Spring, that year, came delicately in among the Galway hills; in primroses, in wild bursts of gorse, and in the later snow of hawthorn, unbeaten by the rain or the wet west wind of rougher seasons. A cuckoo had dropped out of space into the copse at the back of Gurthnamuckla, and kept calling there with a lusty sweetness; a mist of green was breathed upon the trees, and in the meadows by the lake a corncrake was adding a diffident guttural or two to the chirruping chorus of coots and moorhens. Mr. Lambert’s three-year-olds grew and flourished on the young rich grass, and, in the turbulence of theirjoie de vivre, hunted the lambs, and bit the calves, and jumped every barrier that the ingenuity of Miss Mullen’s herdsman could devise. “Those brutes must be put into the Stone Field,” the lady of the house had said, regarding their gambols with a sour eye; “I don’t care whether the grass is good or bad, they’ll have to do with it;” and when she and her guests went forth after their lunch to inspect the farm in general and the young horses in particular, it was to the Stone Field that they first bent their steps.
No one who has the idea of a green-embowered English lane can hope to realise the fortified alley that wound through the heart of the pastures of Gurthnamuckla, and was known as the Farm Lane. It was scarcely wide enough for two people to walk abreast; loose stone walls, of four or five feet in thickness, towered on either side of it as high as the head of a tall man; to meet a cow in it involved either retreat or the perilous ascent of one of the walls. It embodied the simple expedient of bygone farmers for clearing their fields of stones, and contained raw material enough to build a church. Charlotte, Mr. Lambert, and Francie advanced in single file along its meaningless windings, until it finished its career at the gate of the Stone Field, a long tongue of pasture that had the lake for a boundary on three of its sides, and was cut off from the mainland by a wall not inferior in height and solidity to those of the lane.
“There, Roddy,” said Miss Mullen, as she opened the gate, “there’s where I had to banish them, and I don’t think they’re too badly off.”
The young horses were feeding at the farthest point of the field, fetlock deep in the flowery grass, with the sparkling blue of the lake making a background to their slender shapes.
“They look like money, Charlotte, I think. That brown filly ought to bring a hundred at least next Ballinasloe fair, when she knows how to jump,” said Lambert, as he and Charlotte walked across the field, leaving Francie, who saw no reason for pretending an interest that was not expected of her, to amuse herself by picking cowslips near the gate.
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Roddy,” replied Charlotte. “It’s a comfort to think anything looks like money these bad times; I’ve never known prices so low.”
“They’re lower than I ever thought they’d go, by Jove,” Lambert answered gloomily. “I’m going up to Mayo, collecting, next week, and if I don’t do better there than I’ve done here, I daresay Dysart won’t think so much of his father’s shoes after all.”
He was striding along, taking no trouble to suit his pace to Charlotte’s, and perhaps the indifference to her companionship that it showed, as well as the effort involved in keeping beside him, had the effect of irritating her.
“Maybe he might think them good enough to kick people out with,” she said with a disagreeable laugh; “I remember, in the good old times, when my father and Sir Benjamin ruled the roast, we heard very little about bad collections.”
It struck Lambert that though this was the obvious moment for that business talk that he had come over for, it was not a propitious one. “I wonder if the macaroni cheese disagreed with her?” he thought; “it was beastlyenough to do it, anyhow. You may remember,” he said aloud, “that in the good old times the property was worth just about double what it is now, and a matter of three or four hundred pounds either way made no difference to signify.”
“D’ye think ye’ll be that much short this time?”
She darted the question at him with such keenness that Lambert inwardly recoiled before it, though it was the point to which he had wished to bring her.
“Oh, of course one can’t be sure,” he said, retreating from his position; “but I’ve just got a sort of general idea that I’ll be a bit under the mark this time.”
He was instinctively afraid of Charlotte, but in this moment he knew, perhaps for the first time, how much afraid. In theory he believed in his old power over her, and clung to the belief with the fatuity of a vain man, but he had always been uncomfortably aware that she was intellectually his master, and though he thought he could still sway her heart with a caress, he knew he could never outwit her.
“Oh, no one knows better than I do what a thankless business it is, these times,” said Charlotte with a reassuring carelessness; “it’s a case of ‘pull devil, pull baker,’ though indeed I don’t know under which head poor Christopher Dysart comes. And as we’ve got on to the sordid topic of money, Roddy, I’m not going to ask yer honour for a reduction of the rint, ye needn’t be afraid—but I’ve been rather pinched by the expense I’ve been put to in doing up the house and stocking the farm, and it would be mighty convaynient tome, if it would be convaynient toyou, to let me have a hundred pounds or so of that money I lent you last year.”
“Well—Charlotte—” began Lambert, clearing his throat, and striking with his stick at the heads of the buttercups, “that’s the very thing I’ve been anxious to talk to you about. The fact is, I’ve had an awful lot of expense myself this last twelve months, and, as I told you, I can’t lay a finger on anything except the interest of what poor Lucy left me—and—er—I’d give you any percentage you like, you know—?” He broke off for an instant, and then began again. “You can see for yourself what a sin it would be tosell those things now,” he pointed at the three young horses, “when they’ll just bring three times the money this time next year.”
“Oh yes,” said Charlotte, “but my creditors might say it was more of a sin for me not to pay my debts.”
Lambert stood still, and dug his stick into the ground, and Charlotte, watching him, knew that she had put in her sickle and reaped her first sheaf.
“All right,” he said, biting his lip, “if your creditors can manage to hold out till after the fair next week, I daresay by selling every horse I’ve got I could let you have your money then.” As he made the offer, he trusted that its quixotic heroism would make Charlotte ashamed of herself; no woman could possibly expect such a sacrifice as that from a man, and the event proved that he was right.
This was not the sacrifice that Miss Mullen wished for.
“Oh, pooh, pooh, Roddy! you needn’t take me up in such earnest as that,” she said in her most friendly voice, and Lambert congratulated himself upon his astuteness; “I only meant that if you could let me have a hundred or so in the course of the next month, it would be a help to my finances.”
Lambert could not bring himself to admit that he was as little able to pay her one hundred as three; at all events, a month would give him time to look about him, and if he made a good collection he could easily borrow it from the estate account.
“Oh, if that’s all,” he answered, affecting more relief than he felt, “I can let you have it in a fortnight or so.”
They were near the lake by this time, and the young horses feeding by its margin flung up their heads and stared in statuesque surprise at their visitors.
