Innishochery Islandlay on the water like a great green bouquet, with a narrow grey lace edging of stony beach. From the lake it seemed that the foliage stood in a solid impenetrable mass, and that nothing but the innumerable wood-pigeons could hope to gain its inner recesses; even the space of grass which, at the side of the landing-place, drove a slender wedge up among the trees, had still the moss-grown stumps upon it that told it had been recovered by force from the possession of the tall pines and thick hazel and birch scrub. The end of the wedge narrowed into a thread of a path which wound its briary way among the trees with such sinuous vagueness, and such indifference to branches overhead and rocks underfoot, that to follow it was both an act of faith and a penance. Near the middle of the island it was interrupted by a brook that slipped along whispering to itself through the silence of the wood, and though the path made a poor shift to maintain its continuity with stepping-stones, it expired a few paces farther on in the bracken of a little glade.
It was a glade that had in some elfish way acquired an expression of extremest old age. The moss grew deep in the grass, lay deep on the rocks; stunted birch-trees encircled it with pale twisted arms hoary with lichen, and, at the farther end of it, a grey ruined chapel, standing over the pool that was the birthplace of the stream, fulfilled the last requirement of romance. On this hot summer afternoon the glade had more than ever its air of tranced meditation upon other days and superiority to the outer world, lulled in its sovereignty of the island by the monotone of humming insects, while on the topmost stone of the chapel a magpie gabbled and cackled like a court jester. Christopher thought, as he sat by the pool smoking a cigarette, that he had done well in staying behind under the pretence of photographing the yacht from the landing-place, and thus eluding the rest of the party. He was only intermittently unsociable, but he had always had a taste for his own society, and, as he said to himself, he had been going strong all the morning, and the time had come for solitude and tobacco.
He was a young man of a reflective turn, and had artistic aspirations which, had he been of a hardier nature, would probably have taken him further than photography. But Christopher’s temperament held one or two things unusual in the amateur. He had the saving, or perhaps fatal power of seeing his own handiwork with as unflattering an eye as he saw other people’s. He had no confidence in anything about himself except his critical ability, and as he did not satisfy that, his tentative essays in painting died an early death. It was the same with everything else. His fastidious dislike of doing a thing indifferently was probably a form of conceit, and though it was a higher form than the common vanity whose geese are all swans, it brought about in him a kind of deadlock. His relations thought him extremely clever, on the strength of his university career and his intellectual fastidiousness, and he himself was aware that he was clever, and cared very little for the knowledge. Half the people in the world were clever nowadays, he said to himself with indolent irritability, but genius was another affair; and, having torn up his latest efforts in water-colour and verse, he bought a camera, and betook himself to the more attainable perfection of photography.
It was delightful to lie here with the delicate cigarette smoke keeping the flies at bay, and the grasshoppers whirring away in the grass, like fairy sewing-machines, and with the soothing knowledge that the others had been through the glade, had presumably done the ruin thoroughly, and were now cutting their boots to pieces on the water-fretted limestone rocks as they scrambled round from the shore to the landing-place. This small venerable wood, and the boulders that had lain about the glade through sleepy centuries till the moss had smothered their outlines, brought to Christopher’s mind the enchanted country through which King Arthur’s knights rode; and he lay there mouthing to himself fragments of half-remembered verse, and wondering at the chance that had reserved for him this backwater in a day of otherwise dubious enjoyment. He even found himself piecing together a rhyme or two on his own account; but, as is often the case, inspiration was paralysed by the overwhelming fulness of the reality; the fifth line refused to express his idea, and the interruption of lyric emotion causedby the making and lighting of a fresh cigarette proved fatal to the prospects of the sonnet. He felt disgusted with himself and his own futility. When he had been at Oxford not thus had the springs of inspiration ceased to flow. He had begun to pass the period of water-colours then, but not the period when ideas are as plenty and as full of novelty as leaves in spring, and the knowledge has not yet come that they, like the leaves, are old as the world itself.
For the past three or four years the social exigencies of Government House life had not proved conducive to fervour of any kind, and now, while he was dawdling away his time at Bruff, in the uninterested expectation of another appointment, he found that he not only could not write, but that he seemed to have lost the wish to try.
“I suppose I am sinking into the usual bucolic stupor,” he said to himself, as he abandoned the search for the vagrant rhyme. “If I only could read theField, and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing, I should be an ideal country gentleman.”
He crumpled into his pocket again the envelope on the back of which he had been scribbling, and told himself that it was more philosophic and more simple to enjoy things in the homely, pre-historic manner, without trying to express them elaborately for the benefit of others. He was intellectually effete, and what made his effeteness more hopeless was that he recognised it himself. “I am perfectly happy if I let myself alone,” was the sum of his reflections. “They gave me a little more culture than I could hold, and it ran over the edge at first. Now I think I’m just about sufficiently up in the bottle for Lismoyle form.” He tilted his straw hat over his nose, shut his eyes, and, leaning back, soon felt the delicious fusion into his brain of the surrounding hum and soft movement that tells of the coming of out-of-door summer sleep.
It is deplorable to think of the figure Christopher must cut in the eyes of those whose robuster taste demands in a young man some more potent and heroic qualities, a gentlemanly hardihood in language and liquor, an interesting suggestion of moral obliquity, or, at least, some hereditary vice on which the character may make shipwreck with magnificent helplessness. Christopher, with his preferencefor his sister’s society, and his lack of interest in the majority of manly occupations, from hunting to music halls, has small claim to respect or admiration. The invertebrateness of his character seemed to be expressed in his attitude, as he lay, supine, under the birch trees, with the grass making a luxurious couch for his lazy limbs, and the faint breeze just stirring about him. His sleep was not deep enough to still the breath of summer in his ears, but it had quieted the jabber of the magpie to a distant purring, and he was fast falling into the abyss of unconsciousness, when a gentle, regular sound made itself felt, the fall of a footstep and the brushing of a skirt through the grass. He lay very still, and cherished an ungenial hope that the white-stemmed birches might mercifully screen him from the invader. The step came nearer, and something in its solidity and determination gave Christopher a guess as to whose it was, that was speedily made certainty by a call that jarred all the sleepy enchantment of the glade.
“Fran-cie!”
Christopher shrank lower behind a mossy stone, and wildly hoped that his unconcealable white flannels might be mistaken for the stem of a fallen birch.
“Fran-cie!”
It had come nearer, and Christopher anticipated the inevitable discovery by getting up and speaking.
“I’m afraid she’s not here, Miss Mullen. She has not been here for half an hour at least.” He did not feel bound to add that when he first sat down by the pool, he had heard Miss Fitzpatrick’s and Mr. Hawkins’ voices in high and agreeable altercation on the opposite side of the island to that taken by the rest of the party.
The asperity that had been discernible in Miss Mullen’s summons to her cousin vanished at once.
“My goodness me! Mr. Dysart! To think of your being here all the time, ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife!’ Here I am hunting for that naughty girl to tell her to come and help to make tea, instead of letting your poor sister have all the trouble by herself.”
Charlotte was rather out of breath, and looked hot and annoyed, in spite of the smile with which she lubricated her remark.
“Oh, my sister is used to that sort of thing,” said Christopher, “and Miss Hope-Drummond is there to help, isn’t she?”
