“My dear Charlotte,” it began, “I know you will be surprised at the news I have to tell you in this letter, and so will many others; indeed I am almost surprised at it myself.” Charlotte’s left hand groped backwards till it caught the back of a chair and held on to it, but her eyes still flew along the lines. “You are my oldest and best friend, and so you are the first I would like to tell about it, and I would value your good wishes far beyond any others that might be offered to me, especially as I hope you will soon be my relation as well as my friend. I am engaged to Francie Fitzpatrick, and we are to be married as soon as possible.”The reader sat heavily down upon the chair behind her,her colour fading from red to a dirty yellow as she read on. “I am aware that many will say that I am not showing proper respect towards poor dear Lucy in doing this, but you, or any one that knew her well, will support me in saying that I never was wanting in that to her when she was alive, and that she would be the last to wish I should live a lonely and miserable life now that she is gone. It is a great pleasure to me to think that she always had such a liking for Francie, for her own sake as well as because she was your cousin. It was my intention to have put off the marriage for a year, but I heard a couple of days ago from Robert Fitzpatrick that the investment that Francie’s little fortune had been put into was in a very shaky state, and that there is no present chance of dividends from it. He offered to let her live with them as usual, but they have not enough to support themselves. Francie was half starved there, and it is no place for her to be, and so we have arranged to be married very quietly down here at Bray, on the twentieth—just a week from to-day. I will take her to London, or perhaps a little further for a week or so, and about the first or second week in April I hope to be back in Rosemount. I know, my dear Charlotte, my dear old friend, that this must appear a sudden and hasty step, but I have considered it well and thoroughly. I know too that when Francie left your house there was some trifling little quarrel between you, but I trust you will forget all about that, and that you will be the first to welcome her when she returns to her new home. She begs me to say that she is sorry for anything she said to annoy you, and would write to you if she thought you would like to hear from her. I hope you will be as good a friend to her as you have always been to me, and will be ready to help and advise her in her new position. I would be greatly obliged to you if you would let the Lismoyle people know of my marriage, and of the reasons that I have told you for hurrying it on this way; you know yourself how glad they always are to get hold of the wrong end of a story. I am going to write to Lady Dysart myself. Now, my dear Charlotte, I must close this letter. The above will be my address for a week, and I will be very anxious to hear from you. With much love from Francie and myself, I remain your attached friend,Roderick Lambert.”
“My dear Charlotte,” it began, “I know you will be surprised at the news I have to tell you in this letter, and so will many others; indeed I am almost surprised at it myself.” Charlotte’s left hand groped backwards till it caught the back of a chair and held on to it, but her eyes still flew along the lines. “You are my oldest and best friend, and so you are the first I would like to tell about it, and I would value your good wishes far beyond any others that might be offered to me, especially as I hope you will soon be my relation as well as my friend. I am engaged to Francie Fitzpatrick, and we are to be married as soon as possible.”
The reader sat heavily down upon the chair behind her,her colour fading from red to a dirty yellow as she read on. “I am aware that many will say that I am not showing proper respect towards poor dear Lucy in doing this, but you, or any one that knew her well, will support me in saying that I never was wanting in that to her when she was alive, and that she would be the last to wish I should live a lonely and miserable life now that she is gone. It is a great pleasure to me to think that she always had such a liking for Francie, for her own sake as well as because she was your cousin. It was my intention to have put off the marriage for a year, but I heard a couple of days ago from Robert Fitzpatrick that the investment that Francie’s little fortune had been put into was in a very shaky state, and that there is no present chance of dividends from it. He offered to let her live with them as usual, but they have not enough to support themselves. Francie was half starved there, and it is no place for her to be, and so we have arranged to be married very quietly down here at Bray, on the twentieth—just a week from to-day. I will take her to London, or perhaps a little further for a week or so, and about the first or second week in April I hope to be back in Rosemount. I know, my dear Charlotte, my dear old friend, that this must appear a sudden and hasty step, but I have considered it well and thoroughly. I know too that when Francie left your house there was some trifling little quarrel between you, but I trust you will forget all about that, and that you will be the first to welcome her when she returns to her new home. She begs me to say that she is sorry for anything she said to annoy you, and would write to you if she thought you would like to hear from her. I hope you will be as good a friend to her as you have always been to me, and will be ready to help and advise her in her new position. I would be greatly obliged to you if you would let the Lismoyle people know of my marriage, and of the reasons that I have told you for hurrying it on this way; you know yourself how glad they always are to get hold of the wrong end of a story. I am going to write to Lady Dysart myself. Now, my dear Charlotte, I must close this letter. The above will be my address for a week, and I will be very anxious to hear from you. With much love from Francie and myself, I remain your attached friend,
Roderick Lambert.”
A human soul, when it has broken away from its diviner part and is left to the anarchy of the lower passions, is a poor and humiliating spectacle, and it is unfortunate that in its animal want of self-control it is seldom without a ludicrous aspect. The weak side of Charlotte’s nature was her ready abandonment of herself to fury that was, as often as not, wholly incompatible with its cause, and now that she had been dealt the hardest blow that life could give her, there were a few minutes in which rage, and hatred, and thwarted passion took her in their fierce hands, and made her for the time a wild beast. When she came to herself she was standing by the chimney-piece, panting and trembling; the letter lay in pieces on the rug, torn by her teeth, and stamped here and there with the semicircle of her heel; a chair was lying on its side on the floor, and Mrs. Bruff was crouching aghast under the sideboard, looking out at her mistress with terrified inquiry.
Charlotte raised her hand and drew it across her mouth with the unsteadiness of a person in physical pain, then, grasping the edge of the chimney-piece, she laid her forehead upon it and drew a few long shuddering breaths. It is probable that if anyone had then come into the room, the human presence, with its mysterious electric quality, would have drawn the storm outwards in a burst of hysterics; but solitude seems to be a non-conductor, and a parched sob, that was strangled in its birth by an imprecation, was the only sound that escaped from her. As she lifted her head again her eyes met those of a large cabinet photograph of Lambert that stared brilliantly at her with the handsome fatuity conferred by an over-touched negative. It was a recent one, taken during one of those visits to Dublin whose object had been always so plausibly explained to her, and, as she looked at it, the biting thought of how she had been hoodwinked and fooled, by a man to whom she had all her life laid down the law, drove her half mad again. She plucked it out of its frame with her strong fingers, and thrust it hard down into the smouldering fire.
“If it was hell I’d do the same for you!” she said, with a moan like some furious feline creature, as she watched the picture writhe in the heat, “and for her too!” Shetook up the poker, and with it drove and battered the photograph into the heart of the fire, and then, flinging down the poker with a crash that made Louisa jump as she crossed the hall, she sat down at the dinner-table and made her first effort at self-control.
“His old friend!” she said, gasping and choking over the words; “the cur, the double-dyed cur! Lying and cringing to me, and borrowing my money, and—and—” even to herself she could not now admit that he had gulled her into believing that he would eventually marry her—“and sneaking after her behind my back all the time! And now he sends me her love—her love! Oh, my God Almighty—” she tried to laugh, but instead of laughter came tears, as she saw herself helpless, and broken, and aimless for the rest of her life—“I won’t break down—I won’t break down—” she said, grinding her teeth together with the effort to repress her sobs. She staggered blindly to the sideboard, and, unlocking it, took out a bottle of brandy. She put the bottle to her mouth and took a long gulp from it, while the tears ran down her face.
