CHAPTER I

“Well?” she asked.

From the other end of the breakfast-table he returned—“Well?” and for several minutes this exchange of monosyllables seemed going to be the end—it was not quite the beginning—of the conversation that had sprung from a letter, and to the perusal or reperusal of that letter Mrs. Tancred had returned.

“Here is another instance of Felicity’s talent for laying her cuckoo’s egg in other people’s nests!” she said presently with a dryish smile. “There never was a woman who did more good—by proxy—than your sister.”

Mr. Tancred gave as much acquiescence as lay in silence to his wife’s indictment. If you are credited with having married a woman for her money, and can never for one whole minute forget it, you must acquiesce in many statements from which you differ far more widely than he did from the one in question.{2}

“Why cannot she keep the girl herself?”

“Because Tom has put his foot down.”

This time both smiled; laughed out, indeed.

“That convenient foot!”

“It does not usually come down very heavily upon a pretty woman.”

“Who says that she is pretty?”—with a touch of quickness.

“I thought you did, or Felicity—or—some one.”

“I do not think that there is any allusion to her personal appearance. Now, what has become of my spectacles?”—embarking on that exasperating chronic chase which becomes in time the only species of sport left open to the elderly.

“I believe that you can see perfectly well without them,” rejoined he, always irritated by anything that emphasized the fifteen years of disparity in age between them. “What was the use of my giving you those tortoise-shell eyeglasses, if you never use them?”

“Silly, affected things!” replied she, ungraciously, yet with a something of contradictory kindness in her eye; and at the same moment discovering her missing spectacles, unaccountably astride upon her own high well-bared brow, she searched for, found, and read aloud the following sentences—

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome?’”

“Was that the woman who drank eye-wash and methylated spirit if she could not get anything else to quench her thirst?{3}”

“She did it once too often. Do not interrupt again.

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago.’”

“Methylated spirits?” he threw in, disobedient to his wife’s hest, and she avenged herself by beginning all over again.

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago. I had done what I could for her, but it was one of those hopelessly inveterate cases of degradation for which no human aid is of any avail; and she died in a very distressing way last August. Tom went to the funeral.’

“I remember hearing that he was the only person who did, besides the two sham widowers who followed her in crape and weepers to Kensal Green.” The interruption this time emanated from the reader herself.

“‘Tom went to the funeral, and came back full of pity for the girl whom I believe to be really Lord Ransome’s daughter. We may as well give her the benefit of the doubt, at all events, though his—Lord Ransome’s—family decline to believe it, and refuse to do anything for her in consequence. As her family repudiated Claire’——”

“Who is Claire?”

“Why, the girl, of course! No, it is not. I see further down that the girl is Bonnybell. Claire must be the mother.{4}

“‘As her family repudiated Claire when first she took to evil courses, the poor child has not a relation in the world to turn to, nor a roof to cover her. At the present moment she is with us, and as far as I am concerned might remain so indefinitely; but, then, Tom put his foot down.’”

Again one of the Tancred couple smiled with rich amusement.

“‘Under the circumstances it has struck me—I throw out the suggestion for what it is worth—that you might like to have her as an inmate, at all events for a while.’”

“We?”

“Yes, that is Felicity all over! But let me finish.

“‘She is as gay as a lark’ (gay as a lark, when her mother died three months ago!)”

“Died of drink!” amended he, with that sense of justice which is always more inherent in man than woman.

“‘Gay as a lark’ (dear feeling little thing!), ‘and I thought, and think—indeed, it is one of my chief motives for making the proposal’ (ahem!), ‘that the presence of a bright young creature would bring a great accession of cheerfulness into both your lives.’”

“Are we so uncheerful?” asked the man, in a tone whose vexation was coloured with misgiving.

“A childless home is never very merry,” replied his wife, shortly.

