CHAPTER VIII

“Oh comme je regrette mon bras si dodu, Ma jambe bien faite et le temps perdu.”

The planting of Miss Ransome’s siege-train could not be at once taken in hand, as a rapid gallop of the eye over the unknown persons that the room contained showed that not one of them answered to the description which she had extracted from Mr. Tancred, with many precautions in the manner of doing it, of Toby. She made out a mother at once, and an elder sister, and an elder sister’s friend, though at first not quite sure which was which of the two latter, and a couple of elderly men.

As the electric light was not turned on, and the oaky gloom of the room was lit by only a fire that, though generous, was unequal in its distribution of light, Miss Ransome did not immediately realize the additional presence of a large female figure in outdoor dress, _pelotonnée_ in an armchair in a corner. The sight of a motor-car at the hall door had shown that there must be other callers besides themselves, but the girl had forgotten the unimportant fact. It was brought back to her with a jump.

She was halfway through her presentation to the family, executed in her very nicest _jeune fille_ manner, when officious servants, turning buttons, flooded the room with light and set her staringly face to face with her past. It stood opposite to her in the shape of the large dim figure--alas! no longer dim, but revealed in bounteous outline, pigeon-egg pearls, ruddled hair and sable toque, which at the sound of her name precipitated itself out of its chair to look at her.

“Bonnybell Ransome! Is it possible that it is Bonnybell Ransome--poor Cl--oh, of course!”--recalled by the chic woe of the daughter’s hat to the fact of the extinction of that former acquaintance, of whose name nobody, apparently, not even Lady Tennington, dared now pronounce more than the two first letters.

For a moment--since this was a contingency which the most foreseeing could not have guarded against--Bonnybell stood mute and aghast. Was there ever such a stroke of ill luck? Flora Tennington, who knew all about everything! Flora Tennington, so intimately associated with poor Claire’s disastrous career--with all but the last year, that is! That last year had choked even Flora Tennington off! She had held on as long as she could--one must say that for her--and she had tried, yes, tried hard to stem the flood of those dreadful champagnes and brandies and chlorals. Her failure had been the occasion of the final rupture, and then she, too, had disappeared. She was not a bad friend, to do her justice. She had gone on speaking to the unnamable Sir Algy long after he had sunk quite out of social sight; but, all the same, what extraordinary ill luck that she should have reappeared in these surroundings! She had always had the character of being _bonne enfant_, but she would be more than human if she resisted the temptation to tell all she knew--and all was such a very great deal, even without that last year--of poor Claire! And if she did, what, pray, would become of Toby?

It did not take more than five seconds for this chain of actual and possible misfortune to dart through Bonnybell’s brain, nor for her to recover her presence of mind.

“What a _delightful_ surprise!” she said with a sweet blush of pleasure, holding out a glad little black hand.

The rejoinder was not what might have been expected.

“Do not put out your hand,” cried Lady Tennington, precipitately; “she’ll fly at you if you do. Lisa never allows any one to touch me.” If this were true, Lisa must in past years, if report lied not, have had her paws full.

A low growl, a glimpse of age-whitened muzzle, and a struggling chestnut-coloured body revealed the presence, under her mistress’s arm, of a small dachshund. Here was another voice from the past.

“Lisa!” cried Bonnybell, hardily putting out her hand to stroke the little angry, faithful head. “Is Lisa still alive?”

There was an affectionate inflexion in her voice, which Edward, though listening with one whole ear to his hostess, caught, and recognized as an unknown note. Art was non-existent for her, Nature invisible to her, but she understood and appreciated dogs.

“And why should not she be alive, pray?” inquired Lisa’s owner, sharply, her sensitiveness about her dog’s age being even superior to that which she manifested with regard to her own. Then, with a reverting to her original key, “And what, in the name of Fortune, my dear child, brings _you_ here?”

