Perhaps it was surprise at the change in his wife’s tone that hindered Tancred from expressing that pleased acquiescence in their joint incubus’s improvement which might have been expected; but neither did he give any sign of dissent.
“And though she could not have expected a visit from me to-night—I have never before gone near her,” continued Camilla, in the key of one resolved to make her amends for possible former injustice handsome and complete—“she had evidently taken to heart my reproach of having wasted the time, that should have been devoted to study, upon the dog.” (When Camilla occasionally tried to make her family believe that she was indifferent to Jock, she spoke of him as “the dog.”) “The poor girl had evidently been at work until overtaken by sleep, for the books were piled at her bedside.”
Edward must make some comment now, and must try not to let it be too stony; but the “Indeed! how very creditable!” which he at last brought out sounded to himself so coldly ironical that it must rouse his wife’s suspicions by its contrast with his former championship. To his relief, he soon perceived that she was occupied by a train of thought, and stirred by an emotion which blunted her powers of observation.
“She looked very sweet and innocent,” Mrs. Tancred said, in a softened tone, as one recalling a gentle, dreamy vision; “all traces of her terrible heredity wiped away by sleep!” After a short pause in a lower key, “The All Wise gave one more proof of All Wisdom in denying me the blessing of children, for I should have made idols of them.”
CHAPTER XVII
It was a source of mixed wonder and thankfulness to Miss Ransome on the succeeding day that she got off so cheaply when the discovery of the extent to which she had neglected her studies was made. The rebuke incurred was so inexplicably gentle, that though by this time Bonnybell was pretty well acquainted with the directness of her instructress’s methods, she at first suspected that a trap must lie beneath it. She did not know that she had been saved by her usual means, a lie; only that in this case it was an innocent and unintentional one, the lie, namely, of the piled books at her bedside. She escaped with a more sorrowful than indignant expression of opinion from Camilla as to the slenderness of her intellect and her inability to grasp any subjects other than those appertaining to the cult of the frivolous and the trashy.
Insults to her intellect left Miss Ransome perfectly calm. She had long believed the truth of the saying that “Hard words break no bones,” having been dieted upon expletives and adjectives both vigorous and varied whenever “poor Claire” was “not quite right.” Were her mind furnished as Camilla would have it, she might become a second Miss Barnacre, and all that she would know of men would be the banging of doors by them, in hastening from her presence whenever she lifted up her voice in the odious terminology of science and philosophy.
Snubs to her appearance, occasionally administered on hygienic principles by Mrs. Tancred, left her equally good-humoured, though from another cause. Having grown up with her beauty from babyhood, she was as sure of possessing it as she was of possessing hands or a palate. Any one who did not think her pretty must be either blind or jesting. It was valued highly by her, as being the only means of escape she had from the sordid darkness of her outlook. But it was not the source of pleasure to her which their good looks afforded to most handsome women. It had been associated with too many disagreeables; had obliged her to struggle against too many imminent degradations, for her to have much fondness for it, apart from its commercial value as a matrimonial asset.
The serenely sweet acquiescence with which Miss Ransome received the information given as to the unusual smallness of the mind power with which she had been endowed still further increased her teacher’s leniency.
“She thinks that I am half-witted,” said Miss Ransome to herself, “and it will certainly be wiser to encourage her in the idea, as she will expect less of me. In her present mood I might safely finish ‘L’Enigme du Péché’ without fear of detection, but”—with a slight sense of unwonted repulsion—“I don’t think I care to; it is too like Charlie.”