CHAPTER VI

As Miss Ransome was not aware of having made even the ally alluded to by Mr. Tancred overnight, it was with a very self-distrustful heart that next morning she appeared in the breakfast-room, to find her host and hostess waiting for her. It was one of the rules of Camilla’s old-fashioned code of politeness that it is as inadmissible to begin breakfast without a guest as to go in to dinner before he or she has appeared, and many a sleepy visitor had cursed this cruel civility.

Bonnybell had made what appeared to herself superhuman efforts to keep pace with the detestably unanimous clocks, that apparently, from every recess and landing-place in the house, admonished her of the flight of the minutes. For Claire and her daughter time had been not. Her apprenticeship in Hill Street had been neither long nor strict enough to uproot the habits of a lifetime; and though she had scamped her hair, and entirely omitted to underline her eyes, those eyes informed Bonnybell, on the authority of the relentlessly ticking accuser that faced her as she hurried in, that she was ten minutes late.

Edward offered her a choice of excellent foods, and Camilla suggested that perhaps for the future she would prefer to breakfast in her own room.

She was about to accept joyfully the offer, when, just in time, some inward monitor--or was it a look on Mr. Tancred’s face?--warned her that it was sarcastic, and not meant to be taken seriously.

With trembling thanksgiving at having--and only by a hair’s-breadth--shaved the first pitfall set for her, she hastened to change the trend of her response.

“Oh no, thanks, not for worlds! I think it is a horrid habit.”

Once again Edward looked at her, and something regretful in his eye made her feel that it would have been better to have been content with the refusal of Camilla’s ironical offer, and not to have added the ornamental mendacity at the end.

Having accepted coffee, and then wished that she had chosen tea, as being more English and less reminiscential of foreign ways, Miss Ransome ate her breakfast in a wary but smiling silence. Casting about in her mind for a safe and mollifying topic, her eye presently furnished her with one.

“What a beautiful portrait!” she said, pitching with inherited bad taste upon the only modern picture in the room.

“It has no business to be here,” replied Camilla, casting a brief and unadmiring glance upon the presumptuous intruder among a goodly company of Antonio Mores, Cornelius Janssens, Romneys, and Gainsboroughs, “but my parents had it hung there, and I have naturally not liked to move it.”

The idea of Camilla ever having had parents, and not having issued directly from the bosom of Primeval Night, was so stupefying to Bonnybell that it kept her dumb long enough for Edward to throw in, as he did rather hurriedly--

“It is a portrait of my wife by Graves, given her, when she came of age, by the tenants.”

Furnished with this explanation, Miss Ransome’s eyes reverted to the object of an admiration which had originally been more polite than founded on conviction, and she chid herself inwardly for her stupidity in not at once recognizing that in the large-featured girl, whose sandy hair not even a courtly limner had been able to transmute into gold, lay the germ of the grim woman sitting beneath it. It was not yet too late to repair her error.

“Of course, I saw at a glance who it was,” she exclaimed glibly.

No comment followed this brave assertion, and its utterer thought it safer to go boldly on; but the want of conviction that she felt her statement had carried flurried her into a question from which her more deliberate judgment would have refrained.

“Is there no portrait of _you_, no pendant to this one?”

The query was addressed and referred to the host, but it was the hostess who answered.

“At the time that picture was painted, Edward was exactly six years old. There is a difference of fifteen years between us.”

A slight writhe upon Mr. Tancred’s part witnessed to the failure of his skin to have hardened itself against what yet must be a daily pin-prick, and Bonnybell, good-naturedly sorry for him, and still more concerned for herself at having floundered into so egregious a fault in taste, began a precipitate sentence which a look from Edward’s eyes converted into a for-ever unfinished fragment.

“No one would guess it!” was the complete form of the projected lie, but the phrase never got beyond its third word. In fact, Miss Ransome left the breakfast-table with not the slightest remorse indeed for the fibs, complete and inchoate, which she had perpetrated there, but with some misgiving as to their success.

