Onefine morning towards the end of August, Julia Duffy was sitting on a broken chair in her kitchen, with her hands in her lap, and her bloodshot eyes fixed on vacancy. She was so quiet that a party of ducks, which had hung uncertainly about the open door for some time, filed slowly in, and began to explore an empty pot or two with their long, dirty bills. The ducks knew well that Miss Duffy, though satisfied to accord the freedom of the kitchen to the hens and turkeys, had drawn the line at them and their cousins the geese, and they adventured themselves within the forbidden limits with the utmost caution, and with many side glances from their blinking, beady eyes at the motionless figure in the chair. They had made their way to a plate of potato skins and greasy cabbage on the floor by the table, and, forgetful of prudence, were clattering their bills on the delf as they gobbled, when an arm was stretched out above their heads, and they fled in cumbrous consternation.
The arm, however, was not stretched out in menace; Julia Duffy had merely extended it to take a paper from the table, and having done so, she looked at its contents in entire obliviousness of the ducks and their maraudings. Her misfortunes were converging. It was not a week since she had heard of the proclaimed insolvency of the man who had taken the grazing of Gurthnamuckla, and it was not half an hour since she had been struck by this last arrow of outrageous fortune, the letter threatening to process her for the long arrears of rent that she had felt lengthening hopelessly with every sunrise and sunset. She looked round the dreary kitchen that had about it all the added desolation of pastrespectability, at the rusty hooks from which she could remember the portly hams and flitches of bacon hanging; at the big fire-place where her grandfather’s Sunday sirloin used to be roasted. Now cobwebs dangled from the hooks, and the old grate had fallen to pieces, so that the few sods of turf smouldered on the hearthstone. Everything spoke of bygone plenty and present wretchedness.
Julia put the letter into its envelope again and groaned a long miserable groan. She got up and stood for a minute, staring out of the open door with her hands on her hips, and then went slowly and heavily up the stairs, groaning again to herself from the exertion and from the blinding headache that made her feel as though her brain were on fire. She went into her room and changed her filthy gown for the stained and faded black rep that hung on the door. From a band-box of tanned antiquity she took a black bonnet that had first seen the light at her mother’s funeral, and tied its clammy satin strings with shaking hands. Flashes of light came and went before her eyes, and her pallid face was flushed painfully as she went downstairs again, and finding, after long search, the remains of the bottle of blacking, laboriously cleaned her only pair of boots. She was going out of the house when her eye fell upon the plate from which the ducks had been eating; she came back for it, and, taking it out with her, scattered its contents to the turkeys, mechanically holding her dress up out of the dirt as she did so. She left the plate on the kitchen window-sill, and set slowly forth down the avenue.
Under the tree by the gate, Billy Grainy was sitting, engaged, as was his custom in moments of leisure, in counting the coppers in the bag that hung round his neck. He looked in amazement at the unexpected appearance of his patroness, and as she approached him he pushed the bag under his shirt.
“Where are ye goin’?” he asked.
Julia did not answer; she fumbled blindly with the bit of stick that fastened the gate, and, having opened it, went on without attempting to shut it.
“Where are ye goin’ at all?” said Billy again, his bleared eyes following the unfamiliar outline of bonnet and gown.
Without turning, she said, “Lismoyle,” and as she walkedon along the sunny road, she put up her hand and tried to wipe away the tears that were running down her face. Perhaps it was the excitement with which every nerve was trembling that made the three miles to Rosemount seem as nothing to this woman, who, for the last six months, had been too ill to go beyond her own gate; and probably it was the same unnatural strength that prevented her from breaking down, when, with her mind full of ready-framed sentences that were to touch Mr. Lambert’s heart and appeal to his sense of justice, she heard from Mary Holloran at the gate that he was away for a couple of days to Limerick. Without replying to Mary Holloran’s exclamations of pious horror at the distance she had walked, and declining all offers of rest or food, she turned and walked on towards Lismoyle.
She had suddenly determined to herself that she would walk to Bruff and see her landlord, and this new idea took such possession of her that she did not realise at first the magnitude of the attempt. But by the time she had reached the gate of Tally Ho the physical power that her impulse gave her began to be conscious of its own limits. The flashes were darting like lightning before her eyes, and the nausea that was her constant companion robbed her of her energy. After a moment of hesitation she decided that she would go in and see her kinswoman, Norry the Boat, and get a glass of water from her before going further. It wounded her pride somewhat to go round to the kitchen—she, whose grandfather had been on nearly the same social level as Miss Mullen’s; but Charlotte was the last person she wished to meet just then. Norry opened the kitchen door, beginning, as she did so, her usual snarling maledictions on the supposed beggar, which, however, were lost in a loud invocation of her patron saint as she recognised her first cousin, Miss Duffy.
“And is it to leg it in from Gurthnamuckla ye done?” said Norry, when the first greetings had been exchanged, and Julia was seated in the kitchen, “and you looking as white as the dhrivelling snow this minnit.”
“I did,” said Julia feebly, “and I’d be thankful to you for a drink of water. The day’s very close.”
“Faith ye’ll get no wather in this house,” returned Norry in grim hospitality; “I’ll give you a sup of milk, or wouldit be too much delay on ye to wait till I bile the kittle for a cup o’ tay? Bad cess to Bid Sal! There isn’t as much hot wather in the house this minute as’d write yer name!”
“I’m obliged to ye, Norry,” said Julia stiffly, her sick pride evolving a supposition that she could be in want of food; “but I’m only after my breakfast myself. Indeed,” she added, assuming from old habit her usual attitude of medical adviser, “you’d be the better yourself for taking less tea.”
“Is it me?” replied Norry indignantly. “I take me cup o’ tay morning and evening, and if ’twas throwing afther me I wouldn’t take more.”
“Give me the cold wather, anyway,” said Julia wearily; “I must go on out of this. It’s to Bruff I’m going.”
“In the name o’ God what’s taking ye into Bruff, you that should be in yer bed, in place of sthreelin’ through the counthry this way?”
“I got a letter from Lambert to-day,” said Julia, putting her hand to her aching head, as if to collect herself, “and I want to speak to Sir Benjamin about it.”
“Ah, God help yer foolish head!” said Norry impatiently; “sure ye might as well be talking to the bird above there,” pointing to the cockatoo, who was looking down at them with ghostly solemnity. “The owld fellow’s light in his head this long while.”
“Then I’ll see some of the family,” said Julia; “they remember my fawther well, and the promise I had about the farm, and they’ll not see me wronged.”
“Throth, then, that’s thrue,” said Norry, with an unwonted burst of admiration; “they was always and ever a fine family, and thim that they takes in their hands has the luck o’ God! But what did Lambert say t’ye?” with a keen glance at her visitor from under her heavy eyebrows.
Julia hesitated for a moment.
“Norry Kelly,” she said, her voice shaking a little; “if it wasn’t that you’re me own mother’s sister’s child, I would not reveal to you the disgrace that man is trying to put upon me. I got a letter from him this morning saying he’d process me if I didn’t pay him at once the half of what’s due. And Joyce that has the grazing is bankrupt, and owes me what I’ll never get from him.”
“Blast his sowl!” interjected Norry, who was peeling onions with furious speed.
