Rhoda Broughton

“ Now that the power of observation was coming back to her, the extreme wretchedness of Edward’s air struck her with a sense of excess. Of course, the whole affair was terrible in its suddenness; but Edward had never seemed to be very fond of his sister. Miss Ransome’s knowledge of human nature was not yet deep enough to teach her that the death of a person to whom one has owed and not given love sometimes brings with it a bitterer pang than that of one to whom has been given our poor best of tenderness. ”

“ Her hands now clutched the arms till her knuckle-bones stood out through the white skin.
“But I shall not have any married life,” she sighed in a trembling tone that yet seemed to mean what it said.
“Not have any married life!” repeated Mrs. Tancred, with such an accent as made Miss Ransome wonder whether the words could indeed be her own. “I am quite at a loss. I thought I understood you to say that your fiancé” (never since his clandestine courtship had the young man been Toby) —“that your fiancé did not share his family’s suspicions?” ”

“ I wonder how long it will be before Edward puts his foot down in the same way that Tom did? Will it be a matter of months or weeks? Judging from the portrait good old Felicity drew of her sister-in-law, I should say it might be minutes! If old Tom had not been such an ass, I might have stayed with them for ever and a day, and it was not a bad berth! What asses most men are! and all what brutes! No, not all! Old Tom is not a brute! How kind he was on the day of the funeral during that horrible drive to Kensal Green! But what an ass! ‘I shall be at Paddington before you! ”

“ CHAPTER IV “They must have a chef,” said Bonnybell after dinner to herself, as she and Camilla began to tread back their path through the long enfilade of rooms that led from the dining-room to the library, where, accompanied by ceiling-high books, the small family apparently spent its evenings. “The cuisine is better than the Glanvilles’. I fancy that philanthropic women very seldom have good cooks. Yes, they have a chef! What a fool he must be to spend two-thirds of the year in the country!”
As she and her hostess stood by the fire, Miss Ransome’s reflections took another turn. ”

“ Perhaps the whole success of Miss Ransome’s not very artistic falsehoods lay in the poignant flashes of truth that she unintentionally lit up their darkness with, here and there. No hearer could doubt the reality of her desolate fellow-feeling for the social outcast with the golden wig, concerning whom Mr. Tancred had just been hearing something that made him feel that flaying alive would be too lenient a fate for her.
“It is no question of Lady Tennington,” he interrupted with a cold severity, “but of the person who left you so suddenly as soon as he saw me.” ”

“ The result was obvious: freedom—temporary, indeed! but still freedom for Miss Ransome. But of what use was that noblest of God’s gifts to one who had no means of employing it?
“Don’t get into mischief if you can help it,” was Camilla’s parting benediction; and the smiling humility of Bonnybell’s “I will try not,” took an ambiguous meaning as she turned it over afterwards in the leisure and liberty of her own mind. “Try not to get into mischief?” or “Try not to help getting into mischief? How can I help helping? ”

“ But Camilla’s belief appeared to be going to be justified; for beyond a gravely cautious warning now and again to his companion to avoid a puddle, or indication of that strip of road which the night’s rain had left driest, Mr. Tancred walked along almost in silence, with the width of the elm avenue between them.
“Perhaps he would think it wrong to make love to me going to church!” thought the wary Bonnybell. “Men have such funny scruples. I must look out for myself going back.” ”

“ Bonnybell received with joyful acquiescence this unflatteringly couched reprieve from a lesson in theology; and without the least inward or outward murmur the announcement that Camilla would not be visible before teatime. Later on she learned that it was the prosecution of her mysterious cult that kept Mrs. Tancred in austere study and Stoic meditation through the long hours. Though her husband did not share in her solitary devotions, it at first looked as if he were going to be as invisible as she. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Toby would never have let me go. Even now I should not be surprised at his putting a bullet into me to-morrow, as one is always seeing in the papers that grooms do to faithless kitchen-maids, when I give him his final congé. Well, that would be the end, and the dear old camel and Edward would be rid of their incubus. Poor Toby! How sea-sick the mere thought of him makes me! How very sincerely I dislike men! ”

“ There had, indeed, been haste, strange haste, on the dead woman’s part to leave a world so full of a double relish and savour since her accession to fortune; such haste that she had not even waited to say a farewell word to the husband whose anxiety to “have her” to himself had been the motive for Bonnybell’s ejection.
Tom had not returned in time to see his wife alive. Though she had now been twenty-four hours dead, he had not yet returned. Camilla and Edward were in the house. ”

“ Aylmer must be a foolish woman, for she cried the whole way back to the Dower House.
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. ”

“ The season of suspense was passed, like all ordinary mornings, in the schoolroom, but Miss Ransome gave herself a whole holiday in honour of her betrothal, and also because, as she sensibly reflected, an equipment of elegant learning would be wasted upon the mate of Toby.
“If they refuse to entertain the idea at all—and I am a pill for them”—she laughed maliciously—“and Camilla insists on my giving him up to oblige them, I suppose we shall have to be tied up at once in some hugger-mugger way at a Registry Office. Pah! how can any one marry who has any other means of subsistence? ”

