Bonnybell bowed her head, and one shining tear dropped in her lap. It was due less to the rebuke than to an inward reflection of what luck some people had, and how it was thrown away upon them. Even better than Felicity she could have turned old Tom round her finger; but to what a different tune would she have set his gyrations!
The subject was not afterwards much discussed in the little circle, nor did it at first appear to have much bearing on the three lives of which that restricted circle was composed.
A wily hint from Miss Ransome as to the propriety of her paying a visit of congratulation to the late Mrs. Glanville, now Lady Bletchley, in acknowledgment of former hospitalities, was not taken up. It might so easily have been combined with one of those trips to London which since Christmas had been of bi-weekly occurrence. They were undertaken under the strict surveillance of Camilla’s maid, and had for object the receiving of lessons from masters, in addition to the private teaching at home. As pleasures they were, in Bonnybell’s opinion, better than nothing, but what a mockery in comparison of what they might have been!
Generally Edward returned by the same train, but as he invariably travelled in a smoking-carriage, and drove himself home in a dog-cart, her opportunities for those tête-à-tête talks with him, for which her zest was daily growing, were confined to a very few minutes’ pacing of the Paddington platform together. There was the Sunday walk, indeed, which had become a habit, and to which she looked forward with an eagerness which she was obliged generally to explain away to herself. “There is not really the slightest risk; he has himself well in hand; and as for me, the only reason why I am fond of him is that he is not like a man—at least, not like the bestial men I have known.”
Their course was almost always about the park, and through the whims and variations of an English winter Bonnybell, had her senses ever been much open to the sweet surprises of Nature, might have learnt how much beauty even January holds in her hard lap; what wild fantasies of ice-flowers on oak and beech, when sudden frost had surprised their wet boughs; what pensive dignity of mist-enfolded coppice and spinney! She was generally much too busy talking to be aware of any difference in the effects presented to her eyes. One is happily not expected to admire in winter, and so as the north wind did not succeed in piercing the astrachan fur under her chin, nor the crisp grass wet too much the thick boots which Camilla compelled her to wear, she asked no more of the outside world of Stillington.
At first Edward had tried to open her perceptions to the phenomena around her, attributing her obtuseness to the defectiveness of her training; since the eye, strangely enough, has to be told what to see, and the ear what to hear, quite as much as the brain what to admit and assimilate. But a short time sufficed to show him the uselessness of the attempt. Miss Ransome was, and was likely to remain, Nature-deaf and Nature-blind! There was something even pathetic, or so it seemed to her companion, in her efforts to do what was expected of her in the way of appreciation; and though among what seemed to her the shivery drearinesses of the winter snow it was difficult to guess what one was expected to admire, yet her quick tact prevented her from falling into any very gross error. She even, during a spell of hard weather, got up quite a successful show of interest in tracking on the snow the footsteps of some little animal which puzzled Edward; and though her suggestion that perhaps it was a loup garou did not help him much, none the less was he grateful for the good fellowship shown by her aid in the investigation.
At first, by a tacit united agreement, they had avoided the Dower House, but one day, because it lay in the direction preferred by Jock, they found themselves half-accidentally in its neighbourhood. It was on one of the two showery Sundays that they found themselves looking up at its gables and dormer-windows from the closed gates. The dead eyeless look of a house whence the dwellers have departed was accentuated by the cold layer of white that hid the beauty of the old grey slates of its high-pitched roof, and by the many humps that indicated the whereabouts of its garden-beds. A small but piercing air blew in their faces, chill as the liking of the self-ejected friends, that had been wont to give so warm a welcome to one of the two persons who peered silently through the iron-work of the fine old gates.
“Let us come away,” Bonnybell said softly. “This must make you feel bad.”
He turned and looked full at her, which he did not often do, and she felt or imagined a glint of irony in his eye. It was not a happy moment, perhaps, for the bringing up of the fable of her affliction. The snow had had the exhilarating effect it mostly has upon dogs, and had made Jock forget his years, and sent him plunging through little drifts and scattering the frozen powder flying about his rejuvenated heels.