“I know there’s manny would be thankful to take the grazing,” continued Julia, passing a dingy pocket handkerchief over her forehead; “but who knows when I’d be paid for it, and Lambert will have me out on the road before that if I don’t give him the rent.”
Norry looked to see whether both the kitchen doors were shut, and then, putting both her hands on the table, leaned across towards her cousin.
“Herself wants it,” she said in a whisper.
“Wants what? What are you saying?”
“Wants the farm, I tell ye, and it’s her that’s driving Lambert.”
“Is it Charlotte Mullen?” asked Julia, in a scarcely audible voice.
“Now ye have it,” said Norry, returning to her onions, and shutting her mouth tightly.
The cockatoo gave a sudden piercing screech, like a note of admiration. Julia half got up, and then sank back into her chair.
“Are ye sure of that?”
“As sure as I have two feet,” replied Norry, “and I’ll tell ye what she’s afther it for. It’s to go live in it, and to let on she’s as grand as the other ladies in the counthry.”
Julia clenched the bony, discoloured hand that lay on the table.
“Before I saw her in it I’d burn it over my head!”
“Not a word out o’ ye about what I tell ye,” went on Norry in the same ominous whisper. “Shure she have it all mapped this minnit, the same as a pairson’d be makin’ a watch. She’s sthriving to make a match with young Misther Dysart and Miss Francie, and b’leeve you me, ’twill be a quare thing if she’ll let him go from her. Sure he’s the gentlest crayture ever came into a house, and he’s that innocent he wouldn’t think how cute she was. If ye’d seen her, ere yestherday, follying him down to the gate, and she smilin’ up at him as sweet as honey! The way it’ll be, she’ll sell Tally Ho house for a fortune for Miss Francie, though, indeed, it’s little fortune himself’ll ax!”
The words drove heavily through the pain of Julia’s head, and their meaning followed at an interval.
“Why would she give a fortune to the likes of her?” she asked; “isn’t it what the people say, it’s only for a charity she has her here?”
Norry gave her own peculiar laugh of derision, a laugh with a snort in it.
“Sharity! It’s little sharity ye’ll get from that one! Didn’t I hear the old misthress tellin’ her, and she sthretched for death—and Miss Charlotte knows well I heard her say it—‘Charlotte,’ says she, and her knees, dhrawn up in the bed, ‘Francie must have her share.’ And that was the lasht word she spoke.” Norry’s large wild eyes roved skywards out of the window as the scene rose before her. “God rest her soul, ’tis she got the death aisy!”
“That Charlotte Mullen may get it hard!” said Julia savagely. She got up, feeling new strength in her tired limbs, though her head was reeling strangely, and she had to grasp at the kitchen table to keep herself steady. “I’ll go on now. If I die for it I’ll go to Bruff this day.”
Norry dropped the onion she was peeling, and placed herself between Julia and the door.
“The divil a toe will ye put out of this kitchen,” she said, flourishing her knife; “is ityouwalk to Bruff?”
“I must go to Bruff,” said Julia again, almost mechanically; “but if you could give me a taste of sperrits, I think I’d be better able for the road.”
Norry pulled open a drawer, and took from the back of it a bottle containing a colourless liquid.
“Drink this to your health!” she said in Irish, giving some in a mug to Julia; “it’s potheen I got from friends of me own, back in Curraghduff.” She put her hand into the drawer again, and after a little search produced from the centre of a bundle of amorphous rags a cardboard box covered with shells. Julia heard, without heeding it, the clink of money, and then three shillings were slapped down on the table beside her. “Ye’ll go to Conolly’s now, and get a car to dhrive ye,” said Norry defiantly; “or howld on till I send Bid Sal to get it for ye. Not a word out o’ ye now! Sure, don’t I know well a pairson wouldn’t think toput his money in his pocket whin he’d be hasting that way lavin’ his house.”
She did not wait for an answer, but shuffled to the scullery door, and began to scream for Bid Sal in her usual tones of acrid ill-temper. As she returned to the kitchen, Julia met her at the door. Her yellow face, that Norry had likened by courtesy to the driven snow, was now very red, and her eyes had a hot stare in them.
“I’m obliged to you, Norry Kelly,” she said, “but when I’m in need of charity I’ll ask for it. Let me out, if you please.”
The blast of fury with which Norry was preparing to reply was checked by a rattle of wheels in the yard, and Bid Sal appeared with the intelligence that Jimmy Daly was come over with the Bruff cart, and Norry was to go out to speak to him. When she came back she had a basket of grapes in one hand and a brace of grouse in the other, and as she put them down on the table, she informed her cousin, with distant politeness, that Jimmy Daly would drive her to Bruff.
Thedrive in the spring-cart was the first moment of comparative ease from suffering that Julia had known that day. Her tormented brain was cooled by the soft steady rush of air in her face, and the mouthful of “potheen” that she had drunk had at first the effect of dulling all her perceptions. The cart drove up the back avenue, and at the yard gate Julia asked the man to put her down. She clambered out of the cart with great difficulty, and going round to the hall door, went toilfully up the steps and rang the bell. Sir Benjamin was out, Lady Dysart was out, Mr. Dysart was out; so Gorman told her, with a doubtful look at the black Sunday gown that seemed to him indicative of the bearer of a begging petition, and he did not know when they would be in. He shut the door, and Julia went slowly down the steps again.
She had begun to walk mechanically away from the house, when she saw Sir Benjamin in his chair coming up a side walk. His face, with its white hair, gold spectacles, andtall hat, looked so sane and dignified, that, in spite of what Norry had said, she determined to carry out her first intention of speaking to him. She shivered, though the sun blazed hotly down upon her, as she walked towards the chair, not from nervousness, but from the creeping sense of illness, and the ground rose up in front of her as if she were going up-hill. She made a low bow to her landlord, and James Canavan, who knew her by sight, stopped the onward course of the chair.
“I wish to speak to you on an important matter, Sir Benjamin,” began Julia in her best voice; “I was unable to see your agent, so I determined to come to yourself.”
The gold spectacles were turned upon her fixedly, and the expression of the eyes behind them was more intelligent than usual.
“Begad, that’s one of the tenants, James,” said Sir Benjamin, looking up at his attendant.
“Certainly, Sir Benjamin, certainly; this lady is Miss Duffy, from Gurthnamuckla,” replied the courtly James Canavan. “An old tenant, I might almost say an old friend of your honour’s.”
“And what the devil brings her here?” inquired Sir Benjamin, glowering at her under the wide brim of his hat.
“Sir Benjamin,” began Julia again, “I know your memory’s failing you, but you might remember that after the death of my father, Hubert Duffy—” Julia felt all the Protestant and aristocratic associations of the name as she said it—“you made a promise to me in your office that I should never be disturbed in my holding of the land.”
“Devil so ugly a man as Hubert Duffy ever I saw,” said Sir Benjamin, with a startling flight of memory; “and you’re his daughter, are you? Begad, the dairymaid didn’t distinguish herself!”
“Yes, I am his daughter, Sir Benjamin,” replied Julia, catching at this flattering recognition. “I and my family have always lived on your estate, and my grandfather has often had the honour of entertaining you and the rest of the gentry, when they came fox-hunting through Gurthnamuckla. I am certain that it is by no wish of yours, or of your kind and honourable son, Mr. Christopher, that your agent is pairsecuting me to make me leave the farm—” Her voicefailed her, partly from the suffocating anger that rose in her at her own words, and partly from a dizziness that made the bath-chair, Sir Benjamin, and James Canavan, float up and down in the air before her.