Tancred’s eyes dropped to the object upon{5} which his hand was already resting, the head of the wire-haired fox-terrier, whom his mistress spoilt most, but who liked his master best. The husband had long ceased to wince outwardly, though never inwardly, when one of the two great “raws” of his life was touched. He had married Camilla, and he had not given her the children for whom she hungered in that passionate greed, only increased by years and improbabilities, with which some women crave for offspring. And now they had been married for fifteen winters, and Camilla was fifty years old.

“You see that I was right; there is no allusion to her personal appearance.”

“No, it was my stupid mistake.”

“Though she is ‘as gay as a lark,’”—harking back rather grimly to the phrase that had displeased her—“she may also be as ugly as sin.”

He thought it unlikely, but did not say so.

“Bonnybell!” continued she, derisively. “What a cruelly ironical name to inflict—‘Bonne et belle’—when she is probably neither the one nor the other!”

“Let us hope for the worst, at all events,” said he, gently caustic.

“Bonnybell! She was probably named after one of the two sham widowers’ racehorses.”

“I thought you calculated that she dated from the pre-widower period.”

“Ay, so she must have done. Then she was named after one of Lord Ransome’s hounds. If you remember, he kept the Mudshire for several{6} years before a barbed-wire fence broke his worthless neck for him.”

Tancred had known Lord Ransome a little; and the question crossed his mind as to whether it was worth while saying that his neck was not more valueless than his neighbours’. He decided that it was not. If you possess a wife with very decided opinions and a very trenchant mode of expressing them, why not let her enjoy them in peace? You may, at least, make her these trifling amends for the irreparable injury you have done her.

“If we refuse the girl,” he began slowly, after an interval spent in cogitation by two of the party, and in muffled remonstrances at the unusual delay in brewing his slopbasin of weak tea on the part of the third—“if we refuse the girl, what is the alternative?”

“None, apparently, but the streets.”

“Poor little devil!”

“I do not think that that consideration need sway us!” retorted she. “If we let ourselves go, a blind philanthropy might lead us to try and unpeople the Haymarket; and, moreover, it would not come to that. I have never known Felicity fail in getting hold of fingers to pull her chestnuts out of the fire for her, and she will not now.”

He agreed with this view of his sister, and said so; and then there was a pause for refreshment, the slopbowl claim having become too vocal to be longer ignored.

“She is probably as full of hereditary vice as she can hold,” resumed Camilla, presently stooping{7} to test with her forefinger the temperature of Jock’s tea. “No, my dear boy, you are not telling the truth, it is not too hot. Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides.”

“I never heard that Ransome was particularly immoral.”

“The presumption is in favour of it; they mostly go together.”

“And we will not give him the benefit of the doubt, eh?”

“Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides, selfishness on both sides, extravagance and folly on both sides,” enumerated she, checking off the unknown’s heritage upon her fingers.

“Poor little devil!” in a tone of even profounder compassion than had conveyed his former utterance of the phrase. “If your view is correct, she starts in life pretty well handicapped, doesn’t she?”

“Poor little devil!” repeated his wife, in a key of some exasperation. “I think that we should be the poor little devils if we consented to receive such an inmate.”

“But there is no necessity for us to do so. It is easy to say no.”

“Easy to say no to Felicity? Easy for you to say no to any one?”

Again he winced, though this time, if every one had their due, the wince should have been hers. Had she forgotten, or was she impossibly alluding to the one pregnant occasion on which he had not had the strength of mind to say no? Her voice, high and decided, cut into his strangled thought.{8}

“Whichever way we settle it, must be at once—to-day. If she does not hear to the contrary by return of post, Felicity is quite capable of taking silence for consent, and packing the girl off by the next train, as she did her pet inebriate to Mrs. Holmes last summer.”

“I will leave you to decide,” he answered, with an effort at flight, contemptible since it was unsuccessful.

“You will do nothing of the kind,” answered she, seizing him by the lapel of his coat, as he passed her on his way to the door. “You will not shift the responsibility of the whole affair upon me.”

“What do you feel like?” he answered resignedly, not struggling in a clasp which had more of mastery than endearment in it. “Surely it will affect you infinitely more than it will me.”