Charlotte had seated herself on a rock, and was fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief; evidently going to make herself agreeable, Christopher thought, with an irritability that lost no detail of her hand’s ungainly action.
“I don’t think Miss Hope-Drummond is much in the utilitarian line,” she said, with a laugh that was as slighting as she dared to make it. “Hers is the purely ornamental, I should imagine. Now, I will say for poor Francie, if she was there, no one would work harder than she would, and, though I say it that shouldn’t, I think she’s ornamental too.”
“Oh, highly ornamental,” said Christopher politely. “I don’t think there can be any doubt about that.”
“You’re very good to say so,” replied Charlotte effusively; “but I can tell you, Mr. Dysart, that poor child has had to make herself useful as well as ornamental before now. From what she tells me I suspect there were few things she didn’t have to put her hand to before she came down to me here.”
“Really!” said Christopher, as politely as before, “that was very hard luck.”
“You may say that it was!” returned Charlotte, planting a hand on each knee with elbows squared outwards, as was her wont in moments of excitement, and taking up her parable against the Fitzpatricks with all the enthusiasm of a near relation. “Her uncle and aunt are very good people in their way, I suppose, but beyond feeding her and putting clothes on her back, I don’t know what they did for her.”
Charlotte had begun her sentence with comparative calm, but she had gathered heat and velocity as she proceeded. She paused with a snort, and Christopher, who had never before been privileged to behold her in her intenser moments, said, without a very distinct idea of what was expected of him:
“Oh, really, and who are these amiable people?”
“Fitzpatricks!” spluttered Miss Mullen, “and no better than the dirt under my poor cousin Isabella Mullen’s feet. It’s throughherFrancie’s related to me, and not throughthe Fitzpatricks at all.I’mno relation of the Fitzpatricks, thank God! My father’s brother married a Butler, and Francie’s grandmother was a Butler too—”
“It’s very intricate,” murmured Christopher; “it sounds as if she ought to have been a parlour-maid.”
“And that’s the only connection I am of the Fitzpatricks,” continued Miss Mullen at lightning speed, oblivious of interruption; “but Francie takes after her mother’s family and her grandmother’s family, and your poor father would tell you if he was able, that the Butlers of Tally Ho were as well known in their time as the Dysarts of Bruff!”
“I’m sure he would,” said Christopher feebly, thinking as he spoke that his conversations with his father had been wont to treat of more stirring and personal topics than the bygone glories of the Butlers.
“Yes, indeed, as good a family as any in the county. People laugh at me, and say I’m mad about family and pedigree; but I declare to goodness, Mr. Dysart, I think the French are right when they say, ‘bong song ne poo mongtir,’ and there’s nothing like good blood after all.”
Charlotte possessed the happy quality of believing in the purity of her own French accent, and she felt a great satisfaction in rounding her peroration with a quotation in that tongue. She had, moreover, worked off some of the irritation which had, from various causes, been seething within her when she met Christopher; and when she resumed her discourse it was in the voice of the orator, who, having ranted out one branch of his subject, enters upon the next with almost awful quietness.
“I don’t know why I should bore you about a purely family matter, Mr. Dysart, but the truth is, it cuts me to the heart when I see your sister—your charming sister—yes, and Miss Hope-Drummond too—not that I’d mention her in the same breath with Miss Dysart—with every advantage that education can give them, and then to think of that poor girl, brought up from hand to mouth, and her little fortune that should have been spent on herself going, as I may say, to fill the stomachs of the Fitzpatricks’ brood!”
Christopher raised himself from the position of leaning against a tree, in which he had listened, not without interest, to the recital of Francie’s wrongs.
“I don’t think you need apologise for Miss Fitzpatrick,” he said, rather more coldly than he had yet spoken. He had ceased to be amused by Miss Mullen; eccentricity was one thing, but vulgar want of reserve was another; he wondered if she discussed her cousin’s affairs thus openly with all her friends.
“It’s very kind of you to say so,” rejoined Miss Mullen eagerly, “but I know very well you’re not blind, any more than I am, and all my affection for the girl can’t make me shut my eyes to what’s unlady-like or bad style, though I know it’s not her fault.”
Christopher looked at his watch surreptitiously.
“Now I’m delaying you in a most unwarrantable way,” said Charlotte, noting and interpreting the action at once, “but I got so hot and tired running about the woods that I had to take a rest. I was trying to get a chance to say a word to your sister about Francie to ask her to be kind to her, but I daresay it’ll come to the same thing now that I’ve had a chat with you,” she concluded, rising from her seat and smiling with luscious affability.
A little below the pond two great rocks leaned towards each other, and between them a hawthorn bush had pressed itself up to the light. Something like a path was trodden round the rocks, and a few rags impaled on the spikes of the thorn bush denoted that it marked the place of a holy well. Conspicuous among these votive offerings were two white rags, new and spotless, and altogether out of keeping with the scraps of red flannel and dirty frieze that had been left by the faithful in lieu of visiting cards for the patron saint of the shrine. Christopher and Charlotte’s way led them within a few yards of the spot; the latter’s curiosity induced her, as she passed, to examine the last contributions to the thorn bush.
“I wonder who has been tearing up their best pocket-handkerchiefs for a wish?” said Christopher, putting up his eye-glass and peering at the rags.
“Two bigger fools than the rest of them, I suppose,” said Miss Mullen shortly; “we’d better hurry on now, Mr. Dysart, or we’ll get no tea.”
She swept Christopher in front of her along the narrow path before he had time to see that the last two pilgrimshad determined that the saint should make no mistake about their identity, and had struck upon the thorn bush the corners of their handkerchiefs, one of them, a silken triangle, having on it the initials G. H., while on the other was a large and evidently home-embroidered F.
Latethat afternoon, when the sun was beginning to stoop to the west, a wind came creeping down from somewhere back of the mountains, and began to stretch tentative cats’ paws over the lake. It had pushed before it across the Atlantic a soft mass of orange-coloured cloud, that caught the sun’s lowered rays, and spread them in a mellow glare over everything. The lake turned to a coarse and furious blue; all the rocks and tree stems became like red gold, and the polished brass top of the funnel of the steam-launch looked as if it were on fire as Captain Cursiter turned theSerpolette’ssharp snout to the wind, and steamed at full speed round Ochery Point. The yacht had started half an hour before on her tedious zig-zag journey home, and was already far down to the right, her sails all aglow as she leaned aslant like a skater, swooping and bending under the freshening breeze.
It was evident that Lambert wished to make the most of his time, for almost immediately after theDaphnehad gone about with smooth precision, and had sprung away on the other tack, the party on the launch saw a flutter of white, and a top-sail was run up.
“By Jove! Lambert didn’t make much on that tack,” remarked Captain Cursiter to his brother-in-arms, as with an imperceptible pressure of the wheel he serenely headed the launch straight for her destination. “I don’t believe he’s done himself much good with that top-sail either.”
Mr. Hawkins turned a sour eye upon theDaphne, and said laconically, “Silly ass; he’ll smother her.”
“Upon my word, I don’t think he’ll get in much before nine o’clock to-night,” continued Cursiter; “it’s pretty nearly dead in his teeth, and he doesn’t make a hundred yards on each tack.”
