It was a long and stiffish pull; the wind blew her hair about till it looked like a mist of golden threads, the colour glowed dazzlingly in her cheeks, and the few men whom she passed bestowed upon her a stare of whose purport she was well aware. This was a class of compliment which she neither resented nor was surprised at, and it is quite possible that some months before she might have allowed her sense of it to be expressed in her face. But she felt now as if the approval of the man in the street was not worth what it used to be. It was, of course, agreeable in its way, but on this Christmas afternoon, with all its inevitable reminders of the past and the future, it brought with it the thought of how soon her face had been forgotten by the men who had praised it most.
The gas was lighted in the church, and the service was just beginning as she passed the decorated font and went uncertainly up a side-aisle till she was beckoned into a pew by a benevolent old lady. She knelt down in a corner, beside a pillar that was wreathed with a thick serpent of evergreens, and the old lady looked up from her admission of sin to wonder that such a pretty girl was allowed to walk through the streets by herself. The heat of the church had brought out the aromatic smell of all the green things, the yellow gas flared from its glittering standards, and the glimmering colours of the east window were dying into darkness with the dying daylight. When she stood up for the psalms she looked round the church to see if there were anyone there whom she knew; there were several familiar faces, but no one with whom she had ever exchanged a word, and turning round again she devoted herself to the hopeless task of finding out the special psalms that the choir weresinging. Having failed in this, she felt her religious duties to be for the time suspended, and her thoughts strayed afield over things in general, settling down finally on a subject that had become more pressing than was pleasant.
It is a truism of ancient standing that money brings no cure for heartache, but it is also true that if the money were not there the heartache would be harder to bear. Probably if Francie had returned from Lismoyle to a smart house in Merrion Square, with a carriage to drive in, and a rich relative ready to pay for new winter dresses, she would have been less miserable over Mr. Hawkins’ desertion than she was at Albatross Villa; she certainly would not have felt as unhappy as she did now, standing up with the shrill singing clamouring in her ears, while she tried in different ways to answer the question of how she was to pay for the dresses that she had bought to take to Lismoyle. Twenty-five pounds a year does not go far when more than half of it is expended upon board and lodging, and a whole quarter has been anticipated to pay for a summer visit, and Lambert’s prophecy that she would find herself in the county court some day, seemed not unlikely to come true. In her pocket was a letter from a Dublin shop, containing more than a hint of legal proceedings; and even if she were able to pay them a temporising two pounds in a month, there still would remain five pounds due, and she would not have a farthing left to go on with. Everything was at its darkest for her. Her hardy, supple nature was dispirited beyond its power of reaction, and now and then the remembrance of the Sundays of last summer caught her, till the pain came in her throat, and the gaslight spread into shaking stars.
The service went on, and Francie rose and knelt mechanically with the rest of the congregation. She was not irreligious, and even the name of scepticism was scarcely understood by her, but she did not consider that religion was applicable to love affairs and bills; her mind was too young and shapeless for anything but a healthy, negligent belief in what she had been taught, and it did not enter into her head to utilise religion as a last resource, when everything else had turned out a failure. She regarded it with respect, and believed that most people grew good when theygrew old, and the service passed over her head with a vaguely pleasing effect of music and light. As she came out into the dark lofty porch, a man stepped forward to meet her. Francie started violently.
“Oh, goodness gracious!” she cried, “you frightened my life out!”
But for all that, she was glad to see Mr. Lambert.
Thatevening when Mrs. Fitzpatrick was putting on her best cap and her long cameo ear-rings she said to her husband:
“Well now, Robert, you mark my words, he’s after her.”
“Tchah!” replied Mr. Fitzpatrick, who was not in a humour to admit that any woman could be attractive, owing to the postponement of his tea by his wife so that cakes might be baked in Mr. Lambert’s honour; “you can’t see a man without thinking he’s in love with someone or other.”
“I suppose you think it’s to see yourself he’s come all the way from Lismoyle,” rejoined Mrs. Fitzpatrick with becoming spirit, “and says he’s going to stop at Breslin’s Hotel for a week?”
“Oh, very well, have it your own way,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick acrimoniously, “I suppose you have it all settled, and he’ll be married to her by special license before the week’s out.”
“Well, I don’t care, Robert, you wouldn’t think to look at him that he’d only buried his wife four months and a half ago—though I will say he’s in deep mourning—but for all that no one’d blame him that he didn’t think much of that poor creature, and ’twould be a fine match for Francie if she’d take him.”
“Would she take him!” echoed Mr. Fitzpatrick scornfully; “would a duck swim? I never saw the woman yet that wouldn’t half hang herself to get married!”
“Ah, have done being so cross, Robert, Christmas day and all; I wonder you married at all since you think so little of women.”
Finding this argument not easy to answer, Mr. Fitzpatrick said nothing, and his wife, too much interested to linger over side issues, continued,
“The girls say they heard him asking her to drive to the Dargle with him to-morrow, and he’s brought a grand box of sweets for the children as a Christmas box, and six lovely pair of gloves for Francie! ’Pon me word, I call her a very lucky girl!”
“Well, if I was a woman it isn’t that fellow I’d fancy,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, unexpectedly changing his ground, “but as, thank God, I’m not, it’s no affair of mine.” Having delivered himself of this sentiment, Mr. Fitzpatrick went downstairs. The smell of hot cakes rose deliciously upon the air, and, as his niece emerged from the kitchen with a plateful of them in her hand, and called to him to hurry before they got cold, he thought to himself that Lambert would have the best of the bargain if he married her.
Francie found the evening surprisingly pleasant. She was, as she had always been, entirely at her ease with Mr. Lambert, and did not endure, on his account, any vicarious suffering because the table-cloth was far from clean, and the fact that Bridget put on the coal with her fingers was recorded on the edges of the plates. If he chose to come and eat hot cakes in the bosom of the Fitzpatrick family instead of dining at his hotel, he was just as well able to do without a butter-knife as she was, and, at all events, he need not have stayed unless he liked, she thought, with a little flash of amusement and pride that her power over him, at least, was not lost. There had been times during the last month or two when she had believed that he, like everyone else, had forgotten her, and it was agreeable to find that she had been mistaken.