Sometimesthere comes in Paris towards the beginning of April a week or two of such weather as is rarely seen in England before the end of May. The horse-chestnut buds break in vivid green against the sober blue of the sky, there is a warmth about the pavements that suggests the coming blaze of summer, the gutter rivulets and the fountains sparkle with an equal gaiety, and people begin to have their coffee out of doors again. The spring, that on the day Francie was married at Bray was still mainly indicated by east wind and fresh mackerel, was burgeoning in the woods at Versailles with a hundred delicate surprises of blossom and leaf and thick white storm of buds, and tourists were being forced, like asparagus, by the fine weather, and began to appear in occasional twos and threes on the wide square in front of the palace. A remnant of the winter quiet still hung over everything, and a score or two of human beings, dispersed through the endless rooms and gardens, onlymade more emphatic the greatness of the extent and of the solitude. They certainly did not bring much custom to the little woman who had been beguiled by the fine weather to set up her table of cakes and oranges in a sunny angle of the palace wall, and sat by it all day, picturesque and patient in her white cap, while her strip of embroidery lengthened apace in the almost unbroken leisure. Even the first Sunday of April, from which she had hoped great things, brought her, during many bland and dazzling hours, nothing except the purchase of a few sous worth of sweets, and the afternoon was well advanced before she effected a sale of any importance. A tall gentleman, evidently a Monsieur Anglais, was wandering about, and she called to him to tell him of the excellence of herbriochesand the beauty of her oranges. Ordinarily she had not found that English gentlemen were attracted by her wares, but there was something helpless about this one that gave her confidence. He came up to her table and inspected its dainties with bewildered disfavour, while a comfortable clink of silver came from the pocket in which one hand was fumbling.
“Pain d’épices! Des gâteaux! Ver’ goot, ver’ sveet!” she said encouragingly, bringing forth her entire English vocabulary with her most winning smile.
“I wish to goodness I knew what the beastly things are made of,” the Englishman murmured to himself. “I can’t go wrong with oranges anyhow. Er—cela, et cela s’ils vous plait,” producing in his turn his whole stock of French, “combieng.” He had only indicated two oranges, but the little woman had caught the anxious glance at her cakes, and without more ado chose out six of the most highly-glazedbrioches, and by force of will and volubility made her customer not only take them but pay her two francs for them and the oranges.
The tall Englishman strode away round the corner of the palace with these provisions, and along the great terrace towards a solitary figure sitting forlornly at the top of one of the flights of steps that drop in noble succession down to the expanses of artificial water that seem to stretch away into the heart of France.
“I couldn’t find anywhere to get tea,” he said as soon ashe was within speaking distance; “I couldn’t find anything but an old woman selling oranges, and I got you some of those, and she made me get some cakes as well—I don’t know if they’re fit to eat.”
Mr. Lambert spoke with a very unusual timorousness, as he placed his sticky purchases in Francie’s lap, and sat down on the step beside her.
“Oh, thank you awfully, Roddy, I’m sure they’re lovely,” she answered, looking at her husband with a smile that was less spontaneous than it used to be, and looking away again immediately.
There was something ineffably wearying to her in the adoring, proprietary gaze that she found so unfailingly fixed upon her whenever she turned her eyes towards him; it seemed to isolate her from other people and set her upon a ridiculous pedestal, with one foolish worshipper declaiming his devotion with the fervour and fatuity of those who for two hours shouted the praises of Diana of the Ephesians. The supernatural mist that blurs the irksome and the ludicrous till it seems like a glory was not before her eyes; every outline was clear to her, with the painful distinctness of a caricature.
“I don’t think you could eat the oranges here,” he said, “they’d be down on us for throwing the skins about. Are you too tired to come on down into the gardens where they wouldn’t spot us?” He laid his hand on hers, “Youaretired. What fools we were to go walking round all those infernal rooms! Why didn’t you say you had enough of it?”
Francie was aching with fatigue from walking slowly over leagues of polished floor, with her head thrown back in perpetual perfunctory admiration of gilded ceilings and battle pictures, but she got up at once, as much to escape from the heavy warmth of his hand as from the mental languor that made discussion an effort. They went together down the steps, too much jaded by uncomprehended sight-seeing to take heed of the supreme expression of art in nature that stretched out before them in mirrors of Triton and dolphin-guarded water and ordered masses of woodland, and walked slowly along a terrace till they came to another flight of steps that fell suddenly from the statelysplendours of the terraces down to the simplicities of a path leading into a grove of trees.
The path wound temptingly on into the wood, with primroses and celandine growing cool and fresh in the young grass on either side of it; the shady greenness was like the music of stringed instruments after the brazen heroics of a military band. They loitered along, and Francie slipped her hand into Lambert’s arm, feeling, unconsciously, a little more in sympathy with him, and more at ease with life. She had never pretended either to him or to herself that she was in love with him; her engagement had been the inevitable result of poverty, and aimlessness, and bitterness of soul, but her instinctive leniency towards any man who liked her, joined with her old friendliness for Mr. Lambert, made it as easy a way out of her difficulties as any she could have chosen. There was something flattering in the knowledge of her power over a man whom she had been accustomed to look up to, and something, too, that appealed incessantly to her good nature; besides which there is to nearly every human being some comfort in being the first object of another creature’s life. She was almost fond of him as she walked beside him, glad to rest her weight on his arm, and to feel how big and reliable he was. There was nothing in the least romantic about having married him, but it was eminently creditable. Her friends in the north side of Dublin had been immensely impressed by it, and she knew enough of Lismoyle society to be aware that there also she would be regarded with gratifying envy. She quite looked forward to meeting Hawkins again, that she might treat him with the cool and assured patronage proper to the heights of her new position; he had himself seared the wound that he had given her, and now she felt that she was thankful to him.
“Hang this path! it has as many turns as a corkscrew,” remarked Mr. Lambert, bending his head to avoid a down-stretched branch of hawthorn, covered with baby leaves and giant thorns. “I thought we’d have come to a seat long before this; if it was Stephen’s Green there’d have been twenty by this time.”
“There would, and twenty old men sitting on each of them!” retorted Francie. “Mercy! who’s that hidingbehind the tree? Oh, I declare, it’s only one of those everlasting old statues, and look at a lot more of them! I wonder if it was that they hadn’t room enough for them up in the house that they put them out here in the woods?”
They had come to an enclosed green space in the wood, a daisy-starred oval of grass, holding the spring sunshine in serene remoteness from all the outer world of terraces and gardens, and made mysterious and poetical as a vale in Ida by the strange pale presences that peopled every nook of an ivy-grown crag at its further side. A clear pool reflected them, but waveringly, because of the ripples caused by a light drip from the overhanging rock; the trees towered on the encircling high ground and made a wall of silence round the intenser silences of the statues as they leaned and postured in a trance of suspended activity; the only sound was the monotone of the falling water, dropping with a cloistered gravity in the melodious hollow of the cave.
“I’m not going to walk another foot,” said Francie, sitting down on the grass by the water’s edge; “here, give me the oranges, Roddy, no one’ll catch us eating them here, and we can peg the skins at that old thing with its clothes dropping off and the harp in its hand.”
