CHAPTER VII

After that, being a merciful man, Edward let her get off the historico-artistic gridiron, upon which he had been innocently grilling her. He showed her no more pictures, nor, indeed, anything else except his smoking-room, in which she exhibited a lively, and this time perfectly unfeigned interest, and where her intelligent inquiries as to the brand of cigars favoured by him, and her discriminating knowledge of the subject in contrast to her abysmal ignorance of the former ones, taught him that hers had not been a past of mere cigarettes. She had nourished a faint hope that he might have invited her to share a friendly whiff there and then, but it was clearly not to be. Instead, he gently ejected her. “Of course, the old camel would smell it,” said the disappointed young creature, inwardly feeling a sensible relief in this ingeniously insulting play upon the name of her latest benefactress.

Edward had escorted her back to the very spot where he had found her, opposite the calumniated Dierick Bouts; and with despair she saw, or thought she saw, in his eye an imminent intention of leaving her. What could she do to arrest him? Rush at once into some entanglingly interesting subject which would rob him of that wish to escape which it was so incomprehensible that he could ever have nourished? Ask him why he married Camilla?

She was saved from a remedy which would certainly in its results have proved worse than the disease, by the object of her solicitude.

“I am afraid,” he said, looking first compassionately at her and then rather helplessly round the room, as if in puzzled search among its wealth of beautiful objects and inviting books for something capable of amusing her--“I am afraid that you will be very dull all by yourself.”

The inevitable civil falsehood--inevitable, at least, to the ever-lying Bonnybell, followed.

“Oh no, I love being by myself.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really; that is to say”--in terror that he might be obtuse enough to believe her--“that is to say, I love it _generally_.”

The implication that she did not love it on this particular occasion was so piteously apparent, that humanity forced him to throw a rope to her.

“What do you think about going out?”

She glanced through the window. It would have been much more consonant with her views of the right way of spending Sunday to have sat blowing delicate clouds through her nose and picking his brains over the smoking-room fire, but that was a blue rose.

“What do you recommend?” she asked with a smile that looked persuadable.

“Isn’t it rather rash ever to recommend anything to anybody?”

Mr. Tancred’s propositions were mostly put interrogatively. He had not enough value for his own opinion to assert anything with dogmatism, having fifteen years earlier set up so robust a self-contempt as still showed no signs of wearing out.

“Be rash, then.” She was still smiling anxiously, divided between a lurking fear of mud and a horror of solitude.

“I wonder,” he suggested, still tentatively, and eying doubtfully the towny elegance of her garb, “whether you would care to walk with me as far as what we call the Dower House?”

“Is that where you keep your dowagers?” she asked playfully, but with an inward misgiving as to the proposed treat being “good enough.”

“It is where Camilla’s people used to keep them,” replied he, with that careful dissevering of himself, which Bonnybell so often afterwards noticed, from his wife’s possessions; “but as she is the last of the Tancreds, it will not be needed again.”

“The last of the Tancreds!” repeated she, with an accent of surprise. “I thought that Tancred was your name?”

“No,” he answered in that ill-at-ease voice with which he--and that as rarely as might be--alluded to his marriage. “I gave mine up when I married.”

“I hope she made it worth your while,” was the worldly wise reflection of the listener; but on her sweet little face appeared only the expression of an intuitive sympathy. The subject was evidently not a much-relished one; and yet it would be disagreeable to her companion to see that she had discovered the fact; it must be gently glided away from.

“So I am to be taken to see an empty house--four bare walls?” she pouted, with a charming protrusion of her nether lip.

He laughed, in sheer irrational pleasure at the prettiness of the contortion.

“On the contrary, the friends to whom Camilla has lent it while their own house is being rebuilt find themselves inconveniently thick upon the ground.”

“Are there ten of them? and do they live upon _gigots à l’eau_?” cried she, alluding to what he had told her of the full-quivered land-agent on their way home from church.

“No, there are only three young Aylmers--only two at home, unless Toby came back last night.”

“Toby? Who is Toby?”

“Toby is the precious only son.”

That decided her. “I should like it of all things!” she cried. “May I come as I am, or must I make myself frightful, _à l’Anglaise_?” She held her arms straight down a little way from her sides and “invited inspection.”

“I think, if you go as you are, the brambles in the wood will not leave you many of those jingly things.”

“The wood!” repeated she, with a sudden clouding of the brow.

