Miss Ransome had touched the raw of her host’s whole life.
CHAPTER XIII
Of the three denizens of Stillington its owner took by far the easiest mind to bed with her. She had accepted the presence of Bonnybell, with all its attendant ills, in the same spirit as she would have accepted the loss of her fortune, an infidelity of Edward’s, or some dire blain or boil upon her own body. Bonnybell had been sent here by the same Unerring Wisdom that would have sent her any of the other possible afflictions, and she had only to adjust her back to the burden.
Miss Ransome had no such consciousness to support her as, with an inexpressible yearning for the soothing properties of tobacco, she sat in the huge chintz chair by her bedroom fire, taking stock of her errors, and their probable consequences.
“I shall bring him round in time, I suppose,” she reflected. “But what a surprise! Who would have thought he would have taken up the cudgels for his old lady’s juvenility so violently? Violent is not the word. I should not think he could ever be violent; and yet those lackadaisical eyes gave a fine flash when I suggested that she was not quite a slip of a girl! I must pretend for the future that she looks sixteen, or”—more shrewdly—“I had better not meddle with the subject again at all to him.” A lugubrious stare into the fire, with inky hair still unbuilt for the night, and hands clasped round slender lace-and-satin-clad knees. (Bonnybell’s peignoir would not own Camilla’s, even as a poor relation.) “After all, I believe the old camel will prove the easier of the two to get round. I did not half dislike her when she stood glowering over me as I grovelled on the floor, and told me I should have a chance—it will be an uncommonly disagreeable chance”—with a backward glance thrown by memory at her hours of evaded study in the dull schoolroom, ending in the grisly ordeal of confrontation with her accusers—“but such as it is, I must hold on to it until something better turns up.”
When will that be? Not, certainly, on the morrow of her exposure; that brought only a dictation lesson, which threw Röntgen rays of unexampled brutality upon her orthography; brought also a bluntly worded inquiry from Camilla, in allusion to a slight tinting which her late paling experiences had made seem admissible, as to whether she had “forgotten to wash her face?” A still less delicately worded hope followed, in answer to Miss Ransome’s explanation that the wind must have caught her cheeks, a caustic hope that the “zephyr” in question might remain prisoned in its cave during her stay in her present quarters. A further piece of advice to commit it to the flames with the least possible delay displayed the discourtesy of an entire disbelief in Miss Ransome’s interpretation of her heightened roses.
The charge and its feeble parry took place in Edward’s presence; but he did not attempt the smallest share in the engagement. Not a rustle of the paper he was reading; not the least fidgeting on his chair, not an eye-glance nor a lip-biting gave evidence of any inward protest against the “baiting” that was being undergone by one whom he had yesterday seemed inclined to shield and pity. Throughout the day—or rather throughout that small part of it when he was at home and in her presence—he treated her with a perfect but distant courtesy, and so through the next and the next.
“Oh, how careful one ought to be!” she sighed to herself ruefully. “One would have thought that the one perfectly safe thing to do was to laugh at a wife to a husband, or at a husband to a wife, but in this dreadful place there are no rules, only exceptions!”
When the third day showed no sign of a relaxation of her host’s gentle austerity, Miss Ransome grew desperate. She was returning in drag-footed boredom from a walk in the shrubberies to the extreme end of which she had been lured by the distant sound of guns. It was unlikely that the park should be shot in its master’s absence; but triggers were being pulled somewhere within hearing, and one of them might be by Toby! It was on neutral ground alone that she could now have a chance of pursuing that chase which she was so loth to abandon. It was possible that if she walked far enough into the park in the direction of the Dower House, she might intercept him on his homeward way. Her intention to make the attempt held out while she followed a long walk that wound with the slow midland rivulet, that it was long ago cut to accompany on its sluggish course through the pleasure-grounds, until a little bridge across the stream, and a rustic gate on its further side giving access to a copse that led into the Park, were reached. But, having attained this point, her resolution failed. The light was thickening. Some one had told her that this was the season when the stags—heard even from here belling loudly—were dangerous to meet. Even the very off-chance of being rescued by Toby from hoofs and antlers made it scarcely worth while to incur the probability of being tossed by the one and trampled by the other. She turned sadly away, wafting a sigh in the direction of the renounced prize, and breathing the silent, pensive ejaculation, “Oh, you great lout, if you only knew what was good for you!”
She retraced her steps through the humid gloom of the laurels, and by the dimming, dull water. Near the house—but not very near—just where two giant cedars stood on each side of the path, making twilight into midnight beneath their shade, she met Edward.