Ithad been hard work pulling the punt across from Bruff to Lismoyle with two well-grown young women sitting in the stern; it had been a hot walk up from the landing-place to the church, but worse than these, transcendently worse, in that it involved the suffering of the mind as well as the body, was the choir practice. Christopher’s long nose drooped despondingly over his Irish church hymnal, and his long back had a disconsolate hoop in it as he leaned it against the wall in his place in the backmost row of the choir benches. The chants had been long and wearisome, and the hymns were proving themselves equally enduring. Christopher was not eminently musical or conspicuously religious, and he regarded with a kind of dismal respect and surprise the fervour in Pamela’s pure profile as she turned to Mrs. Gascogne and suggested that the hymn they had just gone through twice should be sung over again. He supposed it was because she had High Church tendencies that she was able to stand this sort of thing, and his mind drifted into abstract speculations as to how people could be as good as Pamela was and live.
In the interval before the last hymn he derived a temporary solace from finding his own name inscribed in dull red characters in the leaf of his hymn-book, with, underneath in the same colour, the fateful inscription, “Written in blood by Garrett Dysart.” The thought of his younger brother utilising pleasantly a cut finger and the long minutes of the archdeacon’s sermon, had for the moment inspired Christopher with a sympathetic amusement, but he had relapsed into his pristine gloom. He knew the hymn perfectly well by this time, and his inoffensive tenor joined mechanically with the other voices, while his eyes roamed idly over the two rows of people in front of him. There was nothing suggestive of ethereal devotion about Pamela’s neighbours.Miss Mullen’s heaving shoulders and extended jaw spoke of nothing but her determination to out-scream everyone else; Miss Hope-Drummond and the curate, on the bench in front of him, were singing primly out of the same hymn-book, the curate obviously frightened, Miss Hope-Drummond as obviously disgusted. The Misses Beattie were furtively eyeing Miss Hope-Drummond’s costume; Miss Kathleen Baker was openly eyeing the curate, whose hymn-book she had been wont to share at happier choir practices, and Miss Fitzpatrick, seated at the end of the row, was watching from the gallery window with unaffected interest the progress of the usual weekly hostilities between Pamela’s dachshund and the sexton’s cat, and was not even pretending to occupy herself with the business in hand. Christopher’s eyes rested on her appraisingly, with the minute observation of short sight, fortified by an eyeglass, and was aware of a small head with a fluffy halo of conventionally golden hair, a straight and slender neck, and an appleblossom curve of cheek; he found himself wishing that she would turn a little further round.
The hymn had seven verses, and Pamela and Mrs. Gascogne were going inexorably through them all; the school-master and schoolmistress, an estimable couple, sole prop of the choir on wet Sundays, were braying brazenly beside him, and this was only the second hymn. Christopher’s D sharp melted into a yawn, and before he could screen it with his hymn-book, Miss Fitzpatrick looked round and caught him in the act. A suppressed giggle and a quick lift of the eyebrows instantly conveyed to him that his sentiments were comprehended and sympathised with, and he as instantly was conscious that Miss Mullen was following the direction of her niece’s eye. Lady Dysart’s children did not share her taste for Miss Mullen; Christopher vaguely felt some offensive flavour in the sharp smiling glance in which she included him and Francie, and an unexplainable sequence of thought made him suddenly decide that her niece was as second-rate as might have been expected.
Never had the choir dragged so hopelessly; never had Mrs. Gascogne and Pamela compelled their victims to deal with so many and difficult tunes, and never at any previous choir practice had Christopher registered so serious a vowthat under no pretext whatever should Pamela entice him there again. They were all sitting down now, while the leaders consulted together about the Kyrie, and the gallery cushions slowly turned to stone in their well-remembered manner. Christopher’s ideas of church-going were inseparably bound up with those old gallery cushions. He had sat upon them ever since, as a small boy, he had chirped a treble beside his governess, and he knew every knob in their anatomy. There is something blighting to the devotional tendencies in the atmosphere of a gallery. He had often formulated this theory for his own exculpation, lying flat on his back in a punt in some shady backwater, with the Oxford church bells reminding him reproachfully of Lismoyle Sundays, and of Pamela,—the faithful, conscientious Pamela,—whipping up the pony to get to church before the bell stopped. Now, after a couple of months’ renewed acquaintance with the choir, the theory had hardened into a tedious truism, and when at last Christopher’s long legs were free to carry him down the steep stairs, the malign influence of the gallery had brought their owner to the verge of free thought.
He did not know how it had happened or by whose disposition of the forces it had been brought about, but when Miss Mullen’s tea-party detached itself from the other members of the choir at the churchyard gate, Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond were walking on either side of their hostess, and he was behind with Miss Fitzpatrick.
“You don’t appear very fond of hymns, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie at once, in the pert Dublin accent that, rightly or wrongly, gives the idea of familiarity.
“People aren’t supposed to look about them in church,” replied Christopher with the peculiar suavity which, combined with his disconcerting infirmity of pausing before he spoke, had often baffled the young ladies of Barbadoes, and had acquired for him the reputation, perhaps not wholly undeserved, of being a prig.
“Oh, I daresay!” said Francie, “I suppose that’s why you sit in the back seat, that no one’ll see you doing it!”
There was a directness about this that Lismoyle would not have ventured on, and Christopher looked down at his companion with an increase of interest.
“No; I sit there because I can go to sleep.”
“Well, and do you? and who do you get to wake you?”—her quick voice treading sharply on the heels of his quiet one. “I used always to have to sit beside Uncle Robert in church to pinch him at the end of the sermon.”
“Ifind it very hard to wake at the end of the sermon too,” remarked Christopher, with an experimental curiosity to see what Miss Mullen’s unexpected cousin would say next.
“Do y’ indeed?” said Francie, flashing a look at him of instant comprehension and completesang froid. “I’ll lend the schoolmistress a hat-pin if you like! What on earth makes men so sleepy in church I don’t know,” she continued; “at our church in Dublin I used to be looking at them. All the gentlemen sit in the corner seat next the aisle, because they’re the most comfortable, y’ know, and from the minute the clergyman gives out the text—” she made a little gesture with her hand, showing thereby that half the buttons were off her glove—“they’re snoring!”
How young she was, and how pretty, and how inexpressibly vulgar! Christopher thought all these things in turn, while he did what in him lay to continue the conversation in the manner expected of him. The effort was perhaps not very successful, as, after a few minutes, it was evident that Francie was losing her first freedom of discourse, and was casting about for topics more appropriate to what she had heard of Mr. Dysart’s mental and literary standard.
“I hear you’re a great photographer, Mr. Dysart,” she began. “Miss Mullen says you promised to take a picture of her and her cats, and she was telling me to remind you of it. Isn’t it awfully clever of you to be able to do it?”
To this form of question reply is difficult, especially when it is put with all the good faith of complete ignorance. Christopher evaded the imbecilities of direct response.
“I shall think myself awfully clever if I photograph the cats,” he said.
“Clever!” she caught him up with a little shriek of laughter. “I can tell you you’ll want to be clever! Are you able to photograph up the chimney or under Norry’s bed? for that’s where they always run when a man comesinto the house, and if you try to stop them they’d claw the face off you! Oh, they’re terrors!”