Being much more innocent-minded than she, and accustomed to much more cleanly company, he had not the dimmest suspicion that his mention of the harmless coppice in question had re-aroused her misgivings. They had been almost completely lulled by his demeanour hitherto; but had he been acting all this while? Had his cool and distant friendliness--so improbable in the face of all her experience of men--been assumed only to lead up to this ominous wood? It could be safely said that with not one of Claire’s and her own former intimates would she have for an instant thought of trusting herself in a shady grove.

The thought that his apparently harmless proposition implied an intended enterprise of the usual sort inspired her with no particular disgust. He would only be acting after his kind. All men were alike. This formula, from which she had hitherto had no cause to make any exception, covered with its contemptuous generality her whole masculine acquaintance, actual and possible.

“Well, does the wood frighten you?” he asked, with a slight and most unsuspicious laugh at the perturbation and doubt written in her face. “What do you think will happen to you in it?”

If she answered him truly--which, to do her justice, was the last thing that she had ever any temptation to do--he would probably think it necessary to pretend indignation, and go off in a huff without her, so she temporized.

“It only just struck me that possibly I might be out too late; that Mrs. Tancred might want me.”

“Camilla never wants any one on Sunday afternoon,” returned he, with a sort of compassionate amusement at the idea of his wife ever “wanting,” or doing anything but groan under, the society of her little incubus; “and besides, it was her own suggestion.”

There was no more to be said, and, remarking to herself in derisive gaiety, that “There is no fool like an old fool,” Miss Ransome skipped off to make grudging modifications in her costume.

“Toby would have preferred me as I was,” was her final verdict on her own reflected image; “but I have no doubt that I am good enough, and too good for him, as I am.”

The Dower House stood in the park, sundered by a mere green mile from the great house, so that the departed dowagers had been able clearly to view the scene of their ended importance, and to contrast their successors’ methods unfavourably with their own. It was of such roomy proportions as to suggest the idea that it had been planned by some foreseeing lady, providing cannily for her own days of deposition. Not having been porticoed and stone-faced, as its parent-building had been in the days when you were compelled to inhabit a sham Grecian temple, or forfeit your self-respect, it retained those modest Tudor charms of old red brick and twisted chimney-stacks, which, fashion having happily wheeled them round again into favour, might chance to remain unmutilated during our little day.

The dreaded “wood” was nothing more than the skirt of a large covert, and was easily traversed in five minutes. Although a cautious inquiry as to its length had elicited this fact, Miss Ransome quickened her pace as she entered the shade, which the still adhering leaves on the trees, and the quickly lessening daylight of a November afternoon, rendered thick and almost more than dusk.

Her companion noted with innocent surprise her nervous haste, and again asked her what she was afraid of, adding, with perfect unsuspiciousness that he himself was the cause of her fear--

“There is rather a boggy place just ahead of us in the path; I must have it looked to. Shall I give you a hand?”

She refused softly, but with such decision as provided him with a lazy sense of entertainment at the independence of her spirit, which was only equalled apparently by her absolute indifference to, and unconsciousness of, any of the sights and sounds of Nature. There was nothing very striking, it is true, in a Berkshire park--“as flat as a denial or a pancake”--on a winter afternoon, and he should not have been surprised that the lightly speaking voices of birds, whose songs were long since over, should hit unnoticed her sophisticated ear; but that the glorious colours which still stained the noble trees, that the wonderful eyebeam which the sky--smoke-coloured all day--shot from under lifted lids in good night to whitening grass and copper and rust-tinted bracken, should be apparently entirely invisible to her, gave him a slight shock. He pointed out to her one superb effect of interlacing tints, but did not repeat the experiment.

She was too civil and too anxious to please not to respond with a perfunctory superlative “Yes, too delightful!” but in a moment had dropped back into her chatter about people, a chatter which circled round the family to whom she was on her way to be introduced, and which contained exhaustive, though circuitous, inquiries as to why “Toby” was “precious.” She must know before his presentation to her why and to what extent “Toby” was “precious.” Was it merely the usual dull British adoration of the solitary male of an over-feminine family which made him so? Or was it that he was heir to something so considerable as to render his life of importance to his family stem? Also, why were they rebuilding their house?

By the time she had reached the nail-studded oak front door of the Dower House, both questions were set at rest in her mind. The house was being rebuilt, because, through the carelessness of a housemaid, it had regrettably been burnt down; happily, however, the original plans had been found, and it was being rebuilt, stone for stone, as Sir John Vanbrugh had first erected it.

Bonnybell had never heard of Sir John Vanbrugh as either architect or playwright, but she ejaculated fervently, “_What_ a blessing!” and reckoning up mentally the sum of the information given her, said to herself, with a thankful heart, as she followed the servant into the hall, that Toby was well worth her nicest attention.