“It seemed right to give her an opportunity of clearing herself,” replied Miss Aylmer, in a crestfallen voice, and with a suspicion of nearing tears; “at least, so it seemed to a valuable outside opinion.”
“You are alluding to Miss Barnacre, I presume?”
There was such a belligerent note in the query that Mrs. Aylmer’s alarm at the adverse way in which her battle was going rose to panic.
“Send for Bonnybell!” she cried, with hysterical imperativeness. “I must and will see her. If she is not a fiend—if she has not the heart of a stone, she cannot help relenting, when she sees to what a state she has brought us all.”
Thus it came about that two or three minutes later Miss Ransome, who had been kept in readiness by Camilla’s order, to be produced if her presence were insisted on, appeared on the scene. As she stole in mouse-quiet, snowdrop-pale, the recollection of the last occasion on which she had been summoned to the same room to meet the same two persons darted into her mind. She saw herself frisking up to Mrs. Aylmer, confident of an excellent reception; and the scene of ignominy and disgrace for her that had followed upon that ludicrous accusation of having corrupted stupid Meg’s mind. She was in a better position now; arbiter of the destinies of a whole highly respectable family, she, Bonnybell, poor Claire’s daughter! A spasm of unforgivable laughter seemed likely for a moment to choke her; but the disagreeables of a situation out of which it would take all her ingenuity to wriggle herself conjured it.
“We have come to beg you to forgive us!” Mrs. Aylmer said, precipitating herself to meet the object of her entreaties, and speaking with a trembling eagerness of humility which in its reversal of their natural attitude towards each other gave even Bonnybell a shock.
Before entering the room she had been putting to herself the humorous suggestion, “Shall I make them walk round the room on their knees to me, as poor Toby volunteered that they should?” That question now received a decided negative. “It really would not give me any pleasure!” The ravages it was impossible not to verify on the smooth middle-aged fairness of her would-be mother-in-law’s face gave Miss Ransome anew the measure of the mischief she had done. “Poor creature! she looks nearly as bad as Toby did! I am afraid that I have given her a couple of crow’s-feet that she will never get the better of!”
“We do not blame you for a moment; it was perfectly natural that you should do it, but perhaps it was a little hasty to leave us all in a minute, without a word.”
This plea was poured forth with such painful velocity that its utterer had to stop to draw breath, and Bonnybell felt that she must speak. She would far rather have stood silent in her impregnable fortress of injured maiden weakness.
“I supposed that you could not wish to keep such a—wicked girl—any longer under your roof!”