It was thus that Mrs. Lambert described an Apollo with a lyre who was regarding them from the opposite rock with classic preoccupation. Lambert lighted a cigar, and leaning back on his elbow in the grass, watched Francie’s progress through her inelegant meal with the pride of the provider. He looked at her half wonderingly, she was so lovely in his eyes, and she was so incredibly his own; he felt a sudden insanity of tenderness for her that made his heart throb and his cheek redden, and would have ennobled him to the pitch of dying for her on the spot, had such an extravagance been demanded of him. He longed to put his arms round her, and tell her how dear, how adorable, how entirely delightful she was, but he knew that she would probably only laugh at him in that maddening way of hers, or at all events, make him feel that she was far less interested in the declaration than he was. He gave a quick sigh, and stretching out his hand laid it on her shoulder as if to assure himself of his ownership of her.
“That dress fits you awfully well. I like you better in that than in anything.”
“Then I’d better take care and not get the juice on it,” Francie replied, with her mouth full of orange; “lend me a loan of your handkerchief.”
Lambert removed a bundle of letters and a guide-book from his pocket, and finally produced the handkerchief.
“Why, you’ve a letter there from Charlotte, haven’t you?” said Francie, with more interest than she had yet shown, “I didn’t know you had heard again from her.”
“Yes, I did,” said Lambert, putting the letters back in his pocket, “I wish to goodness we hadn’t left our address at the Charing Cross Hotel. People might let a man alone when he’s on his honeymoon.”
“What did she say?” inquired Francie lightly. “Is she cross? The other one she wrote was as sweet as syrup, and ‘Love to dear Francie’ and all.”
“Oh, no, not a bit,” said Mr. Lambert, who had been secretly surprised and even slightly wounded by the fortitude with which Miss Mullen had borne the intelligence of his second marriage, “but she’s complaining that my colts have eaten her best white petticoat.”
“You may give her one of my new ones,” suggested Francie.
“Oh yes, she’d like that, wouldn’t she?” said Lambert with a chuckle; “she’s so fond of you, y’know!”
“Oh, she’s quite friendly with me now, though I know you’re dying to make out that she’ll not forgive me for marrying you,” said Francie, flinging her last bit of orange-peel at the Apollo; “you’re as proud as Punch about it. I believe you’d have married her, only she wouldn’t take you!”
“Is that your opinion!” said Mr. Lambert with a smile that conveyed a magnanimous reticence as to the facts of the case; “you’re beginning to be jealous, are you? I think I’d better leave you at home the day I go over to talk the old girl into good humour about her petticoat!”
In his heart Mr. Lambert was less comfortable than the tone of his voice might have implied; there had been in the letter, in spite of its friendliness and singular absence of feminine pique, an allusion to that three hundred poundsthat circumstances had forced him to accept from her. His honeymoon, and those new clothes that Francie had bought in London, had run away with no end of money, and it would be infernally inconvenient if Charlotte was going, just at this time of all others, to come down on him for money that he had never asked her for. He turned these things over uncomfortably in his mind as he lay back on the grass, looking up at Francie’s profile, dark against the soft blue of the sky; and even while he took one of her hands and drew it down to his lips he was saying to himself that he had never yet failed to come round Charlotte when he tried, and it would not be for want of trying if he failed now.
The shadows of the trees began to stretch long fingers across the grass of the Bosquet d’Apollon, and Lambert looked at his watch and began to think oftable d’hôteat the Louvre Hotel. Pleasant, paradisaically pleasant as it was here in the sun, with Francie’s hand in his, and one of his best cigars in his mouth, he had come to the age at which not even Paradise would be enjoyable without a regular dinner hour.
Francie felt chilly and exhausted as they walked back and climbed the innumerable flights of steps that lay between them and the Palace; she privately thought that Versailles would be a horrible place to live in, and not to be compared in any way to Bruff, but, at all events, it would be a great thing to say she had been there, and she could read up all the history part of it in the guide-book when she got back to the hotel. They were to go up the Eiffel tower the next day; that would be some fun, anyhow, and to the Hippodrome in the evening, and, though that wouldn’t be as good as Hengler’s circus, the elephants and horses and things wouldn’t be talking French and expecting her to answer them, like the housemaids and shopmen. It was a rest to lean back in the narrow carriage with the pair of starveling ponies, that rattled along with as much whip-cracking and general pomp as if it were doing ten miles an hour instead of four, and to watch the poplars and villas pass by in placid succession, delightfully devoid of historical interest.
It was getting dark when they reached Paris, and thebreeze had become rough and cold. The lamps were shining among the trees on the Boulevards, and the red and green eyes of the cabs and trams crossed and recrossed each other like a tangle of fire-flies. The electric lights of the Place du Louvre were at length in sight, lofty and pale, like globes of imprisoned daylight above the mundane flare of the gas, and Francie’s eyes turned towards them with a languid relief. Her old gift of living every moment of her day seemed gone, and here, in this wonderful Paris, that had so suddenly acquired a real instead of a merely geographical existence for her, the stream of foreign life was passing by her, and leaving her face as uninterested and wearied as it ever had been when she looked out of the window at Albatross Villa at the messenger boys and bakers’ carts. The street was crowded, and the carriage made slower and slower way through it, till it became finally wedged in the centre of a block. Lambert stood up, and entered upon a one-sided argument with the driver as to how to get out, while Francie remained silent, and indifferent to the situation. A piano-organ at a little distance from them was playing the Boulanger March, with the brilliancy of its tribe, its unfaltering vigour dominating all other sounds. It was a piece of music in which Francie had herself a certain proficiency, and, shutting her eyes with a pang of remembrance, she was back in the Tally Ho drawing-room, strumming it on Charlotte’s piano, while Mr. Hawkins, holding the indignant Mrs. Bruff on his lap, forced her unwilling paws to thump a bass. Now the difficult part, in which she always broke down, was being played; he had pretended there that he was her music teacher, and had counted out loud, and rapped her over the knuckles with a tea-spoon, and gone on with all kinds of nonsense. The carriage started forward again with a jerk, and Lambert dropped back into his place beside her.
“Of all the asses unhung these French fellows are the biggest,” he said fervently, “and that infernal organ banging away the whole time till I couldn’t hear my own voice, much less his jabber. Here we are at last, anyhow, and you’ve got to get out before me.”
The tears had sprung overwhelmingly to her eyes, and she could not answer a word. She turned her back on herhusband, and stepping out of the carriage she walked unsteadily across the courtyard in the white glare of the electric light, leaving the hotel servant, who had offered his arm at the carriage door, to draw what conclusions seemed good to him from the spectacle of her wet cheeks and trembling lips. She made for the broad flight of steps, and went blindly up them under the drooping fans of the palms, into the reading-room on the first floor. The piano-organ was still audible outside, reiterating to madness the tune that had torn open her past, and she made a hard effort to forget its associations and recover herself, catching up an illustrated paper to hide her face from the people in the room. It was a minute or two before Lambert followed her.
“Here’s a go!” he said, coming towards her with a green envelope in his hand, “here’s a wire to say that Sir Benjamin’s dead, and they want me back at once.”