“They’ll not let you near them,” said Charlotte, as Lambert walked slowly towards them; “they’re as wild as hawks. And, goodness me! that girl’s gone out of the field and left the gate open! Wait a minute till I go back and shut it.”
Lambert stood and looked after her as she hastened cumbrously back towards the gate, and wondered how he had ever liked her, or brought himself to have any dealings with her, and his eye left her quickly to follow the redparasol that, moving slowly along above the grey wall, marked Francie’s progress along the lane. Charlotte hurried on towards the gate, well satisfied with the result of her conversation, and she was within some fifty yards of it when a loud and excited shout from Lambert, combined with the thud of galloping hoofs, made her start round. The young horses had been frightened by Lambert’s approach, and after one or two circling swoops, had seen the open gate, and, headed by the brown filly, were careering towards it.
“The gate! Charlotte!” roared Lambert, rushing futilely after the horses, “shut the gate!”
Charlotte was off in an instant, realising as quickly as Lambert what might happen if Francie were charged in the narrow lane by this living avalanche; even in the first instant of comprehension another idea had presented itself. Should she stumble and so not reach the gate in time? It was fascinatingly simple, but it was too simple, and it was by no means certain.
Charlotte ran her hardest, and, at some slight personal risk, succeeded in slamming the gate in the face of the brown filly, as she and her attendant squires dashed up to it. There was a great deal of slipping about and snorting, before the trio recovered themselves, and retired to pass off their discomfiture in a series of dislocating bucks and squealing snaps at each other, and then Charlotte, purple from her exertions, advanced to meet Lambert with the smile of the benefactor broad upon her face. His was blotched white and red with fright and running; without a breath left to thank her, he took her hand, and wrung it with a more genuine emotion than he had ever before felt for her.
Francie, meanwhile, strolled slowly up the lane towards the house, with her red parasol on her shoulder and her bunch of cowslips in her hand. She knew that the visit to the Stone Field was only the preliminary to a crawling inspection of every cow, sheep, and potato ridge on the farm, and she remembered that she had seen a novel of attractive aspect on the table in the drawing-room. She felt singularly uninterested in everything; Gurthnamuckla was nothing but Tally Ho over again on a larger and rather cleaner scale; the same servants, the same cats, the same cockatoo, the same leathery pastry and tough mutton. Last summerthese things had mingled themselves easily into her every-day enjoyment of life, as amusing and not unpleasant elements; now she promised herself that, no matter what Roddy said, this was the last time she would come to lunch with Charlotte.
Roddy was very good to her and all that, but there was nothing new about him either, and marriage was an awful humdrum thing after all. She looked back with something of regret to the crowded drudging household at Albatross Villa; she had at least had something to do there, and she had not been lonely; she often found herself very lonely at Rosemount. Before she reached the house she decided that she would ask Ida Fitzpatrick down to stay with her next month, and give her her return ticket, and a summer dress, and a new— Her thoughts came to a startling full stop, as round the corner of the house, she found herself face to face with Mr. Hawkins.
She had quite made up her mind that when she next saw him she would merely bow to him, but she had not reckoned on the necessities of such an encounter as this, and before she had time to collect herself she was shaking hands with him and listening to his explanation of what had brought him there.
“I met Miss Mullen after church yesterday,” he said awkwardly, “and she asked me to come over this afternoon. I was just going out to look for her.”
“Oh, really,” said Francie, moving on towards the hall door; “she and Mr. Lambert are off in those fields there.”
Hawkins stood looking irresolutely at her as she walked up to the open door that in Miss Duffy’s time had been barricaded against all comers. She went in as unswervingly as if she had already forgotten his existence, and then yielding, according to his custom, to impulse, he followed her.
She had already taken up a book, and was seated in a chair by the window when he came in, and she did not even lift her eyes at his entrance. He went over to the polished centre table, and, opening a photograph book, turned over a few of the leaves noisily. There was a pause, tense on both sides as silence and self-consciousness could make it, and broken only by the happy, persistent call of the cuckooand the infant caws of the young rooks in the elms by the gate. The photograph book was shut with a bang, and Hawkins, taking his resolution in both hands, came across the room, and stood in front of Francie.
“Look here!” he said, with a strange mixture of anger and entreaty in his voice; “how much longer is this sort of thing to go on? Are you always going to treat me in this sort of way?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” answered Francie, looking up at him with eyes of icy blue, and then down at her book again. Her heart was beating in leaps, but of this Hawkins was naturally not aware.
“You can’t pretend not to know what I mean—this sort of rot of not speaking to me, and looking as if you had never seen me before. I told you I was sorry and all that. I don’t know what more you want!”
“I don’t want ever to speak to you again.” She turned over a page of her book, and forced her eyes to follow its lines.
“You know that’s impossible; you know you’ve got to speak to me again, unless you want to cut me and kick up a regular row. I don’t know why you’re going on like this. It’s awfully unfair, and it’s awfully hard lines.” Since his visit to Rosemount, the conviction had been growing on him that in marrying another man she had treated him heartlessly, and he spoke with the fervour of righteous resentment.
“Oh, that comes well from you!” exclaimed Francie, dropping the book, and sitting up with all her pent-in wrath ablaze at last; “you that behaved in a way anyone else would be ashamed to think of! Telling me lies from first to last, and trying to make a fool of me—It was a good thing I didn’t believe more than the half you said!”
“I told you no lie,” said Hawkins, trying to stand his ground. “All I did was that I didn’t answer your letters because I couldn’t get out of that accursed engagement, and I didn’t know what to say to you, and then the next thing I knew was that you were engaged, without a word of explanation to me or anything.”
“And will you tell me what call there was for me to explain anything to you?” burst out Francie, looking, withthe hot flash in her eyes, more lovely than he had ever seen her; “for all I knew of you, you were married already to your English heiress—Miss Coppers, or whatever her name is—I wonder at your impudence in daring to say things like that to me!” The lift of her head, and the splendid colour in her cheeks would have befitted any angry goddess, and it is not surprising that Hawkins did not take offence at the crudity of the expression, and thought less of the brogue in which it was uttered than of the quiver of the young voice that accused him.
“Look here,” he said, for the second time, but with a new and very different inflection, “don’t let us abuse each other any more. I couldn’t answer your letters. I didn’t know what to say, except to tell you that I was a cad and a beast, and I didn’t see much good in doing that. Evidently,” he added, with a bitterness that was at least half genuine, “it didn’t make much difference to you whether I did or not.”
