Thequestion, ten days afterwards, to anyone who had known all the features of the case, would have been whether Francie was worth Christopher’s act of championing.
At the back of the Rosemount kitchen-garden the ground rose steeply into a knoll of respectable height, where grew a tangle of lilac bushes, rhododendrons, seringas, and yellow broom. A gravel path wound ingratiatingly up through these, in curves artfully devised by Mr. Lambert to make the most of the extent and the least of the hill, and near the top a garden-seat was sunk in the bank, with laurels shutting it in on each side, and a laburnum “showering golden tears” above it. Through the perfumed screen of the lilac bushes in front unromantic glimpses of the roof of the house were obtainable—eyesores to Mr. Lambert, who had concentrated all his energies on hiding everything nearer than the semi-circle of lake and distant mountain held in an opening cut through the rhododendrons at the corner of the little plateau on which the seat stood. Without the disturbance of middle distance the eye lay at ease on the far-off struggle of the Connemara mountains, and on a serene vista of Lough Moyle; a view that enticed forth, as to a playground, the wildest and most foolish imaginations, and gave them elbow-room; a world so large and remote that it needed the sound of wheels on the road to recall the existence of the petty humanities of Lismoyle.
Francie and Hawkins were sitting there on the afternoon of the day on which Lambert was expected to come home, and as the sun, that had stared in at them through the opening in the rhododendrons when they first went there, slid farther round, their voices sank in unconscious accord with the fading splendours of the afternoon, and their silences seemed momently more difficult to break. They were nearing the end of the phase that had begun in the wood at Bruff, impelled to its verge by the unspoken knowledge that the last of the unthinking, dangerous days was dying with the sun, and that a final parting was looming up beyond. Neither knew for certain the mind of the other, or how they had dropped into this so-called friendship thatin half a dozen afternoons had robbed all other things of reality, and made the intervals between their meetings like a feverish dream. Francie did not dare to think much about it; she lived in a lime-light glow that surrounded her wherever she went, and all the world outside was dark. He was going in a fortnight, in ten days, in a week; that was the only fact that the future had held for her since Captain Cursiter had met them with the telegram in his hand on the lake shore at Bruff. She forgot her resolutions; she forgot her pride; and before she reached home that afternoon the spell of the new phase, that was the old, only intensified by forgiveness, was on her. She shut her eyes, and blindly gave house-room in her heart to the subtle passion that came in the garb of an old friend, with a cant about compassion on its lips, and perfidious promises that its life was only for a fortnight.
To connect this supreme crisis of a life with such a person as Mr. Gerald Hawkins may seem incongruous; but Francie was not aware of either crisis or incongruity. All she knew of was the enthralment that lay in each prosaic afternoon visit, all she felt, the tired effort of conscience against fascination. Her emotional Irish nature, with all its frivolity and recklessness, had also, far down in it, an Irish girl’s moral principle and purity; but each day she found it more difficult to hide the truth from him; each day the under-currents of feeling drew them helplessly nearer to each other. Everything was against her. Lambert’s business had, as he expected, taken him to Dublin, and kept him there; Cursiter, like most men, was chary of active interference in another man’s affairs, whatever his private opinion might be; and Charlotte, that guardian of youth, that trusty and vigilant spy, sat in her own room writing interminable letters, or went on long and complicated shopping expeditions whenever Hawkins came to the house.
On this golden, still afternoon, Francie strayed out soon after lunch, half dazed with unhappiness and excitement. To-night her husband would come home. In four days Hawkins would have gone, as eternally, so far as she was concerned, as if he were dead; he would soon forget her, she thought, as she walked to and fro among the blossomingapple trees in the kitchen-garden. Men forgot very easily, and, thanks to the way she had tried her best to make him think she didn’t care, there was not a word of hers to bring him back to her. She hated herself for her discretion; her soul thirsted for even one word of understanding, that would be something to live upon in future days of abnegation, when it would be nothing to her that she had gained his respect, and one tender memory would be worth a dozen self-congratulations.
She turned at the end of the walk and came back again under the apple trees; the ground under her feet was white with fallen blossoms; her fair hair gleamed among the thick embroidery of the branches, and her face was not shamed by their translucent pink and white. At a little distance Eliza Hackett, in a starched lilac calico, was gathering spinach, and meditating no doubt with comfortable assurance on the legitimacy of Father Heffernan’s apostolic succession, but outwardly the embodiment of solid household routine and respectability. As Francie passed her she raised her decorous face from the spinach-bed with a question as to whether the trout would be for dinner or for breakfast; the master always fancied fish for his breakfast, she reminded Francie. Eliza Hackett’s tone was distant, but admonitory, and it dispelled in a moment the visions of another now impossible future that were holding high carnival before Francie’s vexed eyes. The fetter made itself coldly felt, and following came the quick pang of remorse at the thought of the man who was wasting on her the best love he had to give. Her change of mood was headlong, but its only possible expression was trivial to absurdity, if indeed any incident in a soul’s struggle can be called trivial. Some day, further on in eternity, human beings will know what their standards of proportion and comparison are worth, and may perhaps find the glory of some trifling actions almost insufferable.
She gave the necessary order, and hurrying into the house brought out from it the piece of corduroy that she was stitching in lines of red silk as a waistcoat for her husband, and with a childish excitement at the thought of this expiation, took the path that led to the shrubbery on the hill. As she reached its first turn she hesitated and stopped,an idea of further and fuller renunciation occurring to her. Turning, she called to the figure stooping among the glossy rows of spinach to desire that the parlour-maid should say that this afternoon she was not at home. Had Eliza Hackett then and there obeyed the order, it is possible that many things would have happened differently. But fate is seldom without a second string to her bow, and even if Francie’s message had not been delayed by Eliza Hackett’s determination to gather a pint of green gooseberries before she went in, it is possible that Hawkins would, none the less have found his way to the top of the shrubbery, where Francie was sewing with the assiduity of Penelope. It was about four o’clock when she heard his step coming up the devious slants of the path, and she knew as she heard it that, in spite of all her precautions, she had expected him. His manner and even his look had nothing now in them of the confident lover of last year; his flippancy was gone, and when he began by reproaching her for having hidden from him, his face was angry and wretched, and he spoke like a person who had been seriously and unjustly hurt. He was more in love than he had ever been before, and he was taking it badly, like a fever that the chills of opposition were driving back into his system.