Mr. Hawkins slammed the lid of the coal bunker, and stepped past his chief into the after-part of the launch.
“I say, Miss Mullen,” he began with scarcely suppressed malignity, “Captain Cursiter says you won’t see your niece before to-morrow morning. You’ll be sorry you wouldn’t let her come home in the launch after all.”
“If she hadn’t been so late for her tea,” retorted Miss Mullen, “Mr. Lambert could have started half an hour before he did.”
“Half an hour will be neither here nor there in this game. What Lambert ought to have done was to have started after luncheon, but I think I may remind you, Miss Mullen, that you took him off to the holy well then.”
“Well, and if I did, I didn’t leave my best pocket handkerchief hanging in rags on the thorn bush, like some other people I know of!” Miss Mullen felt that she had scored, and looked for sympathy to Pamela, who, having as was usual with her, borne the heat and burden of the day in the matter of packings and washings-up, was now sitting, pale and tired, in the stern, with Dinah solidly implanted in her lap, and Max huddled miserably on the seat beside her. Miss Hope-Drummond, shrouded in silence and a long plaid cloak, paid no attention to anyone or anything. There are few who can drink the dregs of the cup of pleasuring with any appearance of enjoyment, and Miss Hope-Drummond was not one of them. The alteration in the respective crews of the yacht and the steam-launch had been made by no wish of hers, and it is probable that but for the unexpected support that Cursiter had received from Miss Mullen, his schemes for Mr. Hawkins’ welfare would not have prospered. The idea had indeed occurred to Miss Hope-Drummond that the proprietor of the launch had perhaps a personal motive in suggesting the exchange, but when she found that Captain Cursiter was going to stand with his back to her, and steer, she wished that she had not yielded her place in theDaphneto a young person whom she already thought of as “thatMiss Fitzpatrick,” applying in its full force the demonstrative pronoun that denotes feminine animosity more subtly and expressively than is in the power of any adjective. Hawkins she felt was out of her jurisdiction and unworthy of attention, andshe politely ignored Pamela’s attempts to involve her in conversation with him. Her neat brown fringe was out of curl; long strands of hair blew unbecomingly over her ears; her feet were very cold, and she finally buried herself to the nose in a fur boa that gave her the effect of a moustached and bearded Russian noble, and began, as was her custom during sermons and other periods of tedium, to elaborate the construction of a new tea-gown.
To do Mr. Hawkins justice, he, though equally ill-treated by fate, rose superior to his disappointment. After his encounter with Miss Mullen he settled confidentially down in the corner beside Pamela, and amused himself by pulling Dinah’s short, fat tail, and puffing cigarette smoke in her face, while he regaled her mistress with an assortment of the innermost gossip of Lismoyle.
On board theDaphnethe aspect of things was less comfortable. Although the wind was too much in her teeth for her to make much advance for home, there was enough to drive her through the water at a pace that made the long tacks from side to side of the lake seem as nothing, and to give Francie as much as she could do to keep her big hat on her head. She was sitting up on the weather side with Lambert, who was steering; and Christopher, in the bows, was working the head sails, and acting as movable ballast when they went about. At first, while they were beating out of the narrow channel of Ochery, Francie had found it advisable to lie in a heap beneath a tarpaulin, to avoid the onslaught of the boom at each frequent tack, but now that they were out on the open lake, with the top-sail hoisted, she had risen to her present position, and, in spite of her screams as the sharp squalls came down from the mountains and lifted her hat till it stood on end like a rearing horse, was enjoying herself amazingly. Unlike Miss Hope-Drummond, she was pre-eminently one of those who come home unflagging from the most prolonged outing, and to-day’s entertainment, so far from being exhausting, had verified to the utmost her belief in the charms of the British officer, as well as Miss Fanny Hemphill’s prophecies of her success in such quarters. Nevertheless she was quite content to return in the yacht; it was salutary for Mr. Hawkins to see that she could do without him very well, it took her fromCharlotte’s dangerous proximity, and it also gave her an opportunity of appeasing Mr. Lambert, who, as she was quite aware, was not in the best of tempers. So far her nimble tongue had of necessity been idle. Christopher’s position in the bows isolated him from all conversation of the ordinary pitch, and Lambert had been at first too much occupied with the affairs of his boat to speak to her, but now, as a sharper gust nearly snatched her hat from her restraining hand, he turned to her.
“If it wasn’t that you seem to enjoy having that hat blown inside out every second minute,” he said chillingly, “I’d offer to lend you a cap.”
“What sort is it?” demanded Francie. “If it’s anything like that old deerstalker thing you have on your head now, I wouldn’t touch it with the tongs!”
Lambert’s only reply was to grope under the seat with one hand, and to bring out a red knitted cap of the conventional sailoring type, which he handed to Francie without so much as looking at her. Miss Fitzpatrick recognised its merits with half a glance, and, promptly putting it on her head, stuffed thechef-d’œuvreof the night before under the seat among the deck-swabs and ends of rope that lurked there. Christopher, looking aft at the moment, saw the change of head-gear, and it was, perhaps, characteristic of him that even while he acknowledged the appropriateness of the red cap of liberty to the impertinence of the brilliant face beneath it, he found himself reminded of the extra supplement, in colours, of any Christmas number—indubitably pretty, but a trifle vulgar.
In the meantime the object of this patronising criticism, feeling herself now able to give her undivided attention to conversation, regarded Mr. Lambert’s sulky face with open amusement, and said:
“Well, now, tell me what made you so cross all day. Was it because Mrs. Lambert wasn’t out?”
Lambert looked at her for an instant without speaking. “Ready about,” he called out. “Mind your head! Lee helm!”
The little yacht hung and staggered for a moment, and then, with a diving plunge, started forward, with every sail full and straining. Francie scrambled with some difficultyto the other side of the tiny cockpit, and climbed up on to the seat by Mr. Lambert, just in time to see a very fair imitation of a wave break on the weather bow and splash a sparkling shower into Christopher’s face.
“Oh, Mr. Dysart! are you drowned?” she screamed ecstatically.
“Not quite,” he called back, his hair hanging in dripping points on his forehead as he took off his cap and shook the water out of it. “I say, Lambert, it’s beginning to blow pretty stiff; I’d take that top-sail off her, if I were you.”
“She’s often carried it in worse weather than this,” returned Lambert; “a drop of water will do no one any harm.”
Mr. Lambert in private, and as much as possible in public, affected to treat his employer’s son as a milksop, and few things annoyed him more than the accepted opinion on the lake that there was no better man in a boat than Christopher Dysart. His secret fear that it was true made it now all the more intolerable that Christopher should lay down the law to him on a point of seamanship, especially with Francie by, ready in that exasperating way of hers to laugh at him on the smallest provocation.
“It’ll do him no harm if he does get a drop of water over him,” he said to her in a low voice, forgetting for the moment his attitude of disapproval. “Take some of the starch out of him for once!” He took a pull on the main sheet, and, with a satisfied upward look at the top-sail in question, applied himself to conversation. The episode had done him good, and it was with almost fatherly seriousness that he began:
“Now, Francie, you were telling me a while ago that I was cross all day. I’m a very old friend of yours, and I don’t mind saying that I was greatly put out by the way”—he lowered his voice—“by the way you were going on with that fellow Hawkins.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘going on,’”interrupted Francie, with a slight blush. “What’s the harm in talking to him if he likes to talk to me?”