Themorning after Lambert received the telegram announcing Sir Benjamin’s death, he despatched one to Miss Charlotte Mullen at Gurthnamuckla, in which he asked her to notify his immediate return to his household at Rosemount. He had always been in the habit of relying on her help in small as well as great occasions, and now that he had had that unexpectedly civil letter from her, he had turned to her at once without giving the matter much consideration. It was never safe to trust to a servant’s interpretation of the cramped language of a telegram, and moreover, in his self-sufficient belief in his own knowledge of women, he thought that it would flatter her and keep her in good humour if he asked her to give directions to his household. He would have been less confident of his own sagacity had he seen the set of Miss Mullen’s jaw as she read the message, and heard the laugh which she permitted to herself as soon as Louisa had left the room.
“It’s a pity he didn’t hire me to be his major-domo as well as his steward and stud-groom!” she said to herself, “and his financier into the bargain! I declare I don’t know what he’d do without me!”
The higher and more subtle side of Miss Mullen’s nature had exacted of the quivering savage that had been awakened by Lambert’s second marriage that the answer to his letter should be of a conventional and non-committing kind; and so, when her brain was still on fire with hatred and invective, her facile pen glided pleasantly over the paper in stale felicitations and stereotyped badinage. It is hard to ask pity for Charlotte, whose many evil qualities have without pity been set down, but the seal of ignoble tragedy had been set on her life; she had not asked for love, but it had come to her, twisted to burlesque by the malign hand of fate. There is pathos as well as humiliation in the thought that such a thing as a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, and it is a fact not beyond the reach of sympathy that each time Charlotte stood before her glass her ugliness spoke to her of failure, and goaded her to revenge.
It was a wet morning, but at half-past eleven o’clock the black horse was put into the phaeton, and Miss Mullen, attired in a shabby mackintosh, set out on her mission to Rosemount. A cold north wind drove the rain in her face as she flogged the old horse along through the shelterless desolation of rock and scrub, and in spite of her mackintosh she felt wet and chilled by the time she reached Rosemount yard. She went into the kitchen by the back door, and delivered her message to Eliza Hackett, whom she found sitting in elegant leisure, retrimming a bonnet that had belonged to the late Mrs. Lambert.
“And is it the day after to-morrow, Miss, please?” demanded Eliza Hackett with cold resignation.
“It is, me poor woman, it is,” replied Charlotte, in the tone of facetious intimacy that she reserved for other people’s servants. “You’ll have to stir your stumps to get the house ready for them.”
“The house is cleaned down and ready for them as soon as they like to walk into it,” replied Eliza Hackett with dignity, “and if the new lady faults the drawing-room chimbley for not being swep, the master will know it’s not me that’s to blame for it, but the sweep that’s gone dhrilling with the Mileetia.”
“Oh, she’s not the one to find fault with a man for being a soldier any more than yourself, Eliza!” said Charlotte, who had pulled off her wet gloves and was warming her hands. “Ugh! How cold it is! Is there any place upstairs where I could sit while you were drying my things for me?”
The thought had occurred to her that it would not be uninteresting to look round the house, and as it transpired that fires were burning in the dining-room and in Mr. Lambert’s study she left her wet cloak and hat in the kitchen and ascended to the upper regions. She glanced into the drawing-room as she passed its open door, and saw the blue rep chairs ranged in a solemn circle, gazing with all their button eyes at a three-legged table in the centre of the room; the blinds were drawn down, and the piano was covered with a sheet; it was altogether as inexpressive of everything, except bad taste, as was possible. Charlotte passed on to the dining-room and stationed herself in front of an indifferent fire there, standing with her back to the chimney-piece and her eyes roving about in search of entertainment. Nothing was changed, except that the poor turkey-hen’s medicine bottles and pill boxes no longer lurked behind the chimney-piece ornaments; the bare dinner-table suggested only how soon Francie would be seated at its head, and Charlotte presently prowled on to Mr. Lambert’s study at the end of the passage, to look for a better fire, and a room less barren of incident.
The study grate did not fail of its reputation of being the best in the house, and Mr. Lambert’s chair stood by the hearthrug in wide-armed invitation to the visitor. Charlotte sat down in it and slowly warmed one foot after the other, while the pain rose hot and unconquerable in her heart. The whole room was so gallingly familiar, so inseparably connected with the time when she had still a future, vague and improbable as it was, and could live in sufficient content on its slight sustenance. Another future had now to be constructed, she had already traced out some lines of it, and in the perfecting of these she would henceforward find the cure for what she was now suffering. She roused herself, and glancing towards the table saw that on it lay a heap of unopened newspapers and letters; she got up withalacrity, and addressed herself to the congenial task of examining each letter in succession.
“H’m! They’re of a very bilious complexion,” she said to herself. “There’s one from Langford,” turning it over and looking at the name on the back. “I wonder if he’s ordering a Victoria for her ladyship? I wouldn’t put it past him. Perhaps he’d like me to tell her whose money it was paid Langford’s bill last year!”
She fingered the letter longingly, then, taking a hairpin from the heavy coils of her hair, she inserted it under the flap of the envelope. Under her skilful manipulation it opened easily, and without tearing, and she took out its contents. They consisted of a short but severe letter from the head of the firm, asking for “a speedy settlement of this account, now so long overdue,” and of the account in question. It was a bill of formidable amount, from which Charlotte soon gathered the fact that twenty pounds only of the money she had lent Lambert last May had found its way into the pockets of the coachbuilder. She replaced the bill and letter in the envelope, and, after a minute of consideration, took up for the second time two large and heavy letters that she had thrown aside when first looking through the heap. They had the stamp of the Lismoyle bank upon them, and obviously contained bank-books. Charlotte saw at a glance that the hairpin would be of no avail with these envelopes, and after another pause for deliberation she replaced all the letters in their original position, and went down the passage to the top of the kitchen stairs.
“Eliza,” she called out, “have ye a kettle boiling down there? Ah, that’s right—” as Eliza answered in the affirmative. “I never knew a well kept kitchen yet without boiling water in it! I’m chilled to me bones, Eliza,” she continued, “I wonder could you put your hand on a drop of spirits anywhere, and I’d ask ye for a drop of hot grog to keep the life in me, and”—as Eliza started with hospitable speed in search of the materials,—“let me mix it meself, like a good woman; I know very well I’d be in the lock-up before night if I drank whatyou’dbrew for me!”
Retiring on this jest, Miss Mullen returned to the study,and was sitting over the fire with a newspaper when the refreshment she had asked for was brought in.
“I cut ye a sandwich to eat with it, Miss,” said Eliza Hackett, on whom Charlotte’s generosity in the matter of Mrs. Lambert’s clothing had not been thrown away; “I know meself that as much as the smell itself o’ sperrits would curdle under me nose, takin’ them on an empty stomach. Though, indeed, if ye walked Lismoyle ye’d get no better brandy than what’s in that little bottle. ’Tis out o’ the poor mistress’s medicine chest I got it. Well, well, she’s where she won’t want brandy now!”
