull hearthstone, but for the life of him he could not think what.

It was the anomaly who, surprised and relieved at his entire apparent innocence of the kind of enterprise with which she had credited or discredited him, saved him the trouble of initiating a subject.

“Am I sitting in your chair?” A movement just sketched with hasty grace towards leaving the seat she occupied accompanied the question.

“Oh dear, no!” in courteous distress at the suggestion. “I have not got a chair.”

“You do not say so?”

The words were nothing, but the tone carried such a delicate implication of interest in anything relating to his habits, coupled with a still more delicate fear of carrying that interest into intrusiveness, that Edward felt vaguely gratified.

“I mean that I have not any special chair which makes me inclined to growl as Jock does when another dog approaches the sacred confines of his basket.”

“Thank you for relieving my mind!” she answered gratefully. “I thought I might have taken it without knowing--one makes such stupid mistakes out of ignorance!”

There was a meek but not exaggerated thankfulness for his reassuring information in her whole air; and as if encouraged by his indulgence to gain further enlightenment, she went on--

“But Mrs. Tancred has?”

“Has what?” He had lost sight of her queries in a dreamy enjoyment of her prettiness.

“Has a special chair?”

“Has she?”

“Hasn’t she?”

Both were smiling; he at the inquiring turn of her mind, she at his vagueness. Both looked at the lately vacated seat, and Bonnybell said with hesitating solicitude--

“I hope it was not anything annoying that took Mrs. Tancred away.”

He shook his head. “It often happens. The village and the parson are perfectly conscienceless in their calls upon her.”

There was what sounded like a regretful and rather affectionate admiration in his voice. Was it possible that he could _like_ his old Gorgon? It was, at all events, safer to go upon the supposition that he did, and to shape one’s remarks accordingly.

“Mrs. Glanville spoke with the deepest admiration of Mrs. Tancred’s work,” the girl said in a very respectful tone, and executing her piece of embroidery upon Felicity’s real utterance with the deftest speed and readiness.

“Did she indeed?” replied he, in a key of high surprise, while his lazy eyes flashed a look at her, of whose keenness she had not supposed them capable, and which would not have disgraced Camilla’s own. “And yet their methods are not much alike.”

“You mean that Mrs. Tancred does not get up on platforms--does not speak in public?”

In her perfect darkness as to which mode of influencing the human race, his wife’s or his sister’s, most recommended itself to the husband and brother, Miss Ransome stole out her feeler with cautious colourlessness.

“No, my wife does not get up upon platforms.”

There was no emphasis laid on the denial of Camilla’s claim to puffed and self-advertised usefulness, and the answer might seem as colourless as the question, yet after its utterance no vestige of doubt remained in Bonnybell’s mind as to which of his female philanthropists’ methods Edward preferred. Perhaps he did not care much about either. Perhaps he was indifferent to or averse from philanthropy at all. She might as well ask him. Men were so much easier to ask questions of than women.

“You do not do anything of the kind yourself?”

“Of what kind?”

“Oh, good works--that sort of thing.”

She expected his answer with a flattering hanging on his words, but a slight frown creased his forehead as he replied--

“No, I do not do any good works--or bad ones either. I am a mere cumberer of the ground.”

There was a slight pause; she commenting inwardly upon his phrase, or rather upon a part of it--“no bad ones either.” I know how much of that to believe. “Qui s’excuse s’accuse!” Her amiable rejoinder, when it came, was gently playful.

“I see that I must not take you at your own valuation.”

The want of an answering smile, and the averting of his eyes, told her that the topic was not a gratifying one to him; that here was one of the men--almost unknown in her experience--who did not wish to talk about themselves; nor did she suspect that the gravity of his reception of her feeler was due to the slight sense of discomfort that one of her late carefully prepared sentences had produced. Why did she tell that unnecessary lie about Felicity’s admiration of Camilla’s work? She must have known that it was one!

He was glad, and Bonnybell was not as sorry as she would have expected to be, when the door opened to admit Camilla. The latter was shortly followed by men-servants, who laid out a teatable--an evident survival from the, to Bonnybell, incredible period of Mrs. Tancred’s girlhood; and Jock, ceasing to make a fool of himself on the hearthrug, and knowing that the hour of pet-dog biscuits had come, trotted confidently up to the board. He did not know that in the unprecedented novelty whom he had carefully sniffed over, and finally acquiesced in, lay an enemy to his own peace.

“You do not mean to say that you let him have it for nothing?” cried Bonnybell, in animated remonstrance. “We never allowed our little Mimi to eat a mouthful without barking for it.”

“Was ‘little Mimi’ your dog?” asked Camilla, in a voice that, though carping at the silliness of the name, had yet a ring of true fellow-feeling in it.

“Yes, she was such a beauty. I do not know what Sir Alg--one of Cl--my mother’s friends--did not give for her.”

Thorny is the path of virtuous conversation. People did not talk of Sir Algernon, and she was within an ace of Claire-ing her departed parent again, and her audience was strictly silent; it expected her to go on, so she evidently must continue her narrative, trusting in whatever parody of Providence had hitherto guided her steps to steer her safely through it.

“Mimi was twin-sister to the little dog that always drove in the Bois with Lolotte, sitting up in the victoria beside her, and dressed in the same colours and jewels as her mistress.”

There was a slight sound as of somebody gasping, then a pause, then a question.

“And who, pray, is Lolotte?”

Upon this query there followed another gasp; but this time it came from the causer of the first. Was it possible that there existed in the civilized world a benighted being who had not heard of Lolotte?--an establishment where she was as unmentionable as Sir Algy? The poor young creature, who became suddenly conscious of the terrible _faux pas_ which her beautifully shod feet had taken, threw an agonized glance of entreaty for help at Edward. “_You_ know Lolotte,” it said dumbly; “for goodness’ sake say something, and get me out of this horrible entanglement.” But Edward maintained a masterly, if cowardly, inaction.