Sir Benjamin suddenly began to brandish his stick. “What the devil is she saying about Christopher? What has Christopher to say to my tenants. D—n his insolence! He ought to be at school!”
The remarkable grimaces which James Canavan made at Julia from the back of the bath-chair informed her that she had lighted upon the worst possible method of ingratiating herself with her landlord, but the information came too late.
“Send that woman away, James Canavan!” he screamed, making sweeps at her with his oak stick. “She shall never put her d—d splay foot upon my avenue again. I’ll thrash her and Christopher out of the place! Turn her out, I tell you, James Canavan!”
Julia stood motionless and aghast beyond the reach of the stick, until James Canavan motioned to her to move aside; she staggered back among the long arms of alignum vitæ, and the bath-chair, with its still cursing, gesticulating occupant, went by her at a round pace. Then she came slowly and uncertainly out on to the path again, and looked after the chariot wheels of the Cæsar to whom she had appealed.
James Canavan’s coat-tails were standing out behind him as he drove the bath-chair round the corner of the path, and Sir Benjamin’s imprecations came faintly back to her as she stood waiting till the throbbing giddiness should cease sufficiently for her to begin the homeward journey that stretched, horrible and impossible, before her. Her head ached wildly, and as she walked down the avenue she found herself stumbling against the edge of the grass, now on one side and now on the other. She said to herself that the people would say she was drunk, but she didn’t care now what they said. It would be shortly till they saw her a disgraced woman, with the sheriff coming to put her out of her father’s house on to the road. She gave a hard, short sob as this occurred to her, and she wondered if she would have the good luck to die, supposing she let herself fall down onthe grass, and lay there in the burning sun and took no more trouble about anything. Her thoughts came to her slowly and with great difficulty, but, once come, they whirled and hammered in her brain with the reiteration of chiming bells. She walked on, out of the gate, and along the road to Lismoyle, mechanically going in the shade where there was any, and avoiding the patches of broken stones, as possibly a man might who was walking out to be shot, but apathetically unconscious of what was happening.
At about this time the person whose name Julia Duffy had so unfortunately selected to conjure with was sitting under a tree on the slope opposite the hall door at Tally Ho, reading aloud a poem of Rossetti’s.
“Her eyes were like the wave within,Like water reeds the poiseOf her soft body, dainty thin;And like the water’s noiseHer plaintive voice.“For him the stream had never welledIn desert tracts malignSo sweet; nor had he ever feltSo faint in the sunshineOf Palestine.”
“Her eyes were like the wave within,Like water reeds the poiseOf her soft body, dainty thin;And like the water’s noiseHer plaintive voice.“For him the stream had never welledIn desert tracts malignSo sweet; nor had he ever feltSo faint in the sunshineOf Palestine.”
“Her eyes were like the wave within,Like water reeds the poiseOf her soft body, dainty thin;And like the water’s noiseHer plaintive voice.
“For him the stream had never welledIn desert tracts malignSo sweet; nor had he ever feltSo faint in the sunshineOf Palestine.”
Francie’s attention, which had revived at the description of the Queen, began to wander again. The sound in Christopher’s voice told that the words were touching something deeper than his literary perception, and her sympathy answered to the tone, though the drift of the poem was dark to her. The music of the lines had just power enough upon her ear to predispose her to sentiment, and at present, sentiment with Francie meant the tender repose of her soul upon the thought of Mr. Gerald Hawkins.
A pause at turning over a leaf recalled her again to the fact of Christopher, with a transition not altogether unpleasant; she looked down at him as he lay on the grass, and began to wonder, as she had several times wondered before, if he really were in love with her. Nothing seemed more unlikely. Francie admitted it to herself as she watched his eyes following the lines in complete absorption, and knewthat she had neither part nor lot in the things that touched him most nearly.
But the facts were surprising, there was no denying that. Even without Charlotte to tell her so she was aware that Christopher detested the practice of paying visits even more sincerely than most men, and was certainly not in the habit of visiting in Lismoyle. Except to see her, there was no reason that could bring him to Tally Ho. Surer than all fact, however, and rising superior to mere logic, was her instinctive comprehension of men and their ways, and sometimes she was almost sure that he came, not from kindness, or from that desire to improve her mind which she had discerned and compassionated, but because he could not help himself. She had arrived at one of these thrilling moments of certainty when Christopher’s voice ceased upon the words, “Thy jealous God,” and she knew that the time had come for her to say something appropriate.
“Oh thank you, Mr. Dysart—that’s—that’s awfully pretty. It’s a sort of religious thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Christopher, looking at her with a wavering smile, and feeling as if he had stepped suddenly to the ground out of a dream of flying; “the hero’s a pilgrim, and that’s always something.”
“I know a lovely song called ‘The Pilgrim of Love,’”said Francie timidly; “of course it wasn’t the same thing as what you were reading, but it was awfully nice too.”
Christopher looked up at her, and was almost convinced that she must have absorbed something of the sentiment if not the sense of what he had read, her face was so sympathetic and responsive. With that expression in her limpid eyes it gave him a peculiar sensation to hear her say the name of Love; it was even a delight, and fired his imagination with the picturing of what it would be like to hear her say it with all her awakened soul. He might have said something that would have suggested his feeling, in the fragmentary, inferential manner that Francie never knew what to make of, but that her eyes strayed away at a click of the latch of the avenue gate, and lost their unworldliness in the sharp and easy glance that is the unvalued privilege of the keen-sighted.
“Who in the name of goodness is this?” she said, sittingup and gazing at a black figure in the avenue; “it’s some woman or other, but she looks very queer.”
“I can’t see that it matters much who it is,” said Christopher irritably, “so long as she doesn’t come up here, and she probably will if you let her see you.”
“Mercy on us! she looks awful!” exclaimed Francie incautiously; “why, it’s Miss Duffy, and her face as red as I don’t know what—oh, she’s seen us!”
The voice had evidently reached Julia Duffy’s ears; she came stumbling on, with her eyes fixed on the light blue dress under the beech tree, and when Christopher had turned, and got his eye-glass up, she was standing at the foot of the slope, looking at him with a blurred recognition.
“Mr. Dysart,” she said in a hoarse voice, that, combined with her flushed face and staring eyes, made Christopher think she was drunk, “Sir Benjamin has driven me out of his place like a beggar; me, whose family is as long on his estate as himself; and his agent wants to drive me out of my farm that was promised to me by your father I should never be disturbed in it.”
“You’re Miss Duffy from Gurthnamuckla, are you not?” interrupted Christopher, eyeing her with natural disfavour, as he got up and came down the slope towards her.
“I am, Mr. Dysart, I am,” she said defiantly, “and you and your family have a right to know me, and I ask you to do me justice, that I shall not be turned out into the ditch for the sake of a lying double-faced schemer—” Her voice failed, as it had failed before when she spoke to Sir Benjamin, and the action of her hand that carried on her meaning had a rage in it that hid its despair.