She did not reply, except by a glance that was intended to express more than words could convey of her contempt for him, but somewhere in it, in spite of her, he felt a touch of reproach, and it was it that he answered as he said:
“Of course if you won’t believe me you won’t, and it don’t make much odds now whether you do or no; but I think if you knew how—” he stammered, and then went on with a rush—“how infernally I’ve suffered over the whole thing, you’d be rather sorry for me.”
Francie shaped her lips to a thin and tremulous smile of disdain, but her hands clutched each other under the book in her lap with the effort necessary to answer him. “Oh, yes, Iamsorry for you; I’d be sorry for anyone that would behave the way you did,” she said, with a laugh that would have been more effective had it been steadier; “but I can’t say you look as if you wanted my pity.”
Hawkins turned abruptly away and walked towards the door, and then, as quickly, came back to her side.
“They’re coming across the lawn now,” he said; “before they come, don’t you think you could forgive me—or just say you do, anyhow. I did behave like a brute, but I never thought you’d have cared. You may say the worst things about me you can think of, if you’ll only tell me you forgiveme.” His voice broke on the last words in a way that gave them irresistible conviction.
Francie glanced out of the window, and saw her husband and Charlotte slowly approaching the house. “Oh, very well,” she said proudly, without turning her head; “after all there’s nothing to forgive.”
Lambertand Francie were both very silent as they drove away from Gurthnamuckla. He was the first to speak.
“I’ve asked Charlotte to come over and stay with you while I’m away next week. I find I can’t get through the work in less than a fortnight, and I may be kept even longer than that, because I’ve got to go to Dublin.”
“Asked Charlotte!” said Francie, in a tone of equal surprise and horror. “What on earth made you do that?”
“Because I didn’t wish you should be left by yourself all that time.”
“I think you might have spoken to me first,” said Francie, with deepening resentment. “I’d twice sooner be left by myself than be bothered with that old cat.”
Lambert looked quickly at her. He had come back to the house with his nerves still strained from his fright about the open gate, and his temper shaken by his financial difficulties, and the unexpected discovery of Hawkins in the drawing-room with his wife had not been soothing.
“I don’t choose that you should be left by yourself,” he said, in the masterful voice that had always, since her childhood, roused Francie’s opposition. “You’re a deal too young to be left alone, and—” with a voluntary softening of his voice—“and a deal too pretty, confound you!” He cut viciously with his whip at a long-legged greyhound of a pig that was rooting by the side of the road.
“D’ye mean me or the pig?” said Francie, with a laugh that was still edged with defiance.
“I mean that I’m not going to have the whole country prating about you, and they would if I left you here by yourself.”
“Very well, then, if you make me have Charlotte to staywith me I’ll give tea-parties every day, and dinners and balls every night. I’ll make the country prate, I can tell you, and the money fly too!”
Her eyes were brighter than usual, and there was a fitfulness about her that stirred and jarred him, though he could hardly tell why.
“I think I’ll take you with me,” he said, with the impotent wrath of a lover who knows that the pain of farewell will be all on his side. “I won’t trust you out of my sight.”
“All right! I’ll go with you,” she said, becoming half serious. “I’d like to go.”
They were going slowly up hill, and the country lay bare and desolate in the afternoon sun, without a human being in sight. Lambert took the reins in his right hand, and put his arm round her.
“I don’t believe you. I know you wouldn’t care a hang if I never came back—kiss me!” She lifted her face obediently, and as her eyes met his she wondered at the unhappiness in them. “I can’t take you, my darling,” he whispered; “I wish to God I could. I’m going to places you couldn’t stay at, and—and it would cost too much.”
“Very well; never say I didn’t make you a good offer,” she answered, her unconquerable eyes giving him a look that told she could still flirt with her husband.
“Put my cloak on me, Roddy; the evening’s getting cold.”
They drove on quickly, and Lambert felt the gloom settling down upon him again. He hated going away and leaving Francie; he hated his financial difficulties, and their tortuous, uncertain issues; and above all, he hated Hawkins. He would have given the whole world to know how things had been between him and Francie last year; anything would be less intolerable than suspicion.
The strip of grass by the roadside widened as they left the rocky country, and the deep dints of galloping hoofs became apparent on it. Lambert pointed to them with his whip, and laughed contemptuously.
“If I had a thick-winded pony like your friend Mr. Hawkins, I wouldn’t bucket her up hill in that sort of way. She’d do well enough if he had the sense to take her easy; but in all my knowledge of soldiers—and I’ve seen agood few of them here now—I’ve never seen a more self-sufficient jackass in the matter of horses than Hawkins. I wouldn’t trust him with a donkey.”
“You’d better tell him so,” said Francie indifferently. Lambert chose to suspect a sneer in the reply.
“Tell him so!” he said hotly. “I’d tell him so pretty smart, if I thought there was a chance of his getting outside a horse of mine. But I think it’ll be a long day before that happens!”
“Maybe he wouldn’t thank you for one of your horses.”
“No, I’ll bet he wouldn’t say thank you,” said Lambert, a thrill of anger darting to his brain. “He’s a lad that’ll take all he can get, and say nothing about it, and chuck it away to the devil when he’s done with it.”
“I’m sure I don’t care what he does!” exclaimed Francie, with excusable impatience. “I wonder if he’s able to get into a passion about nothing, the way you’re doing now!”
“It didn’t look this afternoon as if you cared so little about what he does!” said Lambert, his breath coming short. “May I ask if you knew he was coming, that you were in such a hurry back to the house to meet him? I suppose you settled it when he came to see you on Saturday.”
“Since you know all about it, there’s no need for me to contradict you!” Francie flashed back.
One part of Lambert knew that he was making a fool of himself, but the other part, which was unfortunately a hundred times the stronger, drove him on.
“Oh, I daresay you found it very pleasant, talking over old times,” he retorted, releasing the thought at last like a long caged beast; “or was he explaining how it was he got tired of you?”
Francie sat still and dumb; the light surface anger startled out of her in a moment, and its place taken by a suffocating sense of outrage and cruelty. She did not know enough of love to recognise it in this hideous disguise of jealousy; she only discerned the cowardly spitefulness, and it cut down to that deep place in her soul, where, since childhood, had lain her trust in him. She did not say a word, and Lambert went on:
“Oh, I see you are too grand to answer me; I suppose it’s because I’m only your husband that you think I’m not worth talking to.” He gave the horse a lash of the whip, and then chucked up its head as it sprang forward, making the trap rock and jerk. The hateful satisfaction of taunting her about Hawkins was beginning to die in him like drunkenness, and he dimly saw what it was going to cost him. “You make me say these sort of things to you,” he broke out, seeing that she would not speak. “How can I help it, when you treat me like the dirt under your feet, and fight with me if I say a word to you that you don’t like? I’d like to see the man that would stand it!”