The next day proved to be one of the softest and sunniest of the winter, and, as they flew along the wet road towards the Dargle, on the smartest of the Bray outside cars, a great revival took place in Francie’s spirits. They left their car at the gate of the glen to which the Dargle river has given its name, and strolled together along the private road that runs from end to end of it. A few holiday-makers had been tempted down from Dublin by the fine day, but there was nothing that even suggested the noisy pleasure partiesthat vulgarise the winding beauty of the ravine on summer bank holidays.
“Doesn’t it look fearful lonely to-day?” said Francie, who had made her last visit there as a member of one of these same pleasure parties, and had enjoyed herself highly. “You can’t hear a thing but the running of the water.”
They were sitting on the low parapet of the road, looking down the brown slope of the tree-tops to the river, that was running a foaming race among the rocks at the bottom of the cleft.
“I don’t call it lonely,” said Lambert, casting a discontented side-long glance at a couple walking past arm-in-arm, evidently in the silently blissful stage of courtship; “how many more would you like?”
“Oh, lots,” replied Francie, “but I’m not going to tell you who they are!”
“I know one, anyhow,” said Lambert, deliberately leading up to a topic that up to this had been only slightly touched on.
When he had walked home from the church with Francie the evening before, he had somehow not been able to talk to her consecutively; he had felt a nervous awkwardness that he had not believed himself capable of, and the fact that he was holding an umbrella over her head and that she had taken his arm had seemed the only thing that he could give his mind to.
“Who do you know?”
Francie had plucked a ribbon of hart’s-tongue from the edge of the wall, and was drawing its cold satiny length across her lips.
“Wouldn’t you like it now if you saw—” he paused and looked at Francie—“who shall we say—Charlotte Mullen coming up the road?”
“I wouldn’t care.”
“Wouldn’t you though! You’d run for your life, the way you did before out of Lismoyle,” said Lambert, looking hard at her and laughing not quite genuinely.
The strip of hart’s-tongue could not conceal a rising glow in the face behind it, but Francie’s voice was as undaunted as ever as she replied,
“Who told you I ran for my life?”
“You told me so yourself.”
“I didn’t. I only told you I’d had a row with her.”
“Well, that’s as good as saying you had to run. You don’t suppose I thought you’d get the better of Charlotte?”
“I daresay you didn’t, because you’re afraid of her yourself!”
There was a degree of truth in this that made Mr. Lambert suddenly realise Francie’s improper levity about serious things.
“I’ll tell you one thing I’m afraid of,” he said severely, “and that is that you made a mistake in fighting with Charlotte. If you’d chosen to—to do as she wished, she’s easy enough to get on with.”
Francie flung her fern over the parapet and made no answer.
“I suppose you know she’s moved into Gurthnamuckla?” he went on.
“I know nothing about anything,” interrupted Francie; “I don’t know how long it isn’t since you wrote to me, and when you do you never tell me anything. You might be all dead and buried down there for all I know or care!”
The smallest possible glance under her eyelids tempered this statement and confused Mr. Lambert’s grasp of his subject.
“Do you mean that, about not caring if I was dead or no? I daresay you do. No one cares now what happens to me.”
He almost meant what he said, her elusiveness was so exasperating, and his voice told his sincerity. Last summer she would have laughed pitilessly at his pathos, and made it up with him afterwards. But she was changed since last summer, and now as she looked at him she felt a forlorn kinship with him.
“Ah, what nonsense!” she said caressingly. “I’d be awfully sorry if anything happened you.” As if he could not help himself he took her hand, but before he could speak she had drawn it away. “Indeed, you might have been dead,” she went on hurriedly, “for all you told me in your letters. Begin now and tell me the Lismoyle news. I think you said the Dysarts were away from Bruff still, didn’t you?”
Lambert felt as if a hot and a cold spray of water had been turned on him alternately. “The Dysarts? Oh, yes, they’ve been away for some time,” he said, recovering himself; “they’ve been in London, I believe, staying with her people, since you’re so anxious to know about them.”
“Why wouldn’t I want to know about them?” said Francie, getting off the wall. “Come on and walk a bit; it’s cold sitting here.”
Lambert walked on by her side rather sulkily; he was angry with himself for having let his feelings run away with him, and he was angry with Francie for pulling him up so quickly.
“Christopher Dysart’s off again,” he said abruptly; “he’s got another of these diplomatic billets.” He believed that Francie would find the information unpleasant, and he was in some contradictory way disappointed that she seemed quite unaffected by it. “He’s unpaidattachéto old Lord Castlemore at Copenhagen,” he went on; “he started last week.”
So Christopher was gone from her too, and never wrote her a line before he went. They’re all the same, she thought, all they want is to spoon a girl for a bit, and if she lets them do it they get sick of her, and whatever she does they forget her the next minute. And there was Roddy Lambert trying to squeeze her hand just now, and poor Mrs. Lambert, that was worth a dozen of him, not dead six months. She walked on, and forced herself to talk to him, and to make inquiries about the Bakers, Dr. Rattray, Mr. Corkran, and other lights of Lismoyle society. It was absurd, but it was none the less true that the news that Mr. Corkran was engaged to Carrie Beattie gave her an additional pang. The enamoured glances of the curate were fresh in her memory, and the thought that they were being now bestowed upon Carrie Beattie’s freckles and watering eyes was, though ludicrous, not altogether pleasing. She burst out laughing suddenly.
“I’m thinking of what all the Beatties will look like dressed as bridesmaids,” she explained; “four of them, and every one of them roaring, crying, and their noses bright red!”