Seeing him thus docile, she loosed her hold. “At my age,” she said, “all changes in the framework of one’s life seem to be for the worse.”

“Then let it be no,” he answered, though not again endeavouring for freedom, since he felt that one step in that direction would merely mean recapture.

“And yet,” she said, a sort of wistfulness that he too well knew coming into her hard light eyes, “the house is very silent; but for Jock it might be a house of the dead sometimes.”

“We are not very rowdy, I suppose,” he answered, following the ups and downs of her thought with a rueful gentleness.

“We are a dull couple,” she returned, veering{9} round instantly on the other tack; “unquestionably we are often dull—childless people must always be so—but if we admit this equivocal element into our lives, we may become something much worse than dull.”

“Then do not let us admit it.”

“On the other hand, there would to you at least be the undoubted advantage of the companionship of some one nearer your own age.”

He laughed softly, rallying her. “Felicity is foisting a young thing of five and thirty on us, then, is she?”

Camilla laughed also, a little unbending in her own grim way, but recapturing gravity and the argument almost instantaneously.

“Granting that she is eighteen or twenty in actual years, she is probably a hundred in experience of evil.”

“In short, you are afraid that she will take the bloom off our young innocence,” returned he, flying for refuge to irony, and resolutely leaving the room this time, followed by Jock, who, replete with tea, no longer saw any object in pretending that he liked his mistress best.{10}

CHAPTER II

“The last day, and almost the last hour! I am thoroughly sorry,” said Felicity, and she was nearly sure that she meant it.

“Sorry is a weak word to express what I feel!” is the heartfelt answer. “Where should I have been now, I should like to know, but for you and Mr. Glanville?”

“Where indeed!”

The speculation as to Bonnybell’s hypothetical whereabouts silenced both ejaculators for a moment or two, until a glance at the clock telling Mrs. Glanville that her typewriter would be back from luncheon in ten minutes, and that she herself would have to return to multifarious work in her business room after the same time limit, hurried her into new final tendernesses.

“You know how much I should have liked to keep you permanently.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course I do.”

Possibly the extreme fervour of this reassurance was due to a something, if faintly, yet uncomfortably self-suspicious, in the tone with which the hostess made a statement in whose truth that hostess yet almost believed.{11}

“We have not much time, alas!”—leaving a branch of the subject dimly felt to be a little ticklish with some alacrity—“and I want, before you go, to give you a tiny carte du pays; you may find it useful.”

“It will be adding an item to your long, long list of kindnesses.”

“In the first place, my sister-in-law is much older than my brother.”

The hearer, with the black hat and inky gloves of imminent departure upon head and hand, lifted a tiny face of wistful interest in this first recorded fact from the pouf at Felicity’s feet, upon which a slim body, limp with affection and regret, had thrown itself. She at once pensively commented upon it.

“If she makes up well, I dare say it does not show much.”

Mrs. Glanville broke into a horrified laugh. “Camilla make up! My dear child, wait till you see her.”

“I shall not have long to wait”—very lugubriously.

“Well, as you have not much time, I must hurry on. She is, as I say, much older than my brother.”

“Yes.”

“And she never could have been handsome.”

“Poor, poor fellow!” replied the girl, in a tone of the most good-hearted compassion. “But, no doubt, he has his consolations.”

Her hostess looked down upon the peculiarly innocent face at her knee with an expression{12} in which the proportion of amusement to aghastness was considerably less than it had been at some of her protégée’s utterances.

“Bonnybell,” she said, very gravely, “I really dare not ask what you mean!” Then reflecting that the few minutes left her would be scarcely long enough to correct a moral standpoint on which three months’ intercourse had effected so little real change, she hastened on. “Camilla is a right down good woman, but her manners leave something to be desired. In point of fact, she is a good deal soured—embittered is perhaps the better word—by having no children. Unluckily, she is one of those baby-maniacs, who never can reconcile themselves to being childless. I cannot personally understand the feeling; there seems to me something animal about it.”

“I am very fond of children,” replied Bonnybell, thoughtfully; “but when I marry, I shall have only two.”

