But to do Miss Ransome justice, her worst enemy could not deny that at this period of her history she was a very agreeable inmate. The extreme unpleasantness of her late experience, the fright it had caused her, and the entire absence of an opportunity for a temptation to new errors, combined to make her “conduct as the noonday clear.” It is not the highest qualities which make men or women facile à vivre! The tender conscience, the high ideal, the strong affections, when brought into friction with the wrongnesses, the basenesses, the coldnesses of everyday life, produce rubs to the temper which are avoided by the cool heart, which does not care enough for anything to ache; the pliant temper, which gives in because nothing matters much; the absence of aspiration, which acquiesces pleasantly in the actual.
Bonnybell was, as her housemates more and more realized, a shining instance of the value of small virtues in daily intercourse. She was immovably good-tempered, invariably civil, always on the look-out for opportunities for paying little attentions, light-hearted even beneath the pressure of the severe affliction under which she was at present labouring, yet subdued in her mirth as in her graceful movements. Even her efforts to avoid her studies were made with the most shrinking delicacy, and their frustration met with the quickest, sweetest acquiescence; and lastly, her skill in applying antiseptic to Jock’s wounds when the latter’s lifelong feud with the second coachman’s yellow Irish terrier culminated in a battle, which, like Waterloo, “with Cannae’s carnage vied,” was beyond praise. Now and again, indeed, but more and more rarely in Camilla’s presence, some all too intimate trait relating to the habits and haunts of a class never to be recognized as existing by Mrs. Tancred’s school—some startling theory, fact, or opinion, concerning population or the relations of the sexes, would slip out. But these were but tiny blemishes upon the else spotless white of her life and conversation.
So January passed, questionably enlivened by a few stiff shooting-parties, during which the modestly proffered attentions of Miss Ransome to the least attractive among the guests were patent to all eyes, and reaped an immediate harvest of approbation; while her one or two unlucky lapses from jeune-fille-ism in conversation did not transpire till long afterwards.
January was drawing to its close, when to the uneventful household at Stillington the post brought one morning a piece of news which was received and commented upon according to their different characters by the three persons who learnt it. The news in question was communicated by Mrs. Glanville, and announced the fact that, by the perfectly unexpected accidental death of the head of his family, an unmarried cousin less than half his age, her husband had come into possession of a barony and a rent roll of thirty thousand a year.
“What a nuisance for the poor chap!” was Edward’s heartfelt exclamation.
Camilla said, dryly, that she hoped the command of so much money—since, of course, given the weakness of Tom’s character, the whole disposition of it would lie with her—might not lead Felicity into chimerical schemes, like her Guild of St. Swithin, the members of which were to devote half of every wet day to intercession for their erring sisters in society.
Bonnybell’s contribution, though made half under her breath, was unfortunately audible—
“They really ought to try to manage to set up an heir now!”
She was a little off her guard, suddenly dazzled by the brilliant accession of consequence and fortune that had come to her former—nay, as she had reason to know—her present admirer, and wondering whether or not she had been wise in so firmly, though sweetly and sadly, refusing the surreptitious correspondence that poor silly old Tom had pressed upon her. Her ruminations were broken in upon by a short—
“You have a happy knack of giving an indelicate turn to what you say,” Camilla said severely; “and if you have no more valuable contribution to the subject to make, I think you would do well to be silent.”