Eliza withdrew with a well-ordered sigh, that, as Charlotte knew, was expressive of future as well as past regret, and Mr. Lambert’s “oldest friend” was left in sole possession of his study. She first proceeded to mix herself a tumbler of brandy and water, and then she lifted the lid of the brass punch kettle, and taking one of the envelopes that contained the bank-books, she held it in the steam till the gum of the flap melted. The book in it was Lambert’s private banking account, and Charlotte studied it for some time with greedy interest, comparing the amounts of the drafts and cash payments with the dates against each. Then she opened the other envelope, keeping a newspaper ready at hand to throw over the books in case of interruption, and found, as she had anticipated, that it was the bank-book of the Dysart estate. After this she settled down to hard work for half an hour, comparing one book with another, making lists of figures, sipping her brandy and water meanwhile, and munching Eliza Hackett’s sandwiches. Having learned what she could of the bank-books, she fastened them up in their envelopes, and, again having recourse to the kettle that was simmering on the hob, she made, with slow, unslaked avidity, an examination of some of the other letters on the table. When everything was tidy again she leaned back in the chair, and remained in deep meditation over her paper of figures, until the dining-room clock sent a muffled reminder through the wall that it was two o’clock.
Ferry Row had, since Charlotte’s change of residence, breathed a freer air. Even her heavy washing was now done at home, and her visits to her tenantry might be looked forward to only when rents were known to be due. Therewas nothing that they expected less than that, on this wet afternoon, so soon, too, after a satisfactory quarter-day, they should hear the well-known rattle of the old phaeton, and see Miss Mullen, in her equally well-known hat and waterproof, driving slowly past house after house, until she arrived at the disreputable abode of Dinny Lydon the tailor. Having turned the cushions of the phaeton upside down to keep them dry, Miss Mullen knocked at the door, and was admitted by Mrs. Lydon, a very dirty woman, with a half-finished waistcoat over her arm.
“Oh, ye’re welcome, Miss Mullen, ye’re welcome! Come in out o’ the rain, asthore,” she said, with a manner as greasy as her face. “Himself have the coat waitin’ on ye these three days to thry on.”
“Then I’m afraid the change for death must be on Dinny if he’s beginning to keep his promises,” replied Charlotte, adventuring herself fearlessly into the dark interior. “I’d be thrown out in all me calculations, Dinny, if ye give up telling me lies.”
This was addressed through a reeking fog of tobacco smoke to a half-deformed figure seated on a table by the window.
“Oh, with the help o’ God I’ll tell yer honour a few lies yet before I die,” replied Dinny Lydon, removing his pipe and the hat which, for reasons best known to himself, he wore while at work, and turning on Charlotte a face that, no less than his name, told of Spanish, if not Jewish blood.
“Well, that’s the truth, anyway,” said Charlotte, with a friendly laugh; “but I won’t believe in the coat being ready till I see it. Didn’t ye lose your apprentice since I saw ye?”
“Is it that young gobsther?” rejoined Mrs. Lydon acridly, as she tendered her unsavoury assistance to Charlotte in the removal of her waterproof; “if that one was in the house yer coat wouldn’t be finished in a twelvemonth with all the time Dinny lost cursing him. Faith! it was last week he hysted his sails and away with him. Mind ye, ’twas he was the first-class puppy!”
“Was it the trade he didn’t like?” asked Charlotte; “or was it the skelpings he got from Dinny?”
“Throth, it was not, but two plates in the sate of his breeches was what he faulted, and the divil mend him!”
“Two plates!” exclaimed Charlotte, in not unnatural bewilderment; “what in the name of fortune was he doing with them?”
“Well, indeed, Miss Mullen, with respex t’ye, when he came here he hadn’t as much rags on him as’d wipe a candlestick,” replied Mrs. Lydon, with fluent spitefulness; “yerself knows that ourselves has to be losing with puttin’ clothes on thim apprentices, an’ feedin’ them as lavish and as natty as ye’d feed a young bonnuf, an’ afther all they’d turn about an’ say they never got so much as the wettin’ of their mouths of male nor tay nor praties—” Mrs. Lydon replenished her lungs with a long breath,—“and this lad the biggest dandy of them all, that wouldn’t be contint without Dinny’d cut the brea’th of two fingers out of a lovely throusers that was a little sign bulky on him and was gethered into nate plates—”
“Oh, it’s well known beggars can’t bear heat,” said Charlotte, interrupting for purposes of her own a story that threatened to expand unprofitably, “and that was always the way with all the M‘Donaghs. Didn’t I meet that lad’s cousin, Shamus Bawn, driving a new side-car this morning, and his father only dead a week. I suppose now he’s got the money he thinks he’ll never get to the end of it, though indeed it isn’t so long since I heard he was looking for money, and found it hard enough to get it.”
Mrs. Lydon gave a laugh of polite acquiescence, and wondered inwardly whether Miss Mullen had as intimate a knowledge of everyone’s affairs as she seemed to have of Shamus Bawn’s.
“Oh, they say a manny a thing—” she observed with well-simulated inanity. “Arrah!dheen dheffeth, Dinny!thurrum cussoge um’na.”
“Yes, hurry on and give me the coat, Dinny,” said Charlotte, displaying that knowledge of Irish that always came as a shock to those who were uncertain as to its limitations.
The tailor untwisted his short legs and descended stiffly to the floor, and having helped Charlotte into the coat, pushed her into the light of the open door, and surveyedhis handiwork with his large head on one side, and the bitten ends of thread still hanging on his lower lip.
“It turrned well,” he said, passing his hand approvingly over Miss Mullen’s thick shoulder; “afther all, the good stuff’s the best; that’s fine honest stuff that’ll wear forty of thim other thrash. That’s the soort that’ll shtand.”
“To the death!” interjected Mrs. Lydon fervently.
“How many wrinkles are there in the back?” said Charlotte; “tell me the truth now, Dinny; remember ’twas only last week you were ‘making your sowl’ at the mission.”
“Tchah!” said Dinny Lydon contemptuously, “it’s little I regard the mission, but I wouldn’t be bothered tellin’ ye lies about the likes o’ this,” surreptitiously smoothing as he spoke a series of ridges above the hips; “that’s a grand clane back as ever I see.”
“How independent he is about his missions!” said Charlotte jibingly. “Ha! Dinny me man, if you were sick you’d be the first to be roaring for the priest!”
“Faith, divil a roar,” returned the atheistical Dinny; “if I couldn’t knock the stone out of the gap for meself, the priest couldn’t do it for me.”
“Oh, Gaad! Dinny, have conduct before Miss Mullen!” cried Mrs. Lydon.
“He may say what he likes, if he wouldn’t drop candle grease on my jacket,” said Charlotte, who had taken off the coat and was critically examining every seam; “or, indeed, Mrs. Lydon, I believe it was yourself did it!” she exclaimed, suddenly intercepting an indescribable glance of admonition from Mrs. Dinny to her husband; “that’s wax candle grease! I believe you wore it yourself at Michael M‘Donagh’s wake, and that’s why it was finished four days ago.”
Mrs. Lydon uttered a shriek of merriment at the absurdity of the suggestion, and then fell to disclaimers so voluble as at once to convince Miss Mullen of her guilt. The accusation was not pressed home, and Dinny’s undertaking to remove the grease with a hot iron was accepted with surprising amiability. Charlotte sat down on a chair whose shattered frame bore testimony to the renowned violence of Mrs. Lydon when under the influence of liquor, and encouraging the singed and half-starved cat on to her lap, she addressed herself to conversation.
“Wasn’t Michael M‘Donagh husband to your mother’s cousin?” she said to the tailor; “I’m told he had a very large funeral.”
“He had that,” answered Dinny, pushing the black hair back from his high forehead, and looking more than ever like a Jewish rabbi; “three priests, an’ five an’ twenty cars, an’ fifteen pounds of althar money.”