“It’s very good of you to tell me all this in time,” Christopher said, with a rather absent laugh. He was listening to Miss Mullen’s voice, and realising, for the first time, what it would be to live under the same roof with her and her cats; and yet this girl seemed quite light-hearted and happy. “Perhaps, on the whole, I’d better stay away?” he said, looking at her, and feeling in the sudden causeless way in which often the soundest conclusions are arrived at, how vast was the chasm between her ideal of life and his own, and linking with the feeling a pity that would have been self-sufficient if it had not also been perfectly simple.
“Ah! don’t say you won’t come and take the cats!” Francie exclaimed.
They reached the Tally Ho gate as she spoke, and the others were only a step or two in front of them. Charlotte looked over her shoulder with a benign smile.
“What’s this I hear about taking my cats?” she said jovially. “You’re welcome to everything in my house, Mr. Dysart, but I’ll set the police on you if you take my poor cats!”
“Oh, but I assure you—”
“He’s only going to photo them,” said Christopher and Francie together.
“Do you hear them, Miss Dysart?” continued Charlotte, fumbling for her latch key, “conspiring together to rob a poor lone woman of her only live stock!”
She opened the door, and as her visitors entered the hall they caught a glance of Susan’s large, stern countenance regarding them with concentrated suspicion through the rails of the staircase.
“My beauty-boy!” shouted his mistress, as he vanished upstairs. “Steal him if you can, Mr. Dysart!”
Miss Hope-Drummond looked rather more uninterested than is usual in polite society. When she had left the hammock, slung in the shade beside the tennis-ground at Bruff, it had not been to share Mr. Corkran’s hymn-book; still less had it been to walk from the church to Tally Ho between Pamela and a woman whom, from having regardedas merelyoutréeand incomprehensible, she had now come to look upon as rather impertinent. Irish society was intolerably mixed, she decided, as she sniffed the various odours of the Tally Ho hall, and, with some sub-connection of ideas, made up her mind that photography was a detestable and silly pursuit for men. While these thoughts were passing beneath her accurately curled fringe, Miss Mullen opened the drawing-room door, and, as they walked in, a short young man in light grey clothes arose from the most comfortable chair to greet them.
There was surprise and disfavour in Miss Mullen’s eye as she extended her hand to him.
“This is an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Hawkins,” she said.
“Yes,” answered Mr. Hawkins cheerfully, taking the hand and doing his best to shake it at the height prescribed by existing fashion, “I thought it would be; Miss Fitzpatrick asked me to come in this afternoon; didn’t you?” addressing himself to Francie. “I got rather a nasty jar when I heard you were all out, but I thought I’d wait for a bit. I knew Miss Dysart always gives ’em fits at the choir practice. All the same, you know, I should have begun to eat the cake if you hadn’t come in.”
The round table in the middle of the room was spread, in Louisa’s accustomed fashion, as if for breakfast, and in the centre was placed a cake, coldly decked in the silver paper trappings that it had long worn in the grocer’s window.
“’Twas well for you you didn’t!” said Francie, with, as it seemed to Christopher, a most familiar and challenging laugh.
“Why?” inquired Hawkins, looking at her with a responsive eye. “What would you have done?”
“Plenty,” returned Francie unhesitatingly; “enough to make you sorry anyway!”
Mr. Hawkins looked delighted, and was opening his mouth for a suitable rejoinder, when Miss Mullen struck in sharply:
“Francie, go tell Louisa that I suppose she expects us to stir our tea with our fingers, for there’s not a spoon on the table.”
“Oh, let me go,” said Hawkins, springing to open the door; “I know Louisa; she was very kind to me just now. She hunted all the cats out of the room.” Francie was already in the hall, and he followed her.
The search for Louisa was lengthy, involving much calling for her by Francie, with falsetto imitations by Mr. Hawkins, and finally a pause, during which it might be presumed that the pantry was being explored. Pamela brought her chair nearer to Miss Mullen, who had begun wrathfully to stir her tea with the sugar-tongs, and entered upon a soothing line of questions as to the health and number of the cats; and Christopher, having cut the grocer’s cake, and found that it was the usual conglomerate of tallow, saw-dust, bad eggs, and gravel, devoted himself to thick bread and butter, and to conversation with Miss Hope-Drummond. The period of second cups was approaching, when laughter, and a jingle of falling silver in the hall, told that the search for Louisa was concluded, and Francie and Mr. Hawkins re-entered the drawing-room, the latter endeavouring, not unsuccessfully, to play the bones with four of Charlotte’s best electro-plated teaspoons, while his brown boots moved in the furtive rhythm of an imaginary break-down. Miss Mullen did not even raise her eyes, and Christopher and Miss Hope-Drummond continued their conversation unmoved; only Pamela acknowledged the histrionic intention with a sympathetic but nervous smile. Pamela’s finger was always instinctively on the pulse of the person to whom she was talking, and she knew better than either Francie or Hawkins that they were in disgrace.
“I’d be obliged to you for those teaspoons, Mr. Hawkins, when you’ve quite done with them,” said Charlotte, with an ugly look at the chief offender’s self-satisfied countenance; “it’s a good thing no one except myself takes sugar in their tea.”
“We couldn’t help it,” replied Mr. Hawkins, unabashed; “Louisa was out for a walk with her young man, and Miss Fitzpatrick and I had to polish up the teaspoons ourselves.”
Charlotte received this explanation and the teaspoons in silence as she poured out the delinquents’ tea; there were moments when she permitted herself the satisfaction ofshowing disapproval if she felt it. Francie accepted her cousin’s displeasure philosophically, only betraying her sense of the situation by the expressive eye which she turned towards her companion in disgrace over the rim of her tea-cup. But Mr. Hawkins rose to the occasion. He gulped his tepid and bitter cup of tea with every appearance of enjoyment, and having arranged his small moustache with a silk handkerchief, addressed himself undauntedly to Miss Mullen.
“Do you know, I don’t believe you have ever been out in our tea-kettle, Miss Mullen. Captain Cursiter and I are feeling very hurt about it.”
“If you mean by ‘tea-kettle’ that steamboat thing that I’ve seen going about the lake,” replied Charlotte, making an effort to resume her first attitude of suave and unruffled hospitality, and at the same time to administer needed correction to Mr. Hawkins, “I certainly have not. I have always been taught that it was manners to wait till you’re asked.”
“I quite agree with you, Miss Mullen,” struck in Pamela; “we also thought that for a long time, but we had to give it up in the end and ask ourselves! You are much more honoured than we were.”
“Oh, I say, Miss Dysart, you know it was only our grovelling humility,” expostulated Hawkins, “and you always said it dirtied your frock and spoiled the poetry of the lake. You quite put us off taking anybody out. But we’ve pulled ourselves together now, Miss Mullen, and if you and Miss Fitzpatrick will fix an afternoon to go down the lake, perhaps if Miss Dysart says she’s sorry we’ll let her come too, and even, if she’s very good, bring whoever she likes with her.”
Mr. Hawkins’ manner towards ladies had precisely that tone of self-complacent gallantry that Lady Dysart felt to be so signally lacking in her own son, and it was not without its effect even upon Charlotte. It is possible had she been aware that this special compliment to her had been arranged during the polishing of the teaspoons, it might have lost some of its value; but the thought of steaming forth with the Bruff party and “th’ officers,” under the very noses of the Lismoyle matrons, was the only point of view that presented itself to her.