The day was clouding over a little, and a damp windbegan to stir among the leaves that still hung red on the beech trees. Lambert insisted with paternal determination that Francie should put on the extra coat that he was carrying for her, and the couple who had recently passed them, and whom they had now overtaken, looked at them sympathetically, and were certain that they also were engaged. It took some time to reach the far gate of the Dargle, sauntering as they did from bend to bend of the road, and stopping occasionally to look down at the river, or up at the wooded height opposite, with conventional expressions of admiration; and by the time they had passed down between the high evergreens at the lodge, to where the car was waiting for them, Francie had heard all that Lambert could tell her of Lismoyle news. She had also been told what a miserable life Mr. Lambert’s was, and how lonely he was at Rosemount since poor Lucy’s death, and she knew how many young horses he had at grass on Gurthnamuckla, but neither mentioned the name of Mr. Hawkins.
The day of the Dargle expedition was Tuesday, and during the remainder of the week Mr. Lambert became so familiar a visitor at Albatross Villa, that Bridget learned to know his knock, and did not trouble herself to pull down her sleeves, or finish the mouthful of bread and tea with which she had left the kitchen, before she opened the door. Aunt Tish did not attempt to disguise her satisfaction when he was present, and rallied Francie freely in his absence; the children were quite aware of the state of affairs, having indeed discussed the matter daily with Bridget; and Uncle Robert, going gloomily up to his office in Dublin, had to admit to himself that Lambert was certainly paying her great attention, and that after all, all things considered, it would be a good thing for the girl to get a rich husband for herself when she had the chance. It was rather soon after his wife’s death for a man to come courting, but of course the wedding wouldn’t come off till the twelve months were up, and at the back of these reflections was the remembrance that he, Uncle Robert, was Francie’s trustee, and that the security in which he had invested her five hundred pounds was becoming less sound than he could have wished.
As is proverbially the case, the principal persons concerned were not as aware as the lookers-on of the state of the game. Francie, to whom flirtation was as ordinary and indispensable as the breath of her nostrils, did not feel that anything much out of the common was going on, though she knew quite well that Mr. Lambert was very fond of her; and Mr. Lambert had so firmly resolved on allowing a proper interval to elapse between his wife’s death and that election of her successor upon which he was determined, that he looked upon the present episode as of small importance, and merely a permissible relaxation to a man whose hunting had been stopped, and who had, in a general way, been having the devil of a dull time. He was to go back to Lismoyle on Monday, the first of the year; and it was settled that he was to take Francie on Sunday afternoon to walk on Kingstown pier. The social laws of Mrs Fitzpatrick’s world were not rigorous, still less was her interpretation of them; an unchaperoned expedition to Kingstown pier would not, under any circumstances, have scandalised her, and considering that Lambert was an old friend and had been married, the proceeding became almost prudishly correct. As she stood at her window and saw them turn the corner of the road on their way to the station, she observed to Mabel that there wouldn’t be a handsomer couple going the pier than what they were, Francie had that stylish way with her that she always gave a nice set to a skirt, and it was wonderful the way she could trim up an old hat the same as new.
It was a very bright clear afternoon, and a touch of frost in the air gave the snap and brilliancy that are often lacking in an Irish winter day. On such a Sunday Kingstown pier assumes a fair semblance of its spring and summer gaiety; the Kingstown people walk there because there is nothing else to be done at Kingstown, and the Dublin people come down to snatch what they can of sea air before the short afternoon darkens, and the hour arrives when they look out for members of the St. George’s Yacht Club to take them in to tea. There was a fair sprinkling of people on the long arm of granite that curves for a mile into Dublin Bay, and as Mr. Lambert paced along it he was as agreeably conscious as his companion of the glancesthat met and followed their progress. It satisfied his highest ambition that the girl of his choice should be thus openly admired by men whom, year after year, he had looked up at with envious respect as they stood in the bow-window of Kildare Street Club, with figures that time was slowly shaping to its circular form, on the principle of correspondence with environment. He was a man who had always valued his possessions according to other people’s estimation of them, and this afternoon Francie gained a new distinction in his eyes.
Abstract admiration, however, was one thing, but the very concrete attentions of Mr. Thomas Whitty were quite another affair. Before they had been a quarter of an hour on the pier, Francie was hailed by her Christian name, and this friend of her youth, looking more unmistakably than ever a solicitor’s clerk, joined them, flushed with the effort of overtaking them, and evidently determined not to leave them again.
“I spotted you by your hair, Francie,” Mr. Whitty was pleased to observe, after the first greetings; “you must have been getting a new dye for it; I could see it a mile off!”
“Oh, yes,” responded Francie, “I tried a new bottle the other day, the same you use for your moustache, y’know! I thought I’d like people to be able to see it without a spy-glass.”
As Mr. Whitty’s moustache was represented by three sickly hairs and a pimple, the sarcasm was sufficiently biting to yield Lambert a short-lived gratification.
“Mr. Lambert dyes his black,” continued Francie, without a change of countenance. She had the Irish love of a scrimmage in her, and she thought it would be great fun to make Mr. Lambert cross.
“D’ye find the colour comes off?” murmured Tommy Whitty, eager for revenge, but too much afraid of Lambert to speak out loud.
Even Francie, though she favoured the repartee with a giggle, was glad that Lambert had not heard.
“D’ye find you want your ears boxed?” she returned in the same tone of voice; “I won’t walk with you if you don’t behave.” Inwardly, however, she decided thatTommy Whitty was turning into an awful cad, and felt that she would have given a good deal to have wiped out some lively passages in her previous acquaintance with him.