She made excuses as best she might, with her eyes bent upon her work.
“I might have been sitting in the drawing-room now,” he said petulantly; “only that Miss Mullen had seen you going off here by yourself, and told me I’d better go and find you.”
An unreasoning fear came over Francie, a fear as of something uncanny.
“Let us go back to the house,” she said; “Charlotte will be expecting us.” She said it to contradict the thought that had become definite for the first time. “Come; I’m going in.”
Hawkins did not move. “I suppose you forget that this is Wednesday, and that I’m going on Saturday,” he replied dully. “In any case you’ll not be much good to Charlotte. She’s gone up to pack her things. She told me herself she was going to be very busy, as she had to start at six o’clock.”
Francie leaned back, and realised that now she had no one to look to but herself, and happiness and misery fought within her till her hands trembled as she worked.
Each knew that this was, to all intents and purposes, their last meeting, and their consciousness was charged to brimming with unexpressed farewell. She talked of indifferent subjects; of what Aldershot would be like, of what Lismoyle would think of the new regiment, of the trouble that he would have in packing his pictures, parrying, with a weakening hand, his efforts to make every subject personal; and all the time the laburnum drooped in beautiful despair above her, as if listening and grieving, and the cool-leaved lilac sent its fragrance to mingle with her pain, and to stir her to rebellion with the ecstasy of spring-time. The minutes passed barrenly by, and, as has been said, the silences became longer and more clinging, and the thoughts that filled them made each successive subject more bare and artificial. At last Hawkins got up, and walking to the opening cut in the shrubs, stood, with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the lake and the mountains. Francie stitched on; it seemed to her that if she stopped she would lose her last hold upon herself; she felt as if her work were a talisman to remind her of all the things that she was in peril of forgetting. When, that night, she took up the waistcoat again to work at it, she thought that her heart’s blood had gone into the red stitches.
It was several minutes before Hawkins spoke. “Francie,” he said, turning round and speaking thickly, “are you going to let me leave you in this—in this kind of way? Have you realised that when I go on Saturday it’s most likely—it’s pretty certain, in fact—that we shall never see each other again?”
“Yes, I have,” she said, after a pause of a second or two. She did not say that for a fortnight her soul had beaten itself against the thought, and that to hear it in words was as much as her self-command could bear.
“You seem to care a great deal!” he said violently; “you’re thinking of nothing but that infernal piece of work, that I loathe the very sight of. Don’t you think you could do without it for five minutes, at all events?”
She let her hands drop into her lap, but made no other reply.
“You’re not a bit like what you used to be. You seem to take a delight in snubbing me and shutting me up. I must say, I never thought you’d have turned into a prig!” He felt this reproach to be so biting that he paused upon it to give it its full effect. “Here I am going to England in four days, and to India in four months, and it’s ten to one if I ever come home again. I mean to volunteer for the very first row that turns up. But it’s just the same to you, you won’t even take the trouble to say you’re sorry.”
“If you had taken the trouble to answer my letters last autumn, you wouldn’t be saying these things to me now,” she said, speaking low and hurriedly.
“I don’t believe it! I believe if you had cared about me then you wouldn’t treat me like this now.”
“Ididcare for you,” she said, while the hard-held tears forced their way to her eyes; “you made me do it, and then you threw me over, and now you’re trying to put the blame on me!”
He saw the glisten on her eyelashes, and it almost took from him the understanding of what she said.
“Francie,” he said, his voice shaking, and his usually confident eyes owning the infection of her tears, “you might forget that. I’m miserable. I can’t bear to leave you!” He sat down again beside her, and, catching her hand, kissed it with a passion of repentance. He felt it shrink from his lips, but the touch of it had intoxicated him, and suddenly she was in his arms.
For a speechless instant they clung to each other; her head dropped to his shoulder, as if the sharp release from the tension of the last fortnight had killed her, and the familiar voice murmured in her ear:
“Say it to me—say you love me.”
“Yes I do—my dearest—” she said, with a moan that was tragically at variance with the confession. “Ah, why do you make me so wicked!” She snatched herself away from him, and stood up, trembling all over. “I wish I had never seen you—I wish I was dead.”
“I don’t care what you say now,” said Hawkins, springing to his feet, “you’ve said you loved me, and I know you mean it. Will you stand by it?” he went on wildly. “If you’ll only say the word I’ll chuck everything overboard—I can’t go away from you like this. Once I’m in England I can’t get back here, and if I did, what good would it be to me? He’d never give us a chance of seeing each other, and we’d both be more miserable than we are, unless—unless there was a chance of meeting you in Dublin or somewhere—?” He stopped for an instant. Francie mutely shook her head. “Well, then, I shall never see you.”
There was silence, and the words settled down into both their hearts. He cursed himself for being afraid of her, she, whom he had always felt to be his inferior, yet when he spoke it was with an effort.
“Come away with me out of this—come away with me for good and all! What’s the odds? We can’t be more than happy!”
Francie made an instinctive gesture with her hand while he spoke, as if to stop him, but she said nothing, and almost immediately the distant rush and rattle of a train came quietly into the stillness.
“That’s his train!” she exclaimed, looking as startled as if the sound had been a sign from heaven. “Oh, go away! He mustn’t meet you coming away from here.”
“I’ll go if you give me a kiss,” he answered drunkenly. His arms were round her again, when they dropped to his side as if he had been shot.
There was a footstep on the path immediately below the lilac bushes, and Charlotte’s voice called to Francie that she was just starting for home and had come to make her adieux.
Christopher Dysartdrove to Rosemount next morning to see Mr. Lambert on business. He noticed Mrs. Lambert standing at the drawing-room window as he drove up, but she left the window before he reached the hall door, and he went straight to Mr. Lambert’s study without seeing her again.
