“Poor Mr. Tancred! he has indeed every reason to try to keep Mrs. Tancred alive!” Then, feeling dimly that the reflection had not quite a suitable ring, she hung on it a postscript. “And I am sure,” she said prayerfully, “that I heartily wish it, for both their sakes.”
“I am sure you do,” replied Felicity, but she spoke, or Bonnybell thought so, somewhat slowly, and looked at her rather hard, adding more glibly, “So you see that, considering the uncertainty of everything, it would not be a bad plan to cultivate the Slammers; and I shall see that you have every opportunity for doing so.”
Bonnybell thanked her, and wondered internally whether they would be likely to go to bed early. It needed solitude to face such a new aspect of affairs as the last ten minutes’ conversation had presented to her.
“If Camilla died to-morrow, Edward would be almost as much of a pauper as I am!” This was the fact that could be better faced by Bonnybell with her hair hanging down her back in its nightly twisted cable and the enlargement of a dressing-gown. The added flights of stairs which Lady Bletchley would have had to climb made her visitor feel pretty secure from an invasion by her, but, to be on the safe side, Miss Ransome locked her door.
“A pauper!” During her eighteen years Bonnybell had known many persons who freely gave themselves that name; but it had never, so far as she could observe, produced any appreciable effect upon their mode of life or expenditure. She dimly felt that Edward’s pauperism would be of a different type. Her imagination tried to construct a pauper of the upper classes with a sense of duty to his tailor and wine-merchant. Would he smoke pipes, and drink gin-and-water, and wear napless hats, and reach-me-down overcoats?
The frame was one into which it was so impossible to fit the portrait of Mr. Tancred that she laughed aloud, secure in having a whole floor to herself. “My jaw dropped half a yard when I heard it,” she soliloquized. “I am afraid that Felicity must have noticed it.”
An advance upon the glass and a practise in it of elongating her face to different lengths produced such unsatisfactory results that she soon left off her efforts to reconstruct her own attitude under the late thunderbolt. Nor did she disguise from herself that it was a thunderbolt! To do her justice, she had never, since hearing of its probability, consciously wished for Camilla’s death; yet there was no doubt that she had seen through a rosy mist, and at some future epoch, herself in various attitudes of near relationship to Edward.
People’s love-dreams are shaped consonantly to their characters; and Bonnybell’s were as artificial and sophisticated as herself. She saw herself whizzing up the Champs Elysées in an automobile in May when the chestnuts were out, in a dernier cri hat, by Edward’s side; sitting in an opera-box at Covent Garden, blazing in Camilla’s diamonds, reset by a jeweller of the Rue de la Paix, by Edward’s side; at Stillington, during one of their Saturday-to-Mondays there, smoking the best cigarettes procurable for money all over the house, and with no apprehension of any one smelling them, by Edward’s side; or without cigarettes, and receiving discreet and moderate endearments, well and easily kept within such bounds as she herself prescribed, from Edward.
To her own surprise, it was the last picture upon which she dwelt longest, and with most pleasure. And now her house of cards lay in ruins at her feet, and it took her all her philosophy, and a little more, to pull herself together, and extract any cause of congratulation that might be found among their débris.
“What a mercy it was that we kept ourselves well in hand! I do not think he could have held out much longer; and as for me, whatever confidence one has in one’s self, it is well not to put it to too severe a test. I really believe that two more Sunday walks, if the sun had shone, and those birds whose notes I never could distinguish apart had gone on singing, would have finished me off!” After a pause, “I never could have believed that it would be hard to keep from being fond of any one.”