“Well, I’ll give you no answer till I get Mr. Dysart’s opinion. He’s the only one of you that knows the lake,” she said more graciously. “Ifyousay the steamboat is safe, Mr. Dysart, and you’ll come and see we’re not drowned by these harum-scarum soldiers, I’ve no objection to going.”
Further discussion was interrupted by a rush and a scurry on the gravel of the garden path, and a flying ball of fur dashed up the outside of the window, the upper half of which was open, and suddenly realising its safety, poised itself on the sash, and crooned and spat with a collected fury at Mr. Hawkins’ bull terrier, who leaped unavailingly below.
“Oh! me poor darling Bruffy!” screamed Miss Mullen, springing up and upsetting her cup of tea; “she’ll be killed! Call off your dog, Mr. Hawkins!”
As if in answer to her call, a tall figure darkened the window, and Mr. Lambert pushed Mrs. Bruff into the room with the handle of his walking-stick.
“Hullo, Charlotte! Isn’t that Hawkins’ dog?” he began, putting his head in at the window; then, with a sudden change of manner as he caught sight of Miss Mullen’s guests, “oh—I had no idea you had anyone here,” he said, taking off his hat to as much of Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond as was not hidden by Charlotte’s bulky person, “I only thought I’d call round and see if Francie would like to come out for a row before dinner.”
Washerwomendo not, as a rule, assimilate the principles of their trade. In Lismoyle, the row of cottages most affected by ladies of that profession was, indeed, planted by the side of the lake, but except in winter, when the floods sent a muddy wash in at the kitchen doors of Ferry Row, the customers’ linen alone had any experience of its waters. The clouds of steam from the cauldrons of boiling clothes ascended from morning till night, and hung in beads upon the sooty cobwebs that draped the rafters; the food and wearing apparel of the laundresses and their vast familiesmingled horribly with their professional apparatus, and, outside in the road, the filthy children played among puddles that stagnated under an iridescent scum of soap-suds. A narrow strip of goose-nibbled grass divided the road from the lake shore, and at almost any hour of the day there might be seen a slatternly woman or two kneeling by the water’s edge, pounding the wet linen on a rock with a flat wooden weapon, according to the immemorial custom of their savage class.
The Row ended at the ferry pier, and perhaps one reason for the absence of self-respect in the appearance of its inhabitants lay in the fact that the only passers-by were the country people on their way to the ferry, which here, where the lake narrowed to something less than a mile, was the route to the Lismoyle market generally used by the dwellers on the opposite side. The coming of a donkey-cart down the Row was an event to be celebrated with hooting and stone-throwing by the children, and, therefore, it can be understood that when, on a certain still, sleepy afternoon Miss Mullen drove slowly in her phaeton along the line of houses, she created nearly as great a sensation as she would have made in Piccadilly.
Miss Mullen had one or two sources of income which few people knew of, and about which, with all her loud candour, she did not enlighten even her most intimate friends. Even Mr. Lambert might have been surprised to know that two or three householders in Ferry Row paid rent to her, and that others of them had money dealings with her of a complicated kind, not easy to describe, but simple enough to the strong financial intellect of his predecessor’s daughter. No account books were taken with her on these occasions. She and her clients were equally equipped with the absolutely accurate business memory of the Irish peasant, a memory that in few cases survives education, but, where it exists, may be relied upon more than all the generations of ledgers and account books.
Charlotte’s visits to Ferry Row were usually made on foot, and were of long duration, but her business on this afternoon was of a trivial character, consisting merely in leaving a parcel at the house of Dinny Lydon, the tailor, and of convincing her washerwoman of iniquity in a mannerthat brought every other washerwoman to her door, and made each offer up thanks to her most favoured saint that she was not employed by Miss Mullen.
The long phaeton was at last turned, with draggings at the horse’s mouth and grindings of the fore-carriage; the children took their last stare, and one or two ladies whose payments were in arrear emerged from their back gardens and returned to their washing-tubs. If they flattered themselves that they had been forgotten, they were mistaken; Charlotte had given a glance of grim amusement at the deserted washing-tubs, and as her old phaeton rumbled slowly out of Ferry Row, she was computing the number of customers, and the consequent approximate income of each defaulter.
To the deep and plainly expressed chagrin of the black horse, he was not allowed to turn in at the gate of Tally Ho, but was urged along the road which led to Rosemount. There again he made a protest, but, yielding to the weighty arguments of Charlotte’s whip, he fell into his usual melancholy jog, and took the turn to Gurthnamuckla with dull resignation. Once steered into that lonely road, Charlotte let him go at his own pace, and sat passive, her mouth tightly closed, and her eyes blinking quickly as she looked straight ahead of her with a slight furrow of concentration on her low forehead. She had the unusual gift of thinking out in advance her line of conversation in an interview, and, which is even less usual, she had the power of keeping to it. By sheer strength of will she could force her plan of action upon other people, as a conjurer forces a card, till they came to believe it was of their own choosing; she had done it so often that she was now confident of her skill, and she quite understood the inevitable advantage that a fixed scheme of any sort has over indefinite opposition. When the clump of trees round Gurthnamuckla rose into view, Charlotte had determined her order of battle, and was free to give her attention to outward circumstances. It was a long time since she had been out to Miss Duffy’s farm, and as the stony country began to open its arms to the rich, sweet pastures, an often repressed desire asserted itself, and Charlotte heaved a sigh that was as romantic in its way as if she had been sweet and twenty, instead of tough and forty.
Julia Duffy did not come out to meet her visitor, and when Charlotte walked into the kitchen, she found that the mistress of the house was absent, and that three old women were squatted on the floor in front of the fire, smoking short clay pipes, and holding converse in Irish that was punctuated with loud sniffs and coughs. At sight of the visitor the pipes vanished in the twinkling of an eye, and one of the women scrambled to her feet.
“Why, Mary Holloran, what brings you here?” said Charlotte, recognising the woman who lived in the Rosemount gate lodge.
“It was a sore leg I have, yer honour, miss,” whined Mary Holloran; “it’s running with me now these three weeks, and I come to thry would Miss Duffy give me a bit o’ a plashther.”
“Take care it doesn’t run away with you altogether,” replied Charlotte facetiously; “and where’s Miss Duffy herself?”
“She’s sick, the craythure,” said one of the other women, who, having found and dusted a chair, now offered it to Miss Mullen; “she have a wakeness like in her head, and an impression on her heart, and Billy Grainy came afther Peggy Roche here, the way she’d mind her.”
Peggy Roche groaned slightly, and stirred a pot of smutty gruel with an air of authority.
“Could I see her, d’ye think?” asked Charlotte, sitting down and looking about her with sharp appreciation of the substantial excellence of the smoke-blackened walls and grimy woodwork. “There wouldn’t be a better kitchen in the country,” she thought, “if it was properly done up.”
“Ye can, asthore, ye can go up,” replied Peggy Roche, “but wait a while till I have the sup o’ grool hated, and maybe yerself’ll take it up to herself.”
“Is she eating nothing but that?” asked Charlotte, viewing the pasty compound with disgust.
“Faith, ’tis hardly she’ll ate that itself.” Peggy Roche; rose as she spoke, and, going to the dresser, returned with a black bottle. “As for a bit o’ bread, or a pratie, or the like o’ that, she couldn’t use it, nor let it past her shest; with respects to ye, as soon as she’d have it shwallied it’d come up as simple and as pleashant as it wint down.” She liftedthe little three-legged pot off its heap of hot embers, and then took the cork out of the black bottle with nimble, dirty fingers.