Francie returned listlessly to the seat that she had sprung from with a terrified throb of the heart at the thought that the wheels might be those of Hawkins’ trap, and, putting her elbow on the arm of the chair, rested her forehead onher hand; her other hand drooped over the side of the chair, holding still in it the sprig of pink hawthorn that her husband had given her in the garden an hour before. Her attitude was full of languor, but her brain was working at its highest pressure, and at this moment she was asking herself what Sir Christopher would say when he heard that she had gone away with Gerald. She had seen him vaguely as one of the crowd of contemptuous or horror-stricken faces that had thronged about her pillow in the early morning, but his opinion had carried no more restraining power than that of Aunt Tish, or Uncle Robert, or Charlotte. Nothing had weighed with her then; the two principal figures in her life contrasted as simply and convincingly as night and day, and like night and day, too, were the alternative futures that were in her hand to choose from. Her eyes were open to her wrong-doing, but scarcely to her cruelty; it could not be as bad for Roddy, she thought, to live without her as for her to stay with him and think of Gerald in India, gone away from her for ever. Her reasoning power was easily mastered, her conscience was a thing of habit, and not fitted to grapple with this turbulent passion. She swept towards her ruin like a little boat staggering under more sail than she can carry. But the sight of Christopher, momentary as it was, had startled for an instant the wildness of her thoughts; the saner breath of the outside world had come with him, and a touch of the self-respect that she had always gained from him made her press her hot forehead against her hand, and realise that the way of transgressors would be hard.
She remained sitting there, almost motionless, for a long time. She had no wish to occupy herself with anything; all the things about her had already the air of belonging to a past existence; her short sovereignty was over, and even the furniture that she had, a few weeks ago, pulled about and rearranged in the first ardour of possession seemed to look at her in a decorous, clannish way, as if she were already an alien. At last she heard the study door open, and immediately afterwards, Christopher’s dog-cart went down the drive. It occurred to her that now, if ever, was the time to go to her husband and see whether, by diplomacy, she could evade the ride that he had asked her totake with him that afternoon. Hawkins had sent her a note saying that he would come to pay a farewell visit, a cautiously formal note that anyone might have seen, but that she was just as glad had not been seen by her husband, and at all hazards she must stay in to meet him. She got up and went to the study with a nervous colour in her cheeks, glancing out of the hall window as she passed it, with the idea that the threatening grey of the sky would be a good argument for staying at home. But if it rained, Roddy might stay at home too, she thought, and that would be worse than anything. That was her last thought as she went into the study.
Lambert was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the pile of papers and books on the table, and Francie was instantly struck by something unwonted in his attitude, something rigid and yet spent, that was very different from his usual bearing. He looked at her with heavy eyes, and going to his chair let himself drop into it; then, still silently, he held out his hand to her. She thought he looked older, and that his face was puffy and unattractive, and in the highly-strung state of her nerves she felt a repugnance to him that almost horrified her. It is an unfortunate trait of human nature that a call for sympathy from a person with whom sympathy has been lost has a repellent instead of an attractive power, and if a strong emotion does not appear pathetic, it is terribly near the ludicrous. In justice to Francie it must be said that her dominant feeling as she gave Lambert her hand and was drawn down on to his knee was less repulsion than a sense of her own hypocrisy.
“What’s the matter, Roddy?” she asked, after a second or two of silence, during which she felt the labouring of his breath.
“I’m done for,” he said, “that’s what’s the matter.”
“Why! what do you mean?” she exclaimed, turning her startled face half towards him, and trying not to shrink as his hot breath struck on her cheek.
“I’ve lost the agency.”
“Lost the agency!” repeated Francie, feeling as though the world with all the things she believed to be most solid were rocking under her feet. “Do you mean he’s after dismissing you?”
Lambert moved involuntarily, from the twitch of pain that the word gave him. It was this very term that Lismoyle would soon apply to him, as if he were a thieving butler or a drunken coachman.
“That’s about what it will come to,” he said bitterly. “He was too damned considerate to tell me so to-day, but he’s going to do it. He’s always hated me just as I have hated him, and this is his chance, though God knows what’s given it to him.”
“You’re raving!” cried Francie incredulously; “what on earth would make him turn you away?” She felt that her voice was sharp and unnatural, but she could not make it otherwise. The position was becoming momently more horrible from the weight of unknown catastrophe, the sight of her husband’s suffering and the struggle to sympathise with it, and the hollow disconnection between herself and everything about her.
“I can’t tell you—all in a minute,” he said with difficulty. “Wouldn’t you put your arm round my neck, Francie, as if you were sorry for me? You might be sorry for me, and for yourself too. We’re ruined. Oh my God!” he groaned, “we’re ruined!”
She put her arm round his neck, and pity, and a sense that it was expected of her, made her kiss his forehead. At the touch of her lips his sobs came suddenly and dreadfully, and his arms drew her convulsively to him. She lay there helpless and dry-eyed, enduring a wretchedness that in some ways was comparable to his own, but never becoming merged in the situation, never quite losing her sense of repulsion at his abasement.
“I never meant to touch a farthing of his—in the long run—” he went on, recovering himself a little; “I’d have paid him back every half-penny in the end—but, of course, he doesn’t believe that. What does he care what I say!”
“Did you borrow money from him, or what was it?” asked Francie gently.
“Yes, I did,” replied Lambert, setting his teeth; “but I didn’t tell him. I was eaten up with debts, and I had to—to borrow some of the estate money.” It was anguish to lower himself from the pedestal of riches and omnipotence on which he had always posed to her, and he spoke stumblingly. “It’s very hard to explain these things to you—it’s—it’s not so unusual as you’d think—and then, before I’d time to get things square again, some infernal mischief-maker has set him on to ask to see the books, and put him up to matters that he’d never have found out for himself.”
“Was he angry?” she asked, with the quietness that was so unlike her.
“Oh, I don’t know—I don’t care—” moving again restlessly in his chair; “he’s such a rotten, cold-blooded devil, you can’t tell what he’s at.” Even at this juncture it gave him pleasure to make little of Christopher to Francie. “He asked me the most beastly questions he could think of, in that d—d stammering way of his. He’s to write to me in two or three days, and I know well what he’ll say,” he went on with a stabbing sigh; “I suppose he’ll have it all over the country in a week’s time. He’s been to the bank and seen the estate account, and that’s what’s done me. I asked him plump and plain if he hadn’t been put up to it, and he didn’t deny it, but there’s no one could have known what was paid into that account but Baker or one of the clerks, and they knew nothing about the fines—I mean—they couldn’t understand enough to tell him anything. But what does it matter who told him. The thing’s done now, and I may as well give up.”
