Teaat Mrs. Beattie’s parties was a serious meal, and, as a considerable time had elapsed since any of the company,except Mr. Hawkins, had dined, they did full justice to her hospitality. That young gentleman toyed with a plate of raspberries and cream and a cup of coffee, and spasmodically devoted himself to Mrs. Rattray in a way that quite repaid her for occasional lapses of attention. Francie was sitting opposite to him, not at the table, where, indeed, there was no room for her, but on a window-sill, where she was sharing a small table with Mr. Lambert. They were partly screened by the window curtains, but it seemed to Hawkins that Lambert was talking a great deal and that she was eating nothing. Whatever was the subject of their conversation they were looking very serious over it, and, as it progressed, Francie seemed to get more and more behind her window curtain. The general clamour made it impossible for him to hear what they were talking about, and Mrs. Rattray’s demands upon his attention became more intolerable every moment, as he looked at Francie and saw how wholly another man was monopolising her.
“And do you like being stationed here, Mr. Hawkins?” said Mrs. Rattray after a pause.
“Eh? what? Oh yes, of course I do—awfully! you’re all such delightful people, y’know!”
Mrs. Rattray bridled with pleasure at this audacity.
“Oh, Mr. Hawkins, I’m afraid you’re a terrible flatterer! Do you know that one of the officers of the Foragers said he thought it was a beastly spawt!”
“Beastly what? Oh yes, I see. I don’t agree with him at all; I think it’s a capital good spot.” (Why did that old ass, Mrs. Corkran, stick her great widow’s cap just between him and the curtain? Francie had leaned forward and looked at him that very second, and that infernal white towrow had got in his way.)
Mrs. Rattray thought it was time to play her trump card.
“I suppose you read a great deal, Mr. Hawkins? Dr. Rattray takes the—a—thePink OneI think he calls it—I know, of course, it’s only a paper for gentlemen,” she added hurriedly, “but I believe it’s very comical, and the doctor would be most happy to lend it to you.”
Mr. Hawkins, whose Sunday mornings would have been a blank without the solace of theSporting Times, explained that the loan was unnecessary, but Mrs. Rattray felt that shehad nevertheless made her point, and resolved that she would next Sunday study thePink One’sinscrutable pages, so that she and Mr. Hawkins might have, at least, one subject in common.
By this time the younger members of the company had finished their tea, and those nearest the door began to make a move. The first to leave the room were Francie and Lambert, and poor Hawkins, who had hoped that his time of release had at length come, found it difficult to behave as becomes a gentleman and a soldier, when Mrs. Rattray, with the air of one who makes a concession, said she thought she could try another saucer of raspberries. Before they left the table the piano had begun again upstairs, and a muffled thumping, that shook flakes from the ceiling down on to the tea-table, told that the realities of the evening had begun at last.
“I knew the young people would be at that before the evening was out,” said Mrs. Beattie with an indulgent laugh, “though the girls let on to me it was only a musical party they wanted.”
“Ah well, they’ll never do it younger!” said Mrs. Baker, leaning back with her third cup of tea in her hand. “Girls will be girls, as I’ve just been saying to Miss Mullen.”
“Girls will be tom-fools!” said Miss Mullen with a brow of storm, thrusting her hands into her gloves, while her eyes followed Hawkins, who had at length detached Mrs. Rattray from the pleasures of the table, and was hurrying her out of the room.
“Oh now, Miss Mullen, you mustn’t be so cynical,” said Mrs. Beattie from behind the tea-urn; “we have six girls, and I declare now Mr. Beattie and I wouldn’t wish to have one less.”
“Well, they’re a great responsibility,” said Mrs. Corkran with a slow wag of her obtrusively widowed head, “and no one knows that better than a mother. I shall never forget the anxiety I went through—it was just before we came to this parish—when my Bessy had an offer. Poor Mr. Corkran and I disapproved of the young man, and we were both quite distracted about it. Indeed we had to make it a subject of prayer, and a fortnight afterwards the young man died. Oh, doesn’t it show the wonderful force of prayer?”
“Well now, I think it’s a pity you didn’t let it alone,” said Mr. Lynch, with something resembling a wink at Miss Mullen.
“I daresay Bessy’s very much of your opinion,” said Charlotte, unable to refrain from a jibe at Miss Corkran, pre-occupied though she was with her own wrath. She pushed her chair brusquely back from the table. “I think, with your kind permission, Mrs. Beattie, I’ll go upstairs and see what’s going on. Don’t stir, Mr. Lynch, I’m able to get that far by myself.”
When Miss Mullen arrived at the top of the steep flight of stairs, she paused on the landing amongst the exiled drawing-room chairs and tables, and looked in at seven or eight couples revolving in a space so limited as to make movement a difficulty, if not a danger, and in an atmosphere already thickened with dust from the carpet. She saw to her surprise that her cousin was dancing with Lambert, and, after a careful survey of the room, espied Mr. Hawkins standing partnerless in one of the windows.
“I wonder what she’s at now,” thought Charlotte to herself; “is she trying to play Roddy off against him? The little cat, I wouldn’t put it past her!”
As she looked at them wheeling slowly round in the cramped circle she could see that neither he or Francie spoke to each other, and when, the dance being over, they sat down together in the corner of the room, they seemed scarcely more disposed to talk than they had been when dancing.
“Aha! Roddy’s a good fellow,” she thought, “he’s doing his best to help me by keeping her away from that young scamp.”
At this point the young scamp in question crossed the room and asked Miss Fitzpatrick for the next dance in a manner that indicated just displeasure. The heat of the room and the exertion of dancing on a carpet had endued most of the dancers with the complexions of ripe plums, but Francie seemed to have been robbed of all colour. She did not look up at him as he proffered his request.
“I’m engaged for the next dance.”
Hawkins became very red. “Well, the next after that,” he persisted, trying to catch her eye.
“There isn’t any next,” said Francie, looking suddenly at him with defiant eyes; “after the next we’re going home.”
Hawkins stared for a brief instant at her with a sparkle of anger in his eyes. “Oh, very well,” he said with exaggerated politeness of manner, “I thought I was engaged to you for the first dance after supper, that was all.”
He turned away at once and walked out of the room, brushing past Charlotte at the door, and elbowed his way through the uproarious throng that crowded the staircase. Mrs. Beattie, coming up from the tea-table with her fellow-matrons, had no idea of permitting her prize guest to escape so early. Hawkins was captured, his excuses were disregarded, and he was driven up the stairs again.