“I think if you have anything to say you had better write it,” said Christopher, beginning to think that Lambert had some excuse for his opinion of Miss Duffy, but beginning also to pity what he thought was a spectacle of miserable middle-aged drunkenness; “you may be sure that no injustice will be done to you—”
“Is it injustice?” broke in Julia, while the fever cloud seemed to roll its weight back for a moment from her brain; “maybe you’d say there was injustice if you knew all I know. Where’s Charlotte Mullen, till I tell her to her face that I know her plots and her thricks? ’Tis to say that toher I came here, and to tell her ’twas she lent money to Peter Joyce that was grazing my farm, and refused it to him secondly, the way he’d go bankrupt on me, and she’s to have my farm and my house that my grandfather built, thinking to even herself with the rest of the gentry—”
Her voice had become wilder and louder, and Christopher, uncomfortably aware that Francie could hear this indictment of Miss Mullen as distinctly as he did, intervened again.
“Look here, Miss Duffy,” he said in a lower voice, “it’s no use talking like this. If I can help you I will, but it would be a good deal better if you went home now. You—you seem ill, and it’s a great mistake to stay here exciting yourself and making a noise. Write to me, and I’ll see that you get fair play.”
Julia threw back her head and laughed, with a venom that seemed too concentrated for drunkenness.
“Ye’d better see ye get fair play yerself before you talk so grand about it!” She pointed up at Francie. “Mrs. Dysart indeed!”—she bowed with a sarcastic exaggeration, that in saner moments she would not have been capable of—“Lady Dysart of Bruff, one of these days I suppose!”—she bowed again. “That’s what Miss Charlotte Mullen has laid out for ye,” addressing herself to Christopher, “and ye’ll not get away from that one till ye’re under her foot!”
She laughed again; her face became vacant and yet full of pain, and she staggered away down the avenue, talking violently and gesticulating with her hands.
Mrs. Lambertgathered up her purse, her list, her bag, and her parasol from the table in Miss Greely’s wareroom, and turned to give her final directions.
“Now, Miss Greely, before Sunday for certain; and you’ll be careful about the set of the skirt, that it doesn’t firk up at the side, the way the black one did—”
“Weunderstand the set of a skirt, Mrs. Lambert,” interposed the elder Miss Greely in her most aristocratic voice; “I think you may leave that to us.”
Mrs. Lambert retreated, feeling as snubbed as it was intended that she should feel, and with a last injunction to the girl in the shop to be sure not to let the Rosemount messenger leave town on Saturday night without the parcel that he’d get from upstairs, she addressed herself to the task of walking home. She was in very good spirits, and the thought of a new dress for church next Sunday was exhilarating; it was a pleasant fact also that Charlotte Mullen was coming to tea, and she and Muffy, the Maltese terrier, turned into Barrett’s to buy a tea-cake in honour of the event. Mrs. Beattie was also there, and the two ladies and Mrs. Barrett had a most enjoyable discussion on tea; Mrs. Beattie advocating “the one and threepenny from the Stores,” while Mrs. Barrett and her other patroness agreed in upholding the Lismoyle three-and-sixpenny against all others. Mrs. Lambert set forth again with her tea-cake in her hand, and with such a prosperous expression of countenance that Nance the Fool pursued her down the street with a confidence that was not unrewarded.
“That the hob of heaven may be your scratching post!” she screamed, in the midst of one of her most effective fits of coughing, as Mrs. Lambert’s round little dolmaned figure passed complacently onward, “that Pether and Paul may wait on ye, and that the saints may be surprised at yer success! She’s sharitable, the craythur,” she ended in a lower voice, as she rejoined the rival and confederate who had yielded to her the right of plundering the last passer-by, “and sign’s on it, it thrives with her; she’s got very gross!”
“Faith it wasn’t crackin’ blind nuts made her that fat,” said the confidante unamiably, “and with all her riches she didn’t give ye the price of a dhrink itself!”
Mrs. Lambert entered her house by the kitchen, so as to give directions to Eliza Hackett about the tea-cake, and when she got upstairs she found Charlotte already awaiting her in the dining-room, occupied in reading a pamphlet on stall feeding, with apparently as complete a zest as if it had been one of those yellow paper-covered volumes whose appearance aroused such a respectful horror in Lismoyle.
“Well, Lucy, is this the way you receive your visitors?” she began jocularly, as she rose and kissed her hostess’s florid cheek; “I needn’t ask how you are, as you’re looking blooming.”
“I declare I think this hot summer suits me. I feel stronger than I’ve done this good while back, thank God. Roddy was saying this morning he’d have to put me and Muffy on banting, we’d both put up so much flesh.”
The turkey-hen looked so pleased as she recalled this conjugal endearment that Charlotte could not resist the pleasure of taking her down a peg or two.
“I think he’s quite right,” she said with a laugh; “nothing ages ye like fat, and no man likes to see his wife turning into an old woman.”
Poor Mrs. Lambert took the snub meekly, as was her wont. “Well, anyway, it’s a comfort to feel a little stronger, Charlotte; isn’t it what they say, ‘laugh and grow fat.’”She took off her dolman and rang the bell for tea. “Tell me, Charlotte,” she went on, “did you hear anything about that poor Miss Duffy?”
“I was up at the infirmary this morning asking the Sister about her. It was Rattray himself found her lying on the road, and brought her in; he says it’s inflammation of the brain, and if she pulls through she’ll not be good for anything afterwards.”
“Oh, my, my!” said Mrs. Lambert sympathetically. “And to think of her being at our gate lodge that very day! Mary Holloran said she had that dying look in her face you couldn’t mistake.”
“And no wonder, when you think of the way she lived,” said Charlotte angrily; “starving there in Gurthnamuckla like a rat that’d rather die in his hole than come out of it.”
“Well, she’s out of it now, poor thing,” ventured Mrs. Lambert.
“She is! and I think she’ll stay out of it. She’ll never be right in her head again, and her things’ll have to be sold to support her and pay some one to look after her, and if they don’t fetch that much she’ll have to go into the county asylum. I wanted to talk to Roddy about that very thing,” went on Charlotte, irritation showing itself in her voice; “but I suppose he’s going riding or boating or amusing himself somehow, as usual.”
“No, he’s not!” replied Mrs. Lambert, with just a shade of triumph. “He’s taken a long walk by himself. He thought perhaps he’d better look after his figure as well asme and Muffy, and he wanted to see a horse he’s thinking of buying. He says he’d like to be able to leave me the mare to draw me in the phaeton.”
“Where will he get the money to buy it?” asked Charlotte sharply.
“Oh! I leave all the money matters to him,” said Mrs. Lambert, with that expression of serene satisfaction in her husband that had already had a malign effect on Miss Mullen’s temper. “I know I can trust him.”
“You’ve a very different story to-day to what you had the last time I was here,” said Charlotte with a sneer. “Are all your doubts of him composed?”
The entrance of the tea-tray precluded all possibility of answer; but Charlotte knew that her javelin was quivering in the wound. The moment the door closed behind the servant, Mrs. Lambert turned upon her assailant with the whimper in her voice that Charlotte knew so well.
“I greatly regretted, Charlotte,” she said, with as much dignity as she could muster, “speaking to you the way I did, for I believe now I was totally mistaken.”