“What will you do?” said Francie faintly.
“If it wasn’t for you I think I’d put a bullet through my head,” he answered, his innately vulgar soul prompting him to express the best thought that was in him in conventional heroics, “but I couldn’t leave you, Francie—I couldn’t leave you—” he broke down again—“it was for our honeymoon I took the most of the money—” He could not go on, and her whole frame was shaken by his sobs.
“Don’t, Roddy, don’t cry,” she murmured, feeling cold and sick.
“He knows I took the money,” Lambert went on incoherently; “I’ll have to leave the country—I’ll sell everything—” he got up and began to walk about the room—“I’ll pay him—damn him—I’ll pay him every farthing. He sha’n’t have it to say he was kept waiting for his money! He shall have it this week!”
“But how will you pay him if you haven’t the money?” said Francie, with the same lifelessness of voice that had characterised her throughout.
“I’ll borrow the money—I’ll raise it on the furniture; I’ll send the horses up to Sewell’s, though God knows what price I’ll get for them this time of year, but I’ll manage it somehow. I’ll go out to Gurthnamuckla this very afternoon about it. Charlotte’s got a head on her shoulders—” He stood still, and the idea of borrowing from Charlotte herself took hold of him. He felt that such trouble as this must command her instant sympathy, and awaken all the warmth of their old friendship, and his mind turned towards her stronger intelligence with a reliance that was creditable to his ideas of the duties of a friend. “I could give her a bill of sale on the horses and furniture,” he said to himself.
His eyes rested for the first time on Francie, who had sunk into the chair from which he had risen, and was looking at him as if she did not see him. Her hair was ruffled from lying on his shoulder, and her eyes were wild and fixed, like those of a person who is looking at a far-off spectacle of disaster and grief.
Theexpected rain had not come, though the air was heavy and damp with the promise of it. It hung unshed, above the thirsty country, looking down gloomily upon the dusty roads, and the soft and straight young grass in the meadows; waiting for the night, when the wind would moan and cry for it, and the newborn leaves would shudder in the dark at its coming.
At three o’clock Francie was sure that the afternoon would be fine, and soon afterwards she came downstairs in her habit, and went into the drawing-room to wait for the black mare to be brought to the door. She was going to ride towards Gurthnamuckla to meet Lambert, who had gone there some time before; he had made Francie promise to meet him on his way home, and she was going to keep her word. He had become quite a different person to her since the morning, a person who no longer appealed to her admiration or her confidence, but solely and distressingly to her pity. She had always thought of him as invincible,self-sufficing, and possessed of innumerable interests besides herself; she knew him now as dishonest and disgraced, and miserable, stripped of all his pretensions and vanities, but she cared for him to-day more than yesterday. It was against her will that his weakness appealed to her; she would have given worlds for a heart that did not smite her at its claim, but her pride helped out her compassion. She told herself that she could not let people have it to say that she ran away from Roddy because he was in trouble.
She felt chilly, and she shivered as she stood by the fire, whose unseasonable extravagance daily vexed the righteous soul of Eliza Hackett. Hawkins’ note was in her hand, and she read it through twice while she waited; then, as she heard the sound of wheels on the gravel, she tore it in two and threw it into the fire, and, for the second time that morning, ran to the window.
It was Christopher Dysart again. He saw her at the window and took off his cap, and before he had time to ring the bell, she had opened the hall door. She had, he saw at once, been crying, and her paleness, and the tell-tale heaviness of her eyes, contrasted pathetically with the smartness of her figure in her riding habit, and the boyish jauntiness of her hard felt hat.
“Mr. Lambert isn’t in, Sir Christopher,” she began at once, as if she had made up her mind whom he had come to see; “but won’t you come in?”
“Oh—thank you—I—I haven’t much time—I merely wanted to speak to your husband,” stammered Christopher.
“Oh, please come in,” she repeated, “I want to speak to you.” Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she turned quickly from him and walked towards the drawing-room.
Christopher followed her with the mien of a criminal. He felt that he would rather have been robbed twenty times over than see the eyes that, in his memory, had always been brilliant and undefeated, avoiding his as if they were afraid of him, and know that he was the autocrat before whom she trembled. She remained standing near the middle of the room, with one hand on the corner of the piano, whose gaudy draperies had, even at this juncture, a painful subeffect upon Christopher; her other hand fidgeted restlessly with a fold of the habit that she was holding up, and it was evident that whatever her motive had been in bringing himin, her courage was not equal to it. Christopher waited for her to speak, until the silence became unendurable.
“I intended to have been here earlier,” he said, saying anything rather than nothing, “but there was a great deal to be got through at the Bench to-day, and I’ve only just got away. You know I’m a magistrate now, and indifferently minister justice—”
“I’m glad I hadn’t gone out when you came,” she interrupted, as though, having found a beginning, she could not lose a moment in using it. “I wanted to say that if you—if you’ll only give Roddy a week’s time he’ll pay you. He only meant to borrow the money, like, and he thought he could pay you before; but, indeed, he says he’ll pay you in a week.” Her voice was low and full of bitterest humiliation, and Christopher wished that before he had arraigned his victim, and offered him up as an oblation to his half-hearted sense of duty, he had known that his infirmity of purpose would have brought him back three hours afterwards to offer the culprit a way out of his difficulties. It would have saved him from his present hateful position, and what it would have saved her was so evident, that he turned his head away as he spoke, rather than look at her.
“I came back to tell your husband that—that he could arrange things in—in some such way,” he said, as guiltily and awkwardly as a boy. “I’m sorry—more sorry than I can say—that he should have spoken to you about it. Of course, that was my fault. I should have told him then what I came to tell him now.”
“He’s gone out now to see about selling his horses and the furniture,” went on Francie, scarcely realising all of Christopher’s leniency in her desire to prove Lambert’s severe purity of action. Her mind was not capable of more than one idea—one, that is, in addition to the question that had monopolised it since yesterday afternoon, and Christopher’s method of expressing himself had never been easily understood by her.
