There remained the executioner and the gallows bird. Camilla had sat down. Judges always sit, but, on the other hand, hangmen always stand. A grotesque wonder flitted through Bonnybell’s mind as to how a person who united the two functions could harmonize this discrepancy in practice? There followed an absolute silence. Camilla did not even look at her. She sat with the “starers” she had taken off lying in her lap, absently rubbing their glasses with her pocket-handkerchief. Was her wrath too deep for even further vituperation? Would it be satisfied only by a dumb ejection from her house and protection?
As the moments passed this seemed to the girl waiting the pronouncement of her doom the only possible solution, and after a time she lifted up, if such a phrase can apply to anything so low and faint, her little pathetic voice.
“Must I go to-day, or will you let me stay till to-morrow—to make arrangements?”
Camilla lifted her eyes, out of which the fire and sword had gone, but whose expression was inscrutable to the quaking would-be reader of their meaning.
“Where would you go to?”
The cool common sense of the inquiry brought home to Miss Ransome more strongly than ever before the sense of her own waifness. She threw out her hands hopelessly in front of her.
“Where indeed?”
The action once more brought the inky ensign of her studiousness into prominence, and this time it really served as a lifebuoy. Not that Camilla said anything that spoke of relenting; but some indefinable change in the atmosphere that surrounded the rigid figure in the armchair, still rubbing its goggles, emboldened the poor sinner to put up a quivering plea in her own defence.
“I have not had many advantages; it was not poor Claire’s fault”—with a hasty recurrence of that feeling that it was against the rule of the game to impute blame to the helpless dead. “She was too ill latterly to understand about anything—but—I have not had much of a chance.”
For once—except in that pardonable gloss upon the habits of her late mother—the girl was speaking God’s truth, and so strong and immediate was the effect of her appeal that neither Mrs. Tancred nor herself perceived that she had used the tabooed Christian name.