At the end of half an hour Mr. Whitty was still with them, irrepressibly intimate and full of reminiscence. Lambert, after determined efforts to talk to Francie, as if unaware of the presence of a third person, had sunk into dangerous silence, and Francie had ceased to see the amusing side of the situation, and was beginning to be exhausted by much walking to and fro. The sun set in smoky crimson behind the town, the sun-set gun banged its official recognition of the fact, followed by the wild, clear notes of a bugle, and a frosty after-glow lit up the sky, and coloured the motionless water of the harbour. A big bell boomed a monotonous summons to afternoon service, and people began to leave the pier. Those who had secured the entrée of the St. George’s Yacht Club proceeded comfortably thither for tea, and Lambert felt that he would have given untold sums for the right to take Francie in under the pillared portico, leaving Tommy Whitty and his seedy black coat in outer darkness. The party was gloomily tending towards the station, when the happy idea occurred to Mr. Lambert of having tea at the Marine Hotel; it might not have the distinction of the club, but it would at all events give him the power of shaking off that damned presuming counter-jumper, as in his own mind he furiously designated Mr. Whitty.
“I’m going to take you up to the hotel for tea, Francie,” he said decisively, and turned at once towards the gate of the Marine gardens. “Good evening, Whitty.”
The look that accompanied this valedictory remark was so conclusive that the discarded Tommy could do no more than accept the position. Francie would not come to his help, being indeed thankful to get rid of him, and he could only stand and look after the two figures, and detest Mr. Lambert with every fibre of his little heart. The coffee-room at the hotel was warm and quiet, and Francie sank thankfully into an armchair by the fire.
“I declare this is the nicest thing I’ve done to-day,” she said, with a sigh of tired ease; “I was dead sick of walking up and down that old pier.”
This piece of truckling was almost too flagrant, and Lambert would not even look at her as he answered,
“I thought you seemed to be enjoying yourself, or I’d have come away sooner.”
Francie felt none of the amusement that she would once have derived from seeing Mr. Lambert in a bad temper; he had stepped into the foreground of her life and was becoming a large and serious object there, too important and powerful to be teased with any degree of pertinacity.
“Enjoy myself!” she exclaimed, “I was thinking all the time that my boots would be cut to pieces with the horrid gravel; and,” she continued, laying her head on the plush-covered back of her chair, and directing a laughing, propitiatory glance at her companion, “you know I had to talk twice as much to poor Tommy because you wouldn’t say a word to him. Besides, I knew him long before I knew you.”
“Oh, of course if you don’t mind being seen with a fellow that looks like a tailor’s apprentice, I have nothing to say against it,” replied Lambert, looking down on her, as he stood fingering his moustache, with one elbow on the chimney-piece. His eyes could not remain implacable when they dwelt on the face that was upturned to him, especially now, when he felt both in face and manner something of pathos and gentleness that was as new as it was intoxicating.
If he had known what it was that had changed her he might have been differently affected by it; as it was, he put it down to the wretchedness of life at Albatross Villa, and was glad of the adversity that was making things so much easier for him. His sulkiness melted away in spite of him; it was hard to be sulky, with Francie all to himself, pouring out his tea and talking to him with an intimateness that was just tipped with flirtation; in fact, as the moments slipped by, and the thought gripped him that the next day would find him alone at Rosemount, every instant of this last afternoon in her society became unspeakably precious. Thetête-à-têteacross the tea-table prolonged itself so engrossingly that Lambert forgot his wonted punctuality, and their attempt to catch the five o’clock train for Bray resulted in bringing them breathless to the station as their train steamed out of it.
TheIrish mail-boat was well up to time on that frosty thirty-first of December. She had crossed from Holyhead on an even keel, and when the Bailey light on the end of Howth had been sighted, the passengers began to think that they might risk congratulations on the clemency of the weather, and some of the hardier had ordered tea in the saloon, and were drinking it with incredulous enjoyment.
“I shall go mad, Pamela, perfectly mad, if you cannot think of any word for that tenth light. C and H—can’t you think ofanything with C and H? I found out all the others in the train, and the least you might do is to think of this one for me. That dreadful woman snoring on the sofa just outside my berth put everything else out of my head.”
This plaint, uttered in a deep and lamentable contralto, naturally drew some attention towards Lady Dysart, as she swept down the saloon towards the end of the table, and Pamela, becoming aware that the lady referred to was among the audience, trod upon her mother’s dress and thus temporarily turned the conversation.
“C and H,” she repeated, “I’m afraid I can’t think of anything; the only word I can think of beginning with C is Christopher.”
“Christopher!” cried Lady Dysart, “why, Christopher ends with an R.”
As Lady Dysart for the second time pronounced her son’s name the young man who had just come below, and was having a whisky and soda at the bar at the end of the saloon, turned quickly round and put down his glass. Lady Dysart and her daughter were sitting with their backs to him, but Mr. Hawkins did not require a second glance, and made his way to them at once.
“And so you’ve been seeing poor Christopher off to the North Pole,” he said, after the first surprise and explanations had been got over. “I can’t say I envy him. They make it quite cold enough in Yorkshire to suit me.”
“Don’t they ever make it hot for you there?” asked Lady Dysart, unable to resist the chance of poking fun atMr. Hawkins, even though in so doing she violated her own cherished regulations on the subject of slang. All her old partiality for him had revived since Francie’s departure from Lismoyle, and she found the idea of his engagement far more amusing than he did.
“No, Lady Dysart, they never do,” said Hawkins, getting very red, and feebly trying to rise to the occasion; “they’re always very nice and kind to me.”
“Oh, I daresay they are!” replied Lady Dysart archly, with a glance at Pamela like that of a naughty child who glories in its naughtiness. “And is it fair to ask when the wedding is to come off?Weheard something about the spring!”
“Who gave you that interesting piece of news?” said Hawkins, trying not to look foolish.
“A bridesmaid,” said Lady Dysart, closing her lips tightly, and leaning back with an irrepressible gleam in her eye.
“Well, she knows more than I do. All I know about it is, that I believe the regiment goes to Aldershot in May, and I suppose it will be some time after that.” Mr. Hawkins spoke with a singularly bad grace, and before further comment could be made he turned to Pamela. “I saw a good deal of Miss Hope-Drummond in the north,” he said, with an effort so obvious and so futile at turning the conversation that Lady Dysart began to laugh.