It might be imagined that Charlotte would have taken pleasure in Mrs. Lambert’s security, inasmuch as it implied her own; but, so far from this being the case, it was intolerable to her that her friend should be blind to the fact that tortured her night and day.
“And what’s changed your mind, might I ask?”
“His conduct has changed my mind, Charlotte,” replied Mrs. Lambert severely; “and that’s enough for me.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re pleased with his conduct, Lucy; but if he wasmyhusband I’d find out what he was doing at Tally Ho every day in the week before I was so rejoiced about him.”
Charlotte’s face had flushed in the heat of argument, and Mrs. Lambert felt secretly a little frightened.
“Begging your pardon, Charlotte,” she said, still striving after dignity, “he’s not there every day, and when he does go it’s to talk business with you he goes, about Gurthnamuckla and money and things like that.”
Charlotte sat up with a dangerous look about her jaw. She could hardly believe that Lambert could have babbled her secrets to this despised creature in order to save himself.“He appears to tell you a good deal about his business affairs,” she said, her eyes quelling the feeble resistance in Mrs. Lambert’s; “but he doesn’t seem to tell you the truth about other matters. He’s telling ye lies about what takes him to Tally Ho; it isn’t to talk business—” the colour deepened in her face. “I tell ye once for all, that as sure as God’s in heaven he’s fascinated with that girl! This isn’t the beginning of it—ye needn’t think it! She flirted with him in Dublin, and though she doesn’t care two snaps of her fingers for him she’s flirting with him now!”
The real Charlotte had seldom been nearer the surface than at this moment; and Mrs. Lambert cowered before the manifestation.
“You’re very unkind to me, Charlotte,” she said in a voice that was tremulous with fright and anger; “I wonder at you, that you would say such things to me about my own husband.”
“Well, perhaps you’d rather I said it to you now in confidence than that every soul in Lismoyle should be prating and talking about it, as they will be if ye don’t put down yer foot, and tell Roddy he’s making a fool of himself!”
Mrs. Lambert remained stunned for a few seconds at the bare idea of putting down her foot where Roderick was concerned, or of even insinuating that that supreme being could make a fool of himself, and then her eyes filled with tears of mortification.
“He isnotmaking a fool of himself, Charlotte,” she said, endeavouring to pluck up spirit, “and you’ve no right to say anything of the kind. You might have more respect for your family than to be trying to raise scandal this way and upsetting me, and I not able for it!”
Charlotte looked at her, and kept back with an effort the torrent of bullying fury that was seething in her. She had no objection to upsetting Mrs. Lambert, but she preferred that hysterics should be deferred until she had established her point. Why she wished to establish it she did not explain to herself, but her restless jealousy, combined with her intolerance of the Fool’s Paradise in which Mrs. Lambert had entrenched herself, made it impossible for her to leave the subject alone.
“I think ye know it’s not my habit to raise scandal, Lucy,and I’m not one to make an assertion without adequate grounds for it,” she said in her strong, acrid voice; “as I said before, this flirtation is an old story. I have my own reasons for knowing that there was more going on than anyone suspected, from the time she was in short frocks till she came down here, and now, if she hadn’t another affair on hand, she’d have the whole country in a blaze about it. Why, d’ye know that habit she wears? It was your husband paid for that!”
She emphasised each word between her closed teeth, and her large face was so close to Mrs. Lambert’s, by the time she had finished speaking, that the latter shrank back.
“I don’t believe you, Charlotte,” she said with trembling lips; “how do you know it?”
Charlotte had no intention of telling that her source of information had been the contents of a writing-case of Francie’s, an absurd receptacle for photographs and letters that bore the word “Papeterie” on its greasy covers, and had a lock bearing a family resemblance to the lock of Miss Mullen’s work-box. But a cross-examination by the turkey-hen was easily evaded.
“Never you mind how I know it. It’s true.” Then, with a connection of ideas that she would have taken more pains to conceal in dealing with anyone else, “Did ye ever see any of the letters she wrote to him when she was in Dublin?”
“No, Charlotte; I’m not in the habit of looking at my husband’s letters. I think the tea is drawn,” she continued, making a last struggle to maintain her position, “and I’d be glad to hear no more on the subject.” She took the cosy off the tea-pot, and began to pour out the tea, but her hands were shaking, and Charlotte’s eye made her nervous. “Oh, I’m very tired—I’m too long without my tea. Oh, Charlotte, why do you annoy me this way when you know it’s so bad for me?” She put down the tea-pot, and covered her face with her hands. “Is it me own dear husband that you say such things of? Oh, it couldn’t be true, and he always so kind to me; indeed, it isn’t true, Charlotte,” she protested piteously between her sobs.
“Me dear Lucy,” said Charlotte, laying her broad hand on Mrs. Lambert’s knee, “I wish I could say it wasn’t, though of course the wisest of us is liable to error. Comenow!” she said, as if struck by a new idea. “I’ll tell ye how we could settle the matter! It’s a way you won’t like, and it’s a way I don’t like either, but I solemnly think you owe it to yourself, and to your position as a wife. Will you let me say it to you?”
“Oh, you may, Charlotte, you may,” said Mrs. Lambert tearfully.
“Well, my advice to you is this, to see what old letters of hers he has, and ye’ll be able to judge for yourself what the truth of the case is. If there’s no harm in them I’ll be only too ready to congratulate ye on proving me in the wrong, and if there is, why, ye’ll know what course to pursue.”
“Is it look at Roddy’s letters?” cried Mrs. Lambert, emerging from her handkerchief with a stare of horror; “he’d kill me if he thought I looked at them!”
“Ah, nonsense, woman, he’ll never know you looked at them,” said Charlotte, scanning the room quickly; “is it in his study he keeps his private letters?”
“No, I think it’s in his old despatch-box up on the shelf there,” answered Mrs. Lambert, a little taken with the idea, in spite of her scruples.
“Then ye’re done,” said Charlotte, looking up at the despatch-box in its absolute security of Bramah lock; “of course he has his keys with him always.”
“Well then, d’ye know,” said Mrs. Lambert hesitatingly, “I think I heard his keys jingling in the pocket of the coat he took off before he went out, and I didn’t notice him taking them out of it—but, oh, my dear, I wouldn’t dare to open any of his things. I might as well quit the house if he found it out.”
“I tell you it’s your privilege as a wife, and your plain duty besides, to see those letters,” urged Charlotte. “I’d recommend you to go up and get those keys now, this minute; it’s like the hand of Providence that he should leave them behind him.”
The force of her will had its effect. Mrs. Lambert got up, and, after another declaration that Roderick would kill her, went out of the room and up the stairs at a pace that Charlotte did not think her capable of. She heard her step hurrying into the room overhead, and in a surprisingly shorttime she was back again, uttering pants of exhaustion and alarm, but holding the keys in her hand.
“Oh,” she said, “I thought every minute I heard him coming to the door! Here they are for you, Charlotte, take them! I’ll not have anything more to say to them.”
She flung the keys into Miss Mullen’s lap, and prepared to sink into her chair again. Charlotte jumped up, and the keys rattled on to the floor.