The little buzz of greeting was over, followed by a momentary silence among the rest of the party. Not a soul in the room but must have noticed the exaggerated emphasis on the personal pronoun, and have drawn the inevitable inference that to meet Miss Ransome in a respectable house was an experience that must take away any one’s breath. The wings of the not yet seen Toby were already spread for flight. Who could have anticipated that the egg of that bright prospect would be addled almost before it was laid? These thoughts were coursing through Bonnybell’s brain, even while she was murmuring her answer in a tone calculated in its hesitating meekness to deprecate any further showing up.

“I am staying with Mr. and Mrs. Tancred. They are good enough to let me pay them a little visit.”

The rejoinder was a rather discomfited “Humph!” a humph which had no need to have any light thrown upon it for the rest of the company, but which was interpreted only later to Bonnybell, when she learned that Camilla had never shown any sign of a knowledge of Lady Tennington’s presence in the neighbourhood, nor, large as was her circumference despite French corsets and massage, any appearance of seeing her, when they had met on neutral ground.

There was a slight pause; the matron digesting the unintended snub, and the maid quakingly asking herself what she could say next best calculated to stop the flow of Flora’s reminiscences! Rescue came from an unexpected quarter.

“Miss Ransome is very much understating our hopes,” said Edward, in a slow voice of measured courtesy, through which any one who knew him well could trace some sort of smothered exasperation piercing; “my wife and I count upon her to stay with us indefinitely.”

Had he already caught from his young _protégée_ the faculty of glib lying? He knew perfectly that he was saying the thing that was not; that there was nothing in the world which Camilla ambitioned less than to have her present guest as a permanent inmate; but the impulse of partisanship of bucklering one so exposed to the world’s cruel shafts conquered the lifelong instincts of veracity in an almost invariably truthful man. He was rather shocked when he realized what he had done; yet he did not repent. His own espousing her cause would be worse than useless to her, but his wife’s, with her fifty years of almost awful rectitude behind her, was a name to conjure with.

Flora gave a little chuckle--not ill-natured, for she was never ill-natured, but helplessly tickled at the idea of the rigid Pharisee who had cut her for thirty years taking to her bony bosom the progeny of poor Claire--poor Claire, of all people!

“Then I hope we shall see something of each other,” she said bravely, ignoring her own relations, or rather want of relations, with the Tancred family. “I will send the motor over for you. You used to like motoring in the days when poor Al----”

She broke off. Not even she, with all her social courage and no character worth speaking of to lose, dared pronounce more than the first half of the submerged one’s name.

Before Bonnybell could frame a judicious answer to this discomfiting invitation, her hostess came to her aid. She had not caught Miss Ransome’s name with any precision, mumbled as names always are mumbled by English people on introduction, and perhaps even more so on the part of Edward than was usually the case, from the consciousness that it was not a patronymic warranted to ensure a welcome for its owner. Mrs. Aylmer only saw a remarkably pretty and evidently very young girl looking confused and miserable, though trying with the greatest civility to hide it under the avalanche of Lady Tennington’s questions and invitations. Of course, a decent girl could not possibly be allowed, and evidently had no wish, to accept the latter; and, being a warm-hearted woman with a motherly heart going out to the slender black figure standing to be baited by the shocking old _demi-rep_, whom she so unaccountably seemed to know, the hostess hastened to extricate her from the tight place in which the poor child found herself.

“I wonder,” she said, looking kindly at the young stranger, “whether you would care to join the schoolroom tea? My children like it so very much better than ours.”

“I should love it!” replied Bonnybell, fervently, throwing an eyebeam of unmistakable gratitude out of her enormous eyes at her saviour, and thinking with intense inward self-congratulation upon how admirably in the teeth of hideous difficulties she must have played the _jeune fille_ this time. Oh, if she could only keep it up! If only she could have seen Flora Tennington safe into her motor before her own exit! could--failing that--have had any trust in Flora’s reticence!

It remained to be seen what the schoolroom had to show. Its possibilities, at all events, could not include another Flora, nor could any of the disreputable men whose images rose with such unwelcome vividness upon Miss Ransome’s mind, recalled by the sight of Lady Tennington, by any possibility have crossed the scholastic threshold on whose other side a governess with a pince-nez and an assured manner, and a tall diffident girl in a pigtail presently greeted her. The third person’s salutation could scarcely be called a greeting, as it consisted merely in his standing up, stopping eating quince jam, and looking thoroughly annoyed at having to do either. The governess revealed herself on presentation as Miss Barnacre, and the leggy young Miss as Meg.