“Why, she was the bridesmaid—” she began incautiously, when the slackening of the engines set her thoughts flying from the subject in hand to settle in agony upon the certainty that Doyle would forget to put her scent-bottle into her dressing-bag, and then the whole party went up on deck.
It was dark, and the revolving light on the end of the east pier swung its red eye upon the steamer as she passed within a few yards of it, churning a curving road towards the double line of lamps that marked the jetty. The lights of Kingstown mounted row upon row, like an embattled army of stars, the great sweep of Dublin Bay was pricked out in lessening yellow points, and a new moon that looked pale green by contrast, sent an immature shaft along the sea in meek assertion of her presence. The paddles droppedtheir blades more and more languidly into the water, then they ceased, and the vessel slid silently alongside the jetty, with the sentient ease of a living thing. The warps were flung ashore, the gangways thrust on board, and in an instant the sailors were running ashore with the mail bags on their backs, like a string of ants with their eggs. The usual crowd of loafers and people who had come to meet their friends formed round the passengers’ gangway, and the passengers filed down it in the brief and uncoveted distinction that the exit from a steamer affords.
Lady Dysart headed her party as they left the steamer, and her imposing figure in her fur-lined cloak so filled the gangway that Pamela could not, at first, see who it was that met her mother as she stepped on to the platform. The next moment she found herself shaking hands with Mr. Lambert, and then, to her unbounded astonishment, with Miss Fitzpatrick. The lamps were throwing strong light and shadow upon Francie’s face, and Pamela’s first thought was how much thinner she had become.
“Mr. Lambert and I missed our train back to Bray,” Francie began at once in a hurried deprecating voice, “and we came down to see the boat come in just to pass the time—” Her voice stopped as if she had suddenly gasped for breath, and Pamela heard Hawkins’ voice say behind her:
“How de do, Miss Fitzpatrick? Who’d have thought of meetin’ you here?” in a tone of cheerfully casual acquaintanceship.
Even Pamela, with all her imaginative sympathy, did not guess what Francie felt in that sick and flinching moment, when everything rung and tingled round her as if she had been struck; the red had deserted her cheek like a cowardly defender, and the ground felt uneven under her feet, but the instinct of self-control that is born of habit and convention in the feeblest of us came mechanically to her help.
“And I never thought I’d see you either,” she answered, in the same tone; “I suppose you’re all going to Lismoyle together, Miss Dysart?”
“No, we stay in Dublin to-night,” said Pamela, with sufficient consciousness of the situation to wish to shortenit. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Hawkins, I should be very glad if you would put these rugs in the carriage.”
Hawkins disappeared with the rugs in the wake of Lady Dysart, and Lambert and Pamela and Francie followed slowly together in the same direction. Pamela was in the difficult position of a person who is full of a sympathy that it is wholly out of the question to express.
“I am so glad that we chanced to meet you here,” she said, “we have not heard anything of you for such a long time.”
The kindness in her voice had the effect of conveying to Francie how much in need of kindness she was, and the creeping smart of tears gathered under her eyelids.
“It’s awfully kind of you to say so, Miss Dysart,” she said, with something in her voice that made even the Dublin brogue pathetic; “I didn’t think anyone at Lismoyle remembered me now.”
“Oh, we don’t forget people quite so quickly as that,” said Pamela, thinking that Mr. Hawkins must have behaved worse than she had believed; “I see this is our carriage. Mamma, did you know that Miss Fitzpatrick was here?”
Lady Dysart was already sitting in the carriage, her face fully expressing the perturbation that she felt, as she counted the parcels that Mr. Hawkins was bestowing in the netting.
“Oh yes,” she said, with a visible effort to be polite, “I saw her just now; do get in, my dear, the thing may start at any moment.”
If her mind had room for anything beside the anxieties of travelling, it was disapprobation of Francie and of the fact that she was going about alone with Mr. Lambert, and the result was an absence of geniality that added to Francie’s longing to get away as soon as possible. Lambert was now talking to Pamela, blocking up the doorway of the carriage as he stood on the step, and over his shoulder she could see Hawkins, still with his back to her, and still apparently very busy with the disposal of the dressing-bags and rugs. He was not going to speak to her again, she thought, as she stood a little back from the open door with the frosty air nipping her through her thin jacket; she was no more to him than a stranger, she, who knew every turn of his head, and the feeling of his yellow hair that the carriage lamp wasshining upon. The very look of the first-class carriage seemed to her, who had seldom, if ever, been in one, to emphasise the distance that there was between them. The romance that always clung to him even in her angriest thoughts, was slaughtered by this glimpse of him, like some helpless atom of animal life by the passing heel of a schoolboy. There was no scaffold, with its final stupendous moment, and incentive to heroism; there was nothing but an ignoble end in commonplace neglect.
The ticket-collector slammed the door of the next carriage, and Francie stepped back still further to make way for Lambert as he got off the step. She had turned her back on the train, and was looking vacantly at the dark outlines of the steamer when she became aware that Hawkins was beside her.
“Er—good-bye—” he said awkwardly, “the train’s just off.”
“Good-bye,” replied Francie, in a voice that sounded strangely to her, it was so everyday and conventional.
“Look here,” he said, looking very uncomfortable, and speaking quickly, “I know you’re angry with me. I couldn’t help it. I tried to get out of it, but it—it couldn’t be done. I’m awfully sorry about it—”
If Francie had intended to reply to this address, it was placed beyond her power to do so. The engine, which had been hissing furiously for some minutes, now set up the continuous ear-piercing shriek that precedes the departure of the boat train, and the guard, hurrying along the platform, signified to Hawkins in dumb show that he was to take his seat. The whistle continued unrelentingly; Hawkins put out his hand, and Francie laid hers in it. She looked straight at him for a second, and then, as she felt his fingers close hard round her hand in dastardly assurance of friendship if not affection, she pulled it away, and turned to Lambert, laughing and putting her hands up to her ears to show that she could hear nothing in the din. Hawkins jumped into the carriage again, Pamela waved her hand at the window, and Francie was left with Lambert on the platform, looking at the red light on the back of the guard’s van, as the train wound out of sight into the tunnel.