“And d’ye think I’d lay a finger on them?” she said, in such a voice that Mrs. Lambert checked herself in the action of sitting down, and Muffy fled under his mistress’s chair and barked in angry alarm. “Pick them up yourself! It’s no affair of mine!” She pointed with a fateful finger at the keys, and Mrs. Lambert obediently stooped for them. “Now, there’s the desk, ye’d better not lose any more time, but get it down.”
The shelf on which the desk stood was the highest one of a small book-case, and was just above the level of Mrs. Lambert’s head, so that when, after many a frightened look out of the window, she stretched up her short arms to take it down, she found the task almost beyond her.
“Come and help me, Charlotte,” she cried; “I’m afraid it’ll fall on me!”
“I’ll not put a hand to it,” said Charlotte, without moving, while her ugly, mobile face twitched with excitement; “it’s you have the right and no one else, and I’d recommend ye to hurry!”
The word hurry acted electrically on Mrs. Lambert; she put forth all her feeble strength, and lifting the heavy despatch-box from the shelf, she staggered with it to the dinner-table.
“Oh, it’s the weight of the house!” she gasped, collapsing on to a chair beside it.
“Here, open it now quickly, and we’ll talk about the weight of it afterwards,” said Charlotte so imperiously that Mrs. Lambert, moved by a power that was scarcely her own, fumbled through the bunch for the key.
“There it is! Don’t you see the Bramah key?” exclaimed Charlotte, hardly repressing the inclination to call her friend a fool and to snatch the bunch from her; “press it in hard now, or ye’ll not get it to turn.”
If the lock had not been an easy one, it is probable that Mrs. Lambert’s helpless fingers would never have turned the key, but it yielded to the first touch, and she lifted the lid. Charlotte craned over her shoulder with eyes that ravened on the contents of the box.
“No, there’s nothing there,” she said, taking in with one look the papers that lay in the tray; “lift up the tray!”
Mrs. Lambert, now past remonstrance, did as she was bid, and some bundles of letters and a few photographs were brought to light.
“Show the photographs!” said Charlotte in one fierce breath.
But here Mrs. Lambert’s courage failed. “Oh, I can’t, don’t ask me!” she wailed, clasping her hands on her bosom, with a terror of some irrevocable truth that might await her adding itself to the fear of discovery.
Charlotte caught one of her hands, and, with a guttural sound of contempt, forced it down on to the photograph.
“Show it to me!”
Her victim took up the photographs, and turning them round, revealed two old pictures of Lambert in riding clothes, with Francie beside him in a very badly made habit, with her hair down her back.
“What d’ye think of that?” said Charlotte. She was gripping Mrs. Lambert’s sloping shoulder, and her breath was coming hard and short. “Now, get out her letters. There they are in the corner!”
“Ah, she’s only a child in that picture,” said Mrs. Lambert in a tone of relief, as she hurriedly put the photographs back.
“Open the letters and ye’ll see what sort of a child she was.”
Mrs. Lambert made no further demur. She took out the bundle that Charlotte pointed to, and drew the top one from its retaining india-rubber strap. Even in affairs of the heart Mr. Lambert was a tidy man.
“My dear Mr. Lambert,” she read aloud, in a deprecating, tearful voice that was more than ever like the quivering chirrup of a turkey-hen, “the cake was scrumptious, all the girls were after me for a bit of it, and asking where I got it, but I wouldn’t tell. I put it under my pillow three nights,but all I dreamt of was Uncle Robert walking round and round Stephen’s Green in his night-cap. You must have had a grand wedding. Why didn’t you ask me there to dance at it? So now no more from your affectionate friend, F. Fitzpatrick.”
Mrs. Lambert leaned back, and her hands fell into her lap.
“Well, thank God there’s no harm in that, Charlotte,” she said, closing her eyes with a sigh that might have been relief, though her voice sounded a little dreamy and bewildered.
“Ah, you began at the wrong end,” said Charlotte, little attentive to either sigh or tone, “that was written five years ago. Here, what’s in this?” She indicated the one lowest in the packet.
Mrs. Lambert opened her eyes.
“The drops!” she said with sudden energy, “on the sideboard—oh, save me—!”
Her voice fainted away, her eyes closed, and her head fell limply on to her shoulder. Charlotte sprang instinctively towards the sideboard, but suddenly stopped and looked from Mrs. Lambert to the bundle of letters. She caught it up, and plucking out a couple of the most recent, read them through with astonishing speed. She was going to take out another when a slight movement from her companion made her throw them down.
Mrs. Lambert was slipping off the high dining-room chair on which she was sitting, and there was a look about her mouth that Charlotte had never seen there before. Charlotte had her arm under her in a moment, and, letting her slip quietly down, laid her flat on the floor. Through the keen and crowding contingencies of the moment came a sound from outside, a well-known voice calling and whistling to a dog, and in the same instant Charlotte had left Mrs. Lambert and was deftly and swiftly replacing letters and photographs in the despatch-box. She closed the lid noiselessly, put it back on its shelf with scarcely an effort, and after a moment of uncertainty, slipped the keys into Mrs. Lambert’s pocket. She knew that Lambert would never guess at his wife’s one breach of faith. Then, with a quickness almost incredible in a woman of her build, shegot the drops from the sideboard, poured them out, and, on her way back to the inert figure on the floor, rang the bell violently. Muffy had crept from under the table to snuff with uncanny curiosity at his mistress’s livid face, and as Charlotte approached, he put his tail between his legs and yapped shrilly at her.
“Get out, ye damned cur!” she exclaimed, the coarse, superstitious side of her nature coming uppermost now that the absorbing stress of those acts of self-preservation was over. Her big foot lifted the dog and sent him flying across the room, and she dropped on her knees beside the motionless, tumbled figure on the floor. “She’s dead! she’s dead!” she cried out, and as if in protest against her own words she flung water upon the unresisting face, and tried to force the drops between the closed teeth. But the face never altered; it only acquired momentarily the immovable preoccupation of death, that asserted itself in silence, and gave the feeble features a supreme dignity, in spite of the thin dabbled fringe and the gold ear-rings and brooch, that were instinct with the vulgarities of life.
Fewpossessed of any degree of imagination can turn their backs on a churchyard, after having witnessed there the shovelling upon and stamping down of the last poor refuge of that which all feel to be superfluous, a mere fragment of the inevitabledébrisof life, without a clinging hope that in some way or other the process may be avoided for themselves. In spite of philosophy, the body will not picture its surrender to the sordid thraldom of the undertaker and the mastery of the spade, and preferably sees itself falling through cold miles of water to some vague resting-place below the tides, or wedged beyond search in the grip of an ice crack, or swept as grey ash into a cinerary urn; anything rather than the prisoning coffin and blind weight of earth. So Christopher thought impatiently, as he drove back to Bruff from Mrs. Lambert’s funeral, in the dismal solemnity of black clothes and a brougham, while the distant rattle of a reaping-machine was like a voice full of the health andenergy of life, that talked on of harvest, and would not hear of graves.
