“Thank you; but indeed you need not distress yourself. I am going to the Dower House to-day,” he answered, with his usual gentle intonation, perhaps a little hurried from its wonted leisureliness, and so left the room, giving her no opportunity for a rejoinder.
Bonnybell, left to herself thus cursorily, walked to the Venetian mirror nearest her, carrying with her as nearly as possible the expression her face had worn during this last successless venture, in order to judge of what ought to have been its efficacy; and then, exhaling a large sigh, soliloquized, “H’m! I might as well have saved my eloquence, my magnanimity, the tremble in my voice (I am afraid that I am not quite sparing enough in the use of that), and my heartbroken smile, which really was a masterpiece in its way. Bah! and all for one poor harmless indispensable fib! What a ridiculously warped view to take!” She gave a little snort of indignation, but the place where her heart ought to be, and as she had always supposed was not, felt oddly sore.
Neither had Edward’s heart much leap about its actions as he took his way—the way weekly trod by his Sunday feet—to the house where until a fortnight ago he had found pleasant, if not excessive, entertainment for his spirit. It shocked him to find how laggardly that spirit guided him to-day. There was nothing changed in the reciprocal attitude of the Aylmers and himself. Mrs. Aylmer would give him the geniality of her matter-of-course welcome, and to whomsoever Catherine was talking at the moment of his entrance, he would find her—for it was an unwritten law of their recognized comradeship—by his side in as many or as few moments as civility—for Catherine was nothing if not civil—demanded to rid her of her interlocutor. He was always treated like one of the family, but to-day the kind imitation of kinship offered had no charm for him; and he felt a dead reluctance towards the occupation of that wainscoted recess, with none of the secretiveness of a corner, yet all its privacy, where in the course of a good many consecutive Sundays his gentle friend with the candid if not quite straight eyes had made him the happy master of her sentiments about some of the greatest themes upon which our poor intelligences turn the dark lanterns of their groping speculations, and, pleasanter still, had lured some of his own shy imaginings out of him. Cart-ropes should not drag him to that friendship-hallowed window-seat this afternoon. And yet he must not hurt the feelings of his comrade! Why shouldn’t he? The question rose rather brutally in his mind. He had had no scruples as to hurting the feelings of another person, of one whose wretched circumstances claimed a much tenderer handling than the full-blown prosperity of Miss Aylmer.
He stopped in his walk to look up as if in interrogation to the ash-coloured sky, hung so low over his head, that it seemed as if touchable by an uplifted hand.
“How long can I keep up the pretence of harshness with the poor little creature? Why should I be angrier with her than I was with Jock for killing rats in the barn yesterday? Both follow their nature; she her shifty lying one. She is a liar! Yes, but am I not one too? Is not my whole life an actual lie? If it had only been one or two”—his thoughts harping in exasperated pain on Bonnybell’s delinquencies—“they might have been accidents, the result of that abject fear she evidently feels towards us both. But the dreadful glibness of it! the plausibility! the circumstantiality!” The circumstantiality brought him to the Dower House door, and rang the bell for him.
CHAPTER XVIII
The moon unexpectedly lighted Mr. Tancred home. As if she had something agreeable to show him, she had shoved and elbowed aside the smoke-coloured curtains, drawn so closely across the sky when he arrived, and though still vapourish and a little sickly, gave radiance enough by which to distinguish objects. At first her lamp seemed officious. He could find his way home blindfolded along the familiar path, but before the end of his walk he discovered a use for it.
The evening air was mild and mawkish, and it was not because he was chilly that he covered the ground quickly. It was unlikely—scarcely possible—that anything untoward could have happened during his hour’s absence; yet he had heard something at the Dower House which made him eager to verify by his own eyesight the fact that the terrible charge committed to him was still safe, that he should surprise her as he did last Sunday, sampling his best cigarettes over the fire in the smoking-room, to which he had betaken himself earlier than her calculations had led her to expect, and where the austerity of his own manner had routed her, not in repentance for her theft, which at this moment she was probably repeating, but in confusion at its discovery.
His wife had no toleration for female smokers. How, then, did he reconcile it to his conscience that, before leaving that wife’s house this afternoon, he had placed the box of cigarettes, of the brand of Miss Ransome’s predilection, where she could not possibly miss it? Yes, undoubtedly he would find his little lazy, lying inmate, with her depraved instincts and her seraphic eyes, stretched disconsolately on an armchair, scheming some false new wheedlings by which to undermine his principles and cajole him out of his just displeasure.
His reason was convinced that there was no need for haste, and yet he hastened. The moon was getting the better of the vapours as she walked higher up the low sky; and at even some distance off he could see not only the dark bodies of the deer moving in the open spaces between the dead bracken, but could distinguish the branched heads of the stags.