“Well, the three priests have a right to pray their big best for him, with five pounds apiece in their pockets,” remarked Charlotte; “I suppose it was the M‘Donagh side gave the most of the altar. Those brothers of old Michael’s are all stinking of money.”
“Oh, they’re middlin’ snug,” said Dinny, who had just enough family feeling for the M‘Donaghs to make him chary of admitting their wealth; “annyway, they’re able to slap down their five shillin’s or their ten shillin’ bit upon the althar as well as another.”
“Who got the land?” asked Charlotte, stroking the cat’s filthy head, and thereby perfuming her fingers with salt fish.
“Oh, how do I know what turning and twisting of keys there was in it afther himself dyin’?” said the tailor, with the caution which his hearers understood to be a fatiguing but inevitable convention; “they say the daughter got the biggest half, an’ Shamus Bawn got the other. There’s where the battle’ll be between them.” He laughed sardonically, as he held up the hot iron and spat upon it to ascertain its heat.
“He’d better let his sister alone,” said Charlotte. “Shamus Bawn has more land this minute than he has money enough to stock, with that farm he got from Mr. Lambert the other day, without trying to get more.”
“Oh, Jim’s not so poor altogether that he couldn’t bring the law on her if he’d like,” said Dinny, immediately resenting the slighting tone; “he got a good lump of a fortune with the wife.”
“Ah, what’s fifty pounds!” said Charlotte scornfully. “I daresay he wanted every penny of it to pay the fine on Knocklara.”
“Arrah, fifty pounds! God help ye!” exclaimed Dinny Lydon with superior scorn. “No, but a hundhred an’ eighty was what he put down on the table to Lambert for it, and it’s little but he had to give the two hundhred itself.”
Mrs. Lydon looked up from the hearth where she was squatted, fanning the fire with her red petticoat to heat another iron for her husband. “Sure I know Dinny’s safe tellin’ it to a lady,” she said, rolling her dissolute cunning eye from her husband to Miss Mullen; “but ye’ll not spake of it asthore. Jimmy had some dhrink taken when he shown Dinny the docket, because Lambert said he wouldn’t give the farm so chape to e’er a one but Jimmy, an’ indeed Jimmy’d break every bone in our body if he got the wind of a word that ’twas through us the neighbours had it to say he had that much money with him. Jimmy’s very close in himself that way.”
Charlotte laughed good-humouredly. “Oh, there’s no fear of me, Mrs. Lydon. It’s no affair of mine either way,” she said reassuringly. “Here, hurry with me jacket, Dinny; I’ll be glad enough to have it on me going home.”
Sir Benjamin Dysart’sfuneral was an event of the past. It was a full three weeks since the family vault in Lismoyle Churchyard had closed its door upon that ornament of county society; Lady Dysart’s friends were beginning to recover from the strain of writing letters of condolence to her on her bereavement, and Christopher, after sacrificing to his departed parent’s memory a week of perfect sailing weather, had had his boat painted, and had relapsed into his normal habit of spending as much of his time as was convenient on the lake.
There was still the mingled collapse and stir in the air that comes between the end of an old regime and the beginning of a new. Christopher had resigned his appointment at Copenhagen, feeling that his life would, for the future, be vaguely filled with new duties and occupations, but he had not yet discovered anything very novel to do beyond signing his name a good many times, and trying to become accustomed to hearing himself called Sir Christopher; occupations that seemed rather elementary in the construction of a career. His want of initiative energy in every-day matters kept him motionless and apathetic, waiting for his new atmosphere to make itself palpable to him, and prepared to resign himself to its conditions. He even, in his unquenchable self-consciousness, knew that it would be wholesome for him if these were such as he least liked; but in the meantime, he remained passively unsettled, and a letter from Lord Castlemore, in which his tact and conscientiousness as a secretary were fully set forth, roused no outside ambition in him. He re-read it on a shimmering May morning, with one arm hanging over the tiller of his boat, as she crept with scarcely breathing sails through the pale streaks of calm that lay like dreams upon the lake. He was close under the woods of Bruff, close enough to feel how still and busy they were in the industry of spring. It seemed to him that the sound of the insects was like the humming of her loom, and almost mechanically he turned over the envelope of Lord Castlemore’s letter, and began in the old familiar way to scrawl a line or two on the back of it.
The well-known crest, however, disconcerted his fancy, and he fell again to ruminating upon the letter itself. If this expressed the sum of his abilities, diplomatic life was certainly not worth living. Tact and conscientiousness were qualities that would grace the discharge of a doctor’s butler, and might be expected from anyone of the most ordinary intelligence. He could not think that his services to his country, as concentrated in Lord Castlemore, were at all remarkable; they had given him far less trouble than the most worthless of those efforts in prose and verse, that, as he thought contemptuously, were like the skeletons that mark the desert course of a caravan; he did not feel the difficulty, and he, therefore, thought the achievement small. A toying breeze fluttered the letter in his hand, and the boat tilted languidly in recognition of it. The water began to murmur about the keel, and Christopher presently found himself gliding smoothly towards the middle of the lake.
He looked across at Lismoyle, spreading placidly alongthe margin of the water, and as he felt the heat of the sun and the half-forgotten largeness of summer in the air, he could have believed himself back in the August of last year, and he turned his eyes to the trees of Rosemount as if the sight of them would bring disillusionment. It was some time now since he had first been made ashamed of the discovery that disillusionment also meant relief. For some months he had clung to his dream; at first helplessly, with a sore heart, afterwards with a more conscious taking hold, as of something gained, that made life darker, but for ever richer. It had been torture of the most simple, unbearable kind, to drive away from Tally Ho, with the knowledge that Hawkins was preferred to him; but sentiment had deftly usurped the place of his blind suffering, and that stage came that is almost inevitable with poetic natures, when the artistic sense can analyse sorrow, and sees the beauty of defeat. Then he had heard that Francie was going to marry Lambert, and the news had done more in one moment to disillusion him than common sense could do in years. The thought stung him with a kind of horror for her that she could tolerate such a fate as marrying Roddy Lambert. He knew nothing of the tyrannies of circumstance. To prosperous young men like Christopher, poverty, except barefooted and in rags, is a name, and unpaid bills a joke. That Albatross Villa could have driven her to the tremendous surrender of marriage was a thing incredible. All that was left for him to believe was that he had been mistaken, and that the lucent quality that he thought he had found in her soul had existed only in his imagination. Now when he thought of her face it was with a curious half regret that so beautiful a thing should no longer have any power to move him. Some sense of loss remained, but it was charged with self pity for the loss of an ideal. Another man in Christopher’s position would not probably have troubled himself about ideals, but Christopher, fortunately, or unfortunately for him, was not like other men.
The fact must even be faced that he had probably never been in love with her, according to the common acceptation of the term. His intellect exhausted his emotions and killed them with solicitude, as a child digs up a flower to see if it is growing, and his emotions themselves had a feminine refinement, but lacked the feminine quality of unreasoning pertinacity. From self-pity for the loss of an ideal to gratitude for an escape is not far to go, and all that now remained to him of bitterness was a gentle self-contempt for his own inadequacy in falling in love, as in everything else.
It may be imagined that in Lismoyle Francie was a valued and almost invariable topic of conversation. Each visitor to Rosemount went there in the character of a scout, and a detailed account of her interview was published on every possible occasion.