“ Had poor Felicity lived, she would always have been a resource, a refuge, an antidote! She would have been always joyfully grateful for as much of her society as Miss Ransome could spare; as much, that is, as would have been consistent with keeping her well separated from Tom. Tom!
Bonnybell’s thoughts came to a full stop upon the name. Irony, irony! Who was there to prevent her meeting Tom now? Poor Felicity! ”

“ Tancred’s inclination to converse would have led her in another direction than inquiries as to the mode in which she, Bonnybell, had disposed of her solitary day, though those inquiries were made almost genially, and in the spirit of neither a school-mistress nor a spy. It was not that the girl was conscious of any new or even nascent disinclination for fibbing; but when the whole field of invention lay open before her, it was so difficult to know which lie to choose. ”

“ It can be no parti pris that has dwindled her to half her size; and even if she has tried to make a bid for the compassion of the only friends left to her in the world by intentional accentuation of a forlornness real enough in all conscience without accenting, isn’t she even for that poor deceit the more an object of the profoundest, most lenient sympathy?”
By this time Love’s victim had been ordered to a sofa; and Camilla’s knuckly hands were arranging a crocheted shawl of their own manufacture over the little shivering body with an air of protest that was yet not ungentle. ”

“ If I have not a very good settlement, I will have none. Why should I bring any poor creature into the world to be a wretched little adventurer like myself?”
“Miss Ransome.”
Never had the voice of her butler made an announcement less grateful to Mrs. Tancred’s ears. They were prepared for it, as the sound of the horses’ hoofs had penetrated to the morning-room, where she sat alone before her tea-table. But that sound had not been permitted to lift her spectacles—the pair most hated of Edward’s soul, with the thickest rims and the largest goggles—from her book. ”

“ Since Camilla’s death could in no wise profit her, and the memory of her solid kindliness was fresh and vivid, Miss Ransome did wish, with as much sincerity as she was capable of, that Camilla should live, and not die, if she thought such a life as hers worth having. ”

“ The tender conscience, the high ideal, the strong affections, when brought into friction with the wrongnesses, the basenesses, the coldnesses of everyday life, produce rubs to the temper which are avoided by the cool heart, which does not care enough for anything to ache; the pliant temper, which gives in because nothing matters much; the absence of aspiration, which acquiesces pleasantly in the actual.
Bonnybell was, as her housemates more and more realized, a shining instance of the value of small virtues in daily intercourse. ”

“ It was difficult to look at anything so small, so dewy, so palpably made of rose-leaves as Bonnybell’s face without smiling; and in addition to this impulse shared by the generality of her species, Mrs. Tancred had for her own portion that extravagant admiration of beauty which, unmixed with any tincture of spite, is the doubtful appanage of the frankly ugly and really good among women. ”

“ The little uplifted face was so touchingly, unresentfully sad, that Felicity decided with relief that the impression of hardly detectable amusement in it, received by her a minute ago, must have been an optical delusion.
“We shall both miss you very much,” she said with sincere cordiality. “When you are not impossible, you are as nice a little girl as one is likely to meet in a summer’s day. I have given you an excellent character, and all that you have got to do is to live up to it.”
“To live up to it!” repeated Bonnybell. ”

“ Edward had not long rejoined his guest, who was sitting rather out of sight behind a screen, from beyond which her voice came low and plaintive. The few glances at her that he had allowed himself during dinner had told him—or he thought so—that her eyelids were a little reddened, though not to the extent of disfigurement. “I am one of the few people who can cry becomingly,” was her own dispassionate dictum, “and it will be disarming to look as if I had wept, and I am sure”—the waif feeling returning in some strength—“it will come easily enough; no one can ever have had better reason to do it.” ”

“ To be Lady Bletchley’s right hand was no sinecure; but though the humanitarian interest could scarcely be said to be strongly developed in Miss Ransome, she took up her share of the burden of Felicity’s good works—increased tenfold by the latter’s rise in life—with a will, reflecting philosophically that it was quite as well not to have much time to think, since she had nothing satisfactory to think about, and finding or making many little oases of worldly pleasure amid the sands of philanthropy. ”

“ Camilla went on presently, in a voice absolutely destitute of all excitement, but with a sort of reverence in it. “Death or life! If I do not deceive myself, I am ready to face the one, I am willing to face the other.” ”

“ Insults to her intellect left Miss Ransome perfectly calm. She had long believed the truth of the saying that “Hard words break no bones,” having been dieted upon expletives and adjectives both vigorous and varied whenever “poor Claire” was “not quite right.” Were her mind{189} furnished as Camilla would have it, she might become a second Miss Barnacre, and all that she would know of men would be the banging of doors by them, in hastening from her presence whenever she lifted up her voice in the odious terminology of science and philosophy. ”