That the commonplace gloom of a funeral should have plunged his general ideas into despondency is, however, too much to believe of even such a supersensitive mind as Christopher’s. It gave a darker wash of colour to what was already clouded, and probably it was its trite, terrific sneer at human desire and human convention that deadened his heart from time to time with fatalistic suggestion; but it was with lesser facts than these that he strove. Miss Mullen depositing hysterically a wreath upon her friend’s coffin, in the acute moment of lowering it into the grave; Miss Mullen sitting hysterically beside him in the carriage as he drove her back to Tally Ho in the eyes of all men; Miss Mullen lying, still hysterical, on her drawing-room sofa, holding in her black-gloved hand a tumbler of sal volatile and water, and eventually commanding her emotion sufficiently to ask him to bring her, that afternoon, a few books and papers, to quiet her nerves, and to rob of its weariness the bad night that would inevitably be her portion.
It was opposite these views, which, as far as tears went, might well be called dissolving, that his mind chiefly took its stand, in unutterable repugnance, and faint endeavour to be blind to his own convictions. He was being chased. Now that he knew it he wondered how he could ever have been unaware of it; it was palpable to anyone, and he felt in advance what it would be like to hear the exultant winding of the huntsman’s horn, if the quarry were overtaken. The position was intolerable from every rational point of view; Christopher with his lethargic scorn of social tyrannies and stale maxims of class, could hardly have believed that he was sensible of so many of these points, and despised himself accordingly. Julia Duffy’s hoarse voice still tormented his ear in involuntary spasms of recollection, keeping constantly before him the thought of the afternoon of four days ago, when he and Francie had been informed of the destiny allotted to them. The formless and unquestioned dream through which he had glided had then been broken up, like some sleeping stretch of river when the jaws of the dredger are dashed into it, and the mud is dragged to light, and the soiled waves carry the outrage onward inceaseless escape. Nothing now could place him where he had been before, nor could he wish to regain that purposeless content. It was better to look things in the face at last, and see where they were going to end. It was better to know himself to be Charlotte’s prize than to give up Francie.
This was what it meant, he said to himself, while he changed his funeral garb, and tried to get into step with the interrupted march of the morning. The alternative had been with him for four days, and now, while he wrote his letters, and sat at luncheon, and collected the books that were to interpose between Miss Mullen and her grief, the choice became more despotic than ever, in spite of the antagonism that met it in every surrounding. All the chivalry that smouldered under the modern malady of exhausted enthusiasm ranged itself on Francie’s side; all the poetry in which he had steeped his mind, all his own poetic fancy, combined to blind him to many things that he would otherwise have seen. He acquitted her of any share in her cousin’s coarse scheming with a passionateness that in itself testified to the terror lest it might be true. He had idealised her to the pitch that might have been expected, and clothed her with his own refinement, as with a garment, so that it was her position that hurt him most, her embarrassment that shamed him beyond his own.
Christopher’s character is easier to feel than to describe; so conscious of its own weakness as to be almost incapable of confident effort, and with a soul so humble and straightforward that it did not know its own strength and simplicity. Some dim understanding of him must have reached Francie, with her ignorant sentimentalities and her Dublin brogue; and as a sea-weed stretches vague arms up towards the light through the conflict of the tides, her pliant soul rose through its inherited vulgarities, and gained some vision of higher things. Christopher could not know how unparalleled a person he was in her existence, of how wholly unknown a type. Hawkins and he had been stars of unimagined magnitude; but though she had attained to the former’s sphere with scarcely an effort, Christopher remained infinitely remote. She could scarcely have believed that as he drove from Bruff in the quiet sunshine of theafternoon, and surmounted the hill near its gate, the magic that she herself had newly learned about was working its will with him.
The corn that had stood high between him and Francie that day when he had ridden back to look after her, was bound in sheaves on the yellow upland, and the foolish omen set his pulses going. If she were now passing along that other road there would be nothing between him and her. He had got past the stage of reason, even his power of mocking at himself was dead, or perhaps it was that there seemed no longer anything that could be mocked at. In spite of his knowledge of the world the position had an aspect that was so serious and beautiful as to overpower the others, and to become one of the mysteries of life into which he had thought himself too cheap and shallow to enter. A few weeks ago a visit to Tally Ho would have been a penance and a weariness of the flesh, a thing to be groaned over with Pamela, and endured only for the sake of collecting some new pearl of rhetoric from Miss Mullen. Now each thought of it brought again the enervating thrill, the almost sickening feeling of subdued excitement and expectation.
It was the Lismoyle market-day, and Christopher made his way slowly along the street, squeezing between carts and barrels, separating groups locked together in the extremity of bargaining, and doing what in him lay to avoid running over the old women, who, blinded by their overhanging hoods and deaf by nature, paraded the centre of the thoroughfare with a fine obliviousness of dog-carts and their drivers. Most of the better class of shops had their shutters up in recognition of the fact that Mrs. Lambert, a customer whom neither co-operative stores or eighteen-penny teas had been able to turn from her allegiance, had this morning passed their doors for the last time, in slow, incongruous pomp, her silver-mounted coffin commanding all eyes as the glass-sided hearse moved along with its quivering bunches of black plumes. The funeral was still a succulent topic in the gabble of the market; Christopher heard here and there such snatches of it as:
“Rest her sowl, the crayture! ’Tis she was the good wife and more than all, she was the beautiful housekeeper!”
“Is ithelonesome afther her? No, nor if he berrid ten like her.”
“She was a spent little woman always, and ’tis she that doted down on him.”
“And ne’er a child left afther her! Well, she must be exshcused.”
“Musha, I’d love her bones!” shouted Nance the Fool, well aware of the auditor in the dog-cart, “there wasn’t one like her in the nation, nor in the world, no, nor in the town o’ Galway!”
Towards the end of the street, at the corner of a lane leading to the quay, something like a fight was going on, and, as he approached, Christopher saw, over the heads of an admiring audience, the infuriated countenance of a Lismoyle beggar-woman, one of the many who occasionally legalised their existence by selling fish, between long bouts of mendicancy and drunkenness. Mary Norris was apparently giving what she would call the length and breadth of her tongue to some customer who had cast doubts upon the character of her fish, a customer who was for the moment quiescent, and hidden behind the tall figure of her adversary.
“Whoever says thim throuts isn’t leppin’ fresh out o’ the lake he’s a dom liar, and it’s little I think of tellin’ it t’ye up to yer nose! There’s not one in the counthry but knows yer thricks and yer chat, and ye may go home out o’ that, with yer bag sthrapped round ye, and ye can take the tay-leaves and the dhrippin’ from the servants, and huxther thim to feed yer cats, but thanks be to God ye’ll take nothing out o’ my basket this day!”
There was a titter of horrified delight from the crowd.
“Ye never spoke a truer word than that, Mary Norris,” replied a voice that sent a chill down Christopher’s back; “when I come into Lismoyle, it’s not to buy rotten fish from a drunken fish-fag, that’ll be begging for crusts at my hall-door to-morrow. If I hear another word out of yer mouth I’ll give you and your fish to the police, and the streets’ll be rid of you and yer infernal tongue for a week, at all events, and the prison’ll have a treat that it’s pretty well used to!”
Another titter rewarded this sally, and Charlotte, well pleased, turned to walk away. As she did so, she caughtsight of Christopher, looking at her with an expression from which he had not time to remove his emotions, and for a moment she wished that the earth would open and swallow her up. She reddened visibly, but recovered herself, and at once made her way out into the street towards him.