“Very well,” he said to himself, “if she chooses to throw me over, I’ll let her see that I can get on without her.” It did not occur to him that Francie was only acting in accordance with the theory of the affair that he had himself presented to Captain Cursiter. His mind was now wholly given to revenging the snub he had received, and, spurred by this desire, he advanced to Miss Lynch, who was reposing in an armchair in a corner of the landing, while her partner played upon her heated face with the drawing-room bellows, and secured her for the next dance.
When Mr. Hawkins gave his mind to rollicking, there were few who could do it more thoroughly, and the ensuing polka was stamped through by him and Miss Lynch with a vigour that scattered all opposing couples like ninepins. Even his strapping partner appealed for mercy.
“Oh, Mr. Hawkins,” she panted, “wouldn’t you chassy now please? if you twirl me any more, I think I’ll die!”
But Mr. Hawkins was deaf to entreaty; far from moderating his exertions, he even snatched the eldest Miss Beattie from her position as on-looker, and, compelling her to avail herself of the dubious protection of his other arm, whirled her and Miss Lynch round the room with him in a many-elbowed triangle. The progress of the other dancers was necessarily checked by this performance, but it was viewed with the highest favour by all the matrons, especially those whose daughters had been selected to take part in it. Francie looked on from the doorway, whither she and her partner, the Reverend Corkran, had been driven for safety,with a tearing pain at her heart. Her lips were set in a fixed smile—a smile that barely kept their quivering in check—and her beautiful eyes shone upon the dazzled curate through a moisture that was the next thing to tears.
“I want to find Miss Mullen,” she said at last, dragging Mr. Corkran towards the stairs, when a fresh burst of applause from the dancing-room made them both look back. Hawkins’ two partners had, at a critical turn, perfidiously let him go with such suddenness that he had fallen flat on the floor, and having pursued them as they polkaed round the room, he was now encircling both with one arm, and affecting to box their ears with his other hand, encouraged thereto by cries of “Box them, Mr. Hawkins!” from Mrs. Beattie. “Box them well!”
Charlotte was in the dining-room, partaking of a gentlemanly glass of Marsala with Mr. Beattie, and other heads of families.
“Great high jinks they’re having upstairs!” she remarked, as the windows and tea-cups rattled from the stamping overhead, and Mr. Beattie cast many an anxious eye towards the ceiling. “I suppose my young lady’s in the thick of it, whatever it is!” She always assumed the attitude of the benevolently resigned chaperon when she talked about Francie, and Mr. Lynch was on the point of replying in an appropriate tone of humorous condolence, when the young lady herself appeared on Mr. Corkran’s arm, with an expression that at once struck Charlotte as being very unlike high jinks.
“Why, child, what do you want down here?” she said. “Are you tired dancing?”
“I am; awfully tired; would you mind going home, Charlotte?”
“What a question to ask before our good host here! Of course I mind going home!” eyeing Francie narrowly as she spoke; “but I’ll come if you like.”
“Why, what people you all are for going home!” protested Mr. Beattie hospitably; “there was Hawkins that we only stopped by main strength, and Lambert slipped away ten minutes ago, saying Mrs. Lambert wasn’t well, and he had to go and look after her! What’s your reverenceabout letting her go away now, when they’re having the fun of Cork upstairs?”
Francie smiled a pale smile, but held to her point, and a few minutes afterwards she and Charlotte had made their way through the knot of loafers at the garden gate, and were walking through the empty moon-lit streets of Lismoyle towards Tally Ho. Charlotte did not speak till the last clanging of theBric-à-bracpolka had been left behind, and then she turned to Francie with a manner from which the affability had fallen like a garment.
“And now I’ll thank you to tell me what’s the truth of this I hear from everyone in the town about you and that young Hawkins being out till all hours of the night in the steam-launch by yourselves?”
“It wasn’t our fault. We were in by half-past nine.” Francie had hardly spirit enough to defend herself, and the languor in her voice infuriated Charlotte.
“Don’t give me any of your fine-lady airs,” she said brutally; “I can tell ye this, that if ye can’t learn how to behave yourself decently I’ll pack ye back to Dublin!”
The words passed over Francie like an angry wind, disturbing, but without much power to injure.
“All right, I’ll go away when you like.”
Charlotte hardly heard her. “I’ll be ashamed to look me old friend, Lady Dysart, in the face!” She stormed on. “Disgracing her house by such goings on with an unprincipled blackguard that has no more idea of marrying you than I have—not that that’s anything to be regretted! An impudent little upstart without a halfpenny in his pocket, and as for family—” her contempt stemmed her volubility for a mouthing moment. “God only knows what gutter he sprang from; I don’t suppose he has a drop of blood in his whole body!”
“I’m not thinking of marrying him no more than he is of marrying me,” answered Francie in the same lifeless voice, but this time faltering a little. “You needn’t bother me about him, Charlotte; he’s engaged.”
“Engaged!” yelled Charlotte, squaring round at her cousin, and standing stock still in her amazement. “Why didn’t you tell me so before? When did you hear it?”
“I heard it some time ago from a person whose name Iwon’t give you,” said Francie, walking on. “They’re to be married before Christmas.” The lump rose at last in her throat, and she trod hard on the ground as she walked, in the effort to keep the tears back.
Charlotte girded her velveteen skirt still higher, and hurried clumsily after the light, graceful figure.
“Wait, child! Can’t ye wait for me? Are ye sure it’s true?”
Francie nodded.
“The young reprobate! To be making you so remarkable, and to have the other one up his sleeve all the time! Didn’t I say he had no notion of marrying ye?”
Francie made no reply, and Charlotte with some difficulty disengaged her hand from her wrappings and patted her on the back.
“Well, never mind, me child,” she said with noisy cheerfulness; “you’re not trusting to the likes of that fellow! wait till ye’re me Lady Dysart of Bruff, and it’s little ye’ll think of him then!”
They had reached the Tally Ho gate by this time; Francie opened it, and plunged into the pitch-dark tunnel of evergreens without a word.