“Plenty of harm,” returned Lambert quickly, “when he makes a fool of you the way he did to-day. If you don’t care that Miss Dysart and the rest of them think you know no better than to behave like that,Ido!”
“Behave like what?”
“Well, for one thing, to let him and Garry Dysart go sticking grass in your stockings that way after luncheon; and for another to keep Miss Dysart waiting tea for you for half an hour, and your only excuse to be to tell her that he was ‘teaching you to make ducks and drakes’ the other side of the island.” The fatherly quality had died out of his voice, and the knuckles of the hand that held the tiller grew white from a harder grip.
Francie instinctively tucked away her feet under her petticoats. She was conscious that the green pattern still adorned her insteps, and that tell-tale spikes of grass still projected on either side of her shoes.
“How could I help it? It was just a silly game that he and Garry Dysart made up between them; and as for Miss Dysart being angry with me, she never said a word to me. She was awfully good; and she and her brother had kept the teapot hot for me, and everything.” She looked furtively at Christopher, who was looking out at the launch, now crossing their path some distance ahead. “It was more thanyou’dhave done for me!”
“Yes, very likely it was; but I wouldn’t have been laughing at you in my sleeve all the time as they were, or at least as he was, anyhow!”
“I believe that’s a great lie,” said Francie unhesitatingly; “and I don’t care a jack-rat what he thought, or what you think either! Mr. Hawkins is a very nice young man, and I’ll talk to him just as much as I like! And he’s coming to tea at Tally Ho to-morrow; and what’s more, I asked him! So now!”
“Oh, all right!” said Lambert, in such a constrained voice of anger, that even Francie felt a little afraid of him. “Have him to tea by all means; and if I were you I should send down to Limerick and have Miss M‘Carthy up to meet him!”
“What are you saying? Who’s Miss M‘Carthy?” asked Francie, with a disappointing sparkle of enjoyment in her eyes.
“She’s the daughter of a George’s Street tobacconist thatyour friend Mr. Hawkins was so sweet about a couple of months ago that they packed him off here to be out of harm’s way. Look out, Dysart, I’m going about now,” he continued without giving Francie time to reply. “Lee-helm!”
“Oh, I’m sick of you and your old ‘lee-helm’!” cried Francie, as she grovelled again in the cockpit to avoid the swing of the boom. “Why can’t you go straight like Captain Cursiter’s steamer, instead of bothering backwards and forwards, side-ways, like this? And you always do it just when I want to ask you something.”
This complaint, which was mainly addressed to Mr. Lambert’s canvas yachting shoes, received no attention. When Francie came to the surface she found that the yacht was at a more uncomfortable angle than ever, and with some difficulty she established herself on the narrow strip of deck, outside the coaming, with her feet hanging into the cockpit.
“Now, Mr. Lambert,” she began at once, “you’d better tell me Miss M‘Carthy’s address, and all about her, and perhaps if you’re good I’ll ask you to meet her too.”
As she spoke, a smart squall struck the yacht, and Lambert luffed her hard up to meet it. A wave with a ragged white edge flopped over her bows, wetting Christopher again, and came washing aft along the deck behind the coaming.
“Look out aft there!” he shouted. “She’s putting her nose into it! I tell you that top-sail’s burying her, Lambert.”
Lambert made no answer to either Francie or Christopher. He had as much as he could do to hold the yacht, which was snatching at the tiller like a horse at its bit, and ripping her way deep through the waves in a manner too vigorous to be pleasant. It was about seven o’clock, and though the sun was still some height above the dark jagged wall of the mountains, the clouds had risen in a tawny fleece across his path, and it was evident that he would be seen no more that day. The lake had turned to indigo. The beds of reeds near the shore were pallid by contrast as they stooped under the wind; the waves that raced towards the yacht had each an angry foam-crest, having, after the manner of lake waves, lashed themselves into a high state of indignation on veryshort notice, and hissed and effervesced like soda-water all along the lee-gunwale of the flying yacht. A few seagulls that were trying to fight their way back down to the sea, looked like fluttering scraps of torn white paper against the angry bronze of the clouds, and the pine trees on the point, under the lee of which they were scudding, were tossing like the black plumes of a hearse.
Lambert put the yacht about, and headed back across the lake.
“We did pretty well on that tack, Dysart,” he shouted. “We ought to get outside Screeb Point with the next one, and then we’ll get the wind a point fairer, and make better weather of it the rest of the way home.”
He could see the launch, half a mile or so beyond the point, ploughing steadily along on her way to Lismoyle, and in his heart he wished that Francie was on board of her. He also wished that Christopher had held his confounded tongue about the top-sail. If he hadn’t shoved in his oar where he wasn’t wanted, he’d have had that top-sail off her twenty minutes ago; but he wasn’t going to stand another man ordering him about in his own boat.
“Look here, Francie,” he said, “you must look out for yourself when I’m going about next time. It’s always a bit squally round this point, so you’d better keep down in the cockpit till we’re well on the next tack.”
“But I’ll get all wet down there,” objected Francie, “and I’d much rather stay up here and see the fun.”
“You talk as if it was the top of a tram in Sackville Street,” said Lambert, snatching a glance of provoked amusement at her unconcerned face. “I can tell you it will take a good deal more holding on to than that does. Promise me now, like a good child,” he went on, with a sudden thrill of anxiety at her helplessness and ignorance, “that you’ll do as I tell you. Youusedto mind what I said to you.”
He leaned towards her as he spoke, and Francie raised her eyes to his with a laugh in them that made him for the moment forgetful of everything else. They were in the open water in the centre of the lake by this time. And in that second a squall came roaring down upon them.
“Luff!” shouted Christopher, letting go the head sheets. “Luff, or we’re over!”
Lambert let go the main sheet and put the tiller hard down with all the strength he was master of, but he was just too late. In that moment, when he had allowed his thoughts to leave his steering, the yacht had dragged herself a thought beyond his control. The rough hand of the wind struck her, and, as she quivered and reeled under the blow, another and fiercer gust caught hold of her, and flung her flat on her side on the water.
Before Christopher had well realised what had happened, he had gone deep under water, come to the surface again, and was swimming, with a vision before him of a white figure with a red cap falling headlong from its perch. He raised himself and shook the water out of his eyes, and swimming a stroke or two to get clear of the mast, with its sails heaving prone on the water like the pinions of a great wounded bird, he saw over the shoulders of the hurrying waves the red cap and the white dress drifting away to leeward. Through the noise of the water in his ears, and the confusion of his startled brain, he heard Lambert’s voice shouting frantically he did not know what; the whole force of his nature was set and centred on overtaking the red cap, to which each stroke was bringing him nearer and nearer as it appeared and reappeared ahead of him between the steely backs of the waves. She lay horribly still, with the water washing over her face; and as Christopher caught her dress, and turned, breathless, to try to fight his way back with her to the wrecked yacht, he seemed to hear a hundred voices ringing in his ears and telling him that she was dead. He was a good and practised swimmer, but not a powerful one. His clothes hung heavily about him, and with one arm necessarily given to his burden, and the waves and wind beating him back, he began to think that his task was more than he would be able to accomplish. He had up to this, in the intensity of the shock and struggle, forgotten Lambert’s existence, but now the agonised shouts that he had heard came back to him, and he raised himself high in the water and stared about with a new anxiety. To his intense relief he saw that the yacht was still afloat, was, in fact, drifting slowly down towards him, and in the waternot ten yards from him was her owner, labouring towards him with quick splashing strokes, and evidently in a very exhausted state. His face was purple-red, his eyes half starting out of his head, and Christopher could hear his hard breathing as he slowly bore down upon him.