He looked down at her, and saw her head drooping forward, and her hand up to her face. He could not say more, as at that moment Mary Holloran was holding the gate open for him to drive in; and as he lifted his wife out of the trap at the hall door, and saw the tears that she could no longer hide from him, he knew that his punishment had begun, and the iron entered into his soul.
A fewdays afterwards Lambert started on his rent-collecting tour. Peace of a certain sort was restored, complete in outward seeming, but with a hidden flaw that both knew and pretended to ignore. When Lambert sat by himself in the smoking-carriage of the morning train from Lismoyle, with the cold comfort of a farewell kiss still present with him, he was as miserable and anxious a man as could easily have been found. Charlotte had arrived the night before, and with all her agreeability had contrived to remind him that she expected a couple of hundred pounds on his return. He could never have believed that she would have dunned him in this way, and the idea occurred to him for the first time that she was perhaps taking this method of paying him out for what, in her ridiculous vanity, she might have imagined to be his bad treatment of her. But none the less, it was a comfort to him to think that she was at his house. He did not say so to himself, but he knew that he could not have found a better spy.
Dislike, as has been said, was a sentiment that Francie found great difficulty in cultivating. She conducted a feud in the most slipshod way, with intervals of illogical friendship, of which anyone with proper self-respect would have been ashamed, and she consequently accepted, without reservation, the fact that Charlotte was making herself pleasant with a pleasantness that a more suspicious person would have felt to be unwholesome.
Charlotte, upon whose birth so many bad fairies had shed their malign influence, had had at all events one attraction bestowed upon her, the gift of appreciation, and of being able to express her appreciation—a faculty that has been denied to many good and Christian people. The evil spirit may have torn her at sight of Francie enthroned at the head of Roddy Lambert’s table, but it did not come out of her in any palpable form, nor did it prevent her from enjoying to the utmost the change from the grease and smoke of Norry’s cooking, and the slothful stupidity of the Protestant orphan. Charlotte was one of the few women for whom a good cook will exert herself to make a savoury; and Eliza Hackett felt rewarded when the parlour-maid returned to the kitchen with the intelligence that Miss Mullen had taken two helpings of cheese-soufflé, and had sent her special compliments to its constructor. Another of the undoubted advantages of Rosemount was the chance it afforded Charlotte of paying off with dignity and ease the long arrears of visits that the growing infirmities of the black horse were heaping up against her. It was supremely bitter to hear Francie ordering out the waggonette as if she had owned horses and carriages all her life, but she could gulp it down for the sake of the compensating comfort and economy. In the longtête-à-têtesthat these drives involved, Charlotte made herself surprisingly pleasant to her hostess. She knew every scandal about every family in the neighbourhood, and imparted them with a humour and an easy acquaintance with the aristocracy that was both awe-inspiring and encouraging to poor Francie, whose heart beat fast with shyness and conscious inferiority, as, card-case in hand, she preceded Miss Mullen to Mrs. Ffolliott’s or Mrs. Flood’s drawing-room. It modified the terror of Mrs. Flood’s hooked nose to remember that her mother had been a Hebrew barmaid,and it was some consolation to reflect that General Ffolliott’s second son had had to leave his regiment for cheating at cards, when she became aware that she alone, among a number of afternoon callers at Castle Ffolliott, had kept on her gloves during tea.
In every conversation with Charlotte it seemed to Francie that she discovered, as if by accident, some small but disagreeable fact about her husband. He had been refused by such and such a girl; he had stuck so and so with a spavined horse; he had taken a drop too much at the hunt ball; and, in a general way he owed the agency and his present position in society solely to the efforts of Miss Mullen and her father.
Francie accepted these things, adding them to her previous store of disappointment in Roddy, with the philosophy that she had begun to learn at Albatross Villa, and that life was daily teaching her more of. They unconsciously made themselves into a background calculated to give the greatest effect to a figure that now occupied a great deal of her thoughts.
It was at Mrs. Waller’s house that she first met Hawkins after her encounter with him at Gurthnamuckla. He came into the room when it was almost time for her to face the dreadful ordeal of leave-taking, and she presently found herself talking to him with considerably less agitation than she had felt in talking about Paris to Miss Waller. The memory of their last meeting kept her eyes from his, but it made the ground firm under her feet, and in the five minutes before she went away she felt that she had effectually shown him the place she intended him to occupy, and that he thoroughly understood that conversation with her was a grace, and not a right. The touch of deference and anxiety in his self-assured manner were as sweet to her as the flowers strewed before a conqueror, and laid themselves like balm on the wound of her husband’s taunt. Some day Roddy would see for himself the sort of way things were between her and Mr. Hawkins, she thought, as she drove down the avenue, and unconsciously held her head so high and looked so brilliant, that Charlotte, with that new-born amiability that Francie was becoming accustomed to, complimented her upon her colour, and declared that, afterMajor Waller’s attentions, she would have to write to Roderick and decline further responsibility as a chaperone.
They drove to Bruff two or three days afterwards, to return the state visit paid by Pamela on her mother’s behalf, and, during some preliminary marketing in Lismoyle, they came upon Hawkins walking through the town in the Rosemount direction, with an air of smartness and purpose about him that bespoke an afternoon call.
“I was just going to see you,” he said, looking rather blank.
“We’re on our way to Bruff,” replied Francie, too resolved on upholding her dignity to condescend to any conventional regrets.
Mr. Hawkins looked more cheerful, and observing that as he also owed a visit at Bruff this would be a good day to pay it, was turning back to the barracks for his trap, when Miss Mullen intervened with almost childlike impulsiveness.
“I declare now, it vexes my righteous soul to think of your getting out a horse and trap, with two seats going a-begging here. It’s not my carriage, Mr. Hawkins, or I promise you you should have one of them.”
Hawkins looked gratefully at her, and then uncertainly at Francie.
“He’s welcome to come if he likes,” said Francie frigidly, thinking with a mixture of alarm and satisfaction of what Roddy would say if he heard of it.