“Oh, he mustn’t think of doing that!” exclaimed Christopher, horrified that she should think him a Shylock, demanding so extreme a measure of restitution; “it wasn’t the actual money question that—that we disagreed about; he can take as long as he likes about repaying me. In fact—in fact you can tell him from me that—he said somethingthis morning about giving up the agency. Well, I—I should be glad if he would keep it.”
He had stultified himself now effectually; he knew that he had acted like a fool, and he felt quite sure that Mr. Lambert’s sense of gratitude would not prevent his holding the same opinion. He even foresaw Lambert’s complacent assumption that Francie had talked him over, but he could not help himself. The abstract justice of allowing the innocent to suffer with the guilty was beyond him; he forgot to theorise, and acted on instinct as simply as a savage. She also had acted on instinct. When she called him in she had nerved herself to ask for reprieve, but she never hoped for forgiveness, and as his intention penetrated the egotism of suffering, the thought leaped with it that, if Roddy were to be let off, everything would be on the same footing that it had been yesterday evening. A blush that was incomprehensible to Christopher swept over her face; the grasp of circumstances relaxed somewhat, and a jangle of unexplainable feelings confused what self-control she had left.
“You’re awfully good,” she began half hysterically. “I always knew you were good; I wish Roddy was like you! Oh, I wish I was like you! I can’t help it—I can’t help crying; you were always too good to me, and I never was worth it!” She sat down on one of the high stiff chairs, for which her predecessor had worked beaded seats, and hid her eyes in her handkerchief. “Please don’t talk to me; please don’t say anything to me—” She stopped suddenly. “What’s that? Is that anyone riding up?”
“No. It’s your horse coming round from the yard,” said Christopher, taking a step towards the window, and trying to keep up the farce of talking as if nothing had happened.
“My horse!” she exclaimed, starting up. “Oh, yes, I must go and meet Roddy. I mustn’t wait any longer.” She began, as if unconscious of Christopher’s presence, to look for the whip and gloves that she had laid down. He saw them before she did, and handed them to her.
“Good-bye,” he said, taking her cold, trembling hand, “I must go too. You will tell your husband that it’s—it’s all right.”
“Yes. I’ll tell him. I’m going to meet him. I must start now,” she answered, scarcely seeming to notice whathe said, and withdrawing her hand from his, she began hurriedly to button on her gloves.
Christopher did not wait for further dismissal, but when his hand was on the door, her old self suddenly woke.
“Look at me letting you go away without telling you a bit how grateful I am to you!” she said, with a lift of her tear-disfigured eyes that was like a changeling of the look he used to know; “but don’t you remember what Mrs. Baker said about me, that ‘you couldn’t expect any manners from a Dublin Jackeen.’?”
She laughed weakly, and Christopher, stammering more than ever in an attempt to say that there was nothing to be grateful for, got himself out of the room.
After he had gone, Francie gave herself no time to think. Everything was reeling round her as she went out on to the steps, and even Michael the groom thought to himself that if he hadn’t the trap to wash, he’d put the saddle on the chestnut and folly the misthress, she had that thrimulous way with her when he put the reins into her hands, and only for it was the mare she was riding he wouldn’t see her go out by herself.
It was the first of June, and the gaiety of the spring was nearly gone. The flowers had fallen from the hawthorn, the bluebells and primroses were vanishing as quietly as they came, the meadows were already swarthy, and the breaths of air that sent pale shimmers across them, were full of the unspeakable fragrance of the ripening grass. Under the trees, near Rosemount, the shadowing greenness had saturated the daylight with its gloom, but out among the open pastures and meadows the large grey sky seemed almost bright, and, in the rich sobriety of tone, the red cattle were brilliant spots of colour.
The black mare and her rider were now on thoroughly confidential terms, and, so humiliatingly interwoven are soul and body, as the exercise quickened the blood in her veins, Francie’s incorrigible youth rose up, and while it brightened her eyes and drove colour to her cheeks, it whispered that somehow or other happiness might come to her. She rode fast till she reached the turn to Gurthnamuckla, and there, mindful of her husband’s injunctions that she was not to ride up to the house, but to wait for him on the road, she relapsed into a walk.
As she slackened her pace, all the thoughts that she had been riding away from came up with her again. What claim had Roddy on her now? She had got him out of his trouble, and that was the most he could expect her to do for him. He hadn’t thought much about the trouble he was bringing on her; he never as much as said he was sorry for the disgrace it would be to her. Why should she break her heart for him and Gerald’s heart too?—as she said Hawkins’ name to herself, her hands fell into her lap, and she moaned aloud. Every step the mare was taking was carrying her farther from him, but yet she could not turn back. She was changed since yesterday; she had seen her husband’s soul laid bare, and it had shown her how tremendous were sin and duty; it had touched her slumbering moral sense as well as her kindness, and though she rebelled she did not dare to turn back.
It was not till she heard a pony’s quick gallop behind her, and looking back, saw Hawkins riding after her at full speed, that she knew how soon she was to be tested. She had scarcely time to collect herself before he was pulling up the pony beside her, and had turned a flushed and angry face towards her.
“Didn’t you get my note? Didn’t you know I was coming?” he began in hot remonstrance. Then, seeing in a moment how ill and strange she looked, “What’s the matter? Has anything happened?”
“Roddy came home yesterday evening,” she said, with her eyes fixed on the mare’s mane.
“Well, I know that,” interrupted Hawkins. “Do you mean that he was angry? Did he find out anything about me? If he did see the note I wrote you, there was nothing in that.” Francie shook her head. “Then it’s nothing? It’s only that you’ve been frightened by that brute,” he said, kicking his pony up beside the mare, and trying to look into Francie’s downcast eyes. “Don’t mind him. It won’t be for long.”
“You mustn’t say that,” she said hurriedly. “I was very wrong yesterday, and I’m sorry for it now.”