“She’s all right, Lambert!” Christopher cried out, though his heart belied the words. “I’ve got her! Hold hard; the yacht will be down on us in a minute.”
Whether Lambert heard the words or no was not apparent. He came struggling on, and as soon as he got within reach, made a snatch at Francie’s dress. Christopher had contrived to get his left arm round her waist, and to prop her chin on his shoulder, so that her face should be above the water, and, as Lambert’s weight swung on him, it was all he could do to keep her in this position.
“You’ll drown us all if you don’t let go!” Uttermost exertion and want of breath made Christopher’s voice wild and spasmodic. “Can’t you tread water till the boat gets to us?”
Lambert still speechlessly and convulsively dragged at her, his breath breaking from him in loud gasps, and his face working.
“Good God, he’s gone mad!” thought Christopher; “we’re all done for if he won’t let go.” In desperation he clenched his fist, with the intention of hitting Lambert on the head, but just as he gathered his forces for this extreme measure something struck him softly in the back. Lambert’s weight had twisted him round so that he was no longer facing the yacht, and he did not know how near help was. It was the boom of theDaphnethat had touched him like a friendly hand, and he turned and caught at it with a feeling of more intense thankfulness than he had known in all his life.
The yacht was lying over on her side, half full of water, but kept afloat by the air-tight compartments that Mrs. Lambert’s terrors had insisted on, and that her money had paid for, when her husband had first taken to sailing on the lake. Christopher was able with a desperate effort to get one knee on to the submerged coaming of the cockpit, and catching at its upper side with his right hand, he recovered himself and prepared to draw Francie up after him.
“Come, Lambert, let go!” he said threateningly, “and help me to get her out of the water. You need not be afraid, you can hold on to the boat.”
Lambert had not hitherto tried to speak, but now with the support that the yacht gave him, his breath came back to him a little.
“Damn you!” he spluttered, the loud sobbing breaths almost choking him, “I’m not afraid! Let her go! Take your arm from round her, I can hold her better than you can. Ah!” he shrieked, suddenly seeing Francie’s face, as Christopher, without regarding what he said, drew her steadily up from his exhausted grasp, “she’s dead! you’ve let her drown!”
His head fell forward, and Christopher thought with the calm of despair, “He’s going under, and I can’t help him if he does. Here, Lambert! man alive, don’t let go! There! do you hear the launch whistling? They’re coming to us?”
Lambert’s hand, with its shining gold signet-ring, was gripping the coaming under water with a grasp that was already mechanical. It seemed to Christopher that it had a yellow, drowned look about it. He put out his foot, and, getting it under Lambert’s chin, lifted his mouth out of the water. The steam-launch was whistling incessantly, in long notes, in short ones, in jerks, and he lifted up his voice against the forces of the wind and the hissing and dashing of the water to answer her. Perhaps it was the dull weight on his arm and the stricken stillness of the face that lay in utter unconsciousness on his shoulder, but he scarcely recognised his own voice, it was broken with such a tone of stress and horror. He had never before heard such music as Hawkins’ shout hailing him in answer, nor seen a sight so heavenly fair as the bow of theSerpolettecutting its way through the thronging waves to their rescue. White faces staring over her gunwale broke into a loud cry when they saw him hanging, half-spent, against the tilted deck of theDaphne. It was well, he thought, that they had not waited any longer. The only question was whether they were not even now too late. His head swam from excitement and fatigue, his arms and knees trembled, and when at last Francie, Lambert, and finally he himself, were liftedon board the launch, it seemed the culminating point of a long and awful nightmare that Charlotte Mullen should fling herself on her knees beside the bodies of her cousin and her friend, and utter yell after yell of hysterical lamentation.
“Sausagesand bacon, Lady Dysart! Yes, indeed, that was his breakfast, and that for a man who—if you’ll excuse the expression, Lady Dysart, but, indeed, I know you’re such a good doctor that I’d like you to tell me if it was quite safe—who was vomiting lake water for half an hour after he was brought into the house the night before.”
“Do you really mean that he came down to breakfast?” asked Lady Dysart, with the flattering sincerity of interest that she bestowed on all topics of conversation, but especially on those that related to the art and practice of medicine. “He ought to have stayed in bed all day to let the system recover from the shock.”
“Those were the very words I used to him, Lady Dysart,” returned Mrs. Lambert dismally; “but indeed all the answer he made was, ‘Fiddle-de-dee!’ He wouldn’t have so much as a cup of tea in his bed, and you may think what I suffered, Lady Dysart, when I was down in the parlour making the breakfast and getting his tray ready, when I heard him in his bath overhead—just as if he hadn’t been half-drowned the night before. I didn’t tell you that, Mrs. Gascogne,” she went on, turning her watery gaze upon the thin refined face of her spiritual directress. “Now if it was me such a thing happened to, I’d have that nervous dread of water that I couldn’t look at it for a week.”
“No, I am sure you would not,” answered Mrs. Gascogne with the over-earnestness which so often shipwrecks the absent-minded; “of course you couldn’t expect him to take it if it wasn’t made with really boiling water.”
Mrs. Lambert stared in stupefaction, and Lady Dysart, far from trying to cloak her cousin’s confusion, burst into a delighted laugh.
“Kate! I don’t believe you heard a single word thatMrs. Lambert said! You were calculating how many gallons of tea will be wanted for your school feast.”
“Nonsense, Isabel!” said Mrs. Gascogne hotly, with an indignant and repressive glance at Lady Dysart, “and how was it—” turning to Mrs. Lambert, “that he—a—swallowed so much lake water?”
“He was cot under the sail, Mrs. Gascogne. He made a sort of a dash at Miss Fitzpatrick to save her when she was falling, and he slipped someway, and got in under the sail and he was half-choked before he could get out!” A tear of sensibility trickled down the good turkey-hen’s red beak. “Indeed, I don’t know when I’ve been so upset, Lady Dysart,” she quavered.
“Upset!” echoed Lady Dysart, raising her large eyes dramatically to the cut glass chandelier, “I can well believe it! When it came to ten o’clock and there was no sign of them, I was simplyragingup and down between the house and the pier like a mad bull robbed of its whelps!” She turned to Mrs. Gascogne, feeling that there was a biblical ring in the peroration that demanded a higher appreciation than Mrs. Lambert could give, and was much chagrined to see that lady concealing her laughter behind a handkerchief.
Mrs. Lambert looked bewilderedly from one to the other, and, feeling that the ways of the aristocracy were beyond her comprehension, went on with the recital of her own woes.
“He actually went down to Limerick by train in the afternoon—he that was half-drowned the day before, and a paragraph in the paper about his narrow escape. I haven’t had a wink of sleep those two nights, what with palpitations and bad dreams. I don’t believe, Lady Dysart, I’ll ever be the better of it.”