Hawkins waited for no further invitation, and got into the waggonette. A trait of character as old as humanity was at this time asserting itself, with singular freshness and force, in the bosom of Mr. Gerald Hawkins. He had lightly taken Francie’s heart in his hand, and as lightly thrown it away, without plot or premeditation; but now that another man had picked it up and kept it for his own, he began to see it as a thing of surpassing value. He could have borne with a not uninteresting regret the idea of Francie languishing somewhere in the suburbs of Dublin, and would even, had the chance come in his way, have flirted with her in a kind and consolatory manner. But to see her here, prosperous, prettier than ever, and possessing the supreme attraction of having found favour in someone else’s eyes, was a very different affair. The old glamour took himagain, but with tenfold force, and, while he sat in the waggonette and talked to his ancient foe, Miss Mullen, with a novel friendliness, he gnawed the ends of his moustache in the bitterness of his soul because of the coldness of the eyes that were fascinating him.
It was a bright and blowy afternoon, with dazzling masses of white cloud moving fast across the blue, and there was a shifting glimmer of young leaves in the Bruff avenue, and a gusty warmth of fragrance from lilacs and laurel blossoms on either side. As this strangely compounded party of visitors drove up to the hall door they caught sight of Christopher going down the lawn towards the boat-house, and in answer to a call from Mr. Hawkins, he turned and came back to meet them. He was only on his way to the boat-house to meet Cursiter, he explained, and he was the only person at home, but he hoped that they would, none the less, come in and see him. Hawkins helped Francie out of the carriage, giving her a hand no less formal than that which she gave him. She recognised the formality, and was not displeased to think that it was assumed in obedience to her wish.
They all strolled slowly on towards the boat-house, Hawkins walking behind with Miss Mullen, Francie in front with her host. It was not her first meeting with him since her return to Lismoyle, and she found it quite easy to talk with him of her travels, and of those small things that make up the sum of ordinary afternoon conversation. She had come to believe now that she must have been mistaken on that afternoon when he had stood over her in the Tally Ho drawing-room and said those unexpected things to her—things that, at the time, seemed neither ambiguous nor Platonic. He was now telling her, in the quietly hesitating voice that had always seemed to her the very height of good breeding, that the weather was perfect, and that the lake was lower than he had ever known it at that time of year, with other like commonplaces, and though there was something wanting in his manner that she had been accustomed to, she discerned none of the awkwardness that her experience had made her find inseparable from the rejected state.
There was no sign of Captain Cursiter or his launch when they reached the pier, and, after a fruitless five minutesof waiting, they went on, at Christopher’s suggestion, to see the bluebells in the wood that girdled the little bay of Bruff. Before they reached the gate of the wood, Miss Mullen had attached herself to Christopher, having remarked, with engaging frankness, that Mr. Hawkins could only talk to her about Lismoyle, and she wanted Sir Christopher to tell her of the doings of the great world; and Francie found herself following them with Hawkins by her side. The walk turned inwards and upwards from the lake, climbing, by means of a narrow flight of moss-grown stone steps, till it gained the height of about fifty feet above the water. Walking there, the glitter of the lake came up brokenly to the eye, through the beech-tree branches, that lay like sprays of maidenhair beneath them; and over the hill and down to the water’s edge and far away among the grey beech stems, the bluebells ran like a blue mist through all the wood. Their perfume rose like incense about Francie and her companion as they walked slowly, and ever more slowly, along the path. The spirit of the wood stole into their veins, and a pleasure that they could not have explained held them in silence that they were afraid to break.
Hawkins was the first to make a diffident comment.
“They’re ripping, aren’t they? They’re a great deal better than they were last year.”
“I didn’t see them last year.”
“No, I know you didn’t,” he said quickly; “you didn’t come to Lismoyle till the second week in June.”
“You seem to remember more about it than I do,” said Francie, still maintaining her attitude of superiority.
“I don’t think I’m likely to forget it,” he said, turning and looking at her.
She looked down at the ground with a heightening colour and a curl of the lip that did not come easily. If she found it hard to nurse her anger against Charlotte, it was thrice more difficult to harden herself to the voice to which one vibrating string in her heart answered in spite of her.
“Oh, there’s nothing people can’t forget if they try!” she said, with a laugh. “I always find it much harder to remember!”
“But people sometimes succeed in doing things they don’t like,” said Hawkins pertinaciously.
“Not if they don’t want to,” replied Francie, holding her own, with something of her habitual readiness.
Hawkins’ powers of repartee weakened a little before this retort. “No, I suppose not,” he said, trying to make up by bitterness of tone for want of argument.
Francie was silent, triumphantly silent, it seemed to him, as he walked beside her and switched off the drooping heads of the bluebells with his stick. He had experiences that might have taught him that this appetite for combat, this determination to trample on him, was a more measurable thing than the contempt that will not draw a sword; but he was able to think of nothing except that she was unkind to him, and that she was prettier now than he had ever seen her. He was so thoroughly put out that he was not aware of any awkwardness in the silence that had progressed, unbroken, for a minute or two. It was Francie to whom it was apparently most trying, as, at length, with an obvious effort at small talk, she said:
“I suppose that’s Captain Cursiter coming up the lake?” indicating, through an opening in the branches, a glimpse of a white funnel and its thong of thinly streaming vapour; “he seems as fond of boating as ever.”
“Yes, I daresay he is,” said Hawkins, without pretending any interest, real or polite, in the topic. He was in the frame of mind that lies near extravagance of some kind, whether of temper or sentiment, and, being of a disposition not versed in self-repression, he did not attempt diplomacy. He looked sulkily at the launch, and then, with a shock of association, he thought of the afternoon that he and Francie had spent on the lake, and the touch of unworthiness that there was in him made him long to remind her of her subjugation.
“Areyouas fond of boating as—as you were when we ran aground last year?” he said, and looked at her daringly.
He was rewarded by seeing her start perceptibly and turn her head away, and he had the grace to feel a little ashamed of himself. Francie looked down the bluebell slope till her eyes almost ached with the soft glow of colour, conscious that every moment of delay in answering told against her, but unable to find the answer. The freedom and impertinence of the question did not strike her at all; she only felt that he was heartlessly trying to humiliate her.
“I’d be obliged to you, Mr. Hawkins,” she said, her panting breath making her speak with extreme difficulty, “if you’d leave me to walk by myself.”
Before she spoke he knew that he had made a tremendous mistake, and, as she moved on at a quickened pace, he felt he must make peace with her at any price.
“Mrs. Lambert,” he said, with a gravity and deference which he had never shown to her before, “is it any use to beg your pardon? I didn’t know what I was saying—I hardly know now what I did say—but if it made you angry or—or offended you, I can only say I’m awfully sorry.”