“I know you’re not!” he burst out, with all the conviction that he felt. “You can’t unsay what you said to me yesterday. I sat up the whole night thinking the thing over and thinking of you, and at last I thought of a fellow Iknow out in New Zealand, who told me last year I ought to chuck the army and go out there.” He dropped his reins on the pony’s neck, and took Francie’s hand. “Why shouldn’t we go there together, Francie? I’ll give up everything for you, my darling!”
She feebly tried to take her hand away, but did not reply.
“I’ve got three hundred a year of my own, and we can do ourselves awfully well on that out there. We’ll always have lots of horses, and it’s a ripping climate—and—and I love you, and I’ll always love you!”
He was carried away by his own words, and, stooping his head, he kissed her hand again and again.
Every pulse in her body answered to his touch, and when she drew her hand away, it was with an effort that was more than physical.
“Ah! stop, stop,” she cried. “I’ve changed—I didn’t mean it.”
“Didn’t mean what?” demanded Hawkins, with his light eyes on fire.
“Oh, leave me alone,” she said, turning her distracted face towards him. “I’m nearly out of my mind as it is. What made you follow me out here? I came out so as I wouldn’t see you, and I’m going to meet Roddy now.”
Hawkins’ colour died slowly down to a patchy white.
“What do you think it was that made me follow you? Do you want to make me tell you over again what you know already?” She did not answer, and he went on, trying to fight against his own fears by speaking very quietly and rationally. “I don’t know what you’re at, Francie. I don’t believe you know what you’re saying. Something must have happened, and it would be fairer to tell me what it is, than to drive me distracted in this sort of way.”
There was a pause of several seconds, and he was framing a fresh remonstrance when she spoke.
“Roddy’s in great trouble. I wouldn’t leave him,” she said, taking refuge in a prevarication of the exact truth.
Something about her told Hawkins that things were likely to go hard with him, and there was something, too, that melted his anger as it rose; but her pale face drew him to a height of passion that he had not known before.
“And don’t you think anything aboutme?” he said with a breaking voice. “Are you ready to throw me overboardjust because he’s in trouble, when you know he doesn’t care for you a tenth part as much as I do? Do you mean to tell me that you want me to go away, and say good-bye to you for ever? If you do, I’ll go, and if you hear I’ve gone to the devil, you’ll know who sent me.”
The naïve selfishness of this argument was not perceived by either. Hawkins felt his position to be almost noble, and did not in the least realise what he was asking Francie to sacrifice for him. He had even forgotten the idea that had occurred to him last night, that to go to New Zealand would be a pleasanter way of escaping from his creditors than marrying Miss Coppard. Certainly Francie had no thought of his selfishness or of her own sacrifice. She was giddy with struggle; right and wrong had lost their meaning and changed places elusively; the only things that she saw clearly were the beautiful future that had been offered to her, and the look in Roddy’s face when she had told him that wherever he had to go she would go with him.
The horses had moved staidly on, while these two lives stood still and wrestled with their fate, and the summit was slowly reached of the long hill on which Lambert had once pointed out to her the hoof-prints of Hawkins’ pony. The white road and the grey rock country stretched out before them, colourless and discouraging under the colourless sky, and Hawkins still waited for his answer. Coming towards them up the tedious slope was a string of half-a-dozen carts, with a few people walking on either side; an unremarkable procession, that might have meant a wedding, or merely a neighbourly return from market, but for a long, yellow coffin that lay, hemmed in between old women, in the midmost cart. Francie felt a superstitious thrill as she saw it; a country funeral, with its barbarous and yet fitting crudity, always seemed to bring death nearer to her than the plumed conventionalities of the hearses and mourning coaches that she was accustomed to. She had once been to the funeral of a fellow Sunday-school child in Dublin, and the first verse of the hymn that they had sung then, came back, and began to weave itself in with the beat of the mare’s hoofs.
“Brief life is here our portion,Brief sorrow, short-lived care,The life that knows no ending,The tearless life is there.”
“Brief life is here our portion,Brief sorrow, short-lived care,The life that knows no ending,The tearless life is there.”
“Brief life is here our portion,Brief sorrow, short-lived care,The life that knows no ending,The tearless life is there.”
“Francie, are you going to answer me? Come away with me this very day. We could catch the six o’clock train before any one knew—dearest, if you love me—” His roughened, unsteady voice seemed to come to her from a distance, and yet was like a whisper in her own heart.
“Wait till we are past the funeral,” she said, catching, in her agony, at the chance of a minute’s respite.
At the same moment an old man, who had been standing by the side of the road, leaning on his stick, turned towards the riders, and Francie recognised in him Charlotte’s retainer, Billy Grainy. His always bloodshot eyes were redder than ever, his mouth dribbled like a baby’s, and the smell of whisky poisoned the air all around him.
“I’m waitin’ on thim here this half-hour,” he began, in a loud drunken mumble, hobbling to Francie’s side, and moving along beside the mare, “as long as they were taking her back the road to cry her at her own gate. Owld bones is wake, asthore, owld bones is wake!” He caught at the hem of Francie’s habit to steady himself; “be cripes! Miss Duffy was a fine woman, Lord ha’ maircy on her. And a great woman! And divil blasht thim that threw her out of her farm to die in the Union—the dom ruffins.”
As on the day, now very long ago, when she had first ridden to Gurthnamuckla, Francie tried to shake his hand off her habit; he released it stupidly, and staggering to the side of the road, went on grumbling and cursing. The first cart, creaking and rattling under its load of mourners, was beside them by this time, and Billy, for the benefit of its occupants, broke into a howl of lamentation.
“Thanks be to God Almighty, and thanks be to His Mother, the crayture had thim belonging to her that would bury her like a Christian.” He shook his fist at Francie. “Ah—ha! go home to himself and owld Charlotte, though it’s little thim regards you—” He burst into drunken laughter, bending and tottering over his stick.