Thepre-eminently domestic smell of black currant jam pervaded Tally Ho next day. The morning had been spent by Charlotte and her retainers in stripping the straggling old bushes of the berries that resembled nothing so much as boot-buttons in size, colour and general consistency; the preserving pan had been borrowed, according to immemorial custom, from Miss Egan of the hotel, and at three o’clock of the afternoon the first relay was sluggishly seething and bubbling on the kitchen fire, and Charlotte, Norry, and Bid Sal were seated at the kitchen table snipping the brown tips of the shining fruit that still awaited its fate.
It was a bright, steamy day, when the hot sun and the wet earth turned the atmosphere into a Turkish bath, and the cats sat out of doors, but avoided the grass like the plague. Francie had docilely picked currants with theothers. She was accustomed to making herself useful, and it did not occur to her to shut herself up in her room, or go for a walk, or, in fact, isolate herself with her troubles in any way. She had too little self-consciousness for these deliberate methods, and she moved among the currant bushes in her blue gown, and was merely uncomplainingly thankful that she was able to pull the broad leaf of her hat down so as to hide the eyes that were heavy from a sleepless night and red from the sting of tears. She went over again what Lambert had told her, as she mechanically dropped the currants into her tin can; the soldier-servant had read the letters, and had told Michael, the Rosemount groom, and Michael had told Mr. Lambert. She wouldn’t have cared a pin about his being engaged if he had only told her so at first. She had flirted with engaged men plenty of times, and it hadn’t done anybody any harm, but this was quite different. She couldn’t believe, after the way he went on, that he cared about another girl all the time, and yet Michael had said that the soldier had said that they were to be married at Christmas. Well, thank goodness, she thought, with a half sob, she knew about it now; he’d find it hard to make a fool of her again.
After the early dinner the practical part of the jam-making began, and for an hour Francie snipped at the currant-tops as industriously as Charlotte herself. But by the time that the first brew was ready for the preserving pan, the heat of the kitchen, and the wearisomeness of Charlotte’s endless discussions with Norry, made intolerable the headache that had all day hovered about her forehead, and she fetched her hat and a book and went out into the garden to look for coolness and distraction. She wandered up to the seat where she had sat on the day that Lambert gave her the bangle, and, sitting down, opened her book, a railway novel, bought by Charlotte on her journey from Dublin. She read its stodgily sensational pages with hot tired eyes, and tried hard to forget her own unhappiness in the infinitely more terrific woes of its heroine; but now and then some chance expression, or one of those terms of endearment that were lavished throughout its pages, would leap up into borrowed life and sincerity, and she would shut her eyes and drift back into the golden haze on Lough Moyle, whenhis hand had pressed her head down on his shoulder, and his kisses had touched her soul. At such moments all the heated stillness of the lake was round her, with no creature nearer than the white cottages on the far hillsides; and when the inevitable present swam back to her, with carts rattling past on the road, and insects buzzing and blundering against her face, and Bid Sal’s shrill summoning of the hens to their food, she would fling herself again into the book to hide from the pursuing pain and the undying, insane voice of hope.
Hope mastered pain, and reality mastered both, when, with the conventionality of situation to which life sometimes condescends, there came steps on the gravel, and looking up she saw that Hawkins was coming towards her. Her heart stopped and rushed on again like a startled horse, but all the rest of her remained still and almost impassive, and she leaned her head over her book to keep up the affectation of not having seen him.
“I saw your dress through the trees as I was coming up the drive,” he said after a moment of suffocating silence, “and so—” he held out his hand, “aren’t you going to shake hands with me?”
“How d’ye do, Mr. Hawkins?” she gave him a limp hand and withdrew it instantly.
Hawkins sat down beside her, and looked hard at her half-averted face. He had solved the problem of her treatment of him last night in a way quite satisfactory to himself, and he thought that now that he had been sharp enough to have found her here, away from Miss Mullen’s eye, things would be very different. He had quite forgiven her her share in the transgression; in fact, if the truth were known he had enjoyed himself considerably after she had left Mrs. Beattie’s party, and had gone back to Captain Cursiter and disingenuously given him to understand that he had hardly spoken a word to Miss Fitzpatrick the whole evening.
“So you wouldn’t dance with me last night,” he said, as if he were speaking to a child; “wasn’t that very unkind of you?”
“No it was not,” she replied, without looking at him.
“Well,Ithink it was,” he said, lightly touching the hand that held the novel.
Francie took her hand sharply away.
“I think you are being very unkind now,” he continued; “aren’t you even going to look at me?”
“Oh yes, I’ll look at you if you like,” she said, turning upon him in a kind of desperation; “it doesn’t do me much harm, and I don’t suppose it does you much good.”
The cool, indifferent manner that she had intended to assume was already too difficult for her, and she sought a momentary refuge in rudeness. He showed all the white teeth, that were his best point, in a smile that was patronisingly free from resentment.
“Why, what’s the matter with her?” he said caressingly. “I believe I know what it’s all about. She’s been catching it about that day in the launch! Isn’t that it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Hawkins,” said Francie, with an indifferent attempt at hauteur; “but since you’re so clever at guessing things I suppose there’s no need of me telling you.”
Hawkins came closer to her, and forcibly took possession of her hands. “What’s the matter with you?” he said in a low voice; “why are you angry with me? Don’t you know I love you?” The unexpected element of uncertainty sharpened the edge of his feelings and gave his voice an earnestness that was foreign to it.
Francie started visibly; “No, I know you don’t,” she said, facing him suddenly, like some trapped creature; “I know you’re in love with somebody else!”
His eyes flinched as though a light had been flashed in them. “What do you mean?” he said quickly, while a rush of blood darkened his face to the roots of his yellow hair, and made the veins stand out on his forehead; “who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter who told me,” she said with a miserable satisfaction that her bolt had sped home; “but I know it’s true.”
“I give you my honour it’s not!” he said passionately; “you might have known better than to believe it.”
“Oh yes, I might,” she said with all the scorn she was master of; “but I think ’twas as good for me I didn’t.” Her voice collapsed at the end of the sentence, and the dry sob that rose in her throat almost choked her. She stoodup and turned her face away to hide the angry tears that in spite of herself had sprung to her eyes.
Hawkins caught her hand again and held it tightly. “I know what it is. I suppose they’ve been telling you of that time I was in Limerick; and that was all rot from beginning to end; anyone could tell you that.”