“What in the name of goodness is that ye have there?” demanded Charlotte hastily.
Mrs. Roche looked somewhat confused, and murmured something about “a weeshy suppeen o’ shperits to wet the grool.”
Charlotte snatched the bottle from her, and smelt it.
“Faugh!” she said, with a guttural at the end of the word that no Saxon gullet could hope to produce; “it’s potheen! that’s what it is, and mighty bad potheen too. D’ye want to poison the woman?”
A loud chorus of repudiation arose from the sick-nurse and her friends.
“As for you, Peggy Roche, you’re not fit to tend a pig, let alone a Christian. You’d murder this poor woman with your filthy fresh potheen, and when your own son was dying, you begrudged him the drop of spirits that’d have kept the life in him.”
Peggy flung up her arms with a protesting howl.
“May God forgive ye that word, Miss Charlotte! If ’twas the blood of me arrm, I didn’t begridge it to him; the Lord have mercy on him—”
“Amen! amen! You would not, asthore,” groaned the other women.
“—but doesn’t the world know its mortial sin for a poor craythur to go into th’ other world with the smell of dhrink on his breath!”
“It’s mortal sin to be a fool,” replied Miss Mullen, whose medical skill had often been baffled by such winds of doctrine; “here, give me the gruel. I’ll go give it to the woman before you have her murdered.” She deftly emptied the pot of gruel into a bowl, and, taking the spoon out of the old woman’s hand, she started on her errand of mercy.
The stairs were just outside the door, and making their dark and perilous ascent in safety, she stood still in a low passage into which two or three other doors opened. She knocked at the first of these, and, receiving no answer, turned the handle quietly and looked in. There was no furniture in it except a broken wooden bedstead; innumerable flies buzzed on the closed window, and in the slant of sunlight that fell through the dim panes was a box from which a turkey reared its red throat, and regarded her with a suspicion born, like her chickens, of long hatching. Charlotte closed the door and noiselessly opened the next. There was nothing in the room, which was of the ordinary low-ceiled cottage type, and after a calculating look at the broken flooring and the tattered wall-paper, she went quietly out into the passage again. “Good servants’ room,” she said to herself, “but if she’s here much longer it’ll be past praying for.”
If she had been in any doubt as to Miss Duffy’s whereabouts, a voice from the room at the end of the little passage now settled the matter. “Is that Peggy?” it called.
Charlotte pushed boldly into the room with the bowl of gruel.
“No, Miss Duffy, me poor old friend, it’s me, Charlotte Mullen,” she said in her most cordial voice; “they told me below you were ill, but I thought you’d see me, and I brought your gruel up in my hand. I hope you’ll like it none the less for that!”
The invalid turned her night-capped head round from the wall and looked at her visitor with astonished, bloodshot eyes. Her hatchety face was very yellow, her long nose was rather red, and her black hair thrust itself out round the soiled frill of her night-cap in dingy wisps.
“You’re welcome, Miss Mullen,” she said with a pitiable attempt at dignity; “won’t you take a cheer?”
“Not till I’ve seen you take this,” replied Charlotte, handing her the bowl of gruel with even broaderbonhomiethan before.
Julia Duffy reluctantly sat up among her blankets, conscious almost to agony of the squalor of all her surroundings, conscious even that the blankets were of the homespun, madder-dyed flannel such as the poor people use, and taking the gruel, she began to eat it in silence. She tried to prop herself in this emergency with the recollection that Charlotte Mullen’s grandfather drank her grandfather’s port wine under this very roof, and that it was by no fault of hers that she had sunk while Charlotte had risen; but the wornout boots that lay on the floor where she had thrown them off, and the rags stuffed into the broken panes in the window, were facts that crowded out all consolation from bygone glories.
“Well, Miss Duffy,” said Charlotte, drawing up a chair to the bedside, and looking at her hostess with a critical eye, “I’m sorry to see you so sick; when Billy Grainy left the milk last night he told Norry you were laid up in bed, and I thought I’d come over and see if there was anything I could do for you.”
“Thank ye, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia stiffly, sipping the nauseous gruel with ladylike decorum, “I have all I require here.”
“Well, ye know, Miss Duffy, I wanted to see how you are,” said Charlotte, slightly varying her attack; “I’m a bit of a doctor, like yourself. Peggy Roche below told me you had what she called ‘an impression on the heart,’ but it looks to me more like a touch of liver.”
The invalid does not exist who can resist a discussion of symptoms, and Miss Duffy’s hauteur slowly thawed before Charlotte’s intelligent and intimate questions. In a very short time Miss Mullen had felt her pulse, inspected her tongue, promised to send her a bottle of unfailing efficacy, and delivered an exordium on the nature and treatment of her complaint.
“But in deed and in truth,” she wound up, “if you want my opinion, I’ll tell you frankly that what ails you is you’re just rotting away with the damp and loneliness of this place. I declare that sometimes when I’m lying awake in my bed at nights, I’ve thought of you out here by yourself, without an earthly creature near you if you got sick, and wondered at you. Why, my heavenly powers! ye might die a hundred deaths before anyone would know it!”
Miss Duffy picked up a corner of the sheet and wiped the gruel from her thin lips.
“If it comes to that, Miss Mullen,” she said with some resumption of her earlier manner, “if I’m for dying I’d as soon die by myself as in company; and as for damp, I thank God this house was built by them that didn’t spare money on it, and it’s as dry this minyute as what it was forty years ago.”
“What! Do you tell me the roof’s sound?” exclaimed Charlotte with genuine interest.
“I have never examined it, Miss Mullen,” replied Julia coldly, “but it keeps the rain out, and I consider that suffeecient.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s not a word to be said against the house,” Charlotte made hasty reparation; “but, indeed, Miss Duffy, I say—and I’ve heard more than myself say the same thing—that a delicate woman like you has no business to live alone so far from help. The poor Archdeacon frets about it, I can tell ye. I believe he thinks Father Heffernan’ll be raking ye into his fold! And I can tell ye,” concluded Charlotte, with what she felt to be a certain rough pathos, “there’s plenty in Lismoyle would be sorry to see your father’s daughter die with the wafer in her mouth!”
“I had no idea the people in Lismoyle were so anxious about me and my affairs,” said Miss Duffy. “They’re very kind, but I’m able to look afther my soul without their help.”
“Well, of course, everyone’s soul is their own affair; but, ye know, when no one ever sees ye in your own parish church—well, right or wrong, there are plenty of fools to gab about it.”
The dark bags of skin under Julia Duffy’s eyes became slowly red, a signal that this thrust had gone home. She did not answer, and her visitor rose, and moving towards the hermetically sealed window, looked out across the lawn over Julia’s domain. Her roundest and weightiest stone was still in her sling, while her eye ran over the grazing cattle in the fields.
“Is it true what I hear, that Peter Joyce has your grazing this year?” she said casually.
“It is quite true,” answered Miss Duffy, a little defiantly. A liver attack does not pre-dispose its victims to answer in a Christian spirit questions that are felt to be impertinent.
“Well,” returned Charlotte, still looking out of the window, with her hands deep in the pockets of her black alpaca coat, “I’m sorry for it.”
“Why so?”
Julia’s voice had a sharpness that was pleasant to Miss Mullen’s ear.