Francie, heedless of the etiquette that required that she and Hawkins should stop their horses till the funeral passed, struck the mare, and passed by him at a quickened pace. The faces in the carts were all turned upon her, and she felt as if she were enduring, in a dream, the eyes of an implacable tribunal; even the mare seemed to share in her agitation, and sidled and fidgeted onthe narrow strip of road, that was all the space left to her by the carts. The coffin was almost abreast of Francie now, and her eyes rested with a kind of fascination on its bare, yellow surface. She became dimly aware that Norry the Boat was squatted beside it on the straw, when one of the other women began suddenly to groan and thump on the coffin-lid with her fists, in preparation for a burst of the Irish Cry, and at the signal Norry fell upon her knees, and flung out her arms inside her cloak, with a gesture that made her look like a great vulture opening its wings for flight. The cloak flapped right across the mare’s face, and she swerved from the cart with a buck that loosened her rider in the saddle, and shook her hat off. There was a screech of alarm from all the women, the frightened mare gave a second and a third buck, and at the third Francie was shot into the air, and fell, head first, on the road.
Thefloor of the potato loft at Gurthnamuckla had for a long time needed repairs, a circumstance not in itself distressing to Miss Mullen, who held that effort after mere theoretical symmetry was unjustifiable waste of time in either housekeeping or farming. On this first of June, however, an intimation from Norry that “there’s ne’er a pratie ye have that isn’t ate with the rats,” given with the thinly-veiled triumph of servants in such announcements, caused a truculent visit of inspection to the potato loft; and in her first spare moment of the afternoon, Miss Mullen set forth with her tool-basket, and some boards from a packing-case, to make good the breaches with her own hands. Doing it herself saved the necessity of taking the men from their work, and moreover ensured its being properly done.
So she thought, as, having climbed the ladder that led from the cowhouse to the loft, she put her tools on the ground, and surveyed with a workman’s eye the job she had set herself. The loft was hot and airless, redolent of the cowhouse below, as well as of the clayey mustiness of the potatoes that were sprouting in the dirt on the floor, and even sending pallid, worm-like roots down into space through the cracks in the boards. Miss Mullen propped the window-shutter open with the largest potato, and, pinning up her skirt, fell to work.
She had been hammering and sawing for a quarter of an hour when she heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs on the cobble-stones of the yard, and, getting up from her knees, advanced to the window with caution and looked out. It was Mr. Lambert, in the act of pulling up his awkward young horse, and she stood looking down at him in silence while he dismounted, with a remarkable expression on her face, one in which some acute mental process was mixed with the half-unconscious and yet all-observant recognition of an intensely familiar object.
“Hullo, Roddy!” she called out at last, “is that you? What brings you over so early?”
Mr. Lambert started with more violence than the occasion seemed to demand.
“Hullo!” he replied, in a voice not like his own, “is that where you are?”
“Yes, and it’s where I’m going to stay. This is the kind of fancy work I’m at,” brandishing her saw; “so if you want to talk to me you must come up here.”
“All right,” said Lambert, gloomily, “I’ll come up as soon as I put the colt in the stable.”
It is a fact so improbable as to be worth noting, that before Lambert found his way up the ladder, Miss Mullen had unpinned her skirt and fastened up the end of a plait that had escaped from the massive coils at the back of her head.
“Well, and where’s the woman that owns you?” she asked, beginning to work again, while her visitor stood in obvious discomfort, with his head touching the rafters, and the light from the low window striking sharply up against his red and heavy eyes.
“At home,” he replied, almost vacantly. “I’d have been here half an hour ago or more,” he went on after a moment or two, “but the colt cast a shoe, and I had to go on to the forge beyond the cross to get it put on.”
Charlotte, with a flat pencil in her mouth, grunted responsively, while she measured off a piece of board, and, holding it with her knee on the body of a legless wheelbarrow, began to saw it across. Lambert looked on, provoked and disconcerted by this engrossing industry. Withhis brimming sense of collapse and crisis, he felt that even this temporary delay of sympathy was an unkindness.
“That colt must be sold this week, so I couldn’t afford to knock his hoof to bits on the hard road.” His manner was so portentous that Charlotte looked up again, and permitted herself to remark on what had been apparent to her the moment she saw him.
“Why, what’s the matter with you, Roddy? Now I come to see you, you look as if you’d been at your own funeral.”
“I wish to God I had! It would be the best thing could happen me.”
He found pleasure in saying something to startle her, and in seeing that her face became a shade hotter than the stifling air and the stooping over her work had made it.
“What makes you talk like that?” she said, a little strangely, as it seemed to him.
He thought she was moved, and he immediately felt his position to be more pathetic than he had believed. It would be much easier to explain the matter to Charlotte than to Francie, he felt at once; Charlotte understood business matters, a formula which conveyed to his mind much comfortable flexibility in money affairs.
“Charlotte,” he said, looking down at her with eyes that self-pity and shaken self-control were moistening again, “I’m in most terrible trouble. Will you help me?”
“Wait till I hear what it is and I’ll tell you that,” replied Charlotte, with the same peculiar, flushed look on her face, and suggestion in her voice of strong and latent feeling. He could not tell how it was, but he felt as if she knew what he was going to say.
“I’m four hundred pounds in debt to the estate, and Dysart has found it out,” he said, lowering his voice as if afraid that the spiders and wood-lice might repeat his secret.
“Four hundred,” thought Charlotte; “that’s more than I reckoned;” but she said aloud, “My God! Roddy, how did that happen?”
“I declare to you I don’t know how it happened. One thing and another came against me, and I had to borrow this money, and before I could pay it he found out.”
Lambert was a pitiable figure as he made his confession,his head, his shoulders, and even his moustache drooping limply, and his hands nervously twisting his ash plant.
“That’s a bad business,” said Charlotte reflectively, and was silent for a moment, while Lambert realised the satisfaction of dealing with an intelligence that could take in such a situation instantaneously, without alarm or even surprise.
“Is he going to give you the sack?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. He didn’t say anything definite.”
Lambert found the question hard to bear, but he endured it for the sake of the chance it gave him to lead up to the main point of the interview. “If I could have that four hundred placed to his credit before I see him next, I believe there’d be an end of it. Not that I’d stay with him,” he went on, trying to bluster, “or with any man that treated me this kind of way, going behind my back to look at the accounts.”
“Is that the way he found you out?” asked Charlotte, taking up the lid of the packing-case and twisting a nail out of it with her hammer. “He must be smarter than you took him for.”
