To be quite on the safe side, he framed to himself the fiction that Camilla and he were coeval. That there should be any delay in embarking on this halcyon plan seemed unendurable, and he began at once to reflect upon the earliest train by which he and his augmented party might return to Stillington on the morrow.
It was in the highest degree unseemly to suspect Tom, at such an infant stage of his loud sorrow and early widowhood; but Edward knew his brother-in-law well enough to be quite sure that the lapse of a very few days would see him—if Bonnybell wore an apron—drying his eyes upon a corner of it. So Mr. Tancred wondered whether his wife would think the 8.50 train too early.
Meanwhile, the cause of Mr. Tancred’s self-schoolings was in no danger of incurring a remorse like his for being too cheerful. She was alone in a sitting-room, which had been occupied by her during the last two or three days, because, since it looked to the back, its blinds had not needed to be pulled down, and she was sitting in an attitude of, for once, entirely unstudied dejection. Since no one was likely to intrude upon her, she might be and look just as miserable or as little miserable as she felt inclined. The quantum of grief expressed by her whole person was enough to have satisfied even the claims of Tom’s gluttonous demands upon his friends for a sorrow as vociferous as his own.
For once Miss Ransome’s philosophy was quite out of gear, and her spirits had descended below the soles of her feet, and abode there. She had cried a good deal, though not in public—a thing which she always disliked. Private weeping could serve no purpose of cajoling, persuading, or mollifying, and was likely to be damaging to that stock in trade of which her eyes formed so valuable an item; and she had hated the funeral. It had reminded her of poor Claire’s, though, except in the main fact, no other functions could ever have differed more widely; and for “Claire” in her small, cool heart, there always lingered a remnant of rueful pity, though it never ran to the length of wishing to have her back again.
Tom’s deportment and appearance at the ceremony had been as repulsive to her as to his brother-in-law. Why, in Heaven’s name, if he were so overwhelmed with grief at the loss of a wife, his tenderness to whom while in life had been eked out by so many fond by-plays with others, could not he control it as an English gentleman of his class and breeding was bound to do? Why, in the face of that large and reverent gathering, need he have roared like a bull and blubbered like a whipped schoolboy? And why, oh, why need Edward and he have stood side by side, so as to bring into monstrous prominence the contrast between them? Not even grief had succeeded in paling Tom, and the image of his rubicund face defaced by tears, of his bulky outline and shining bared head beside the silent pale dignity of Edward’s sorrow, filled Bonnybell with physical disgust.
Her thoughts moved on a little from the funeral to a scene that followed the return from it. “Poor old woman, she really did not do it badly, considering how little practice she has had in pretending. I could have given her a few hints, but it really was a very creditable performance; and in a way I think it was a disappointment to her to forego continuing my education. Never again can she hope to have a pupil who set off by, and meant to go on, knowing as little as I!”
Upon the hitherto unlightened gloom of her spirits there played a little ray of cynic mirth, but the gust of a heavy sigh blew it out. “But what a relief too! I saw a sort of shining come into her poor old eyes—they are not nearly so hard and horny as they were when first I knew them—and when she at last took in that I was in earnest, that the Slammers’ invitation was not one of my tasteful embroideries, how hard she tried not to beam too flagrantly!”
A pause, and then a still heavier sigh than the last. “I was right, undoubtedly I was right. It would have been madness. It may be all very well for people who have a high level, and think they can keep up to it—it would still remain to be proved if they could—but as for me, I never had any level to speak of, and I do not possess that confidence in myself which I once had. I believe I am quite capable of committing a sottise if I put myself in the way of it; and at this time of the year I suppose all those horrid birds in the copse would be love-making, and it might have been catching.”
As she spoke, the door gently opened; and, since the sitting-room was a general one there was nothing strange in the fact, the object of her thoughts came in.
“I was looking for you.”