In the case of the third person, presentation, though it took place duly, was superfluous. If induction had not, intuition would have taught Miss Ransome to recognize in the sullen consumer of interrupted jam the magnet that had guided her tender feet through the puddly park of a November twilight. He conquered his indignation at her intrusion enough to set her a chair at the command of Miss Barnacre, who followed up the attention by asking her a series of patronizing questions, adapted to the intellect of a child of four years. Miss Barnacre was of the new type of instructress, that type which sometimes makes its employer privily regret its down-trodden predecessor, victim to melancholy and indigestion; that new type which, fortified by all the rites of Girton, condescends to the parents of its pupils, chaffs and lectures their brothers, and inspires adoring awed friendships in their elder sisters; that type which differs as much from the early Victorian one as does the pert _houri_ in “bang” and streamers who commands at our sick-bed side from the classic figure of Mrs. Gamp.

Bonnybell responded with meek submissiveness to the elementary catechism so glaringly adapted to her comprehension, and consoled herself for the time wasted upon the governess by the philosophic reflection that she might gain more by being seen and heard in the case of so obvious a cub as Toby, than by being brought into more direct colloquy with him.

Miss Barnacre interrupted her own questionings at last, to give a brusque order to the young man to ring the bell, and it was now the turn of the eldest daughter of the house.

“Lady Tennington is an old friend of yours?” she asked quite pleasantly, and with a curiosity that was well within the limits of the courteous and permissible; yet in which the young stranger divined an inevitable surprise.

Her answer must be cautious, yet not hesitating. To repudiate intimacy with Flora would be--shabby?--yes, but that might pass at a pinch, but it would also be useless.

“She was very kind to me when I was a child,” answered the dear little voice, with a deprecating gratitude in its tones; “and she was at school with my grandmother.”

“With your grandmother!” repeated Miss Aylmer, in a key of rather gratified discovery. “Oh, then she must be much older than----” The speaker broke off; but it was not difficult for the hearer to supply the missing “than she pretends.”

“My grandmother would not be so very old if she were alive,” replied Bonnybell; “Claire was only thirty-four when she died.”

The name slipped out headlong, all Miss Ransome’s wariness being unfortunately on duty in another direction. Every one looked puzzled, not having the slightest idea as to who “Claire” was, nor how her early death affected the age of the young stranger’s grandmother.

“Lady Tennington is very _bien conservée_, isn’t she?” continued the girl, hurrying away from the too-late-realized blunder; “and though she looks a good deal made up, it is really more face massage than anything else. We--I know her masseuse! We often employed her. She was the best in Paris.”

There was a slight silence, as of a company taken aback. Every eye involuntarily rested on Bonnybell’s lovely bloom, each looker asking himself or herself distrustfully whether it and the exquisite seventeen-year-old contour were due to mysterious French rubbings and unguents?

“She has not been very long in the neighbourhood; we know her only very slightly,” said the elder Miss Aylmer, presently, with an air of reserve, and the subject was felt to be closed. The never-to-be-defeated governess at once replaced it by another.

“You walked here?”

“Yes.”

“Are you fond of walking?”

“Oh yes, very, very fond.”

Of course, it was not true; but equally of course Toby would think the better of her if he could picture her stumping through wet vegetables by his side. Her ideas of all sport, except racing, were of the vaguest.

“Mrs. Tancred is inaccessible on Sunday afternoon?”

“I believe that she does not like to be disturbed; she shuts herself up to study.”

“She always interests me,” said Miss Barnacre, as if making an announcement that was advantageous to its object. “There is something stimulating to the curiosity in those resolutely solitary thinkers; but I cannot quite make her out. I used to think that she had leanings towards Hegelianism.”