It was contrary to what she would have expected, but yet the conviction came solidly home to her, as she pinned a veil with careful nicety over the chastened mournfulness and unchastened coquetry of her toque, that Camilla would be more easy to take in than Edward.

Miss Ransome was pinning on a veil at ten o’clock in the morning, not because her ejection had come thus early--though in her own opinion unlikelier things might have happened--but because it was Sunday morning, and she had been told that she was to walk to church with Mr. Tancred. There was apparently no question of Mrs. Tancred’s attending Divine Service.

“You are not coming with us?” the girl had said with an extremely engaging _moue_ of regret. “But I suppose that you do not feel up to it.”

“Up to what?”

“To the long morning service.”

“The long morning service lasts exactly one hour and ten minutes, and it is not because of its length that I do not attend it, but because I am not a member of the Church of England.”

“Oh!”--a little nonplussed by a momentary inability to think of a suitable comment; then, with a quick recovery, “Of course! So many of the oldest families are Catholics.”

“I am not a Roman Catholic either; but if you wait for me to expound my creed you will be late for church, and--I do not think that your hat is quite straight.” The words were snubby, but the speaker relaxed into an unintentional smile as she evoked them.

Of course, there was not the slightest foundation in fact for Bonnybell’s expressed regret, but there was a certain pleasantness in even the fiction, in even the false presentment and elusive shadow of a young thing belonging to one, and concerning itself about one’s comings and goings.

As to Miss Ransome, she skipped off, relieved, and with a humorous inward indignation at Camilla for not having perceived that her toque’s racy obliquity was intentional.

She found her escort waiting for her under the stone portico over the hall door, and casting a rather questioning eye up to a sky that did not answer very reassuringly.

“Have you an umbrella?” he asked.

Of course she had not, the decorative in costume always engaging her attention to the exclusion of the useful. They were already a couple of hundred yards from the house, and he answered her suggestion of returning to fetch one by--

“I am afraid we are already a little late, and if it comes on to rain I can hold mine over you.”

“Of course he hopes that it will rain!” was the inward comment of the innocent creature to whom this assurance was addressed, and upon it followed a feeling of wonder at Camilla’s rash confidence, in trusting her husband to a _tête-à-tête_ with herself.

But Camilla’s belief appeared to be going to be justified; for beyond a gravely cautious warning now and again to his companion to avoid a puddle, or indication of that strip of road which the night’s rain had left driest, Mr. Tancred walked along almost in silence, with the width of the elm avenue between them.

“Perhaps he would think it wrong to make love to me going to church!” thought the wary Bonnybell. “Men have such funny scruples. I must look out for myself going back.”

It was in a hansom while returning from St. Paul’s Cathedral that Tom had first told her that she could turn him round her little finger. There was no sign at present of Edward’s executing or intending to execute a like gyration, but it was always well to be on the safe side, and nothing kept dangerous topics better at bay than a little safe small talk upon unimpeachable subjects.

“You always go to church here, I suppose?”

“Generally. And you?”

There was a slight demur. To talk about her own past and its habits formed no part of Miss Ransome’s scheme; but after a moment’s hesitation she answered--

“I went to church a good deal with the Glanvilles.”

“I cannot at this moment remember who Felicity’s favourite pope is?”

“She did not generally take me with her; she sent me with Tom--Mr. Glanville--instead.”

Bonnybell did not think it necessary to explain that towards the close of her unluckily shortened stay Felicity had deemed it advisable to alter this arrangement. Doubts such as she had already felt with regard to what the Tancreds knew or did not know of the Hill Street _fiasco_ hurried her into a well-sounding expression of opinion.

“I like going to church, of all things.”

The turn of the phrase amused him, and, against his intention, he showed it a little.

“Is it a new sensation?”

She repented the slip, but her hearer, glanced sideways at in fleeting apprehension, looked so lenient, that she took heart.

“We--Claire and I--were not generally up in time to go to church in the morning, and we mostly played bridge in the afternoon.”