“Oh, you’ll get over it soon, Mrs. Lambert,” said Lady Dysart cheerfully; “why, I had no less than three children—”
“Calves,” murmured Mrs. Gascogne, with still streaming eyes.
“Children,” repeated Lady Dysart emphatically, “and I thought they were every one of them drowned!”
“Oh, but ahusband, Lady Dysart,” cried Mrs. Lambertwith orthodox unction; “what are children compared to the husband?”
“Oh—er—of course not,” said Lady Dysart, with something less than her usual conviction of utterance, her thoughts flying to Sir Benjamin and his bath chair.
“By the way,” struck in Mrs. Gascogne, “my husband desired me to say that he hopes to come over to-morrow afternoon to see Mr. Lambert, and to hear all about the accident.”
Mrs. Lambert looked more perturbed than gratified. “It’s very kind of the Archdeacon, I’m sure,” she said nervously; “but Mr. Lambert—” (Mrs. Lambert belonged to the large class of women who are always particular to speak of their husbands by their full style and title) “Mr. Lambert is most averse to talking about it, and perhaps—if the Archdeacon didn’t mind—”
“That’s just what I complain of in Christopher,” exclaimed Lady Dysart, breaking with renewed vigour into the conversation. “He wasmostunsatisfactory about it all. Of course, when he came home that night, he was so exhausted that I spared him. I said, ‘Not one word will I allow you to say to-night, and Icommandyou to stay in bed for breakfast to-morrow morning!’ I even went down at one o’clock, and pinned a paper on William’s door, so that he shouldn’t call him. Well—” Lady Dysart, at this turning-point of her story, found herself betrayed into saying “My dear,” but had presence of mind enough to direct the expression at Mrs. Gascogne. “Well, my dear, when I went up in the morning, craving for news, he was most confused and unsatisfactory. He pretended he knew nothing of how it had happened, and that after the upset they all went drifting about in a sort of a knot till the yacht came down on top of them. But, of course, something more must have happened to them thanthat!It really was the greatest pity that Miss Fitzpatrick got stunned by that blow on the head just at the beginning of the whole business.Shewould have told us all about it. But men never can describe anything.”
“Oh, well, I assure you, Lady Dysart,” piped the turkey hen, “Mr. Lambert described to me all that he possibly could, and he said Mr. Dysart gave every assistance in hispower, and was the greatest help to him in supporting that poor girl in the water; but the townspeople were so very inquisitive, and really annoyed him so much with their questions, that he said to me this morning he hoped he’d hear no more about it, which is why I took the liberty of asking Mrs. Gascogne, that the Archdeacon wouldn’t mention it to him.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Gascogne very politely, recalling herself with difficulty from the mental excursion on which she had started when Lady Dysart’s unrelenting eye had been removed. “I am sure he will—a—be delighted. I think, you know, Isabel, we ought—”
Lady Dysart was on her feet in a moment. “Yes, indeed, we ought!” she responded briskly. “I have to pick up Pamela. Good-bye, Mrs. Lambert; I hope I shall find you looking better the next time I see you, and remember, if you cannot sleep, that there is no opiate like an open window!”
Mrs. Lambert’s exclamation of horror followed her visitors out of the room. Open windows were regarded by her as a necessary housekeeping evil, akin to twigging carpets and whitewashing the kitchen, something to be got over before anyone came downstairs. Not even her reverence for Lady Dysart would induce her to tolerate such a thing in any room in which she was, and she returned to her woolwork, well satisfied to let the July sunshine come to her through the well-fitting plate-glass windows of her hideous drawing-room.
“The person I do pity in the whole matter,” remarked Lady Dysart, as the landau rolled out of the Rosemount gates and towards Lismoyle, “is Charlotte Mullen. Of course, that poor excellent little Mrs. Lambert got a great shock, but that was nothing compared with seeing the sail go flat down on the water, as the people in the launch did. In the middle of all poor Pamela’s own fright, when she was tearing open one of the luncheon baskets to get some whisky out, Charlotte went into raging hysterics, androared, my dear! And then she all but fainted on to the top of Mr. Hawkins. Who would ever have thought of her breaking down in that kind of way?”
“Faugh!” said Mrs. Gascogne, “disgusting creature!”
“Now, Kate, you are always saying censorious things about that poor woman. People can’t help showing their feelings sometimes, no matter how ugly they are! All that I can tell you is,” said Lady Dysart, warming to fervour as was her wont, “if you had seen her this afternoon as I did, with the tears in her eyes as she described the whole thing to me, and the agonies she was in about that girl, you would have felt sorry for her.”
Mrs. Gascogne shot a glance, bright with intelligence and amusement, at her cousin’s flushed handsome face, and held her peace. With Mrs. Gascogne, to hold her peace was to glide into the sanctuary of her own thoughts, and remain there oblivious of all besides; but the retribution that would surely have overtaken her at the next pause in Lady Dysart’s harangue was averted by the stopping of the carriage at Miss Mullen’s gate.
Francie lay back on her sofa after Pamela Dysart had left her. She saw the landau drive away towards Bruff, with the sun twinkling on the silver of the harness, and thought with an ungrudging envy how awfully nice Miss Dysart was, and how lovely it would be to have a carriage like that to drive about in. People in Dublin, who were not half as grand as the Dysarts, would have been a great deal too grand to come and see her up in her room like this, but here everyone was as friendly as they could be, and not a bit stuck-up. It was certainly a good day for her when she came down to Lismoyle, and in spite of all that Uncle Robert had said about old Aunt Mullen’s money, and how Charlotte had feathered her own nest, there was no denying that Charlotte was not a bad old thing after all. Her only regret was that she had not seen the dress that Miss Dysart had on this afternoon before she had got herself that horrid ready-made pink thing, and the shirt with the big pink horse-shoes on it. Fanny Hemphill’s hitherto unquestioned opinion in the matter of costume suddenly tottered in her estimation, and, with the loosening of that buttress of her former life, all her primitive convictions were shaken.
The latch of the gate clicked again, and she leaned forward to see who was coming. “What nonsense it is keeping me up here this way!” she said to herself; “there’s Roddy Lambert coming in, and won’t he be cross when hefinds that there’s only Charlotte for him to talk to! Iwillgo down to-morrow, no matter what they say, but I suppose it will be ages before the officers call again now.” Miss Fitzpatrick became somewhat moody at this reflection, and tried to remember what it was that Mr. Hawkins had said about “taking shooting leave for the 12th”; she wished she hadn’t been such a fool as not to ask him what he had meant by the 12th. If it meant the 12th of July, she mightn’t see him again till he came back, and goodness knows when that would be. Roddy Lambert was all very well, but what was he but an old married man. “Gracious!” she interrupted herself aloud with a little giggle, “how mad he’d be if he thought I called him that!” and Hawkins was really a very jolly fellow. The hall-door opened again; she heard Charlotte’s voice raised in leave-taking, and then Mr. Lambert walked slowly down the drive and the hall-door slammed. “He didn’t stay long,” thought Francie; “I wonder if he’s cross because I wasn’t downstairs? He’s a very cross man. Oh, look at him kicking Mrs. Bruff into the bushes! It’s well for him Charlotte’s coming upstairs and can’t see him!”