“Thank you, I don’t want you to say anything,” she answered, still walking stiffly on.
“If it would give you any pleasure, I swear I’ll promise never to speak to you again!” Hawkins continued; “shall I go away now?” His instinct told him to risk the question.
“Please yourself. It’s nothing to me what you do.”
“Then I’ll stay—”
Following on what he said, like an eldritch note of exclamation, there broke in the shrill whistle of theSerpoletteas she turned into the bay of Bruff, and an answering hail from Christopher rose to them, apparently from the lower path by the shore of the lake.
“That’s Cursiter,” said Hawkins irritably; “I suppose we shall have to go back now.”
She turned, as if mechanically accepting the suggestion, and, in the action, her eyes passed by him with a look that was intended to have as little reference to him as the gaze of a planet in its orbit, but which, even in that instant, was humanised by avoidance. In the space of that glance, he knew that his pardon was attainable, if not attained, but he had cleverness enough to retain his expression of gloomy compunction.
It was quite true that Francie’s anger, always pitiably short-lived, had yielded to the flattery of his respect. Every inner, unformed impulse was urging her to accept his apology, when three impatient notes from the whistle of the steam-launch came up through the trees, and seemed toopen a way for her to outside matters from the narrow stress of the moment.
“Captain Cursiter seems in a great hurry about something,” she said, her voice and manner conveying sufficiently well that she intended to pass on with dignity from the late dispute. “I wonder what he wants.”
“Perhaps we’ve got the route,” said Hawkins, not sorry to be able to remind her of the impending calamity of his departure; “I shouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
They walked down the flight of stone steps, and reached the gate of the wood in silence. Hawkins paused with his hand on the latch.
“Look here, when am I going to see you again?” he said.
“I really don’t know,” said Francie, with recovered ease. She felt the wind blowing in on her across the silver scales of the lake, and saw the sunshine flashing on Captain Cursiter’s oars as he paddled himself ashore from the launch, and her spirits leaped up in “the inescapable joy of spring.” “I should think anyone that goes to church to-morrow will see me there.”
Her glance veered towards his cloudy, downcast face, and an undignified desire to laugh came suddenly upon her. He had always looked so babyish when he was cross, and it had always made her feel inclined to laugh. Now that she was palpably and entirely the conqueror, the wish for further severity had died out, and the spark of amusement in her eye was recklessly apparent when Hawkins looked at her.
His whole expression changed in a moment. “Then we’re friends?” he said eagerly.
Before any answer could be given, Christopher and Charlotte came round a bend in the lower path, and even in this moment Francie wondered what it was that should cause Charlotte to drop her voice cautiously as she neared them.
Itwas very still inside the shelter of the old turf quay at Bruff. The stems of the lilies that curved up through its brown-golden depths were visible almost down to the blackmud out of which their mystery of silver and gold was born; and, while the water outside moved piquantly to the breeze, nothing stirred it within except the water spiders, who were darting about, pushing a little ripple in front of them, and finding themselves seriously inconvenienced by the pieces of broken rush and the sodden fragments of turf that perpetually stopped their way. It had rained and blown very hard all the day before, and the innermost corners of the tiny harbour held a motionless curve of foam, yellowish brown, and flecked with the feathers of a desolated moorhen’s nest.
Civilisation at Bruff had marched away from the turf quay. The ruts of the cart-track were green from long disuse, and the willows had been allowed to grow across it, as a last sign of superannuation. In old days every fire at Bruff had been landed at the turf quay from the bogs at the other side of the lake; but now, since the railway had come to Lismoyle, coal had taken its place. It was in vain that Thady, the turf-cutter, had urged that turf was a far handsomer thing about a gentleman’s place than coal. The last voyage of the turf boat had been made, and she now lay, grey from rottenness and want of paint, in the corner of the miniature dock that had once been roofed over and formed a boat-house. Tall, jointed reeds, with their spiky leaves and stiff stems, stood out in the shallow water, leaning aslant over their own reflections, and, further outside, green rushes grew thickly in long beds, the homes of dabchicks, coots, and such like water people. Standing on the brown rock that formed the end of the quay, the spacious sky was so utterly reproduced in the lake, cloud for cloud, deep for deep, that it only required a little imagination to believe oneself floating high between two atmospheres. The young herons, in the fir trees on Curragh Point, were giving utterance to their meditations on things in general in raucous monosyllables, and Charlotte Mullen, her feet planted firmly on two of the least rickety stones of the quay, was continuing a conversation that had gone on one-sidedly for some time.
“Yes, Sir Christopher, my feeling for your estate is like the feeling of a child for the place where he was reared; it is the affection of a woman whose happiest days were passed with her father in your estate office!”
The accurate balance of the sentence and its nasal cadence showed that Charlotte was delivering herself of a well-studied peroration. Her voice clashed with the stillness as dissonantly as the clamour of the young herons. Her face was warm and shiny, and Christopher looked away from it, and said to himself that she was intolerable.
“Of course—yes—I understand—” he answered stammeringly, her pause compelling him to speak; “but these are very serious things to say—”
“Serious!” Charlotte dived her hand into her pocket to make sure that her handkerchief was within hail. “D’ye think, Sir Christopher, I don’t know that well! I that have lain awake crying every night since I heard of it, not knowing how to decide between me affection for me friend and my duty to the son of my dear father’s old employer!”
“I think anyone who makes charges of this kind,” interrupted Christopher coldly, “is bound to bring forward something more definite than mere suspicion.”
Charlotte took her hand out of her pocket without the handkerchief, and laid it for a moment on Christopher’s arm.
“My dear Sir Christopher, I entirely agree with you,” she said in her most temperate, ladylike manner, “and I am prepared to place certain facts before you, on whose accuracy you may perfectly rely, although circumstances prevent my telling you how I learned them.”
The whole situation was infinitely repugnant to Christopher. He would himself have said that he had not nerve enough to deal with Miss Mullen; and joined with this, and his innate and overstrained dislike of having his affairs discussed, was the unendurable position of conniving with her at a treachery. Little as he liked Lambert, he sided with him now with something more than a man’s ordinary resentment against feminine espionage upon another man. He was quite aware of the subdued eagerness in Charlotte’s manner, and it mystified while it disgusted him; but he was also aware that nothing short of absolute flight would check her disclosures. He could do nothing now but permit himself the single pleasure of staring over her head with a countenance barren of response to her histrionic display of expression.