Mr. Tancred gave a slight shudder of thankfulness--if a shudder can ever be thankful--that this glimpse into the young stranger’s past had been revealed to him, instead of to his wife. To his thankfulness was added a prick of conscience, reminding him that he ought to chide the girl for her glib use of the forbidden Christian name. But he did not; and the civil, unrebuking attention with which he listened deceived her into fresh admissions.

“Sometimes Sir Algy took us down on his motor to Richmond or Maidenhead.”

This time the hearer’s shudder was a shudder indeed.

“You liked that?”

“It was no question of liking,” she answered, with a lightning-quick realization that she had made a false step, and that for the future “Sir Algy” had better remain in the extreme background of her conversation. “I had to go; Claire would have been dreadfully hurt if I had objected.”

There was a moment’s pause. He must brace himself to the effort, odious and anomalous as it was, to tutor her.

“Would you mind--I must apologize a thousand times for my presumption in making the suggestion--but would you mind not speaking of Lady Ransome by her Christian name? I do not mind it in the least myself”--yielding to the relief of an emphatic assertion--“but it might shock some of these strait-laced people down here. I am not sure”--very reluctantly--“that my wife would like it.”

“I am sure she would not,” replied the object of this rebuke, with a great candour, which would have disarmed her admonisher, if he had ever been armed. “In fact, I saw it by her manner last night. Of course, I ought not to call my mother ‘Claire,’ but it slipped out. The habit of a lifetime, you know. Well, ‘C’est plus fort que moi!’”

“Such a long lifetime, too!” returned he, with a gentle mocking of her absurd air of longevity.

“I should have been more on my guard with Mrs. Tancred,” continued she, in anxious explanation; “but with you I fancied it did not matter.”

He found a rejoinder to this speech difficult. He ought to have conveyed to her that he had no wish to be set on any different plane of intimacy with her from his wife, nor the least intention of being drawn into conniving behind Camilla’s back at what he knew that she disapproved. But long before he had found, even approximately, a form into which to cast this necessary snub, they had reached their destination. The church, standing on a little eminence above the slow midland river that slid through the park, was, from its small size and original destination, rather a chapel to the great house than a parish church.

“Is the music good? and do we come out before the sermon?” asked his charge, whispering.

He had to reply in the negative to both questions, and the slight but amusing twist that she gave her features on receiving his answer made him not as alive as he ought to have been to the knowledge that she would not have dared to make that grimace in Camilla’s presence.

The Tancreds had a small side gallery, entered by a private door in the church, set apart for them, where for generations they had worshipped in comfortable apartness, owners and guests--with a superior view of the congregation--in front, and servants ranged in decorous rows behind.

To-day, as Edward had foreseen, they were late, and--the good old days of waiting for the entrance of the “Wicked Man” by the parson being gone--it was upon an assemblage of bent heads that Miss Bonnybell’s cautiously roving eye alighted. What a sparse congregation! and what an immense space separated her from Edward when each was ensconced in his and her distant corner of the long seat. That space was obviously intended to be occupied by a numerous progeny--Edward and Camilla’s family. She gave an irreverent inward chuckle at the thought of a row of prim little boys and bony girls fashioned in Camilla’s image.

Then a panic seized her. Was a visible smile, produced by this tickling idea, showing itself on her face, to be seen now that everybody was standing up again? At once she composed her features to an expression of devout melancholy, which, being--as she had not a glass whereby to regulate the amount--a little overdone, made Edward pityingly reflect, when he occasionally glanced at her during the sermon, that, despite that playful gaiety of disposition which broke out every now and then, her terrible past had written its name indelibly upon her tiny features.

Those veracious indicators allowed themselves to relax a little from their pious gloom, as their owner lightly trod her homeward way, and cast about for something suitable to say regarding the service. If she could also obtain a little useful information by the way no harm would be done.

“What a dear little church!”

“Yes, it is rather an interesting specimen of Transitional.”

“Built in the time of Edward the Confessor, did you say?”

“Well, not quite”--with a smile.

“And what a nice congregation!”

“I am glad you think so. But why did they strike you as so particularly nice?”

She thought it was a question that he need not have put, but took pains with her reply.