Itwas a cold east-windy morning near the middle of March, when the roads were white and dusty, and the clouds were grey, and Miss Mullen, seated in her new dining-room at Gurthnamuckla, was finishing her Saturday balancing of accounts. Now that she had become a landed proprietor, the process was more complicated than it used to be. A dairy, pigs, and poultry cannot be managed and made to pay without thought and trouble, and, as Charlotte had every intention of making Gurthnamuckla pay, she spared neither time nor account books, and was beginning to be well satisfied with the result. She had laid out a good deal of money on the house and farm, but she was going to get a good return for it, or know the reason why; and as no tub of skim milk was given to the pigs, or barrow of turnips to the cows, without her knowledge, the chances of success seemed on her side.
She had just entered, on the page headed Receipts, the sale of two pigs at the fair, and surveyed the growing amount, in its neat figures with complacency; then, laying down her pen, she went to the window, and directed a sharp eye at the two men who were spreading gravel on the reclaimed avenue, and straightening the edges of the grass.
“’Pon my word, it’s beginning to look like a gentleman’s avenue,” she said to herself, eyeing approvingly the arch of the elm tree branches, and the clumps of yellow daffodils, the only spots of light in the colourless landscape, while the cawing of the building rooks had a pleasant manorial sound in her ears. A young horse came galloping across the lawn, with floating mane and tail, and an intention to jump the new wooden railings that only failed him at the last moment, and resulted in two soapy slides in the grass, that Charlotte viewed from her window with wonderful equanimity. “I’ll give Roddy a fine blowing up when he comes over,” she thought, as she watched the colt cutting capers among the daffodils; “I’ll ask him if he’d like me to have his four precious colts in to tea. He’s as bad about them as I am about the cats!” Miss Mullen’s expression denoted that the reproof would not be of the character to which Louisawas accustomed, and Mrs. Bruff, who had followed her mistress into the window, sprang on a chair, and arching her back, leaned against the well-known black alpaca apron with a feeling that the occasion was exceptionally propitious. The movements of Charlotte’s character, for it cannot be said to possess the power of development, were akin to those of some amphibious thing, whose strong, darting course under the water is only marked by a bubble or two, and it required almost an animal instinct to note them. Every bubble betrayed the creature below, as well as the limitations of its power of hiding itself, but people never thought of looking out for these indications in Charlotte, or even suspected that she had anything to conceal. There was an almost blatant simplicity about her, a humorous rough and readiness which, joined with her literary culture, proved business capacity, and her dreaded temper seemed to leave no room for any further aspect, least of all of a romantic kind.
Having opened the window for a minute to scream abusive directions to the men who were spreading gravel, she went back to the table, and, gathering her account-books together, she locked them up in her davenport. The room that, in Julia Duffy’s time, had been devoted to the storage of potatoes, was now beginning life again, dressed in the faded attire of the Tally Ho dining-room. Charlotte’s books lined one of its newly-papered walls; the fox-hunting prints that dated from old Mr. Butler’s reign at Tally Ho hung above the chimney-piece, and the maroon rep curtains were those at which Francie had stared during her last and most terrific encounter with their owner. The air of occupation was completed by a basket on the rug in front of the fire with four squeaking kittens in it, and by the Bible and the grey manual of devotion out of which Charlotte read daily prayers to Louisa the orphan and the cats. It was an ugly room, and nothing could ever make it anything else, but with the aid of the brass-mounted grate, a few bits of Mrs. Mullen’s silver on the sideboard, and the deep-set windows, it had an air of respectability and even dignity that appealed very strongly to Charlotte. She enjoyed every detail of her new possessions, and unlike Norry and the cats, felt no regret for the urban charms and old associations of Tally Ho. Indeed, since her aunt’s death,she had never liked Tally Ho. There was a strain of superstition in her that, like her love of land, showed how strongly the blood of the Irish peasant ran in her veins; since she had turned Francie out of the house she had not liked to think of the empty room facing her own, in which Mrs. Mullen’s feeble voice had laid upon her the charge that she had not kept; her dealings with table-turning and spirit-writing had expanded for her the boundaries of the possible, and made her the more accessible to terror of the supernatural. Here, at Gurthnamuckla, there was nothing to harbour these suggestions; no brooding evergreens rustling outside her bedroom window, no rooms alive with the little incidents of a past life, no doors whose opening and shutting were like familiar voices reminding her of the footsteps that they had once heralded. This new house was peopled only by the pleasant phantoms of a future that she had fashioned for herself out of the slightest and vulgarest materials, and her wakeful nights were spent in schemings in which the romantic and the practical were logically blended.