“I can’t well explain the matter to ye now,” Charlotte said, turning round and looking portentously upon the sick woman, “but I have it from a sure hand that Peter Joyce is bankrupt, and will be in the courts before the year is out.”
When, a short time afterwards, Julia Duffy lay back among her madder blankets and heard the last sound of Miss Mullen’s phaeton wheels die away along the lake road, she felt that the visit had at least provided her with subject for meditation.
Mr. Roderick Lambert’sstudy window gave upon the flower garden, and consequently the high road also came within the sphere of his observations. He had been sitting at his writing-table, since luncheon-time, dealing with a variety of business, and seldom lifting his glossy black head except when some sound in the road attracted his attention. It was not his custom to work after a solid luncheon on a close afternoon, nor was it by any means becoming to his complexion when he did so; but the second post had brought letters of an unpleasant character that required immediate attention, and the flush on his face was not wholly due to hot beef-steak pie and sherry. It was not only that several of Sir Benjamin’s tenants had attended a Land League meeting the Sunday before, and that their religious director had written to inform him that they had there pledged themselves to the Plan of Campaign. That was annoying, but as the May rents were in he had no objection to their amusing themselves as they pleased during the summer; in fact, from a point of view on which Mr. Lambert dwelt as little as possible even in his own mind, a certain amount of nominal disturbance among the tenants might not come amiss. The thing that was really vexing was the crass obstinacy of his wife’s trustees, who had acquainted him with the fact that they were unable to comply with her wish that some of her capital should be sold out.
It is probably hardly necessary to say that the worthy turkey hen had expressed no such desire. A feeble, “to be sure, Roderick dear; I daresay it’d be the best thing to do;but you know I don’t understand such things,” had been her share of the transaction, and Mr. Lambert knew that the refusal of her trustees to make the desired concession would not ruffle so much as a feather; but he wished he could be as sure of the equanimity of his coachbuilder, one of whose numerous demands for payment was lying upon the table in front of him; while others, dating back five years to the period of his marriage, lurked in the pigeon-holes of his writing-table.
Mr. Lambert, like other young gentlemen of fashion, but not of fortune, had thought that when he married a well-to-do widow, he ought to prove his power of adjusting himself to circumstances by expending her ready money in as distinguished a manner as possible. The end of the ready money had come in an absurdly short time, and, paradoxical as it may seem, it had during its brief life raised a flourishing following of bills which had in the past spring given Mr. Lambert far more trouble than he felt them to be worth, and though he had stopped the mouths of some of the more rapacious of his creditors, he had done so with extreme difficulty and at a cost that made him tremble. It was especially provoking that the coachbuilder should have threatened legal proceedings about that bill just now, when, in addition to other complications, he happened to have lost more money at the Galway races than he cared to think about, certainly more than he wished his wife and her relations to know of.
Early in the afternoon he had, with an unregarding eye, seen Charlotte drive by on her way to Gurthnamuckla; but after a couple of hours of gloomy calculation and letter-writing, the realisation that Miss Mullen was not at her house awoke in him, coupled with the idea that a little fresh air would do him good. He went out of the house, some unconfessed purpose quickening his step. He hesitated at the gate while it expanded into determination, and then he hailed his wife, whose poppy-decked garden-hat was painfully visible above the magenta blossoms of a rhododendron bush.
“Lucy! I wouldn’t be surprised if I fetched Francie Fitzpatrick over for tea. She’s by herself at Tally Ho. I saw Charlotte drive by without her a little while ago.”
When he reached Tally Ho he found the gate open, an offence always visited with extremest penalties by Miss Mullen, and as he walked up the drive he noticed that, besides the broad wheel-tracks of the phaeton, there were several thin and devious ones, at some places interrupted by footmarks and a general appearance of a scuffle; at another heading into a lilac bush with apparent precipitancy, and at the hall-door circling endlessly and crookedly with several excursions on to the newly-mown plot of grass.
“I wonder what perambulator has been running amuck in here? Charlotte will make it hot for them, whoever they were,” thought Lambert, as he stood waiting for the door to be opened, and watched through the glass of the porch-door two sleek tortoise-shell cats lapping a saucer of yellow cream in a corner of the hall. “By Jove! how snug she is in this little place. She must have a pot of money put by; more than she’d ever own up to, I’ll engage!”
At this juncture the door opened, and he was confronted by Norry the Boat, with sleeves rolled above her brown elbows, and stockinged feet untrammelled by boots.
“There’s noan of them within,” she announced before he had time to speak. “Miss Charlotte’s gone dhriving to Gurthnamuckla, and Miss Francie went out a while ago.”
“Which way did she go, d’ye know?”
“Musha, faith! I donotknow what way did she go,” replied Norry, her usual asperity heightened by a recent chase of Susan, who had fled to the roof of the turf-house with a mackerel snatched from the kitchen-table. “I have plinty to do besides running afther her. I heard her spakin’ to one outside in the avenue, and with that she clapped the hall-doore afther her and she didn’t come in since.”
Lambert thought it wiser not to venture on the suggestion that Louisa might be better informed, and walked away down the avenue trying hard not to admit to himself his disappointment.
He turned towards home again in an objectless way, thoroughly thwarted, and dismally conscious that the afternoon contained for him only the prospect of having tea with his wife and finishing his letters afterwards. His step became slower and slower as he approached his own entrance gates, and he looked at his watch.
“Confound it! it’s only half-past four. I can’t go in yet;” then, a new idea striking him, “perhaps she went out to meet Charlotte. I declare I might as well go a bit down the road and see if they’re coming back yet.”
He walked for at least half a mile under the trees, whose young June leaves had already a dissipated powdering of white limestone dust, without meeting anything except a donkey with a pair of creaking panniers on its back, walking alone and discreetly at its own side of the road, as well aware as Mr. Lambert that its owner was dallying with a quart of porter at a roadside public house a mile away. The turn to Gurthnamuckla was not far off when the distant rumble of wheels became at last audible; Lambert had only time to remember angrily that, as the Tally Ho phaeton had but two seats, he had had his walk for nothing, when the bowed head and long melancholy face of the black horse came in sight, and he became aware that Charlotte was without a companion.
Her face had more colour in it than usual as she pulled up beside him, perhaps from the heat of the afternoon and the no small exertion of flogging her steed, and her manner when she spoke was neither bluff nor hearty, but approximated more nearly to that of ordinary womankind than was its wont. Mr. Lambert noticed none of these things; and, being a person whose breeding was not always equal to annoying emergencies, he did not trouble himself to take off his hat or smile appropriately as Charlotte said—
“Well, Roddy, I’d as soon expect to see your two horses sitting in the dog-cart driving you as to see you as far from home as this on your own legs. Where are you off to?”
“I was taking a stroll out to meet you, and ask you to come back and have tea with Lucy,” replied Mr. Lambert, recognising the decree of fate with a singularly bad grace. “I went down to Tally Ho to ask you, and Norry told me you had gone to Gurthnamuckla.”
“Did you see Francie there?” said Charlotte quickly.
“No; I believe she was out somewhere.”
“Well, you were a very good man to take so much troubleabout us,” she replied, looking at him with an expression that softened the lines of her face in a surprising way. “Are you too proud to have a lift home now?”
“Thank you, I’d sooner walk—and—” casting about for an excuse—“you mightn’t like the smell of my cigar under your nose.”