“It’s not that; I heard all about that—”
Hawkins jumped up. “I don’t care what you heard,” he said violently. “Don’t turn your head away from me like that, I won’t have it. I know that you care about me, and I know that I shouldn’t care if everyone in the world was dead, so long as you were here.” His arm was round her, but she shook herself free.
“What about Miss Coppard?” she said; “what about being married before Christmas?”
For a moment Hawkins could find no words to say. “So you’ve got hold of that, have you,” he said, after some seconds of silence that seemed endless to Francie. “And do you think that will come between us?”
“Of course it must come between us,” she said in a stifled voice; “and you knew that all through.”
Mr. Hawkins’ engagement was a painful necessity about which he affaired himself as little as possible. He recognised it as a certain and not disagreeable road to paying his debts, which might with good luck be prolonged till he got his company, and, latterly, it had fallen more than ever into the background. That it should interfere with his amusements in any way made it an impertinence of a wholly intolerable kind.
“It shallnotcome between us!” he burst out; “I don’t care what happens, I won’t give you up! I give you my honour I never cared twopence about her—I’ve never thought of her since I first saw you—I’ve thought of no one but you.”
His hot, stammering words were like music to her, but that staunchness of soul that was her redeeming quality still urged her to opposition.
“It’s no good your going on like this. You know you’re going to marry her. Let me go.”
But Mr. Hawkins was not in the habit of being baulked of anything on which he had set his heart.
“No, I will not let you go,” he said, drawing her towards him with bullying tenderness. “In the first place, you’re not able to stand, and in the second place, I’m not going to marry anybody but you.”
He spoke with a certainty that convinced himself; the certainty of a character that does not count the cost either for itself or for others; and, in the space of a kiss, her distrust was left far behind her as a despicable thing.
Nearlythree weeks had gone by since Mrs. Beattie’s party, and as Charlotte Mullen walked slowly along the road towards Rosemount one afternoon, her eyes fixed on the square toes of her boots, and her hands, as was her custom, in the pockets of her black jacket, she meditated agreeably upon recent events. Of these perhaps the pleasantest was Mr. Hawkins’ departure to Hythe, for a musketry course, which had taken place somewhat unexpectedly a fortnight ago. He was a good-for-nothing young limb, and engagement or no engagement it was a good job he was out of the place; and, after all, Francie had not seemed to mind. Almost equally satisfactory was the recollection of that facetious letter to Christopher Dysart, in which she had so playfully reminded him of the ancient promise to photograph the Tally Ho cats, and hoped that she and her cousin would not come under that category. Its success had even been surprising, for not only had Christopher come and spent a long afternoon in that difficult enterprise, but had come again more than once, on pretexts that had appeared to Charlotte satisfactorily flimsy, and had apparently set aside what she knew to be his repugnance to herself. That he should lend Francie “John Inglesant” and Rossetti’s Poems, made Charlotte laugh in her sleeve. She had her own very sound opinion of her cousin’s literary capacity, and had no sympathy for the scientific interest felt by a philosopher in the evolution of a nascent soul. Christopher’s manner did not, it is true, coincide with her theory of a lover, which was crude, and founded on taste rather than experience, but she had imagination enough to recognise that Christopher, inlove-making, as in most other things, would pursue methods unknown to her.
At this point in her reflections, congratulation began to wane. She thought she knew every twist and turn in Roddy Lambert, but lately she had not been able to explain him at all to her satisfaction. He was always coming to Tally Ho, and he always seemed in a bad temper when he was there; in fact she had never known him as ill-mannered as he was last week, one day when he and Christopher were there together, and she had tried, for various excellent reasons, to get him off into the dining-room to talk business. She couldn’t honestly say that Francie was running after him, though of course she had that nasty flirty way with every man, old or young, married or single; but all the same, there was something in it she didn’t like. The girl was more trouble than she was worth; and if it wasn’t for Christopher Dysart she’d have sent her packing back to Letitia Fitzpatrick, and told her that whether she could manage it or not she must keep her. But of course to have Sir Christopher Dysart of Bruff—she rolled the title on her tongue—as a cousin was worthy of patience.
As she walked up the trim Rosemount avenue she spied the owner of the house lying in a basket-chair in the shade, with a pipe in his mouth, and in his hand that journal politely described by Mrs. Rattray as the “thePink One.”
“Hallo, Charlotte!” he said lazily, glancing up at her from under the peak of his cap, “you look warm.”
“And you look what you are, and that’s cool, in manners and body,” retorted Miss Mullen, coming and standing beside him, “and if you had tramped on your four bones through the dust, maybe you’d be as hot as I am.”
“What do you wear that thick coat for?” he said, looking at it with a disfavour that he took no trouble to hide.
Charlotte became rather red. She had the Irish peasant-woman’s love of heavy clothing and dislike of abating any item of it in summer.
“If you had my tendency to bronchitis, me fine fellow,” she said, seating herself on the uncomfortable garden bench beside which his chair had been placed, “you’d think more of your health than your appearance.”
“Very likely,” said Mr. Lambert, yawning and relapsing into silence.
“Well, Roddy,” resumed Charlotte more amicably, “I didn’t walk all the way here to discuss the fashions with you. Have y’any more news from the seat of war?”
“No; confound her, she won’t stir, and I don’t see what’s going to make her unless I evict her.”
“Why don’t ye writ her for the money?” said Charlotte, the spirit of her attorney grandfather gleaming in her eyes; “that’d frighten her!”
“I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I spoke to her about the lodge that Lady Dysart said she could have, and the old devil was fit to be tied; but we might get her to it before we’ve done with her.”
“If it was me I’d writ her now,” repeated Charlotte venomously; “you’ll find you’ll have to come to it in the end.”
“It’s a sin to see that lovely pasture going to waste,” said Lambert, leaning back and puffing at his pipe. “Peter Joyce hasn’t six head of cattle on it this minute.”
“If you and I had it, Roddy,” said Charlotte, eyeing him with a curious, guarded tenderness, “it wouldn’t be that way.”
Some vibration of the strong, incongruous tremor that passed through her as she spoke, reached Lambert’s indolent perception and startled it. It reminded him of the nebulous understanding that taking her money seemed to have involved him in; he believed he knew why she had given it to him, and though he knew also that he held his advantage upon precarious terms, even his coarse-fibred nature found something repellent in the thought of having to diplomatise with such affections as Charlotte’s.