Charlotte was not looking any the worse for what she had gone through on the day of the accident; in fact, as she came into the room, there was an air of youthfulness and good spirits about her that altered her surprisingly, and her manner towards her cousin was geniality itself.
“Well, me child!” she began, “I hadn’t a minute since dinner to come and see you. The doorstep’s worn out with the world and his wife coming to ask how you are; and Louisa doesn’t know whether she’s on her head or her heels with all the clean cups she’s had to bring in!”
“Well, I wish to goodness I’d been downstairs to help her,” said Francie, whirling her feet off the sofa and sitting upright; “there’s nothing ails me to keep me stuck up here.”
“Well, you shall come down to-morrow,” replied Charlotte soothingly; “I’m going to lunch with the Bakers, so you’ll have to come down to do your manners to Christopher Dysart. His mother said he was coming to inquire for you to-morrow. And remember that only for him the pike would be eating you at the bottom of the lake this minute!Mind that! You’ll have to thank him for saving your life.”
“Mercy on us,” cried Francie; “what on earth will I say to him?”
“Oh, you’ll find plenty to say to him! They’re as easy as me old shoe, all those Dysarts; I’d pity no one that had one of them to talk to, from the mother down. Did you notice at the picnic how Pamela and her brother took all the trouble on themselves? That’s what I call breeding, and not sitting about to be waited on like that great lazy hunks, Miss Hope-Drummond! I declare I loathe the sight of these English fine ladies, and my private belief is that Christopher Dysart thinks the same of her, though he’s too well-bred to show it. Yes, my poor Susan,” fondling with a large and motherly hand the cat that was sprawling on her shoulder; “he’s a real gentleman, like yourself, and not a drop of dirty Saxon blood in him.Hedoesn’t bring his great vulgar bull-dog here to worry my poor son—”
“What did Mr. Lambert say, Charlotte?” asked Francie, who began to be a little bored by this rhapsody. “Was he talking about the accident?”
“Very little,” said Charlotte, with a change of manner; “he only said that poor Lucy, who wasn’t there at all, was far worse than any of us. As I told him, you, that we thought was dead, would be down to-morrow, and not worth asking after. Indeed we were talking about business most of the time—” She pressed her face down on the cat’s grey back to hide an irrepressible smile of recollection. “But that’s only interesting to the parties concerned.”
Franciefelt an unexpected weakness in her knees when she walked downstairs next day. She found herself clutching the stair-rail with an absurdly tight grasp, and putting her feet down with trembling caution on the oil-cloth stair covering, and when she reached the drawing-room she was thankful to subside into Charlotte’s arm-chair, and allow her dizzy head to recover its equilibrium. She thought very little about her nerves; in fact, was too ignorant to knowwhether she possessed such things, and she gave a feeble laugh of surprise at the way her heart jumped and fluttered when the door slammed unexpectedly behind her. The old green sofa had been pulled out from the wall and placed near the open window, with the DublinExpresslaid upon it; Francie noticed and appreciated the attention, and noted, too, that an arm-chair, sacred to the use of visitors had been planted in convenient relation to the sofa. “For Mr. Dysart, I suppose,” she thought, with a curl of her pretty lip; “he’ll be as much obliged to her as I am.” She pushed the chair away, and debated with herself as to whether she should dislodge the two cats who, with faces of frowning withdrawal from all things earthly, were heaped in simulated slumber in the corner of the sofa. She chose the arm-chair, and, taking up the paper, languidly read the list of places where bands would play in the coming week, and the advertisement of the anthem at St. Patrick’s for the next day.
How remote she felt from it all! How stale appeared these cherished amusements! Most people would think the Lismoyle choir a poor substitute for the ranks of white surplices in the chancel of St. Patrick’s, with the banners of the knights hanging above them, but Francie thought it much better fun to look down over the edge of the Lismoyle gallery at the red coats of Captain Cursiter’s detachment, than to stand crushed in the nave of the cathedral, even though the most popular treble was to sing a solo, and though Mr. Thomas Whitty might be waiting on the steps to disentangle her from the crowd that would slowly surge up them into the street. A heavy booted foot came along the passage, and the door was opened by Norry, holding in her grimy hand a tumbler containing a nauseous-looking yellow mixture.
“Miss Charlotte bid me give ye a bate egg with a half glass of whisky in it whenever ye’d come downstairs.” She stirred it with a black kitchen fork, and proffered the sticky tumbler to Francie, who took it, and swallowed the thin, flat liquid which it contained with a shudder of loathing. “How bad y’are! Dhrink every dhrop of it now! An empty sack won’t stand, and ye’re as white as a masheroon this minute. God knows it’s in yer bed ye should be, and notshtuck out in a chair in the middle of the flure readin’ the paper!” Her eye fell on the apparently unconscious Mrs. and Miss Bruff. “Ha, ha! thin! how cosy the two of yez is on yer sofa! Walk out, me Lady Ann!”
This courtesy-title, the expression of Norry’s supremest contempt and triumph, was accompanied by a sudden onslaught with the hearth-brush, but long before it could reach them, the ladies referred to had left the room by the open window.
The room was very quiet after Norry had gone away. Francie took the evicted holding of the cats, and fell speedily into a doze induced by the unwonted half glass of whisky. Her early dinner, an unappetising meal of boiled mutton and rice pudding, was but a short interlude in the dulness of the morning; and after it was eaten, a burning tract of afternoon extended itself between her and Mr. Dysart’s promised visit. She looked out of the window at the sailing shreds of white cloud high up in the deep blue of the sky, at the fat bees swinging and droning in the purple blossoms of the columbine border, at two kittens playing furiously in the depths of the mignonette bed; and regardless of Charlotte’s injunctions about the heat of the sun, she said to herself that she would go out into the garden for a little. It was three o’clock, and her room was as hot as an oven when she went up to get her hat; her head ached as she stood before the glass and arranged the wide brim to her satisfaction, and stuck her best paste pin into the sailor’s knot of her tie. Suddenly the door burst unceremoniously open, and Norry’s grey head and filthy face were thrust round the edge of it.
“Come down, Miss Francie!” she said in a fierce whisper; “give over making shnouts at yerself in the glass and hurry on down! Louisa isn’t in, and sure I can’t open the doore the figure I am.”
“Who’s there?” asked Francie, with flushing cheeks.
“How would I know? I’d say ’twas Misther Lambert’s knock whatever. Sich galloppin’ in and out of the house as there is these two days! Ye may let in this one yerself!”
When Francie opened the hall-door she was both relieved and disappointed to find that Norry had been right in the matter of the knock. Mr. Lambert was apparently moretaken by surprise than she was. He did not speak at once, but, taking her hand, pressed it very hard, and when Francie, finding the silence slightly embarrassing, looked up at him with a laugh that was intended to simplify the situation, she was both amazed and frightened to see a moisture suspiciously like tears in his eyes.
“You—you look rather washed out,” he stammered.
“You’re very polite! Is that all you have to say to me?” she said, slipping her hand out of his, and gaily ignoring his tragic tone. “You and your old yacht nearly washed me out altogether! At all events, you washed the colour out of me pretty well.” She put up her hands and rubbed her cheeks. “Are you coming in or going out? Charlotte’s lunching at the Bakers’, and I’m going into the garden till tea-time, so now you can do as you like.”