“Come, now, Roddy,” exclaimed Charlotte, “you ought to know me better than that! Don’t you remember how you used to sit smoking beside me in the office when I was helping you to do your work? In fact, I wouldn’t say that there hadn’t been an occasion when I was guilty of a cigarette in your company myself!”
She turned her eyes towards him, and the provocative look in them came as instinctively and as straight as ever it did from Francie’s, or as ever it has been projected from the curbed heart of woman. But, unfair as it may be, it is certain that if Lambert had seen it, he would not have been attracted by it. He, however, did not look up.
“Well, if you don’t mind going slow, I’ll walk beside you,” he said, ignoring the reminiscence. “I want to know whether you did better business with Julia Duffy than I did last week.”
The soft look was gone in a moment from Charlotte’s face.
“I couldn’t get much satisfaction out of her,” she replied; “but I think I left a thorn in her pillow when I told her Peter Joyce was bankrupt.”
“I’ll take my oath you did,” said Lambert, with a short laugh. “I declare I’d be sorry for the poor old devil if she wasn’t such a bad tenant, letting the whole place go to the mischief, house and all.”
“I tell you the house isn’t in such a bad way as you think; it’s dirt ails it more than anything else.” Charlotte had recovered her wonted energy of utterance. “Believe me, if I had a few workmen in that house for a month you wouldn’t know it.”
“Well, I believe you will, sooner or later. All the same, I can’t see what the deuce you want with it. Now, ifIhad the place, I’d make a pot of money out of it, keeping young horses there, as I’ve often told you. I’d do a bit of coping, and making hunters to sell. There’s no work on earth I’d like as well.”
He took a long pull at his cigar, and expelled a sigh and a puff of smoke.
“Well, Roddy,” said Charlotte, after a moment’s pause, speaking with an unusual slowness and almost hesitancy, “you know I wouldn’t like to come between you and your fancy. If you want the farm, in God’s name take it yourself!”
“Take it myself! I haven’t the money to pay the fine, much less to stock it. I tell you what, Charlotte,” he went on, turning round and putting his hand on the splash-board of the phaeton as he walked, “you and I are old pals, and I don’t mind telling you it’s the most I can do to keep going the way I am now. I never was so driven for money in my life,” he ended, some vague purpose, added to the habit of an earlier part of his life, pushing him on to be confidential.
“Who’s driving you, Roddy?” said Charlotte, in a voice in which a less preoccupied person than her companion might have noticed a curiously gentle inflection.
It is perhaps noteworthy that while Mr. Lambert’s lips replied with heartfelt irritation, “Oh, they’re all at me, Langford the coachbuilder, and everyone of them,” one section of his brain was asking the other how much ready money old Mrs. Mullen had had to leave, and was receiving a satisfactory answer.
There was a pause in the conversation. It was so long now since the black horse had felt the whip, that, acting on the presumption that his mistress had fallen asleep, he fell into an even more slumbrous crawl without any notice being taken.
“Roddy,” said Charlotte at last, and Lambert now observed how low and rough her voice was, “do you remember in old times once or twice, when you were put to it for a five-pound note, you made no bones about asking a friend to help you? Well, you know I’m a poor woman”—even at this moment Charlotte’s caution asserted itself—“but I daresay I could put my hand on a couple of hundred, and if they’d be any use to you—”
Lambert became very red. The possibility of some such a climax as this had floated in a sub-current of thought just below the level of formed ideas, but now that it had come,it startled him. It was an unheard-of thing that Charlotte should make such an offer as this. It gave him suddenly a tingling sense of power, and at the same time a strange instinct of disgust and shame.
“Oh, my dear Charlotte,” he began awkwardly, “upon my soul you’re a great deal too good. I never thought of such a thing—I—I—” he stammered, wishing he could refuse, but casting about for words in which to accept.
“Ah, nonsense. Now, Roddy, me dear boy,” interrupted Charlotte, regaining her usual manner as she saw his embarrassment, “say no more about it. We’ll consider it a settled thing, and we’ll go through the base business details after tea.”
Lambert said to himself that there was really no way out of it. If she was so determined the only thing was to let her do as she liked; no one could say that the affair was of his seeking.
“And, you know,” continued Charlotte in her most jocular voice, before he could frame a sentence of the right sort, “who knows, if I get the farm, that we mightn’t make a joint-stock business out of it, and have young horses there, and all the rest of it!”
“You’re awfully good, Charlotte,” said Lambert, with an emotion in his voice that she did not guess to be purely the result of inward relief and exultation; “I’m awfully obliged to you—you always were a—a true friend—some day, perhaps, I’ll be able to show you what I think about it,” he stammered, unable to think of anything else to say, and, lifting his hand from the splash-board, he put it on hers, that lay in her lap with the reins in it, and pressed it for a moment. Into both their minds shot simultaneously the remembrance of a somewhat similar scene, when, long ago, Charlotte had come to the help of her father’s pupil, and he had expressed his gratitude in a more ardent manner—a manner that had seemed cheap enough to him at the time, but that had been more costly to Charlotte than any other thing that had ever befallen her.
“You haven’t forgotten old times any more than I have,” he went on, knowing very well that he was taking now much the same simple and tempting method of getting rid of his obligation that he had once found so efficacious, and to acertain extent enjoying the thought that he could still make a fool of her. “Ah, well!” he sighed, “there’s no use trying to get those times back, any more than there is in trying to forget them.” He hesitated. “But, after all, there’s many a new tune played on an old fiddle! Isn’t that so?” He was almost frightened at his own daring as he saw Charlotte’s cheek burn with a furious red, and her lips quiver in the attempt to answer.
Upon their silence there broke from the distance a loud scream, then another, and then a burst of laughter in a duet of soprano and bass, coming apparently from a lane that led into the road a little further on—a smooth and secluded little lane, bordered thickly with hazel bushes—a private road, in fact, to a model farm that Mr. Lambert had established on his employer’s property. From the mouth of this there broke suddenly a whirling vision of whiteness and wheels, and Miss Fitzpatrick, mounted on a tricycle and shrieking loudly, dashed across the high road and collapsed in a heap in the ditch. Lambert started forward, but long before he could reach her the Rev. Joseph Corkran emerged at full speed from the lane, hatless, with long flying coat-tails, and, with a skill born of experience, extricated Francie from her difficulties.
“Oh, I’m dead!” she panted. “Oh, the horrible thing! What good were you that you let it go?” unworthily attacking the equally exhausted Corkran. Then, in tones of consternation, “Goodness! Look at Mr. Lambert and Charlotte! Oh, Mr. Lambert,” as Lambert came up to her, “did you see the toss I got? The dirty thing ran away with me down the hill, and Mr. Corkran was so tired running he had to let go, and I declare I thought I was killed—and you don’t look a bit sorry for me!”
“Well, what business had you to get up on a thing like that?” answered Lambert, looking angrily at the curate. “I wonder, Corkran, you hadn’t more sense than to let a lady ride that machine.”
“Well, indeed, Mr. Lambert, I told Miss Fitzpatrick it wasn’t as easy as she thought,” replied the guilty Corkran, a callow youth from Trinity College, Dublin, who had been as wax in Francie’s hands, and who now saw, with unfeigned terror, the approach of Charlotte. “I begged of her not togo outside Tally Ho, but—but—I think I’d better go back and look for my hat”—he ended abruptly, retreating into the lane just as Charlotte drew up the black horse and opened her mouth to deliver herself of her indignation.