“Well, I took my time about calling on her,” observed Mrs. Baker; “I thought I’d let her see I was in no hurry.”
Mrs. Corkran, with whom Mrs. Baker was having tea, felt guiltily conscious of having called on Mrs. Lambert two days after her arrival, and hastened to remind the company of the pastoral nature of the attention.
“Oh, of course we know clergymen’s families can’t pick their company,” went on Mrs. Baker, dismissing the interruption not without a secret satisfaction that Carrie Beattie, who, in the absence of Miss Corkran, was pouring out tea for her future mother-in-law, should see that other people did not consider the Rev. Joseph such a catch as she did. “Only that Lambert’s such a friend of Mr. Baker’s, and always banked with him, I declare I don’t know that I’d have gone at all. I assure you it gave me quite a turn to see her stuck up there in poor Lucy Lambert’s chair, talking about the grand hotels that she was in, in London and Paris, as if she never swept out a room or cleaned a saucepan in her life.”
“She had all the walls done round with those penny fans,” struck in Miss Kathleen Baker, “and a box of French bongbongs out on the table; and oh, mamma! did you notice the big photograph of him and her together on the chimney-piece?”
“I could notice nothing, Kathleen, and I didn’t want to notice them,” replied Mrs. Baker; “I could think of nothing but of what poor Lucy Lambert would say to see her husband dancing attendance on that young hussy without so much as a mourning ring on him, and her best tea-service thrashed about as if it was kitchen delf.”
“Was he very devoted, Mrs. Baker?” asked Miss Beattie with a simper.
“Oh, I suppose he was,” answered Mrs. Baker, as if in contempt for any sentiment inspired by Francie, “but I can’t say I observed anything very particular.”
“Oh, then,Idid!” said Miss Baker with a nod of superior intelligence; “I was watching them all the time; every word she uttered he was listening to it, and when she asked for the tea-cosy heflewfor it!”
“Eliza Hackett told my Maria there was shocking waste going on in the house now; fires in the drawing-room from eight o’clock in the morning, and this the month of May!” said Mrs. Corkran with an approving eye at the cascade of cut paper that decked her own grate, “and the cold meat given to the boy that cleans the boots!”
“Roddy Lambert’ll be sorry for it some day when it’s too late,” said Mrs. Baker darkly, “but men are all alike; it’s out of sight out of mind with them!”
“Oh, Mrs. Baker,” wheezed Mrs. Corkran with asthmatic fervour, “I think you’re altogether too cynical; I’m sure that’s not your opinion of Mr. Baker.”
“I don’t know what he might do if I was dead,” replied Mrs. Baker, “but I’ll answer for it he’ll not be carrying on with Number Two whileI’malive, like other people I know!”
“Oh, don’t say such things before these young ladies,” said Mrs. Corkran; “I wish them no greater blessing of Providence than a good husband, and I think I may say that dear Carrie will find one in my Joseph.”
The almost death-bed solemnity of this address paralysed the conversation for a moment, and Miss Beattie concealed her blushes by going to the window to see whose was the vehicle that had just driven by.
“Oh, it’s Mr. Hawkins!” she exclaimed, feeling the importance of the information.
Kathleen Baker sprang from her seat and ran to the window. “So it is!” she cried, “and I bet you sixpence he’s going to Rosemount! My goodness, I wish it was to-day we had gone there!”
Hawkinshad, like Mrs. Baker, been in no hurry to call upon the bride. He had seen her twice in church, he had once met her out driving with her husband, and, lastly, he had come upon her face to face in the principal street of Lismoyle, and had received a greeting of aristocratic hauteur, as remarkable as the newly acquired English accent in which it was delivered. After these things a visit to her was unavoidable, and, in spite of a bad conscience, he felt, when he at last set out for Rosemount, an excitement that was agreeable after the calm of life at Lismoyle.
There was no one in the drawing-room when he was shown into it, and as the maid closed the door behind him he heard a quick step run through the hall and up the stairs. “Gone to put on her best bib and tucker,” he said to himself with an increase of confidence; “I’ll bet she saw me coming.” The large photograph alluded to by Miss Baker was on the chimneypiece, and he walked over and examined it with great interest. It obeyed the traditions of honeymoon portraits, and had the inevitable vulgarity of such; Lambert, sitting down, turned the leaves of a book, and Francie, standing behind him, rested one hand on his shoulder, while the other held a basket of flowers. In spite of its fatuity as a composition, both portraits were good, and they had moreover an air of prosperity and new clothes that Mr. Hawkins found to be almost repulsive. He studied the photograph with deepening distaste until he was aware of a footstep at the door, and braced himself for the encounter, with his heart beating uncomfortably and unexpectedly.
They shook hands with the politeness of slight acquaintance, and sat down, Hawkins thinking he had never seen her look so pretty or so smart, and wondering what he was going to talk to her about. It was evidently going to be war to the knife, he thought, as he embarked haltingly upon the weather, and found that he was far less at his ease than he had expected to be.
“Yes, it’s warmer here than it was in England,” said Francie, looking languidly at the rings on her left hand; “we were perished there after Paris.”
She felt that the familiar mention of such names must of necessity place her in a superior position, and she was so stimulated by their associations with her present grandeur that she raised her eyes, and looked at him. Their eyes met with as keen a sense of contact as if their hands had suddenly touched, and each, with a perceptible jerk, looked away.
“You say that Paris was hot, was it?” said Hawkins, with something of an effort. “I haven’t been there since I went with some people the year before last, and it was as hot then as they make it. I thought it rather a hole.”
“Oh, indeed?” said Francie, chillingly; “Mr. Lambert and I enjoyed it greatly. You’ve been here all the spring, I suppose?”
“Yes; I haven’t been out of this place, except for Punchestown, since I came back from leave;” then with a reckless feeling that he would break up this frozen sea of platitudes, “since that time that I met you on the pier at Kingstown.”
“Oh yes,” said Francie, as if trying to recall some unimportant incident; “you were there with the Dysarts, weren’t you?”
Hawkins became rather red. She was palpably overdoing it, but that did not diminish the fact that he was being snubbed, and though he might, in a general and guarded way, have admitted that he deserved it, he realised that he bitterly resented being snubbed by Francie.
“Yes,” he said, with an indifference as deliberately exaggerated as her own, “I travelled over with them. I remember how surprised we were to see you and Mr. Lambert there.”
She felt the intention on his part to say something disagreeable, and it stung her more than the words.
“Why were you surprised?” she asked coolly.
“Well—er—I don’t exactly know,” stammered Mr. Hawkins, a good deal taken aback by the directness of the inquiry; “we didn’t exactly know where you were—thought Lambert was at Lismoyle, you know.” He began to wish he had brought Cursiter with him; no one could have guessed that she would have turned into such a cat and given herself such airs; her ultra-refinement, and her affected accent, andher exceeding prettiness, exasperated him in a way that he could not have explained, and though the visit did not fail of excitement, he could not flatter himself that he was taking quite the part in it that he had expected. Certainly Mrs. Lambert was not maintaining the rôle that he had allotted her; huffiness was one thing, but infernal swagger was quite another. It is painful for a young man of Mr. Hawkins’ type to realise that an affection that he has inspired can wane and even die, and Francie’s self-possession was fast robbing him of his own.
