In the height of a simoom it seems incredible that the face of Nature should ever recover from its distortion and resume its smiles and dimples, yet a few hours effect this marvellous restoration. In the case of the Stillington simoom it took less than a week to remove the more obvious signs of the devastation it had caused in its destructive passage. In less than a week the Aylmers had not only ceased to be the only subject of conversation, but by tacit consent had been banished from it as too painful a topic for even incidental allusion. In less than a week the distracted Toby, having thought better of—if, indeed, he had ever really entertained the idea of—self-slaughter, had actually set off on that globe-circling voyage which his cruel fair one had prescribed to him, and the rest of the Aylmer family were in mid-process of indignantly bundling out of the Dower House, to await inconveniently on the shores of the Riviera the completion of their rebuilding house.
“They are punishing themselves more than me,” was Mrs. Tancred’s sole comment upon the announcement that her quondam friends could no longer bear to lie under the obligation of a roof-tree to her. But Edward, conscious of the strong hold of habit upon his wife’s mind, conscious also of her small power of making new friends, and of the tenacity with which she clung to ancient ties, recognized with pitying sorrow the cut which so painful and abrupt a severance of an old and pleasant relation gave her.
Only one sentence from that final interview’s stormy end which Miss Ransome’s well planned and timed hysterics had saved her from witnessing ever leaked out to the curious little public around. It had been addressed by Catherine Aylmer to Camilla, and must have been repeated in a species of triumph at its point and fitness, and have filtered through who knows what channel of confidential Barnacre or eavesdropping servants back to the ears of Bonnybell.
“We can only hope that you will not have personal cause to regret your championship!”
“What a cat!” was Miss Ransome’s inward comment upon this innuendo. “I am glad that she does not know how little difficulty I have in keeping dear Edward at arm’s length. But it is a word to the wise. I must be additionally careful.”
By Christmas everything at Stillington was to all appearances as it had been. Life ran in its accustomed grooves, and not even the yearly hospitalities, largely understood by and still more largely carried out by Mrs. Tancred, as regarded the surrounding poor, were allowed to interfere with the resolutely resumed and ruthlessly adhered-to education of Bonnybell. Her eager offers to help in the dispensing of her hostess’s gifts, and arranging of her entertainments, were received with a curt and modified acquiescence. But a cautiously slidden out suggestion that a reprieve from study would help her to throw herself with more heart and soul into the work of benevolence met with a decided negative. To it was due the one sigh of regret ever breathed by Miss Ransome for her broken engagement. “If I had married Toby, I need never again have opened a book! It would have been impossible to know less than he did, and bad taste to know more.”
But, despite the considerable drawback of having to waste so much time on the improvement of her mind, the spirits of Miss Ransome rose, on the removal of the incubus laid upon them, to a height that often gave her grave uneasiness as to how to bridle and conceal them—spirits whose ebullition had to be worked off in low singings and childish skippings about her own room, before they could be tamed to the chastened sorrowfulness and veiled heartbreak which beseemed their supposed condition. Even with the nicest care a spurt of young joyousness would go nigh to betray her, but, happily, in each case Edward had been the sole witness, and Miss Ransome had never felt quite sure that Edward had found the evidences of her affliction personally convincing. How soon might she begin to be cheerful again? Earnestly she wished that she had some one to consult on that head; and sometimes the grotesque notion of taking Edward’s opinion darted across her mind; the hypothetical idea of what would happen supposing she were to put to him the question how soon—in case he were bereaved of Camilla—he would think it seemly to dress his countenance again in smiles? But, after all, it would not be a parallel case, since Edward never suffered from high spirits, and the experiment would probably blow the hospitable floor that carried her from under her feet. And, meanwhile, her inconvenient gaiety stood the shock not only of the rigorously pursued cultivation of her intelligence—for, after all, it was astonishing how little one need learn if one put one’s mind to it—but the information conveyed to her, without any explanation of its reason, that the family’s yearly habit of migrating to London after Christmas was this year to be intermitted.
There was, therefore, nothing visibly ahead of her but the monotonous life she was at present pursuing. Of course, it was assommant as to dullness; and the only wonder was that she felt its oppression so little. She supposed that she must be kept up by the little fillip of Edward’s daily return; and the—as daily—effort to present herself convincingly to his mind as a very nice and thoroughly truthful young girl! The enduring doubt as to what progress—if any—she made in this praiseworthy task kept her zest for it keen.
As for Edward, if his estimate of his guest still held any elements of uncertainty, it was not for want of thought upon the subject. How could he help thinking of her? Was not she the one scarlet thing that stood out saliently from the iron-grey background of his life? How could he help, when on his daily downward journey from Paddington his evening paper was finished, and even whilst “Telegrams” and “Stop Press” were writing themselves on his retina—how could he help the ever-repeated question asking itself, “Has she got into any fresh mischief to-day? If she has, how can I hinder her telling me lies about it? Has she any more glimmer of a sense of the existence of such things as truth and honour than when she came to us?”
For the first week or two after the angry flitting of the Aylmer family had been accomplished, Mr. Tancred had anxiously watched his wife, partly in an intensifying of the compassion he always felt for her, partly in a fear that the irritation of nerves caused by the break with the inmates of the Dower House might wreak itself upon Bonnybell, instead of—as he devoutly hoped it might, in pursuance of a habit of fifteen years—upon himself. But he found with relief that his fears on this head were groundless. Camilla, it is true, continued to snub her pupil with unstinted liberality, and ruthlessly pruned away the little fripperies with which Miss Ransome tried cautiously to qualify the morose black of her mourning garb; but a smile forced its way oftener than she was aware into her hard eyes when the girl entered the room; and she never failed—whatever her effort to the contrary—to break into that laugh of hers, so rare, hitherto, as to be almost terrifying, over Bonnybell’s games and idiocies with Jock.