“I was up at Murphy’s yesterday,” he said, as if his train of ideas had not been interrupted. “He has a grand filly there that I’d buy to-morrow if I had the money, or any place to put her. There’s a pot of money in her.”
“Well, if you’ll get me Gurthnamuckla,” said Charlotte with a laugh, in which nervousness was strangely apparent, “you may buy up every young horse in the country and stable them in the parlour, so long as you’ll leave the attics for me and the cats.”
Lambert turned his head upon its cushion, and looked at her.
“I think I’ll leave you a little more space than that, Charlotte, if ever we stable our horses together.”
She glanced at him, as aware of thedouble entendre, and as stirred by it as he had intended her to be. Perhaps a little more than he had intended; at all events, he jerked himself into a sitting position, and, getting on to his feet, stretched himself with almost ostentatious ease.
“Where’s Francie?” he asked, yawning.
“At home, dressmaking,” replied Miss Mullen. She was a little paler than usual. “I think I’ll go in now and have a cup of tea with Lucy,” she said, rising from the garden bench with something like an effort.
“Well, I daresay I’ll take the mare down to Tally Ho, and make Francie go for a ride,” said Lambert; “it’s a pity for anyone to be stewing in the house on a day like this.”
“I wanted her to come here with me, but she wouldn’t,” Charlotte called after him as he turned towards the path that led to the stables. “Maybe she thought there might be metal more attractive for her at home!”
She grinned to herself as she went up the steps. “Me gentleman may put that in his pipe and smoke it,” she thought; “that little hussy would let him think it was for him she was sitting at home!”
Ever since Mrs. Lambert’s first entrance into Lismoyle society, she had found in Charlotte her most intimate and reliable ally. If Mr. Lambert had been at all uneasy as to his bride’s reception by Miss Mullen, he must have been agreeably surprised to find that after a month or so Charlotte had become as useful and pleasant to Mrs. Lambert as in older days she had been to him. That Charlotte should have recognised the paramount necessity of his marrying money, had been to Lambert a proof of her eminent common sense. He had always been careful to impress his obvious destiny upon her, and he had always been grateful to that destiny for having harmlessly fulfilled itself, while yet old Mrs. Mullen’s money was in her own keeping, and her niece was, beyond all question, ineligible. That was Mr. Lambert’s view of the situation; whatever Charlotte’s opinion was, she kept it to herself.
Mrs. Lambert was more than usually delighted to see her ever-sympathising friend on this hot afternoon. One of her chiefest merits in the turkey-hen’s eyes was that she “was as good as any doctor, and twice better than Dr. Rattray, who would never believe the half she went through with palpitations, and buzzings in her ears and roarings in her head,” and the first half hour or so of her visit was consumed in minute detail of her more recent symptoms. The fact that large numbers of women entertain their visitors with biographies, mainly abusive, of their servants, has been dwelt on to weariness by many writers; but, nevertheless, in no history of Mrs. Lambert could this characteristic be conscientiously omitted.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, as her second cup of sweet weak tea was entered upon, “you know that Eliza Hackett, that I got with the highest recommendations from the Honourable Miss Carrick, and thinking she’d be so steady, being a Protestant? Well, last Sunday she went to mass!” She paused, and Charlotte, one of whose most genuine feelings was a detestation of Roman Catholics, exclaimed:
“Goodness alive! what did you let her do that for?”
“How could I stop her?” answered Mrs. Lambert plaintively, “she never told one in the house she was going, and this morning, when I was looking at the meat with her in the larder, I took the opportunity to speak to her about it. ‘Oh,’ says she, turning round as cool as you please, ‘I consider the Irish Church hasn’t the Apostolic succession!’”
“You don’t tell me that fat-faced Eliza Hackett said that?” ejaculated Charlotte.
“She did, indeed,” replied Mrs. Lambert deplorably; “I was quite upset. ‘Eliza,’ says I, ‘I wonder you have the impudence to talk to me like that. You that was taught better by the Honourable Miss Carrick.’ ‘Ma’am,’ says she, up to my face, ‘Moses and Aaron was two holy Roman Catholic priests, and that’s more than you can say of the archdeacon!’ ‘Indeed, no,’ says I, ‘thank God he’s not!’ but I ask you, Charlotte, what could I say to a woman like that, that would wrest the Scriptures to her own purposes?”
Even Charlotte’s strong brain reeled in the attempt to follow the arguments of Eliza the cook and Mrs. Lambert.
“Well, upon my word, Lucy, it’s little I’d have arguedwith her. I’d have just said to her, ‘Out of my house you march, if you don’t go to your church!’ I think that would have composed her religious scruples.”
“Oh! but, Charlotte,” pleaded the turkey-hen, “Icouldn’tpart with her; she knows just what gentlemen like, and Roderick’s so particular about savouries. When I told him about her, he said he wouldn’t care if she was a Mormon and had a dozen husbands, so long as she made good soup.”
Charlotte laughed out loud. Mr. Lambert’s turn of humour had a robustness about it that always roused a sympathetic chord in her.
“Well, that’s a man all over! His stomach before anyone else’s soul!”
“Oh, Charlotte, you shouldn’t say such things! Indeed, Roderick will often take only the one cut of meat at his dinner these times, and if it isn’t to his liking he’ll take nothing; he’s a great epicure. I don’t know what’s over him those last few weeks,” continued Mrs. Lambert gloomily, “unless it’s the hot weather, and all the exercise he’s taking, that’s making him cross.”
“Well, from all I’ve ever seen of men,” said Charlotte, with a laugh, “the hotter they get the better pleased they are. Take my word for it, there’s no time a man’s so proud of himself as when he’s ‘larding the lean earth’!”
Mrs. Lambert looked bewildered, but was too much affaired with her own thoughts to ask for an explanation of what seemed to her a strange term in cookery.
“Did he know Francie Fitzpatrick much in Dublin?” she said after a pause, in which she had given a saucerful of cream and sopped cake to her dog.
Charlotte looked at her hostess suddenly and searchingly as she stooped with difficulty to take up the saucer.
“He’s known her since she was a child,” she replied, and waited for further developments.
“I thought it must be that way,” said Mrs. Lambert with a dissatisfied sound in her voice; “they’re so very familiar-like talking to each other.”