“Oh, they looked so homely, and attentive, and--and--_un_-smart. I liked them so much better than the London congregation I am used to. Felicity’s ‘Pope,’ as you call him, has all the _mondaines_ and _demi-mondaines_ too at his feet.”

“But I thought you did not sit under Felicity’s Oracle; I thought you told me that you usually went to church with Tom.”

Miss Ransome wished, with a momentary impatience, that her companion’s memory for her statements was not so good, as it might lead to inconveniences in the long run, but she answered readily--

“Latterly, Felicity usually took me with her. Tom often had a cold or an engagement on Sunday morning.”

She laughed off further inquiries with her airy cynicism, and having the best reasons for preferring the _rôle_ of questioner to questioned, began an indirect catechism concerning the congregation, whose motive Mr. Tancred did not suspect.

“It all seemed so patriarchal; everybody looked like tenants and farmers, and people of that class. I suppose your neighbours have churches of their own to go to?”

“John Drake occasionally bicycles over to Morning Service.”

“John Drake?” She looked across the road at him with a sudden alertness of interest. Did John Drake sound like the name of the South African millionaire who was to pilot her out of her present slough of dependence and manœuvring to the odious but indispensable anchorage of marriage? “Who is John Drake? Is it very benighted of me never to have heard of him?”

The desire to keep his boots clean still apparently held in check the desire that Edward must experience to be near her, and it was across the width of the drive that his answer reached her.

“Not in the least; it would have been odd if you had. He is agent to a man who has a property near here.”

An _agent_! Miss Ransome had a distinct sensation of disappointment. But agent to _whom_? Perhaps her chance of promotion was only set one step further off.

“I dare say he will turn up to luncheon to-day. My wife is always glad when he does. She thinks he has not enough to eat at home.”

“Why has not he enough to eat at home?”

“I dare say he has; but Camilla is convinced that when all the ten children are helped, there is not much left of the leg of mutton.” (Ten children!) “Poor chap!” continued Edward; then, checking his expression of compassion, “though I do not know why I pity him. He probably gets quite as much out of life as the rest of us”--with a smile. “He is a fair shot, and he used to play the ’cello a bit, but he has given that up; and I think that is nearly all about him.”

“How monstrous of anybody to have ten children!” she said with the shocked accent of a philanthropist hearing of a great crime.

He did not feel inclined to discuss the subject with her; and his silence recalled her to the consciousness that the turn of her phrase was not that of the _jeune fille_.

“Agent to whom, did you say?”

“I do not think I did say; he is agent to Sir Frederick Milward.”

Ah, now we are beginning to get at something more promising! Sir Frederick Milward!--a well-acred baronet, perhaps, or preferably an industrial millionaire, knighted for judicious hospitalities in high places.

“Is he nice?”

“Oh, fairly; but they are scarcely ever here. His wife is a neurotic; and the place--it is a dreary barrack at the best of times--is empty for ten months of the year.”

In profound discouragement, Miss Ransome desisted from her queries. What a disgusting neighbourhood; everybody married, eating gory _gigots à l’eau_, and breeding like rabbits!

At luncheon Mrs. Tancred took away her guest’s appetite for the moment by asking her what the sermon was about, but dealt more gently than might have been expected with her total inability to reply, letting her off with the ironical hope that she had enjoyed her nap, and adding with that habitual grim justice which sentenced herself as uncompromisingly as others--

“You might fairly ask why, if I wished to know, I did not myself go to hear it?”

“I should be very much interested if you cared to tell me,” replied the culprit, with meek untruthfulness.

“I do not think you would,” rejoined the other, bluntly. “Anyhow, I have a creed, though I am quite sure that you would not make head or tail of it.”

Bonnybell received with joyful acquiescence this unflatteringly couched reprieve from a lesson in theology; and without the least inward or outward murmur the announcement that Camilla would not be visible before teatime. Later on she learned that it was the prosecution of her mysterious cult that kept Mrs. Tancred in austere study and Stoic meditation through the long hours. Though her husband did not share in her solitary devotions, it at first looked as if he were going to be as invisible as she.