Norry the Boat did not, as has been hinted, share her mistress’s satisfaction in Gurthnamuckla. For four months she had reigned in its kitchen, and it found no more favour in her eyes than on the day when she, with her roasting-jack in one hand and the cockatoo’s cage in the other, had made her official entry into it. It was not so much the new range, or the barren tidyness of the freshly-painted cupboards; these things had doubtless been at first very distressing. But time had stored the cupboards with the miscellanies that Norry loved to hoard, and Bid Sal had imparted a home-like feeling to the range by wrenching the hinge of the oven-door so that it had to be kept closed with the poker. Even the unpleasantly dazzling whitewash was now turning a comfortable yellow brown, and the cobwebs were growing about the hooks in the ceiling. But none of these things thoroughly consoled Norry. Her complaints, it is true, did not seem adequate to account for her general aspect of discontent. Miss Mullen heard daily lamentations over the ravages committed by Mr. Lambert’s young horses on the clothes bleaching on the furze-bushes, the loss of “the clever little shcullery that we had in Tally Ho,” andthe fact that “if a pairson was on his dying bed for the want of a grain o’ tay itself, he should thravel three miles before he’d get it,” but the true grievance remained locked in Norry’s bosom. Not to save her life would she have admitted that what was really lacking in Gurthnamuckla was society. The messengers from the shops, the pedlar-woman; above all, the beggars; of these she had been deprived at a blow, and life had become a lean ill-nurtured thing without the news with which they had daily provided her. Billy Grainy and Nance the Fool were all that remained to her of this choice company, the former having been retained in his offices of milk-seller, messenger, and post-boy, and the latter, like Abdiel, faithful among the faithless, was undeterred by the distance that had discouraged the others of her craft, and limped once a week to Gurthnamuckla for the sake of old times and a mug of dripping.
By these inadequate channels a tardy rill of news made its way to Miss Mullen’s country seat, but it came poisoned by the feeling that every one else in Lismoyle had known it for at least a week, and Norry felt herself as much aggrieved as if she had been charged “pence apiece” for stale eggs.
It was therefore the more agreeable that, on this same raw, grey Saturday morning, when Norry’s temper had been unusually tried by a search for the nest of an out-lying hen, Mary Holloran, the Rosemount lodgewoman, should have walked into the kitchen.
“God save all here!” she said, sinking on to a chair, and wiping away with her apron the tears that the east wind had brought to her eyes; “I’m as tired as if I was afther walking from Galway with a bag o’ male!”
“Musha, then,cead failthe, Mary,” replied Norry with unusual geniality; “is it from Judy Lee’s wake ye’re comin’?”
“I am, in throth; Lord ha’ mercy on her!” Mary Holloran raised her eyes to the ceiling and crossed herself, and Norry and Bid Sal followed her example. Norry was sitting by the fire singeing the yellow carcase of a hen, and the brand of burning paper in her hand heightened the effect of the gesture in an almost startling way. “Well now,” resumed Mary Holloran, “she was as nice a woman as ever threw a tub of clothes on the hill, and an honestpoor craythure through all. She battled it out well, as owld as she was.”
“Faith thin, an’ if she did die itself she was in the want of it,” said Norry sardonically; “sure there isn’t a winther since her daughther wint to America that she wasn’t anointed a couple of times. I’m thinking the people th’ other side o’ death will be throuncin’ her for keepin’ them waitin’ on her this way!”
Mary Holloran laughed a little and then wiped her face with the corner of her apron, and sighed so as to restore a fitting tone to the conversation.
“The neighbours was all gethered in it last night,” she observed; “they had the two rooms full in it, an’ a half gallon of whisky, and porther and all sorts. Indeed, her sisther’s two daughthers showed her every respect; there wasn’t one comin’ in it, big nor little, but they’d fill them out a glass o’ punch before they’d sit down. God bless ye, Bid Sal,” she went on, as if made thirsty by the recollection; “have ye a sup o’ tay in that taypot that’s on th’ oven? I’d drink the lough this minute!”
“Is it the like o’ that ye’d give the woman?” vociferated Norry in furious hospitality, as Bid Sal moved forward to obey this behest; “make down the fire and bile a dhrop of wather the way she’ll get what’ll not give her a sick shtummuck. Sure, what’s in that pot’s the lavin’s afther Miss Charlotte’s breakfast for Billy Grainy when he comes with the post; and good enough for the likes of him.”
“There was a good manny axing for ye last night,” began Mary Holloran again, while Bid Sal broke up a box with the kitchen cleaver, and revived the fire with its fragments and a little paraffin oil. “And you a near cousin o’ the corp’. Was it herself wouldn’t let you in it?”
“Whether she’d let me in it or no I have plenty to do besides running to every corp’-house in the counthry,” returned Norry with an acerbity that showed how accurate Mary Holloran’s surmise had been; “if thim that was in the wake seen me last night goin’ out to the cow that’s afther calvin’ with the quilt off me bed to put over her, maybe they’d have less chat about me.”
Mary Holloran was of a pacific turn, and she tried another topic. “Did ye hear that John Kenealy wasafther summonsing me mother before the Binch?” she said, unfastening her heavy blue cloak and putting her feet up on the fender of the range.
“Ah, God help ye, how would I hear annything?” grumbled Norry; “it’d be as good for me to be in heaven as to be here, with ne’er a one but Nance the Fool comin’ next or nigh me.”
“Oh, indeed, that’s the thruth,” said Mary Holloran with polite but transient sympathy. “Well, whether or no, he summonsed her, and all the raison he had for putting that scandal on her, was thim few little hins and ducks she have, that he seen different times on his land, themselves and an owld goat thravellin’ the fields, and not a bit nor a bite before them in it that they’d stoop their heads to, only what sign of grass was left afther the winther, and faith! that’s little. ’Twas last Tuesday, Lady-Day an’ all, me mother was bringin’ in a goaleen o’ turf, an’ he came thundherin’ round the house, and every big rock of English he had he called it to her, and every soort of liar and blagyard—oh, indeed, his conduck was not fit to tell to a jackass—an’ he summonsed her secondly afther that. Ye’d think me mother’d lose her life when she seen the summons, an’ away she legged it into Rosemount to meself, the way I’d spake to the masther to lane heavy on Kenealy the day he’d bring her into coort. ‘An’ indeed,’ says I to the masther, ‘is it to bring me mother into coort!’ says I; ‘sure she’s hardly able to lave the bed,’ says I, ‘an owld little woman that’s not four stone weight! She’s not that size,’ says I—” Mary Holloran measured accurately off the upper joints of her first two fingers—“‘Sure ye’d blow her off yer hand! And Kenealy sayin’ she pelted the pavement afther him, and left a backward sthroke on him with the shovel!’ says I. But in any case the masther gave no satisfaction to Kenealy, and he arbithrated him the way he wouldn’t be let bring me mother into coort, an’ two shillin’ she paid for threspass, and thank God she’s able to do that same, for as desolate as Kenealy thinks her.”