“Had she?” returned Bonnybell, faintly, asking herself, with a sick heart, whether Hegelianism--whatever it might be--was one of the properties that no _jeune fille bien élevée_ should be without. Let it be what else it might, it was certainly a word of ill omen, for no sooner was it pronounced than Toby pushed back his chair with such cruel violence that it fell over backwards, and left the room, shutting the door noisily behind him.

“In some respects I fancy she is nearer Esoteric Buddhism,” continued the governess, fixing her unescapable eye upon the victim of her horrible suppositions. “I must tackle her upon the subject.”

“I am sure that she will be delighted,” murmured Miss Ransome, with the greatest outward demureness, and a malicious inward wish that her tormentor would put her threat into execution and “tackle” Camilla. There could be little doubt as to the issue of the combat. Her own ardent personal wish now was to escape before revealing some damning and irretrievable ignorance.

“Do you think that Mr. Tancred is waiting for me?” she asked, turning, with pretty deference, to Miss Aylmer, whom she thought much more worth propitiating than the pushing propounder of odious riddles.

“You need not be in any hurry,” replied the other, with a pleasant smile, that yet seemed to have a touch of superiority in its deeper knowledge of Edward’s habits. “Mr. Tancred always pays us a good long visit on Sunday afternoon; but if you had rather go back to the hall----”

Bonnybell’s hesitation was of but two seconds’ duration. Barnacre and Hegelianism, or Flora and Sir Algy? If these were her only two alternatives, unpleasant as was the first, it was undoubtedly the least objectionable of the two.

“I am very happy here,” she said with soft civility, “if I am not in the way.”

She glanced appealingly across at the pigtailed Meg, in whom she seemed to divine less of neck-and-crop absorption in the utterances of the governess and more of covertly admiring interest in herself than was the case with the elder sister.

“May I help you to look at your picture-paper?” she asked, and took the acceptance of her appeal for granted, crossing the room to the side of the young girl, who was shyly holding the leaves of the journal in question, so as to be able to peep over its sheets at the startling stranger. The shyness in this case was not of the brutal, chair-oversetting, bolting character of the brother, and was compatible with honoured gratification, as was evidenced by the room readily made, and the paper hospitably spread open.

Miss Ransome’s first need was to suppress the expression of contempt which sprang to eyes and lips at the mawkish character of the publication; but to a really well-trained mind even _Our Girlies_ can be made to provide nutritious pabulum. The portrait of a lady, surrounded by prize-taking Schipperke dogs, was the text provided on this occasion for Bonnybell’s instructive discourse.

“Lady Cressida Beaulieu!” she read, then added elucidatingly, “She used to go to the same coiffeur in Paris as we. She has thirty wigs; and he told us that hardly a week passed without one of them coming over from London to be refrisèd, or done something to.”

“Thirty! What an expense!” ejaculated Meg, in thrifty horror.

Bonnybell laughed, her little bubbling, innocent laugh, that often swore so piquantly with the themes that called it forth.

“It would be if she paid for them.”

“And doesn’t she?”

The other looked incredulously at the putter of this question. Is it possible that ignorance of the simplest facts of nature and civilization could be so crass?

“She had not a farthing; and Reggy Beaulieu ran through the little he ever had before he married.”

Miss Meg’s eyes were opening rounder and rounder in riveted interest at each fresh stroke added to the portrait of the lady of the Schipperkes.

“How _does_ she manage it?”

Bonnybell laughed again. “It is not very difficult. Of course, everybody knows that Waddy, the indiarubber-tyre man, runs her.”

“_Runs_ her?”

“Yes; dresses her, finds her in diamonds, pays for her motor and her house in Grosvenor Street.”

It was a pity--at least, one of the interlocutors thought so--that so surprising, puzzling, and exciting a dialogue should be brought to a premature close; but ere Bonnybell could finish one more illuminating sentence, “Oh, I dare say there is no real harm in it; it is merely a matter of mutual convenience. Waddy pays and Cressida introduces him to----” the place at her other side was occupied by the elder Miss Aylmer, and Miss Ransome’s promising pupil disappeared on a message, to return no more.