“Someone must have put him up to it,” said Lambert, “someone who’d got at the books. It beats me to make it out. But what’s the good of thinking of that? The thing that’s setting me mad is to know how to pay him.” He waited to see if Charlotte would speak, but she was occupied in straightening the nail against the wall with her hammer, and he went on with a dry throat. “I’m going to sell all my horses, Charlotte, and I daresay I can raise some money on the furniture; but it’s no easy job to raise money in such a hurry as this, and if I’m to be saved from being disgraced, I ought to have it at once to stop his mouth. I believe if I could pay him at once he wouldn’t have spunk enough to go any further with the thing.” He waited again, but the friend of his youth continued silent. “Charlotte, no man ever had a better friend, through thick and thin, than I’ve had in you. There’s no other person living that I’d put myself under an obligation to but yourself. Charlotte, for the sake of all that’s ever been between us, would you lend me the money?”
Her face was hidden from him as she knelt, and he stooped and placed a clinging, affectionate hand upon hershoulder. Miss Mullen got up abruptly, and Lambert’s hand fell.
“All that’s ever been between us is certainly a very weighty argument, Roddy,” she said with a smile that deepened the ugly lines about her mouth, and gave Lambert a chilly qualm. “There’s a matter of three hundred pounds between us, if that’s what you mean.”
“I know, Charlotte,” he said hastily. “No one remembers that better than I do. But this is a different kind of thing altogether. I’d give you a bill of sale on everything at Rosemount—and there are the horses out here too. Of course, I suppose I might be able to raise the money at the bank or somewhere, but it’s a very different thing to deal with a friend, and a friend who can hold her tongue too. You never failed me yet, Charlotte, old girl, and I don’t believe you’ll do it now!”
His handsome, dark eyes were bent upon her face with all the pathos he was master of, and he was glad to feel tears rising in them.
“Well, I’m afraid that’s just what I’ll have to do,” she said, flinging away the nail that she had tried to straighten, and fumbling in her pocket for another; “I may be able to hold my tongue, but I don’t hold with throwing good money after bad.”
Lambert stood quite still, staring at her, trying to believe that this was the Charlotte who had trembled when he kissed her, whose love for him had made her his useful and faithful thrall.
“Do you mean to say that you’ll see me ruined and disgraced sooner than put out your hand to help me?” he said passionately.
“I thought you said you could get the money somewhere else,” she replied, with undisturbed coolness, “and you might know that coming to me for money is like going to the goat’s house for wool. I’ve got nothing more to lend, and no one ought to know that better than yourself!”
Charlotte was standing, yellow-faced and insolent, opposite to Lambert, with her hands in the pockets of her apron; in every way a contrast to him, with his flushed forehead and suffused eyes. The dull, white light that struck up into the roof from the whitewashed kitchen wall, showed Lambertthe furrowed paths of implacability in his adversary’s face, as plainly as it showed her his defeat and desperation.
“You’vegot no more money to lend, d’ye say!” he repeated, with a laugh that showed he had courage enough left to lose his temper; “I suppose you’ve got all the money you got eighteen months ago from the old lady lent out? ’Pon my word, considering you got Francie’s share of it for yourself, I think it would have been civiller to have given her husband the first refusal of a loan! I daresay I’d have given you as good interest as your friends in Ferry Lane!”
Charlotte’s eyes suddenly lost their exaggerated indifference.
“And if she ever had the smallest claim to what ye call a share!” she vociferated, “haven’t you had it twenty times over? Was there ever a time that ye came cringing and crawling to me for money that I refused it to ye? And how do you thank me? By embezzling the money I paid for the land, and then coming to try and get it out of me over again, because Sir Christopher Dysart is taught sense to look into his own affairs, and see how his agent is cheating him!”
Some quality of triumph in her tone, some light of previous knowledge in her eye, struck Lambert.
“Was it you told him?” he said hoarsely, “was it you spoke to Dysart?”
Even now and then in the conduct of her affairs, Miss Mullen permitted the gratification of her temper to take the place of the slower pleasure of secrecy.
“Yes, I told him,” she answered, without hesitation.
“You went to Dysart, and set him on to ruin me!” said Lambert, in a voice that had nearly as much horror as rage in it.
“And may I ask you what you’ve ever done for me,” she said, gripping her hammer with a strong, trembling hand, “that I was to keep your tricks from being found out for you? What reason was there in God’s earth that I wasn’t to do my plain duty by those that are older friends than you?”
“What reason!” Lambert almost choked from the intolerable audacity and heartlessness of the question. “Are you in your right mind to ask me that? You, that’s been like a—a near relation to me all these years, or pretendingto be! There was a time you wouldn’t have done this to me, you know it damned well, and so do I. You were glad enough to do anything for me then, so long as I’d be as much as civil to you, and now, I suppose, this is your dirty devilish spite, because you were cut out by someone else!”
She did not flinch as the words went through and through her.
“Take care of yourself!” she said, grinning at him, “perhaps you’re not the one to talk about being cut out! Oh, I don’t think ye need look as if ye didn’t understand me. At all events, all ye have to do is to go home and ask your servants—or, for the matter of that, anyone in the streets of Lismoyle—who it is that’s cut ye out, and made ye the laughing-stock of the country?”
She put her hand on the dusty beam beside her, giddy with her gratified impulse, as she saw him take the blow and wither under it.
She scarcely heard at first the strange and sudden sound of commotion that had sprung up like a wind in the house opposite. The windows were all open, and through them came the sound of banging doors and running footsteps, and then Norry’s voice screaming something as she rushed from room to room. She was in the kitchen now, and the words came gasping and sobbing through the open door.
“Where’s Miss Charlotte? Where is she? O God! O God! Where is she? Miss Francie’s killed, her neck’s broke below on the road! O God of Heaven, help us!”
Neither Charlotte nor Lambert heard clearly what she said, but the shapeless terror of calamity came about them like a vapour and blanched the hatred in their faces. In a moment they were together at the window, and at the same instant Norry burst out into the yard, with outflung arms and grey hair streaming. As she saw Lambert, her strength seemed to go from her. She staggered back, and, catching at the door for support, turned from him and hid her face in her cloak.
FINIS.PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, ABERDEEN