“Lambert’s a fine arbithrator,” said Norry, dispassionately. “Here, Bid Sal, run away out to the lardher and lave this within in it,” handing over the singed hen, “and afther that, go on out and cut cabbages for the pigs. Divil’s cure to ye! Can’t ye make haste! I suppose ye think it’s to be standin’ lookin’ at the people that ye get four pounds a year an’ yer dite! Thim gerrls is able to put annyone that’d be with them into a decay,” she ended, as Bid Sal reluctantly withdrew, “and there’s not a word ye’ll say but they’ll gallop through the counthry tellin’ it.” Then, dropping into a conversational tone, “Nance was sayin’ Lambert was gone to Dublin agin, but what signifies what the likes of her’d say; it couldn’t be he’d be goin’ in it agin and he not home a week from it.”
Mary Holloran pursed up her mouth portentously.
“Faith hecouldgo in it, and it’s in it he’s gone,” she said, beginning upon a new cup of tea, as dark and sweet as treacle, that Norry had prepared for her. “Ah, musha! Lord have mercy on thim that’s gone; ’tis short till they’re forgotten!”
Norry contented herself with an acquiescing sound, devoid of interrogation, but dreary enough to be encouraging. Mrs. Holloran’s saucer had received half the contents of her cup, and was now delicately poised aloft on the outspread fingers of her right hand, while her right elbow rested on the table according to the etiquette of her class, and Norry knew that the string of her friend’s tongue would loosen of its own accord.
“Seven months last Monday,” began Mary Holloran in the voice of a professional reciter; “seven months since he berrid her, an’ if he gives three more in the widda ye may call me a liar.”
“Tell the truth!” exclaimed Norry, startled out of her self-repression and stopping short in the act of poking the fire. “D’ye tell me it’s to marry again he’d go, an’ the first wife’s clothes on his cook this minit?”
Mary Holloran did not reveal by look or word the gratification that she felt. “God forbid I’d rise talk or dhraw scandal,” she continued with the same pregnant calm, “but the thruth it is an’ no slandher, for the last month there’s not a week—arrah what week—no, but there’s hardly the day, but a letther goes to the post for—for one you know well, an’ little boxeens and rejestered envelopes an’ all sorts. An’ letthers coming from that one to him to further ordhers! Sure I’d know the writin’. Hav’n’t she her name writtenthe size of I don’t know what on her likeness that he have shtuck out on the table.”
Mary Holloran broke off like a number of a serial story, with a carefully interrupted situation, and sipped her tea assiduously. Norry advanced slowly from the fireplace with the poker still clutched in her hand, and her glowing eyes fixed upon her friend, as if she were stalking her.
“For the love o’ God, woman!” she whispered, “is it Miss Francie?”
“Now ye have it,” said Mary Holloran.
Norry clasped her hands, poker and all, and raised them in front of her face, while her eyes apparently communed with a familiar spirit at the other end of the kitchen. They puzzled Mary Holloran, who fancied she discerned in them a wild and quite irrelevant amusement, but before further opinions could be interchanged, a dragging step was heard at the back door, a fumbling hand lifted the latch, and Billy Grainy came in with the post-bag over his shoulder and an empty milk-can in his hand.
“Musha, more power to ye, Billy!” said Mary Holloran, concealing her disgust at the interruption with laudable good breeding, and making a grimace of lightning quickness at Norry, expressive of the secrecy that was to be observed; “’tis you’re the grand post-boy!”
“Och thin I am,” mumbled Billy sarcastically, as he let the post-bag slip from his shoulders to the table, “divil a boot nor a leg is left on me with the thravelling!” He hobbled over to the fireplace, and, taking the teapot off the range, looked into it suspiciously. “This is a quare time o’ day for a man to be atin’ his breakfast! Divil dom the bit I’d ate in this house agin’ if it wasn’t for the nathure I have for the place—”
Norry banged open a cupboard, and took from it a mug with some milk in it, and a yellow pie-dish, in which were several stale ends of loaves.
“Take it or lave it afther ye!” she said, putting them down on the table. “If ye had nathure for risin’ airly out o’ yer bed the tay wouldn’t be waitin’ on ye this way, an’ if ourselves can’t plaze ye, ye can go look for thim that will. ‘Thim that’s onaisy let thim quit!’”Norry cared little whether Billy Grainy was too deaf to take in this retort orno. Mary Holloran and her own self-respect were alike gratified, and taking up the post-bag she proceeded with it to the dining-room.
“Well, Norry,” said Charlotte jocularly, looking round from the bookshelf that she was tidying, “is it only now that old thief’s brought the post? or have ye been flirting with him in the kitchen all this time?”
Norry retired from the room with a snarl of indescribable scorn, and Charlotte unlocked the bag and drew forth its contents. There were three letters for her, and she laid one of them aside at once while she read the other two. One was from a resident in Ferry Lane, an epistle that began startlingly, “Honored Madman,” and slanted over two sides of the note-paper in lamentable entreaties for a reduction of the rent and a little more time to pay it in. The other was an invitation from Mrs. Corkran to meet a missionary, and tossing both down with an equal contempt, she addressed herself to the remaining one. She was in the act of opening it when she caught sight of the printed name of a hotel upon its flap, and she suddenly became motionless, her eyes staring at the name, and her face slowly reddening all over.
“Bray!” she said between her teeth, “what takes him to Bray, when he told me to write to him to the Shelbourne?”
She opened the letter, a long and very neatly written one, so neat, in fact, as to give to a person who knew Mr. Lambert’s handwriting in all its phases the idea of very unusual care and a rough copy.