“You ask me for something more definite than mere suspicion,” continued Charlotte, approaching one of the supremest gratifications of her life with full and luxurious recognition. “I can give you two facts, and if, on investigation, you find they are not correct, you may go to Roderick Lambert, and tell him to take an action for libel against me! I daresay you know that a tenant of yours, named James M‘Donagh—commonly called Shamus Bawn—recently got the goodwill of Knocklara, and now holds it in addition to his father’s farm, which he came in for last month.” Christopher assented. “Jim M‘Donagh paid one hundred and eighty pounds fine on getting Knocklara. I ask you to examine your estate account, and you will see that the sum credited to you on that transaction is no more than seventy.”
“May I ask how you know this?” Christopher turned his face towards her for a moment as he asked the question, and encountered, with even more aversion than he had expected, her triumphing eyes.
“I’m not at liberty to tell you. All I say is, go to Jim M‘Donagh, and ask him the amount of his fine, and see if he won’t tell you just the same sum that I’m telling you now.”
Captain Cursiter, at this moment steering theSerpolettedaintily among the shadows of Bruff Bay, saw the two incongruous figures on the turf quay, one short, black, and powerful, the other tall, white, and passive, and wondered, through the preoccupation of crawling to his anchorage, what it was that Miss Mullen was holding forth to Dysart about, in a voice that came to him across the water like the gruff barking of a dog. He thought, too, that there was an almost ship-wrecked welcome in the shout with which Christopher answered his whistle, and was therefore surprised to see him remain where he was, apparently enthralled by Miss Mullen’s conversation, instead of walking round to meet him at the boat-house pier.
Charlotte had, in fact, by this time, compelled Christopher to give her his whole attention. As he turned towards her again, he admitted to himself that the thing looked rather serious, though he determined, with the assistance of a good deal of antagonistic irritability, to keep his opinion to himself.This feeling was uppermost as he said: “I have never had the least reason to feel a want of confidence in Mr. Lambert, Miss Mullen, and I certainly could not discredit him by going privately to M‘Donagh to ask him about the fine.”
“It’s a pity all unfaithful stewards haven’t as confiding a master as you, Sir Christopher,” said Charlotte, with a laugh. She felt Christopher’s attitude towards her, as a man in armour may have felt the arrows strike him, and no more, and it came easily to her to laugh. “However,” she went on, correcting her manner quickly, as she saw a very slight increase of colour in Christopher’s face, “the burden of proof does not lie with James M‘Donagh. Last November, as you may possibly remember, my name made its first appearance on your rent-roll, as the tenant of Gurthnamuckla, and in recognition of that honour,”—Charlotte felt that there was an academic polish about her sentences that must appeal to a University man—“I wrote your agent a cheque for one hundred pounds, which was duly cashed some days afterwards.” She altered her position, so that she could see his face better, and said deliberately: “Not one penny of that has been credited to the estate! This I know for a fact.”
“Yes,” said Christopher, after an uncomfortable pause, “that’s very—very curious, but, of course—until I know a little more, I can’t give any opinion on the matter. I think, perhaps, we had better go round to meet Captain Cursiter—”
Charlotte interrupted him with more violence than she had as yet permitted to escape.
“If you want to know more, I can tell you more, and plenty more! For the last year and more, Roddy Lambert’s been lashing out large sums of ready money beyond his income, and I know his income to the penny and the farthing! Where did he get that money from? I ask you. What paid for his young horses, and his new dog-cart, and his new carpets, yes! and his honeymoon trip to Paris? I ask you what paid for all that? It wasn’t his first wife’s money paid for it, I know that for a fact, and it certainly wasn’t the second wife’s!”
She was losing hold of herself; her gestures were of the sort that she usually reserved for her inferiors, and the corners of her mouth bubbled like a snail. Christopherlooked at her, and began to walk away. Charlotte followed him, walking unsteadily on the loose stones, and inwardly cursing his insolence as well as her own forgetfulness of the method she had laid down for the interview. He turned and waited for her when he reached the path, and had time to despise himself for not being able to conceal his feelings from a woman so abhorrent and so contemptible.
“I am—er—obliged for your information,” he said stiffly. In spite of his scorn for his own prejudice, he would not gratify her by saying more.
“You will forgive me, Sir Christopher,” replied Charlotte with an astonishing resumption of dignity, “if I say that that is a point that is quite immaterial to me. I require no thanks. I felt it to be my duty to tell you these painful facts, and what I suffer in doing it concerns only myself.”
They walked on in silence between the lake and the wood, with the bluebells creeping outwards to their feet through the white beech stems, and as the last turn of the path brought them in sight of Francie and Hawkins, Charlotte spoke again:
“You’ll remember that all this is in strict confidence, Sir Christopher.”
“I shall remember,” said Christopher curtly.
An hour later, Pamela, driving home with her mother, congratulated herself, as even the best people are prone to do, when she saw on the gravel-sweep the fresh double wheel tracks that indicated that visitors had come and gone. She felt that she had talked enough for one afternoon during the visit to old Lady Eyrecourt, whose deaf sister had fallen to her share, and she did not echo her mother’s regret at missing Miss Mullen and her cousin. She threw down the handful of cards on the hall table again, and went with a tired step to look for Christopher in the smoking-room, where she found him with Captain Cursiter, the latter in the act of taking his departure. The manner of her greeting showed that he was an accustomed sight there, and, as a matter of fact, since Christopher’s return Captain Cursiter had found himself at Bruff very often. He had discovered that it was, as he expressed it, the only house in the country where the women let him alone. Lady Dysart had expressed the position from another point of view, when she had deplored to Mrs. Gascogne Pamela’s “hopeless friendliness” towards men, and Mrs. Gascogne had admitted that there might be something discouraging to a man in being treated as if he were a younger sister.
This unsuitable friendliness was candidly apparent in Pamela’s regret when she heard that Cursiter had come to Bruff with the news that his regiment was to leave Ireland for Aldershot in a fortnight.
“Here’s Captain Cursiter trying to stick me with the launch at an alarming reduction, as the property of an officer going abroad,” said Christopher. “He wants to take advantage of my grief, and he won’t stay and dine here and let me haggle the thing out comfortably.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t time to stay,” said Cursiter rather cheerlessly. “I’ve got to go up to Dublin to-morrow, and I’m very busy. I’ll come over again—if I may—when I get back.” He felt all the awkwardness of a self-conscious man in the prominence of making a farewell that he is beginning to find more unpleasant than he had expected.