“I hear that your regiment is after being ordered to India?” she said cheerfully, when it became apparent that Hawkins could find no more to say.
“Yes, so they say; next trooping season will about see us, I expect, and they’re safe to send us to Aldershot first, so we may be out of this at any minute.” He glanced at her as he spoke, to see how she took it.
“Oh, that’ll be very nice for you,” answered Francie, still more cheerfully. “I suppose,” she went on with her most aristocratic drawl, “that you’ll be married before you go out?”
She had arranged the delivery of this thrust before she came downstairs, and it glided from her tongue as easily as she could have wished.
“Yes, I daresay I shall,” he answered defiantly, though the provokingly ready blush of a fair man leaped to his face. He looked at her, angry with himself for reddening, and angrier with her for blazoning her indifference, by means of a question that seemed to him the height of bad taste and spitefulness. As he looked, the colour that burned in his own face repeated itself in hers with slow relentlessness; at the sight of it a sudden revulsion of feeling brought him dangerously near to calling her by her name, with reproaches for her heartlessness, but before the word took form she had risen quickly, and, saying something incoherent about ordering tea, moved towards the bell, her head turned from him with the helpless action of a shy child.
Hawkins, hardly knowing what he was doing, started forward, and as he did so the door opened, and a well-known voice announced,
“Miss Charlotte Mullen!”
The owner of the voice advanced into the room, and saw, as anyone must have seen, the flushed faces of its two occupants, and felt that nameless quality in the air that tells of interruption.
“I took the liberty of announcing myself,” she said, with her most affable smile; “I knew you were at home, as I saw Mr. Hawkins’ trap at the door, and I just walked in.”
As she shook hands and sat down she expanded easily into a facetious description of the difficulties of getting her old horse along the road from Gurthnamuckla, and by the time she had finished her story Hawkins’ complexion had regained its ordinary tone, and Francie had resumed the air of elegant nonchalance appropriate to the importance of the married state. Nothing, in fact, could have been more admirable than Miss Mullen’s manner. She praised Francie’s new chair covers and Indian tea; she complimented Mr. Hawkins on his new pony; even going so far as to reproach him for not having been out to Gurthnamuckla to see her, till Francie felt some pricks of conscience about the sceptical way that she and Lambert had laughed together over Charlotte’s amiability when she paid her first visit to them. She found inexpressible ease in the presence of a third person as capable as Charlotte of carrying on a conversation with the smallest possible assistance; sheltered by it she slowly recovered from her mental overthrow, and, furious as she was with Hawkins for his part in it, she was beginning to be able to patronise him again by the time that he got up to go away.
“Well, Francie, my dear child,” began Charlotte, as soon as the door had closed behind him, “I’ve scarcely had a word with you since you came home. You had such a reception the last day I was here that I had to content myself with talking to Mrs. Beattie, and hearing all about the price of underclothes. Indeed I had a good mind to tell her that only for your magnanimity she wouldn’t be having so much to say about Carrie’s trousseau!”
“Indeed she was welcome to him!” said Francie, putting her chin in the air, “that little wretch, indeed!”
It was one of the moments when she touched the extreme of satisfaction in being married, and in order to cover, forher own and Charlotte’s sake, the remembrance of that idiotic blush, she assumed a little extra bravado.
“Talking of your late admirers—” went on Charlotte, “for I hope for poor Roddy’s sake they’re not present ones—I never saw a young fellow so improved in his manners as Mr. Hawkins. There was a time I didn’t fancy him—as you may remember, though we’ve agreed to say nothing more about our old squabbles—but I think he’s chastened by adversity. That engagement, you know—” she paused, and cast a side-long, unobtrusive glance at Francie. “He’s not the first young man that’s been whipped in before marriage as well as after it, and I think the more he looks at it the less he likes it.”
“He’s been looking at it a long time now,” said Francie with a laugh that was intended to be careless, but into which a sneer made its way. “I wonder Roddy isn’t in,” she continued, changing the subject to one in which no pitfalls lurked; “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d gone to Gurthnamuckla to see you, Charlotte; he’s been saying ever since we came back he wanted to have a talk with you, but he’s been so busy he hadn’t a minute.”
“If I’m not greatly mistaken,” said Charlotte, standing up so as to be able to see out of the window, “here’s the man of the house himself. What horse is that he’s on?” her eyes taking in with unwilling admiration the swaggering ease of seat and squareness of shoulder that had so often captivated her taste, as Lambert, not unaware of spectators at the window, overcame much callow remonstrance on the part of the young horse he was riding, at being asked to stand at the door till a boy came round to take him.
“Oh, that’s the new four-year-old that Roddy had taken in off Gurthnamuckla while we were away,” said Francie, leaning her elbow against the shutter and looking out too. “He’s an awful wild young brat of a thing! Look at the way he’s hoisting now! Roddy says he’ll have me up on him before the summer’s out, but I tell him that if he does I won’t be on him long.” Her eyes met her husband’s, and she laughed and tapped on the glass, beckoning imperiously to him to come in.
Charlotte turned away from the window, and when, a few minutes afterwards, Mr. Lambert came into the room, thevisitor had put her gloves on, and was making her farewells to her hostess.
“No, Roddy,” she said, “I must be off now. I’m like the beggars, ‘tay and turn out’ is my motto. But supposing now that you bring this young lady over to lunch with me to-morrow—no, not to-morrow, that’s Sunday—come on Monday. How would that suit your book?”
Lambert assented with a good grace that struck Francie as being wonderfully well assumed, and followed Miss Mullen out to put her in her phaeton.
Francie closed the door behind them, and sat down. She was glad she had met Hawkins and got it over, and as she reviewed the incidents of his visit, she thought that on the whole she had come very near her own ideal of behaviour. Cool, sarcastic, and dignified, even though she had, for one moment, got a little red, he could not but feel that she had acted as became a married lady, and shown him his place once for all. As for him, he had been horrible, she thought bitterly; sitting up and talking to her as if he had never seen her before, and going on as if he had never—she got up hastily as if to escape from the hateful memories of last year that thrust themselves suddenly into her thoughts. How thankful she was that she had shown him she was not inconsolable; she wished that Roddy had come in while he was there, and had stood over him, and overshadowed him with his long legs and broad shoulders, and his air of master of the house. Why on earth had Charlotte praised him? Gurthnamuckla must have had the most extraordinarily sweetening effect upon her, for she seemed to have a good word for everybody now, and Roddy’s notion that she would want to be coaxed into a good temper was all nonsense, and conceited nonsense too, and so she would tell him. It was not in Francie’s light, wholesome nature to bear malice; the least flutter of the olive branch, the faintest glimmer of the flag of truce, was enough to make her forgive an injury and forget an insult.
When her husband came back she turned towards him with a sparkle in her eye.
“Well, Roddy, I hope you squeezed her hand when you were saying good-bye! I daresay now you’ll want me to believe that it’s all in honour of you that she’s asked usover to lunch to-morrow, and I suppose that’s what she was telling you out in the hall? Aren’t you sorry you didn’t marry her instead of me?”
Lambert did not answer, but came over to where she was standing, and putting his arm round her, drew her towards him and kissed her with a passion that seemed too serious an answer to her question. She could not know, as she laughed and hid her face from him, that he was saying to himself, “Of course he was bound to come and call, he’d have had to do that no matter who she was!”