To escape the odious memory evoked, Bonnybell diverted her thoughts into another channel. “What induced her to come up to my room last night? I felt sure it was because she had found me out, and I thought it safer to sham being asleep till I could make up my mind what excuse to offer. And why, in Heaven’s name, did she kiss me?”
The girl lost herself in contradictory solutions of this enigma. Was it in order to test the reality of her slumbers or to break them that Camilla had inflicted that astounding caress? Or was it humanly possible that the poor old lady was growing a little fond of her, and treated her as she would have done a young Camilla? The notion, to her own surprise, touched her oddly at first, but she shook off the sensation almost indignantly. How likely! She drove away her own inchoate softness by exchanging it for the ridiculous thought of what a hideous object a sleeping young Camilla would have been, and how impossible that in wildest fancy she could have been mistaken for such an imaginary monster.
“I always knew that Camilla would be easier to take in than Edward,” pursued Miss Ransome, a rather anxious wrinkle furrowing her brow; “and it is unlucky that just as I had brought him round, his belief in me should have received this fresh shock. With him now I have, I am afraid, my work cut out.”
The ensuing days justified this forecast. There could be no doubt that Edward was in possession of the fact that she had taken “the key of the fields.” “He must have heard it at the stables,” was Bonnybell’s conclusion; “but how could I ward off that? How could I ask all the grooms and helpers after their colds, or offer them anti-kamnia for their wives’ neuralgias? In this case I am not to blame. It is my misfortune, not my fault.”
Misfortune or fault, the result remained the same; Edward did not betray her. It did not surprise her that he refrained from doing so, though it was only doubtfully that she attributed his silence to loyalty to that promise of friendship which she had extracted from him.
Loyalty to given promises was not a quality with which she had ever had more than a bowing acquaintance. In all probability it was a taste for peace, coupled with the knowledge of what a terrific household storm his communication would arouse, that sealed his lips. Doubtless during the last fifteen years he had had frequent need of reticences and concealments on his own account. But whatever the cause of his conduct, Miss Ransome had regretfully to own that it was not due to any of that lurking partiality for herself, with which she had, up to yesterday evening, credited him. If his eye met hers—a rencounter apparently neither sought nor avoided—no grain of admiration was to be detected in its cold beam. A repelled curiosity, a sort of frosty wonder was all that was to be read in it.
However, a philosophic mind is able to see the good derivable from even the least propitious set of circumstances. There was an advantageous side even to Edward’s objectionable attitude. She would never be in the least afraid of being left alone in the same room with him. The fears apparently were all on the other side. She laughed to herself jeeringly. Would any one believe it? And yet it was true, that without overtly seeming to seek that end, her host undoubtedly avoided her.
She set herself with all the power of the wits her benefactress held so cheaply to propitiate him. But it was a path beset with pitfalls. His ideas, springs of action, standards were so radically different from those she had been used to find in the men of her acquaintance, that experience lent no candle to light her steps. She had learnt, indeed, by the process of burning her fingers at the flame kindled at one taper, that any discussion of Camilla’s body or mind, any comments on her actions, however mendaciously flattering, were to be shunned like the plague. But even thus much of progress was negative, and held out little hope, as a method of rebuilding his good opinion. What were his weak spots? And what chance had she of finding them out, if he never indulged her in any enlightening talk about himself? It was chiefly interest and the desire for a valuable ally in her arduous life battle that prompted her efforts to bring him round, but mixed with it was a worthier regret at having forfeited the only chance of a pure and honourable friendship with a man that her short ignoble life had yet offered her.
For several days she cast her little cautious nets in vain. Not a worthless sprat did the meshes enfold when drawn to land. He must be vulnerable somewhere, if only it were given her to discover the spot. The days passed in the fruitless search, and by the time the second Sunday came round since the disaster of her falsehood—or, as she would have it, the disaster of its discovery—she was almost desperate of success. On that day an idea struck her, which she hastened to put into execution. Luncheon was just over. Camilla had retired to her weekly stock-taking of her spiritual condition, and Edward was in the act of withdrawing himself, as he had done on the previous Sunday, for the whole afternoon. This self-effacement of his might have had its advantages, by leaving her free to carry out any innocent project of her own, but the motive that prompted it was at once too obvious and too distressing in its results not to demand one more urgent effort for its renewal. He had the door-handle already in his hand, when she addressed him so pointedly that politeness—and in that, at all events, he had never been lacking—compelled him to pause a moment to listen.
“I noticed,” she said, with what sounded like the painful diffidence of one making a great effort over herself, “that you did not go to the Dower House last Sunday.”