Thebroad limestone steps at Bruff looked across the lawn to the lake, and to the south. They were flanked on either hand by stone balustrades which began and ended in a pot of blazing scarlet geraniums, and on their topmost plateau on this brilliant 1st of July, the four Bruff dogs sat on their haunches and gazed with anxious despondency in at the open hall-door. For the last half-hour Max and Dinah, the indoor dogs, had known that an expedition was toward. They had seen Pamela put on a hat that certainly was not her garden one, and as certainly lacked the veil that betokened the abhorred ceremony of church-going. They knew this hat well, and at the worst it usually meant a choir practice; but taken in connection with a blue serge skirt and the packing of a luncheon basket, they almost ventured to hope it portended a picnic on the lake. They adored picnics. In the first place, the outdoor dogs were always left at home, which alone would have imparted a delicious flavour to any entertainment, and in the second, all dietary rules were remitted for the occasion, and they were permitted to raven unchecked upon chicken bones, fat slices of ham, and luscious leavings of cream when the packing-up time came. There was, however, mingled with this enchanting prospect, the fear that they might be left behind, and from the sounding of the first note of preparation they had never let Pamela out of their sight. Whenever her step was heard through the long passages, there had gone with it the scurrying gallop of the two little waiters on providence, and when her arrangements had culminated in the luncheon basket, their agitation had become so poignant that a growling game of play under the table, got up merely to pass the time, turned into an acrimonious squabble, and caused their ejection to the hall-door steps by Lady Dysart. Now, sitting outside the door, they listened with tremblingto the discussion that was going on in the hall, and with the self-consciousness of dogs, were convinced that it was all about themselves.
“No, I cannot allow Garry to go,” exclaimed Lady Dysart, her eyes raised to the ceiling as if to show her remoteness from all human entreaty; “he isnotover the whooping-cough; I heard him whooping this morning in his bedroom.”
The person mentioned ceased from a game of fives with a tennis-ball that threatened momentarily to break the windows, and said indignantly, “Oh, I say, mother, that was only the men in the yard pumping. That old pump makes a row just like whooping-cough.”
Lady Dysart faltered for a moment before this ingenious falsehood, but soon recovered herself.
“I don’t care whether it was you or the pump that whooped, it does not alter the fact of your superfluity at a picnic.”
“I think Captain Cursiter and Mr. Hawkins wanted him to stoke,” said Pamela from the luncheon basket.
“I have no doubt they do, but they shall not have him,” said Lady Dysart with the blandness of entire decision, though her eyes wavered from her daughter’s face to her son’s; “they’re very glad indeed to save their own clothes and spoil his.”
“Well, then, I’ll go with Lambert,” said Garry rebelliously.
“You will do nothing of the sort!” exclaimed Lady Dysart, “whatever I may do about allowing you to go with Captain Cursiter, nothing shall induce me to sanction any plan that involves your going in that most dangerous yacht. Christopher himself says she is over-sparred.” Lady Dysart had no idea of the meaning of the accusation, but she felt the term to be good and telling. “Now, Pamela, will you promise me to stay with Captain Cursiter all the time?”
“Oh, yes, I will,” said Pamela, laughing; “but you know in your heart that he would much rather have Garry.”
“I don’t care what my heart knows,” replied Lady Dysart magnificently, “I know what my mouth says, and that is that you must neither of you stir out of the steam-launch.”
At this descent of his mother into the pit so artfully dug for her, Garry withdrew to attire himself for theposition of stoker, and Pamela discreetly changed the conversation.
It seemed a long time to Max and Dinah before their fate was decided, but after some last moments of anguish on the pier they found themselves, the one coiled determinedly on Pamela’s lap, and the other smirking in the bow in Garry’s arms, as Mr. Hawkins sculled the second relay of the Bruff party out to the launch. The first relay, consisting of Christopher and Miss Hope-Drummond, was already on its way down the lake in Mr. Lambert’s 5-ton boat, with every inch of canvas set to catch the light and shifty breeze that blew petulantly down from the mountains, and ruffled the glitter of the lake with dark blue smears. The air quivered hotly over the great stones on the shore, drawing out the strong aromatic smell of the damp weeds and the bog-myrtle, and Lady Dysart stood on the end of the pier, and wrung her hands as she thought of Pamela’s complexion.
Captain Cursiter was one of the anomalous soldiers whose happiness it is to spend as much time as possible in a boat, dressed in disreputable clothes, with hands begrimed and blistered with oil or ropes as the case may be, and steaming or sailing to nowhere and back again with undying enthusiasm. He was a thin, brown man, with a moustache rather lighter in colour than the tan of his face, and his beaky nose, combined with his disposition to flee from the haunts of men, had inspired his friends to bestow on him the pet name of “Snipey.” The festivity on which he was at present embarked was none of his seeking, and it had been only by strenuous argument, fortified by the artful suggestion that no one else was really competent to work the boat, that Mr. Hawkins had got him into clean flannels and the conduct of the expedition. He knew neither Miss Mullen nor Francie, and his acquaintance with the Dysarts, as with other dwellers in the neighbourhood, was of a slight and unprogressive character, and in strong contrast to the manner in which Mr, Hawkins had become at Bruff and elsewhere what that young gentleman was pleased to term “the gated infant.” During the run from Lismoyle to Bruff he had been able to occupy himself with the affairs of the steam-launch; but when Hawkins, his prop and stay,had rowed ashore for the Dysart party, the iron had entered into his soul.
As the punt neared the launch, Mr. Hawkins looked round to take his distance in bringing her alongside, and recognised with one delighted glance the set smile of suffering politeness that denoted that Captain Cursiter was making himself agreeable to the ladies. Charlotte was sitting in the stern with a depressing air of Sunday-outness about her, and a stout umbrella over her head. It was not in her nature to feel shy; the grain of it was too coarse and strong to harbour such a thing as diffidence, but she knew well enough when she was socially unsuccessful, and she was already aware that she was going to be out of her element on this expedition. Lambert, who would have been a kind of connecting link, was already far in the offing. Captain Cursiter she mentally characterised as a poor stick. Hawkins, whom she had begun by liking, was daily—almost hourly—gaining in her disfavour, and from neither Pamela, Francie, or Garry did she expect much entertainment. Charlotte had a vigorous taste in conversation, and her idea of a pleasure party was not to talk to Pamela Dysart about the choir and the machinery of a school feast for an hour and a half, and from time to time to repulse with ill-assumed politeness the bird-like flights of Dinah on to her lap. Francie and Mr. Hawkins sat forward on the roof of the little cabin, and apparently entertained one another vastly, judging by their appearance and the fragments of conversation that from time to time made their way aft in the environment of a cloud of smuts. Captain Cursiter, revelling in the well-known restrictions that encompass the man at the wheel, stood serenely aloof, steering among the hump-backed green islands and treacherous shallows, and thinking to himself that Hawkins was going ahead pretty fast with that Dublin girl.
Mr. Hawkins had been for some time a source of anxiety to his brother officers, who disapproved of matrimony for the young of their regiment. Things had looked so serious when he was quartered at Limerick that he had been hurriedly sent on detachment to Lismoyle before he had time to “make an example of himself,” as one of the most unmarried of the majors observed, and into Captain Cursiter’s trusted hands he had been committed, with urgent instructions to keep an eye on him. Cursiter’s eye was renowned for its blighting qualities on occasions such as these, and his jibes at matrimony were looked on by his brother officers as the most finished and scathing expressions of proper feeling on the subject that could be desired; but it was agreed that he would have his hands full.