A sense of desperation laid hold of the young stranger on finding herself left alone, with the whole house, rich in artistic and historic interest, it is true, to range over, but with, in all probability, not a living soul to exchange a word with for two and a half mortal hours. She filched some violets and a tube-rose out of a vase, and pinned them upon her smart blackness, but she had to stand on tip-toe to get a good sight of herself in the beautiful Venetian mirror, evidently hung with a view to its own becomingness, not for the convenience of “rash gazers;” and the whole manœuvre, though she prolonged it by practising a variety of expressions that might come in useful by-and-by upon her face, did not occupy five minutes.

From among the wealth of books, new and old, that strewed the table, she picked up one, whose yellow paper back “faisait espérer des choses,” only to throw it down in disgust, since a very slight skimming of its pages proved it to belong to the literature of the _jeune fille_; and where a French novel is innocent, it is innocent with a vengeance.

She walked to one of the long windows. Should she go out? She decided not. Rain-charged clouds hung over the ruddy trees of the park. There was not the slightest chance in those miles of walks, whose beginnings she saw stretching hopelessly away in their odious privacy, of meeting any one not belonging to the place, and if you had to endure boredom it might as well be a dry and warm as a wet and cold one. She tried the pictures. They were all hopelessly good, some dusky, some mellow, glowing and glooming from the harmonious dull-green brocade of their background. Why on earth didn’t they sell them, now that there was a “boom” in these dingy old masters, and hang something worth looking at on their walls? Her mind reverted admiringly to the canvases--how unlike these!--that had adorned “Le Nid,” Claire’s villa at Monaco.

Miss Ransome had not considered all her mother’s methods commendable, but surely her taste in pictures was perfect. Where had they all gone to now, those charming specimens of modern French art--“Le Bain,” “La Surprise”?

Her disparaging contemplation of the picture at which she was staring was broken in upon by the voice of Edward.

“It is hung too high,” he said, not guessing the spirit in which she was gazing. “I told Camilla so, but she is not fond of change.”

“People of her age seldom are, I suppose,” returned Bonnybell, radiant at her interrupted solitude, but at once feeling that she had said the wrong thing.

“We have always thought it a Dierick Bouts. Camilla’s grandfather brought it from Bruges,” he went on, in a tone that seemed to put him further away from her than his first remark had done. “Of course, when we sent it to a Winter Exhibition at Burlington House, the critics pronounced it a copy, but we took leave to disbelieve them.”

“I am sure you were quite right,” rejoined she, with outward emphasis and an inward wonder why any one should care to discuss the paternity of such a grotesque old _croûte_.

Apparently her acting was all too good, and took him in.

“Since you are fond of pictures,” he said, “perhaps you will let me show you some rather good portraits in the morning-room. They are not all by any very well-known masters; but though their interest is chiefly historical, they are not badly painted.”

She acquiesced gratefully. Any change from her late forlorn condition of being thrown on her own resources must be for the better, and if she pretended to be interested in his old daubs, she might be more likely to retain his company.

They had reached the morning-room, and Tancred held back the heavy curtain from the nearest window, to let a larger measure of the niggard daylight of a November afternoon fall upon the object he was exhibiting.

“That is Sir Thomas Overbury; it was given by him to a cousin of his who married an ancestor of my wife’s. That”--indicating another portrait--“is Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. There is a grim irony in hanging them cheek by jowl, isn’t there?”

“Very grim,” returned she, and called inwardly upon her gods for help in enabling her to disguise how little she knew why it was grim, or why there was any question of irony.

“And that is Somerset’s wife”--pointing to a good female portrait by Van Somers. “I always think she has such a deceptive face; one would never read her story in it, would one?”

“Never.”

This was perfectly true, since Bonnybell had not the foggiest notion of what the illustrious murderess’s story was.

“It was taken when she was Lady Essex.”

“Oh yes, of course.”

The “of course” was redundant, and a mistake. It made him look at her in slight surprise, and with that look dawned upon him the fact that never before had Miss Ransome “heard tell” of any one of the three notorious personages to whose effigies he had just introduced her.