“You will have what God pleases to send you, I suppose,” rejoined Mrs. Glanville, sharply.

The other lifted her dove’s eyes. “More than two are destructive to the appearance.”

The hostess gave a sort of gasp. Of course, considering all things, the poor young creature was not to be blamed; but would not she herself have done more wisely to have in some degree prepared Camilla for the contents of the singular parcel she was sending her? Did “gay as a lark” at all cover the area occupied by this remarkable young person?

“My dear child,” she said, in a tone largely{13} tinged with misgiving, “if you open the campaign at Stillington by remarks of that class, I shall have you back here in London by the first train to-morrow.”

“That will be clear gain, at all events.”

Mrs. Glanville did not assent.

“Camilla would be outraged at a girl of eighteen alluding to her future family at all; and if you made her the announcement that you have just made to me, I am convinced—yes, I am convinced—that she would take you by the shoulders and turn you out of the house!”

There was a minute’s pause, for Miss Ransome to assimilate this agreeable prophecy. Then she said in a voice of profound gloom—

“I believe that I shall spend my life in being turned neck and crop out of houses; and I shall never know what I have done!”

“You will, at all events, be able to give a good guess in this case,” rejoined the other.

“I shall be able to avoid saying that one particular thing,” returned Bonnybell, accepting her snub with the most perfect sweetness, but in a rather hopeless tone; “but I shall, no doubt, say hundreds of other things which I shall find out too late that a jeune fille ought not to have said. I have not the least idea what sort of things the right kind of jeune fille does say.”

This wonder was expressed with apparently such perfect good faith, and such deferential asking for light, that Felicity—never very hardhearted, and possessed, in this case, by some{14} slight inward compunction—abandoned her judicial attitude.

“Between ourselves,” she said, in a confidential tone, “there is very little that the jeune fille of to-day does not say; but Camilla is not of to-day.”

“And is he—Mr. Tancred—not of to-day either?”

Felicity thought a moment. “Edward? No, Edward is not of to-day either. Edward is of no particular day; if anything, he has strayed out of the Middle Ages.”

The phrase, as applied to the person in question, had no particular meaning; but Mrs. Glanville admired her brother, and it sounded picturesque.

“We shall make an odd jumble of periods between us!”—still more hopelessly than before. “Oh”—with a sudden burst of clinging affection—“oh, how I wish that Mr. Glanville had allowed you to keep me permanently, as you were so dear and kind as to want to do.”

Miss Ransome’s delicate black arm was flung across her protectress’s knee, and her head and attendant black feathers were flopped down upon it; but she lifted her face soon enough to notice the expression that her aspiration had called up in Felicity’s countenance.

Mrs. Glanville had quite as soon that her young friend’s eyes had remained hidden, being conscious of a slight shade of confusion on the dial-plate of her own emotions, and a qualmy question flashed across her brain as to whether it was possible that in the very tail of the{15} despairing orbs lifted to her, full of such unmistakable sorrowful gratitude, a tiny spark of contradictory mischief and mirth could lurk. Was it conceivable that the child—she was a terribly sharp child, and her vicious upbringing had made her still sharper—could have pricked the bladder, and detected the pious fraud of Tom’s supposed eagerness for her departure?

“You must not run away with the idea,” she said, with more flurry than approved itself to her own judgment—“you must not run away with the idea that Tom dislikes you.”

“Oh no, I am sure he does not”—with courteous hurry.

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. “Will you mind telling me what you have said about me?”

Misgiving as to the height of the moral plane upon which Miss Ransome was warranted to move so obviously dictated this inquiry that Felicity laughed a little.

“I have said that you are as gay as a lark,{16} to begin with. By-the-by”—with an air of bethinking herself—“if I were you I would not be too gay, just at first. Of course, I thoroughly understand that it argues no want of feeling on your part, and that the rebound is perfectly natural; but Camilla is very conventional.”

Miss Ransome bowed her head submissively under the blast of these somewhat contradictory counsels.