“Camilla heard this morning from my sister Felicity, begging us to spare you to her. It seems that you made yourself so helpful and indispensable when you stayed with her last autumn that she has missed you grievously ever since. She wrote so urgently—Felicity is one of those people who always manage to get what they want—that my wife did not think it right to refuse her, more especially as she thought it would be doing you a good turn—giving you a pleasant change.”
His voice died away into an indistinct murmur. Every word uttered by him had been strict truth—to offer untruth to Bonnybell would have been, as has been already observed, sending coals to Newcastle. Yet in his own ears his statement sounded like a bad, bald lie.
Of its un-veracity not the slightest doubt traversed the girl’s mind. “What a much better story I could have made up,” she said to herself, with an artist’s pity for a croûte. Across the unaffected quiver of her lips a slight sigh of relief stole. “There’s not a word of truth in it! As long as old Tom was alive, Felicity would never have asked me to stay with her again; but they are somehow going to force her to take me.”
Miss Ransome’s philosophy here began to return to her aid. “It is better than the streets, anyhow, and five minutes ago I did not see any other outlet. But I certainly am sorrier to leave Edward than a wretched little adventuress like me ought ever to let herself be about anything.”
These reflections did not lend themselves to utterance, and after all, as he had evidently made no effort to run counter to Camilla’s fiat for her dismissal, it was as well to make him feel as uncomfortable as an attitude of submissive but heartbroken silence could render him. Bonnybell’s heart was not of those that break, but there was quite enough of true stuff in the mixed woof of real and counterfeit which went to make up her attitude of sacrificial lamb bound to the altarhorns, to make it inimitably touching.
“The only wonder is that you should have kept me so long,” she murmured at last, with the most submissive figurative kissing of the hand that smote her, yet, in the turmoil of her spirits, forgetting to feign any belief in the supposed fiction of Felicity’s summons. “You will laugh at me, but I had begun to hope that I was becoming a little useful to Mrs. Tancred, that she was growing to be just a very little fond of me.”
Her slight, desolate smile at the fatuity of having hoped to reap a small crop of that affection which to most girls of her age was a banal matter of course, reduced her hearer to a state of wretchedness far deeper than her mild aspiration after vengeance had wished.
“Laugh at you!” he said in a choked voice. “Laugh at you for believing what falls so far short of the real truth! You have been like a most kind and dear daughter to my wife—to us both.”
This last clause, with its evident effort to set the rickety situation on four strong straight legs, provoked so acute a mirth in Bonnybell’s spirit, sore as it was, that she had much ado to disguise it. “The poor dear is so determined to be my ‘papa,’ and he looks and feels so unlike it!” she said to herself. She drew a long, patient sigh.
“Thank you for saying so! I am glad that I am not being sent away in disgrace.”