Charlotte’s heart paused for an instant in its strong, regular course. Was it possible, she thought, that wisdom was being perfected in the mouth of Lucy Lambert?
“I never noticed anything so wonderfully familiar,” she said, in a tone meant to provoke further confidence; “I never knew Roddy yet that he wasn’t civil to a pretty girl; and as for Francie, any man comes handy to her! Upon my word, she’d dote on a tongs, as they say!”
Mrs. Lambert fidgeted nervously with her long gold watchchain. “Well, Charlotte,” she said, a little defiantly, “I’ve been married to him five years now, and I’ve never known him particular with any girl.”
“Then, my dear woman, what’s this nonsense you’re talking about him and Francie?” said Charlotte, with Mephistophelian gaiety.
“Oh, Charlotte!” said Mrs. Lambert, suddenly getting very red, and beginning to whimper, “I never thought to speak of it—” she broke off and began to look for her handkerchief, while her respectable middle-aged face began to wrinkle up like a child’s, “and, indeed, I don’t want to say anything against the girl, for she’s a nice girl, and so I’ve always found her, but I can’t help noticing—” she broke off again.
“What can’t ye help noticing?” demanded Charlotte roughly.
Mrs. Lambert drew a long breath that was half-suffocated by a sob. “Oh, I don’t know,” she cried helplessly; “he’s always going down to Tally Ho, by the way he’ll take her out riding or boating or something, and though he doesn’t say much, a little thing’ll slip out now and again, and you can’t say a word to him but he’ll get cross.”
“Maybe he’s in trouble about money unknown to you,” suggested Charlotte, who, for some reason or other, was not displaying her usual capacity for indictment, “or maybe he finds ‘life not worth living because of the liver’!” she ended, with a mirthless laugh.
“Oh, no, no, Charlotte; indeed, it’s no laughing joke at all—” Mrs. Lambert hesitated, then, with a little hysterical burst of sobs, “he talks about her in his sleep!” she quavered out, and began to cry miserably.
Charlotte sat perfectly still, looking at Mrs. Lambert with eyes that saw, but held no pity for, her abundant tears. How far more serious was this thing, if true, to her, than to that contemptible whining creature, whose snuffling gaspswere exasperating her almost beyond the bounds of endurance. She waited till there was a lull.
“What did he say about her?” she asked in a hard, jeering voice.
“Oh, Charlotte, how can I tell you? all sorts of things he says, nonsense like, and springing up and saying she’ll be drowned.”
“Well, if it’s any comfort to you,” said Charlotte, “she cares no more for him than the man in the moon! She has other fish to fry, I can tell you!”
“But what signifies that, Charlotte,” sighed Mrs. Lambert, “so long as he thinks about her?”
“Tell him he’s a fool to waste his time over her,” suggested Charlotte scoffingly.
“Is itmetell him such a thing!” The turkey-hen lifted her wet red eyes from her saturated pocket handkerchief and began to laugh hysterically. “Much regard he has for whatIsay to him! Oh, don’t make me laugh, Charlotte—” a frightened look came over her face, as if she had been struck, and she fell back in her chair. “It’s the palpitations,” she said faintly, with her hand on her heart. “Oh, I’m going—I’m going—”
Charlotte ran to the chimney-piece, and took from it a bottle of smelling salts. She put it to Mrs. Lambert’s nose with one hand, and with the other unfastened the neck of her dress without any excitement or fuss. Her eyes were keen and quiet as she bent over the pale blotched face that lay on the antimacassar; and when Mrs. Lambert began to realise again what was going on round her, she was conscious of a hand chafing her own, a hand that was both gentle and skilful.
“Metalmore attractive!” Lambert thought there could not be a more offensive phrase in the English language than this, that had rung in his ears ever since Charlotte had flung it at him when he parted from her on his own avenue. He led the black mare straight to the dilapidated loose-box at Tally Ho Lodge, in which she had before now waited sooften and so dismally, with nothing to do except nose about the broken manger for a stray oat or two, or make spiteful faces through the rails at her comrade, the chestnut, in the next stall. Lambert swung open the stable door, and was confronted by the pricked ears and interested countenance of a tall bay horse, whom he instantly recognised as being one of the Bruff carriage horses, looking out of the loose-box. Mr. Lambert’s irritation culminated at this point in appropriate profanity; he felt that all these things were against him, and the thought that he would go straight back to Rosemount made him stand still on the doorstep. But the next moment he had a vision of himself and the two horses turning in at the Rosemount gate, with the certain prospect of being laughed at by Charlotte and condoled with by his wife, and without so much as a sight of that maddening face that was every day thrusting itself more and more between him and his peace. It would be a confession of defeat at the hands of Christopher Dysart, which alone would be intolerable; besides, there wasn’t a doubt but that, if Francie were given her choice, she would rather go out riding with him than anything.
Buoyed up by this reflection, he put the chestnut into the stable, and the mare into the cow-shed, and betook himself to the house. The hall door was open, and stepping over the cats on the door-mat, he knocked lightly at the drawing-room door, and walked in without waiting for an answer. Christopher was sitting with his back to him, holding one end of a folded piece of pink cambric, while Francie, standing up in front of him, was cutting along the fold towards him, with a formidable pair of scissors.
“Must I hold on to the end?” he was saying, as the scissors advanced in leaps towards his fingers.
“I’ll kill you if you let go!” answered Francie, rather thickly, by reason of a pin between her front teeth. “Goodness, Mr. Lambert! you frightened the heels off me! I thought you were Louisa with the tea.”
“Good evening, Francie; good evening, Dysart,” said Lambert with solemn frigidity.
Christopher reddened a little as he looked round. “I’m afraid I can’t shake hands with you, Lambert,” he said with an unavoidably foolish laugh, “I’m dressmaking.”
“So I see,” replied Mr. Lambert, with something as near a sneer as he dared. He always felt it a special unkindness of Providence to have placed this young man to reign over him, and the practical sentiment that it is well not to quarrel with your bread and butter, had not unfrequently held him back from a much-desired jibe. “I came, Francie,” he went on with the same portentous politeness, “to see if you’d care to come for a ride with me.”
“When? Now?” said Francie, without much enthusiasm.
“Oh, not unless you like,” he replied in a palpably offended tone.
“Well, how d’ye know I wouldn’t like? Keep quiet now, Mr. Dysart, I’ve another one for you to hold!”