The launch slid smoothly along with a low clicking of the machinery, cutting her way across the reflections of the mountains in pursuit of the tall, white sail of theDaphne, that seemed each moment to grow taller, as the yacht was steadily overhauled by her more practical comrade. The lake was narrower here, where it neared the end of its twenty-mile span, and so calm that the sheep and cattle grazing on the brown mountains were reflected in its depths, and the yacht seemed as incongruous in the midst of them as the ark on Mount Ararat. The last bend of the lake was before them; theDaphnecrept round it, moved mysteriously by a wind that was imperceptible to the baking company on the steam-launch, and by the time the latter had churned her way round the fir-clad point, the yacht was letting go her anchor near the landing-place of a large wooded island.
At a picnic nothing is of much account before luncheon, and the gloom of hunger hung like a pall over the party that took ashore luncheon baskets, unpacked knives and forks, and gathered stones to put on the corners of the table-cloth. But such a hunger is Nature’s salve for the inadequacy of human beings to amuse themselves; the body comes to the relief of the mind with the compassionate superiority of a good servant, and confers inward festivity upon many a dull dinner party. Max and Dinah were quite of this opinion. They had behaved with commendable fortitude during the voyage, though in the earlier part of it a shuddering dejection on Max’s part had seemed to Pamela’s trained eye to forebode sea-sickness, but at the lifting of the luncheon basket into the punt their self-control deserted them. The succulent trail left upon the air, palpable to the dog-nose as the smoke of the steam-launch to the human eye, beguiled them into efforts to follow, which were only suppressed by their being secretly immured in the cabin by Garry. No one but he saw the two wan faces that yearned at the tinycabin windows, as the last punt load left for the land, and when at last the wails of the captives streamed across the water, anyone but Garry would have repented of the cruelty. The dogs will never forget it to Captain Cursiter that it was he who rowed out to the launch and brought them ashore to enjoy their fair share of the picnic, and their gratitude will never be tempered by the knowledge that he had caught at the excuse to escape from the conversation which Miss Hope-Drummond, notwithstanding even the pangs of hunger, was proffering to him.
There is something unavoidably vulgar in the aspect of a picnic party when engaged in the culminating rite of eating on the grass. They may feel themselves to be picturesque, gipsy-like, even romantic, but to the unparticipating looker-on, not even the gilded dignity of champagne can redeem them from being a mere group of greedy, huddled backs, with ugly trimmings of paper, dirty plates, and empty bottles. But at Innishochery the only passers-by were straight-flying wild-duck or wood-pigeons, or an occasional sea-gull lounging up from the distant Atlantic, all observant enough in their way, but not critical. It is probable they did not notice even the singular ungracefulness of Miss Mullen’s attitude, as she sat with her short legs uncomfortably tucked away, and her large jaws moving steadily as she indemnified herself for the stupidity of the recent trip. The champagne at length had its usual beneficent effect upon the conversation. Charlotte began to tell stories about her cats and her servants to Christopher and Pamela, with admirable dramatic effect and a sense of humour that made her almost attractive. Miss Hope-Drummond had discovered that Cursiter was one of the Lincolnshire Cursiters, and, with mutual friends as stepping-stones, was working her way on with much ability; and Francie was sitting on a mossy rock, a little away from the table-cloth, with a plate of cherry-pie on her lap, Mr. Hawkins at her feet, and unlimited opportunities for practical jestings with the cherry-stones. Garry and the dogs were engaged in scraping out dishes and polishing plates in a silence more eloquent than words; Lambert alone, of all the party, remained impervious to the influences of luncheon, and lay on his side with his eyes moodilyfixed upon his plate, only responding to Miss Mullen’s frequent references to him by a sarcastic grunt.
“Now I assure you, Miss Dysart, it’s perfectly true,” said Charlotte, after one of these polite rejoinders. “He’s too lazy to say so, but he knows right well that when I complained of my kitchen-maid to her mother, all the good I got from her was that she said, ‘Would ye be agin havin’ a switch and to be switchin’ her!’ That was a pretty way for me to spend my valuable time.” Her audience laughed; and inspired by another half glass of champagne, Miss Mullen continued, “But big a fool as Bid Sal is, she’s a Solon beside Donovan. He came to me th’ other day and said he wanted ‘little Johanna for the garden.’ ‘Littlewho?’ says I; ‘Little Johanna,’ says he. ‘Ye great, lazy fool,’ says I, ‘aren’t ye big enough and ugly enough to do that little pick of work by yerself without wanting a girl to help ye?’ And after all,” said Charlotte, dropping from the tones of fury in which she had rendered her own part in the interview, “all he wanted was some guano for my early potatoes!”
Lambert got up without a smile, and sauntering down to the lake, sat down on a rock and began to smoke a cigar. He could not laugh as Christopher and even Captain Cursiter did, at Charlotte’s dramatisation of her scene with her gardener. At an earlier period of his career he had found her conversation amusing, and he had not thought her vulgar. Since then he had raised himself just high enough from the sloughs of Irish middle-class society to see its vulgarity, but he did not stand sufficiently apart from it to be able to appreciate the humorous side, and in any case he was at present little disposed to laugh at anything. He sat and smoked morosely for some time, feeling that he was making his dissatisfaction with the entertainment imposingly conspicuous; but his cigar was a failure, the rock was far from comfortable, and his bereaved friends seemed to be enjoying themselves rather more than when he left them. He threw the cigar into the water in front of him, to the consternation of a number of minnows, who had hung in the warm shallow as if listening, and now vanished in a twinkling to spread among the dark resorts of the elder fishes the tale of the thunderbolt that fell in their midst,while Lambert stalked back to the party under the trees.
Its component parts were little altered, saving that Miss Hope-Drummond had, by the ingenious erection of a parasol, isolated herself and Christopher from the others, and that Garry had joined himself to Francie and Hawkins, and was, in company with the latter, engaged in weaving stalks of grass across the insteps of Miss Fitzpatrick’s open-worked stockings.
“Just look at them, Mr. Lambert,” Francie called out in cheerful complaint. “They’re having a race to see which of them will finish their bit of grass first, and they won’t let me stir, though I’m nearly mad with the flies!”
She had a waving branch of mountain-ash in her hand; the big straw hat that she had trimmed for herself with dog-roses the night before was on the back of her head; her hair clustered about her white temples, and the colour that fighting the flies had brought to her face lent a lovely depth to eyes that had the gaiety and the soullessness of a child. Lambert had forgotten most of his classics since he had left school, and it is probable that even had he remembered them it would not have occurred to him to regard anything in them as applicable to modern times. At all events Francie’s dryad-like fitness to her surroundings did not strike him, as it struck another more dispassionate onlooker, when an occasional lift of the Hope-Drummond parasol revealed the white-clad figure, with its woody background, to Christopher.
“It seems to me you’re well able to take care of yourself,” was Lambert’s reply to Miss Fitzpatrick’s appeal. He turned his back upon her, and interrupted Charlotte in the middle of a story by asking her if she would walk with him across the island and have a look at the ruins of Ochery Chapel.
One habit at least of Mr. Lambert’s school life remained with him. He was still a proficient at telling tales.