“How are you again, Mr. Dysart? You just came in time to get a specimen of theres angusta domi,” she said, in a voice that contrasted almost ludicrously with her last utterances. “People like David, who talk about the advantages of poverty, have probably never tried buying fish in Lismoyle. It’s always the way with these drunken old hags. They repay your charity by impudence and bad language, and one has to speak pretty strongly to them to make one’s meaning penetrate to their minds.”
Her eyes were still red and swollen from her violent crying at the funeral. But for them, Christopher could hardly have believed that this was the same being whom he had last seen on the sofa at Tally Ho, with the black gloves and the sal volatile.
“Oh yes, of course,” he said vaguely; “everyone has to undergo Mary Norris some time or other. If you are going back to Tally Ho now, I can drive you there.”
The invitation was lukewarm as it well could be, but had it been the most fervent in the world Charlotte had no intention of accepting it.
“No thank you, Mr. Dysart. I’m not done my marketing yet, but Francie’s at home and she’ll give you tea. Don’t wait for me. I’ve no appetite for anything to-day. I only came out to get a mouthful of fresh air, in hopes it might give me a better night, though, indeed, I’ve small chance of it after what I’ve gone through.”
Christopher drove on, and tried not to think of Miss Mullen or of his mother or Pamela, while his too palpably discreet hostess elbowed her way through the crowd in the opposite direction.
Francie was sitting in the drawing-room awaiting her visitor. She had been up very early making the wreath of white asters that Charlotte had laid on Mrs. Lambert’s coffin, and had shed some tears over the making of it, for the sake of the kindly little woman who had never been anything but good to her. She had spent a trying morningin ministering to Charlotte; after her early dinner she had dusted the drawing-room, and refilled the vases in a manner copied as nearly as possible from Pamela’s arrangement of flowers; and she was now feeling as tired as might reasonably have been expected. About Christopher she felt thoroughly disconcerted and out of conceit with herself. It was strange that she, like him, should least consider her own position when she thought about the things that Julia Duffy had said to them; her motive was very different, but it touched the same point. It was the effect upon Christopher that she ceaselessly pictured, that she longed to understand: whether or not he believed what he had heard, and whether, if he believed, he would ever be the same to her. His desertion would have been much less surprising than his allegiance, but she would have felt it very keenly, with the same aching resignation with which we bear one of nature’s acts of violence. When she met him this morning her embarrassment had taken the simple form of distance and avoidance, and a feeling that she could never show him plainly enough that she, at least, had no designs upon him; yet, through it all, she clung to the belief that he would not change towards her. It was burning humiliation to see Charlotte spread her nets in the sight of the bird, but it did not prevent her from dressing herself as becomingly as she could when the afternoon came, nor, so ample are the domains of sentiment, did some nervous expectancy in the spare minutes before Christopher arrived deter her from taking out of her pocket a letter worn by long sojourn there, and reading it with delaying and softened eyes.
Her correspondence with Hawkins had been fraught with difficulties; in fact, it had been only by the aid of a judicious shilling and an old pair of boots bestowed on Louisa, that she had ensured to herself a first sight of the contents of the post-bag, before it was conveyed, according to custom, to Miss Mullen’s bedroom. Somehow since Mr. Hawkins had left Hythe and gone to Yorkshire the quantity and quality of his letters had dwindled surprisingly. The three thick weekly budgets of sanguine anticipation and profuse endearments had languished into a sheet or two every ten days of affectionate retrospect in which less and less reference was made to breaking off his engagement with MissCoppard, that trifling and summary act which was his ostensible mission in going to hisfiancée’shouse; and this, the last letter from him, had been merely a few lines of excuse for not having written before, ending with regret that his leave would be up in a fortnight, as he had had a ripping time on old Coppard’s moor, and the cubbing was just beginning, a remark which puzzled Francie a good deal, though its application was possibly clearer to her than the writer had meant it to be. Inside the letter was a photograph of himself, that had been done at Hythe, and was transferred by Francie from letter to letter, in order that it might never leave her personal keeping; and, turning from the barren trivialities over which she had been poring, Francie fell to studying the cheerful, unintellectual face therein portrayed above the trim glories of a mess jacket.
She was still looking at it when she heard the expected wheels; she stuffed the letter back into her pocket, then remembering the photograph, pulled the letter out again and put it into it. She was putting the letter away for the second time when Christopher came in, and in her guilty self-consciousness she felt that he must have noticed the action.
“How did you get in so quickly?” she said, with a confusion that heightened the general effect of discovery.
“Donovan was there and took the trap,” said Christopher, “and the hall door was open, so I came in.”
He sat down, and neither seemed certain for a moment as to what to say next.
“I didn’t really expect you to come, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie, the colour that the difficulty with the photograph had given her ebbing slowly away; “you have a right to be tired as well as us, and Charlotte being upset that way and all, made it awfully late before you got home, I’m afraid.”
“I met her a few minutes ago, and was glad to see that she was all right again,” said Christopher perfunctorily; “but certainly if I had been she, and had had any option in the matter, I should have stayed at home this morning.”
Both felt the awkwardness of discussing Miss Mullen, but it seemed a shade less than the awkwardness of ignoring her.
“She was such a friend of poor Mrs. Lambert’s,” said Francie; “and I declare,” she added, glad of even this trivial chance of showing herself antagonistic to Charlotte, “I think she delights in funerals.”
“She has a peculiar way of showing her delight,” replied Christopher, with just enough ill-nature to make Francie feel that her antagonism was understood and sympathised with.
Francie gave an irrepressible laugh. “I don’t think she minds crying before people. I wish everyone minded crying as little as she does.”
Christopher looked at her, and thought he saw something about her eyes that told of tears.
“Do you mind crying?” he said, lowering his voice while more feeling escaped into his glance than he had intended; “it doesn’t seem natural that you should ever cry.”
“You’re very inquisitive!” said Francie, the sparkle coming back to her eye in a moment; “why shouldn’t I cry if I choose?”
“I should not like to think that you had anything to make you cry.”
She looked quickly at him to see if his face were as sincere as his voice; her perceptions were fine enough to suggest that it would be typical of Christopher to show her by a special deference and friendliness that he was sorry for her, but now, as ever, she was unable to classify those delicate shades of manner and meaning that might have told her where his liking melted into love. She had been accustomed to see men as trees walking, beings about whose individuality of character she did not trouble herself; generally they made love to her, and, if they did not, she presumed that they did not care about her, and gave them no further attention. But this test did not seem satisfactory in Christopher’s case.
“I know what everyone thinks of me,” she said, a heart truth welling to the surface as she felt herself pitied and comprehended; “no one believes I ever have any trouble about anything.”
Christopher’s heart throbbed at the bitterness in a voice that he had always known so wholly careless and undisturbed;it increased his pity for her a thousandfold, but it stirred him with a strange and selfish pleasure to think that she had suffered. Whatever it was that was in her mind, it had given him a glimpse of that deeper part of her nature, so passionately guessed at, so long unfindable. He did not for an instant think of Hawkins, having explained away that episode to himself some time before in the light of his new reading of Francie’s character; it was Charlotte’s face as she confronted Mary Norris in the market that came to him, and the thought of what it must be to be under her roof and dependent on her. He saw now the full pain that Francie bore in hearing herself proclaimed as the lure by which he was to be captured, and that he should have brought her thus low roused a tenderness in him that would not be gainsaid.