“I’m afraid I must be going—” began Christopher, looking helplessly at the billows of pink cambric which surrounded him on the floor. Lambert’s arrival had suddenly made the situation seem vulgar.
“Ah, can’t you sit still now?” said Francie, thrusting another length of material into his hand, and beginning to cut swiftly towards him. “I declare you’re very idle!”
Lambert stood silent while this went on, and then, with an angry look at Francie, he said, “I understand, then, that you’re not coming out riding to-day?”
“Do you?” asked Francie, pinning the seam together with marvellous rapidity; “take care your understanding isn’t wrong! Have you the horse down here?”
“Of course I have.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do; we’ll have tea first, and then we’ll ride back with Mr. Dysart; will that do you?”
“I wanted to ride in the opposite direction,” said Lambert; “I had some business—”
“Oh, bother your old business!” interrupted Francie; “anyway, I hear her bringing in the tea.”
“Oh, I hope you’ll ride home with me,” said Christopher; “I hate riding by myself.”
“Much I pity you!” said Francie, flashing a side-long look at him as she went over to the tea-table; “I suppose you’d be frightened!”
“Quite so. Frightened and bored. That is what I feel like when I ride by myself,” said Christopher, trying to eliminate from his manner the constraint that Lambert’s arrival had imparted to it, “and my horse is just as bored; I feel apologetic all the time and wishing I could do something to amuse him that wouldn’t be dangerous. Do come; I’m sure he’d like it.”
“Oh, how anxious you are about him!” said Francie, cutting bread and butter with a dexterous hand from the loaf that Louisa had placed on the table in frank confession of incapacity. “I don’t know what I’ll do till I’ve had my tea. Here now, here’s yours poured out for both of you; I suppose you’d like me to come and hand it to you!” with a propitiatory look at Lambert.
Thus adjured, the two men seated themselves at the table, on which Francie had prepared their tea and bread and butter with a propriety that reminded Christopher of his nursery days. It was a very agreeable feeling, he thought; and as he docilely drank his tea and laughed at Francie for the amount of sugar that she put into hers, the idealising process to which he was unconsciously subjecting her advanced a stage. He was beginning to lose sight of her vulgarity, even to wonder at himself for ever having applied that crudely inappropriate word to her. She had some reflected vulgarities of course, thought the usually hypercritical Mr. Christopher Dysart, and her literary progress along the lines he had laid down for her was slow; but, lately, since his missionary resolve to let the light of culture illuminate her darkness, he had found out subtle depths of sweetness and sympathy that were, in their responsiveness, equivalent to intellect.
When Francie went up a few minutes later to put on her habit, Christopher did not seem disposed to continue the small talk in which his proficiency had been more surprising than pleasing to Mr. Lambert.
He strolled over to the window, and looked meditatively out at Mrs. Bruff and a great-grandchild or two embowered in a tangle of nasturtiums, and putting his hands in his pockets began to whistlesotto voce. Lambert looked him up and down, from his long thin legs to his small head, on which the light brown hair grew rather long, with a wave in it that was to Lambert the height of effeminacy. He began to drum with his fingers on the table to show that he too was quite undisturbed and at his ease.
“By the bye, Dysart,” he observed presently, “have you heard anything of Hawkins since he left?”
Christopher turned round. “No, I don’t know anything about him except that he’s gone to Hythe.”
“Gone tohide, d’ye say?” Lambert laughed noisily in support of his own joke.
“No, Hythe.”
“It seems to me its more likely it’s a case of hide,” Lambert went on with a wink; he paused, fiddled with his teaspoon, and smiled at his own hand as he did so. “P’raps he thought it was time for him to get out of this.”
“Really?” said Christopher, with a lack of interest that was quite genuine.
Lambert’s pulse bounded with the sudden desire to wake this supercilious young hound up for once, by telling him a few things that would surprise him.
“Well, you see it’s a pretty strong order for a fellow to carry on as Hawkins did, when he happens to be engaged.”
The fact of Mr. Hawkins’ engagement had, it need scarcely be said, made its way through every highway and byway of Lismoyle; inscrutable as to its starting-point, impossible of verification, but all the more fascinating for its mystery. Lambert had no wish to claim its authorship; he had lived among gentlemen long enough to be aware that the second-hand confidences of a servant could not creditably be quoted by him. What he did not know, however, was whether the story had reached Bruff, or been believed there, and it was extremely provoking to him now that instead of being able to observe its effect on Christopher, whose back was to the light, his discoveries should be limited to the fact that his own face had become very red as he spoke.
“I suppose he knows his own affairs best,” said Christopher, after a silence that might have meant anything, or nothing.
“Well,” leaning back and putting his hands in his pockets, “I don’t pretend to be strait-laced, but d—n it, you know, I think Hawkins went a bit too far.”
“I don’t think I have heard who it is that he is engaged to,” said Christopher, who seemed remarkably unaffected by Mr. Hawkins’ misdemeanours.
“Oh, to a Yorkshire girl, a Miss—what’s this her nameis?—Coppard. Pots of money, but mighty plain about the head, I believe. He kept it pretty dark, didn’t he?”
“Apparently it got out, for all that.”
Lambert thought he detected a tinge of ridicule in the voice, whether of him or of Hawkins he did not know; it gave just the necessary spur to that desire to open Christopher’s eyes for him a bit.
“Oh, yes, it got out,” he said, putting his elbow on the table, and balancing his teaspoon on his forefinger, “but I think there are very few that know for certain it’s a fact,—fortunately for our friend.”
“Why fortunately? I shouldn’t think it made much difference to anyone.”
“Well, as a rule, girls don’t care to flirt with an engaged man.”
“No, I suppose not,” said Christopher, yawning with a frankness that was a singular episode in his demeanour towards his agent.
Lambert felt his temper rising every instant. He was a man whose jealousy took the form of reviling the object of his affections, if, by so doing, he could detach his rivals.
“Well, Francie Fitzpatrick knows it for one; but perhaps she’s not one of the girls who object to flirting with an engaged man.”
Lambert got up and walked to the window; he felt that he could no longer endure seeing nothing of Christopher except a lank silhouette with an offensive repose of attitude. He propped his back against one of the shutters, and obviously waited for a comment.
“I should think it was an inexpensive amusement,” said Christopher, in his most impersonal and academic manner, “but likely to pall.”