“I’ll come into the garden with you,” he said, stepping aside to let her pass out. “But are you sure your head is well enough for you to go out in this sun?”
“Sun your granny!” responded Francie, walking gingerly across the gravel in her high-heeled house shoes; “I’m as well as ever I was.”
“Well, you don’t look it,” he said with a concerned glance at the faint colour in her cheeks and the violet shadows under her eyes. “Come and sit down in the shade; it’s about all you’re good for.”
A path skirted the flower-beds and bent round the evergreen-covered slope that rose between the house and the road, and at the bend a lime-tree spread its flat, green boughs lavishly over the path, shading a seat made of half-rotten larch poles that extended its dilapidated arms to the passer-by.
“Well now, tell me all about it,” began Lambert as soon as they had sat down. “What did you feel like when you began to remember it all? Were you very angry with me?”
“Yes, of course, I was angry with you, and I am now this minute, and haven’t I a good right, with my new hat at the bottom of the lake?”
“I can tell you we were both pretty nearly at the bottom of the lake along with it,” said Lambert, who disapproved of this frivolous way of treating the affair. “I don’t suppose I ever was nearer death than I was when the sail was on top of me.”
Francie looked at him for one instant with awe-struck eyes, and Lambert was congratulating himself on having made her realise the seriousness of the situation, when she suddenly burst out laughing.
“Oh!” she apologised, “the thought just came into my head of the look of Mrs. Lambert in a widow’s cap, and how she’d adore to wear one! You know she would, now don’t you?”
“And I suppose you’d adore to see her in one?”
“Of course I would!” She gave him a look that was equivalent to the wag of the tail with which a dog assures the obtuse human being that its worrying and growling are only play. “You might know that without being told. And now perhaps you’ll tell me how poor Mrs. Lambert is? I hear she was greatly upset by the fright she got about you, and indeed you’re not worthy of it.”
“She’s much better, thank you.”
He looked at Francie under his lowered lids, and tried to find it in his heart to wish that she could sometimes be a little more grown up and serious. She was leaning back with her hat crushed against a trunk of the tree, so that its brim made a halo round her face, and the golden green light that filtered through the leaves of the lime moved like water over her white dress. If he had ever heard the story of “Undine” it might have afforded him the comforting hypothesis that this delicate, cool, youthful creature, with her provoking charm, could not possibly be weighted with the responsibility of a soul; but an unfortunate lack of early culture denied to Mr. Lambert this excuse for the levity with which she always treated him—a man fifteen years older than she was, her oldest friend, as he might say, who had always been kind to her ever since she was a scut of a child. Her eyes were closed; but an occasional quiver of the long lashes told him that she had no intention of sleeping; she was only pretending to be tired, “out of tricks,” he thought angrily. He waited for a moment or two, and then he spoke her name. The corners of her mouth curved a little, but the eyelashes were not raised.
“Are you tired, or are you shamming?”
“Shamming,” was the answer, still with closed eyes.
“Don’t you think you could open your eyes?”
“No.”
Another short period of silence ensued, and the sound of summer in the air round them strengthened and deepened, as the colour strengthens and deepens in a blush. A wasp strayed in under the canopy of the lime and idled inquisitively about Francie’s hat and the bunch of mignonette in her belt, but she lay so still under this supreme test that Lambert thought she must be really asleep, and taking out his handkerchief prepared to route the invader. At the same moment there came a sound of wheels and a fast-trotting horse on the road; it neared them rapidly, and Miss Fitzpatrick leaped to her feet and put aside the leaves of the lime just in time to see the back of Mr. Hawkins’ head as his polo-cart spun past the Tally Ho gate.
“I declare I thought it was Mr. Dysart,” she said, looking a little ashamed of herself; “I wonder where in the name of fortune is Mr. Hawkins going?”
“I thought you were so dead asleep you couldn’t hear anything,” said Lambert, with a black look; “he’s not coming here, anyhow.”
She dropped back into the corner of the seat again as if the start forward had tired her.
“Oh! I was so frightened at the wasp, and I wouldn’t let on!”
“I wonder why you’re always so unfriendly with me now,” began Lambert suddenly, fixing his eyes upon her; “there was once on a time when we were great friends, and you used to write to me, and you’d say you were glad to see me when I went up to town, but now you’re so set up with your Dysarts and your officers that you don’t think your old friends worth talking to.”
“Oh!” Francie sat up and faced her accuser valiantly, but with an inwardly-stricken conscience. “You know that’s a dirty, black lie!”
“I came over here this afternoon,” pursued Lambert, “very anxious about you, and wanting to tell you how sorry I was, and how I accused myself for what had happened—and how am I treated? You won’t so much as take the trouble to speak to me. I suppose if I was one of yourswell new friends—Christopher Dysart, for instance, who you are looking out for so hard—it would be a very different story.”
By the time this indictment was delivered, Francie’s face had more colour in it than it had known for some days; she kept her eyes on the ground and said nothing.
“I knew it was the way of the world to kick a fellow out of the way when you had got as much as you wanted out of him, and I suppose as I am an old married man I have no right to expect anything better, but I did think you’d have treatedmebetter than this!”
“Don’t,” she said brokenly, looking up at him with her eyes full of tears; “I’m too tired to fight you.”
Lambert took her hand quickly. “My child,” he said, in a voice rough with contrition and pity, “I didn’t mean to hurt you; I didn’t know what I was saying.” He tenderly stroked the hand that lay limply in his. “Tell me you’re not vexed with me.”
“No,” said Francie, with a childish sob; “but you said horrid things to me—”
“Well, I never will again,” he said soothingly. “We’ll always be friends, won’t we?” with an interrogatory pressure of the hand. He had never seen her in such a mood as this; he forgot the inevitable effect on her nerves of what she had gone through, and his egotism made him believe that this collapse of her usual supple hardihood was due to the power of his reproaches.
“Yes,” she answered, with the dawn of a smile.
“Till the next time, anyhow,” continued Lambert, still holding her hand in one of his, and fumbling in his breast pocket with the other. “And now, look here what I brought you to try and make up to you for nearly drowning you.” He gently pulled her hand down from her eyes, and held up a small gold bangle, with a horse-shoe in pearls on it. “Isn’t that a pretty thing?”
Francie looked at it incredulously, with the tears still shining on her eyelashes.
“Oh, Mr. Lambert, you don’t mean you got that for me? Icouldn’ttake it. Why, it’s real gold!”
“Well, you’ve got to take it. Look what’s written on it.”
She took it from him, and saw engraved inside thenarrow band of gold her own name and the date of the accident.
“Now, you see it’s yours already,” he said. “No, you mustn’t refuse it,” as she tried to put it back into his hand again. “There,” snapping it quickly on to her wrist, “you must keep it as a sign you’re not angry with me.”
“It’s like a policeman putting on a handcuff,” said Francie, with a quivering laugh. “I’ve often seen them putting them on the drunken men at Dublin.”
“And you’ll promise not to chuck over your old friends?” said Lambert urgently.
“No, I won’t chuck them over,” she replied, looking confidingly at him.
“Not for anybody?” He weighted the question with all the expression he was capable of.
“No, not for anybody,” she repeated, rather more readily than he could have wished.
“And you’re sure you’re not angry with me?” he persisted, “and you like the bangle?”