“Oh, yes! indeed, you must come over again,” said Pamela, in the soft voice that was just Irish enough for Saxons of the more ignorant sort to fail to distinguish, save in degree, between it and Mrs. Lambert’s Dublin brogue.
It remained on Captain Cursiter’s ear as he stalked down through the shrubberies to the boat-house, and, as he steamed round Curragh Point, and caught the sweet, turfy whiff of the Irish air, he thought drearily of the arid glare of Aldershot, and, without any apparent connection of ideas, he wondered if the Dysarts were really coming to town next month.
Not long after his departure Lady Dysart rustled into the smoking-room in her solemnly sumptuous widow’s dress.
“Is he gone?” she breathed in a stage whisper, pausing on the threshold for a reply.
“No; he’s hiding behind the door,” answered Christopher; “he always does when he hears you coming.” When Christopher was irritated, his method of showing it was generally so subtle as only to satisfy himself; it slipped through the wide and generous mesh of his mother’s understanding without the smallest friction.
“Nonsense, Christopher!” she said, not without a furtiveglance behind the door. “What a visitation you must have had from the whole set! Had they anything interesting to say for themselves? Charlotte Mullen generally is a great alleviation.”
“Oh yes,” replied her son, examining the end of his cigarette with a peculiar expression, “she—she alleviated about as much as usual; but it was Cursiter who brought the news.”
“I can’t imagine Captain Cursiter so far forgetting himself as to tell any news,” said Lady Dysart; “but perhaps he makes an exception in your favour.”
“They’re to go to Aldershot in a fortnight,” said Christopher.
“You don’t say so!” exclaimed his mother, with an irrepressible look at Pamela, who was sitting on the floor in the window, taking a thorn out of Max’s spatulate paw. “In a fortnight? I wonder how Mr. Hawkins will like that? Evelyn said that Miss Coppard told her the marriage was to come off when the regiment went back to England.”
Christopher grunted unsympathetically, and Pamela continued her researches for the thorn.
“Well,” resumed Lady Dysart, “I, for one, shall not regret them. Selfish and second-rate!”
“Which is which?” asked Christopher, eliminating any tinge of interest or encouragement from his voice. He was quite aware that his mother was in this fashion avenging the slaughter of the hope that she had secretly nourished about Captain Cursiter, and, being in a perturbed frame of mind, it annoyed him.
“I thinkyourfriend is the most self-centred, ungenial man I have ever known,” replied Lady Dysart, in sonorous denunciation, “and if Mr. Hawkins is not second-rate, his friends are, which comes to the same thing! And, by the by, how was it that he went away before Captain Cursiter? Did not they come together?”
“Miss Mullen and Mrs. Lambert gave him a lift,” said Christopher, uncommunicatively; “I believe they overtook him on his way here.”
Lady Dysart meditated, with her dark eyebrows drawn into a frown.
“I think that girl will make a very great mistake if she begins a flirtation with Mr. Hawkins again,” she said presently; “there has been quite enough talk about her already in connection with her marriage.” Lady Dysart untied her bonnet strings as if with a need of more air, and flung them back over each shoulder. In the general contrariety of things, it was satisfactory to find an object so undeniably deserving of reprobation as the new Mrs. Lambert. “I call her a thorough adventuress!” she continued. “She came down here, determined to marry some one, and as Mr. Hawkins escaped from her, she just snatched at the next man she could find!”
Pamela came over and sat down on the arm of her mother’s chair. “Now, mamma,” she said putting her arm round Lady Dysart’s crape-clad shoulder, “you can’t deny that she knew all about the Dublin clergy and went to Sunday-school regularly for ten years, and she guessed two lights of an acrostic for you.”
“Yes, two that happened to be slangy! No, my dear child, I admit that she is very pretty, but, as I said before, she has proved herself to be nothing but an adventuress. Everyone in the country has said the same thing.”
“I can scarcely imagine anyone less like an adventuress,” said Christopher, with the determined quietness by which he sometimes mastered his stammer.
His mother looked at him with the most unaffected surprise. “And I can scarcely imagine anyone who knows less about the matter than you!” she retorted. “Oh, my dear boy, don’t smoke another of those horrid things,” as Christopher got up abruptly and began to fumble rather aimlessly in a cigarette-box on the chimney-piece, “I’m sure you’ve smoked more than is good for you. You look quite white already.”
He made no reply, and his mother’s thoughts reverted to the subject under discussion. Suddenly a little cloud of memory began to appear on her mental horizon. Now that she came to think of it, had not Kate Gascogne once mentioned Christopher’s name to her in preposterous connection with that of the present Mrs. Lambert?
“Let me tell you!” she exclaimed, her deep-set eyes glowing with the triumphant effort of memory, “that peoplesaid she did her utmost to captureyou! and I can very well believe it of her; a grievous waste of ammunition on her part, wasn’t it, Pamela? Though it did not result in anengagement!” she added, highly pleased at being able to press a pun into her argument.
“Oh, I think she spared Christopher,” struck in Pamela with a conciliatory laugh; “‘Poor is the conquest of the timid hare,’ you know!” She was aware of something portentously rigid in her brother’s attitude, and would have given much to have changed the conversation, but the situation was beyond her control.
“I don’t think she would have thought it such a poor conquest,” said Lady Dysart indignantly; “a girl like that, accustomed to attorneys’ clerks and commercial travellers—she’d have done anything short of suicide for such a chance!”
Christopher had stood silent during this discussion. He was losing his temper, but he was doing it after his fashion, slowly and almost imperceptibly. The pity for Mr. Lambert’s wife, that had been a primary result of Charlotte’s indictment, flamed up into quixotism, and every word his mother said was making him more hotly faithful to the time when his conquest had been complete.
“I daresay it will surprise you to hear that I gave her the chance, and she didn’t take it,” he said suddenly.
Lady Dysart grasped the arms of her chair, and then fell back into it.
“Youdid!”
“Yes, I did,” replied Christopher, beginning to walk towards the door. He knew he had done a thing that was not only superfluous, but savoured repulsively of the pseudoheroic, and the attitude in which he had placed himself was torture to his reserve. “This great honour was offered to her,” he went on, taking refuge in lame satire, “last August, unstimulated by any attempts at suicide on her part, and she refused it. I—I think it would be kinder if you put her down as a harmless lunatic, than as an adventuress, as far as I am concerned.” He shut the door behind him as he finished speaking, and Lady Dysart was left staring at her daughter, complexity of emotions making speech an idle thing.