“Pall! Deuce a bit of it!” Lambert put a toothpick in his mouth, and began to chew it, to convey the effect of ease. “I can tell you I’ve known that girl since she was the length of my stick, and I never saw her that she wasn’t up to some game or other; and she wasn’t over particular about engagements or anything else!”
Christopher slightly shifted his position, but did not speak, and Lambert went on:
“I’m very fond of the girl, and she’s a good-hearted littlething; but, by Jove! I was sorry to see the way she went on with that fellow Hawkins. Here he was, morning, noon, and night, walking with her, and steam-launching, and spooning, and setting all the old women in the place prating. I spoke to her about it, and much thanks I got, though there was a time she was ready enough to mind what I said to her.” During this recital Mr. Lambert’s voice had been deficient in the accent of gentlemanlike self importance that in calmer moments he was careful to impart to it, and the raw Limerick brogue was on top as he said, “Yes, by George! I remember the time when she wasn’t above fancying your humble servant!”
He had almost forgotten his original idea; his own position, long brooded over, rose up out of all proportion, and confused his mental perspective, till Christopher Dysart’s opinions were lost sight of. He was recalled to himself by a startling expression on the face of his confidant, an expression of almost unconcealed disgust, that checked effectively any further outpourings. Christopher did not look at him again, but turned from the window, and, taking up Miss Mullen’s photograph-book, proceeded to a minute inspection of its contents. Neither he nor Lambert quite knew what would happen next, each in his own way being angry enough for any emergency, and both felt an extreme relief when Francie’s abrupt entrance closed the situation.
“Well, I wasn’t long now, was I?” she said breathlessly; “but what’ll I do? I can’t find my gloves!” She swept out of the corner of the sofa a cat that had been slumbering unseen behind a cushion. “Here they are! and full of fleas, I’ll be bound, after Clementina sleeping on them! Oh, goodness! Are both of you too angry to speak to me? I didn’t think I was so long. Come on out to the yard; you can’t say I’m keeping you now.”
She whirled out of the room, and by the time Lambert and Christopher got into the yard, she had somehow dragged the black mare out of the cow-shed and was clambering on to her back with the aid of a wheel-barrow.
Riding has many charms, but none of its eulogists have properly dwelt on the advantages it offers to the unconversational. To ride in silence is the least marked form of unsociability, for something of the same reason that talking on horseback is one of the pleasantest modes of converse. The power of silence cuts both ways, and simplifies either confidence or its reverse amazingly. It so happened, however, that had Lambert had the inclination to make himself agreeable to his companions he could not have done so. Christopher’s carriage-horse trotted with the machine-like steadiness of its profession, and the black mare, roused to emulation, flew along beside him, ignoring the feebly expressed desire of her rider that she should moderate her pace. Christopher, indeed, seldom knew or cared at what pace his horse was going, and was now by no means sorry to find that the question of riding along with Lambert had been settled for him. The rough, young chestnut was filled with a vain-glory that scorned to trot, and after a great deal of brilliant ramping and curveting he fell into a kind of heraldic action, half-canter, half-walk, that left him more and more hopelessly in the rear, and raised Lambert’s temper to boiling point.
“We’re going very fast, aren’t we?” panted Francie, trying to push down her rebellious habit-skirt with her whip, as they sped along the flat road between Lismoyle and Bruff. “I’m afraid Mr. Lambert can’t keep up. That’s a dreadfully wild horse he’s riding.”
“Are we?” said Christopher vaguely. “Shall we pull up? Here, woa, you brute!” He pulled the carriage-horse into a walk, and looked at Francie with a laugh. “I’m beginning to hope you’re as bad a rider as I am,” he said sympathetically. “Let me hold your reins, while you’re pinning up that plait.”
“Oh, botheration take it! Is my hair down again? It always comes down if I trot fast,” bewailed Francie, putting up her hands to her dishevelled hair, that sparkled like gold in the sun.
“Do you know, the first time I ever saw you, your hair had come down out riding,” said Christopher, looking at her as he held her rein, and not giving a thought to the intimate appearance they presented to the third member of the party; “if I were you I should start with it down my back.”
“Ah, nonsense, Mr. Dysart; why would you have me make a Judy of myself that way?”
“Because it’s the loveliest hair I’ve ever seen,” answered Christopher, the words coming to his lips almost without his volition, and in their utterance causing his heart to give one or two unexpected throbs.
“Oh!” There was as much astonishment as pleasure in the exclamation, and she became as red as fire. She turned her head away, and looked back to see where Lambert was.
She had heard from Hawkins only this morning, asking her for a piece of the hair that Christopher had called lovely. She had cut off a little curl from the place he had specified, near her temple, and had posted it to him this very afternoon after Charlotte went out; but all the things that Hawkins had said of her hair did not seem to her so wonderful as that Mr. Dysart should pay her a compliment.
Lambert was quite silent after he joined them. In his heart he was cursing everything and everyone, the chestnut, Christopher, Francie, and most of all himself, for having said the things that he had said. All the good he had done was to leave no doubt in Christopher’s mind that Hawkins was out of the running, and as for telling him that Francie was a flirt, an ass like that didn’t so much as know the meaning of the word flirting. He knew now that he had made a fool of himself, and the remembrance of that disgusted expression on Christopher’s face made his better judgment return as burningly as the blood into veins numbed with cold. At the cross-roads next before Bruff, he broke in upon the exchange of experiences of the Dublin theatres that was going on very enjoyably beside him.
“I’m afraid we must part company here, Dysart,” he said in as civil a voice as he could muster; “I want to speak to a farmer who lives down this way.”
Christopher made his farewells, and rode slowly down the hill towards Bruff. It was a hill that had been cut down in the Famine, so that the fields on either side rose high above its level, and the red poppies and yellowing corn nodded into the sky over his head. The bay horse was collecting himself for a final trot to the avenue gates, when he found himself stopped, and, after a moment of hesitation on the part of his rider, was sent up the hill again a gooddeal faster than he had come down. Christopher pulled up again on the top of the hill. He was higher now than the corn, and, looking across its multitudinous, rustling surface, he saw the figure that some errant impulse had made him come back to see. Francie’s head was turned towards Lambert, and she was evidently talking to him. Christopher’s eyes followed the pair till they were out of sight, and then he again turned his horse, and went home to Bruff.