The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “You haven’t forgotten old times any more than I have,” he went on, knowing very well that he was taking now much the same simple and tempting method of getting rid of his obligation that he had once found so efficacious, and to a certain extent enjoying the thought that he could still make a fool of her. “Ah, well!” he sighed, “there’s no use trying to get those times back, any more than there is in trying to forget them.” He hesitated. “But, after all, there’s many a new tune played on an old fiddle! Isn’t that so?” He was almost frightened at his own daring as he saw Charlotte’s cheek burn with a furious red, and her lips quiver in the attempt to answer.

  Upon their silence there broke from the distance a loud scream, then another, and then a burst of laughter in a duet of soprano and bass, coming apparently from a lane that led into the road a little further on— a smooth and secluded little lane, bordered thickly with hazel bushes—a private road, in fact, to a model farm that Mr. Lambert had established on his employer’s property. From the mouth of this there broke suddenly a whirling vision of whiteness and wheels, and Miss Fitzpatrick, mounted on a tricycle and shrieking loudly, dashed across the high road and collapsed in a heap in the ditch. Lambert started forward, but long before he could reach her the Rev. Joseph Corkran emerged at full speed from the lane, hatless, with long flying coat-tails, and, with a skill born of experience, extricated Francie from her difficulties.

  “Oh, I’m dead!” she panted. “Oh, the horrible thing! What good were you that you let it go?” unworthily attacking the equally exhausted Corkran. Then, in tones of consternation, “Goodness! Look at Mr. Lambert and Charlotte! Oh, Mr. Lambert,” as Lambert came up to her, “did you see the toss I got? The dirty thing ran away with me down the hill, and Mr. Corkran was so tired running he had to let go, and I declare I thought I was killed—and you don’t look a bit sorry for me!”

  “Well, what business had you to get up on a thing like that?” answered Lambert, looking angrily at the curate. “I wonder, Corkran, you hadn’t more sense than to let a lady ride that machine.”

  “Well, indeed, Mr. Lambert, I told Miss Fitzpatrick it wasn’t as easy as she thought,” replied the guilty Corkran, a callow youth from Trinity College, Dublin, who had been as wax in Francie’s hands, and who now saw, with unfeigned terror, the approach of Charlotte. “I begged of her not to go outside Tally Ho, but—but—I think I’d better go back and look for my hat—” he ended abruptly, retreating into the lane just as Charlotte drew up the black horse and opened her mouth to deliver herself of her indignation.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XII.

  The broad limestone steps at Bruff looked across the lawn to the lake, and to the south. They were flanked on either hand by stone balustrades which began and ended in a pot of blazing scarlet geraniums, and on their topmost plateau on this brilliant Ist of July, the four Bruff dogs sat on their haunches and gazed with anxious despondency in at the open hall-door. For the last half-hour Max and Dinah, the indoor dogs, had known that an expedition was toward. They had seen Pamela put on a hat that certainly was not her garden one, and as certainly lacked the veil that betokened the abhorred ceremony of church-going. They knew this hat well, and at the worst it usually meant a choir practice; but taken in connection with a blue serge skirt and the packing of a luncheon basket, they almost ventured to hope it portended a picnic on the lake. They adored picnics. In the first place, the outdoor dogs were always left at home, which alone would have imparted a delicious flavour to any entertainment, and in the second, all dietary rules were remitted for the occasion, and they were permitted to raven unchecked upon chicken bones, fat slices of ham, and luscious leavings of cream when the packing-up time came. There was, however, mingled with this enchanting prospect, the fear that they might be left behind, and from the sounding of the first note of preparation they had never let Pamela out of their sight. Whenever her step was heard through the long passages there had gone with it the scurrying gallop of the two little waiters on providence, and when her arrangements had culminated in the luncheon basket their agitation had become so poignant that a growling game of play under the table, got up merely to pass the time, turned into an acrimonious squabble, and caused their ejection to the hall-door steps by Lady Dysart. Now, sitting outside the door, they listened with trembling to the discussion that was going on in the hall, and with the self-consciousness of dogs were convinced that it was all about themselves.

  “No, I cannot allow Garry to go,” declaimed Lady Dysart, her eyes raised to the ceiling as if to show her remoteness from all human entreaty; “he is not over the whooping-cough; I heard him whooping this morning in his bedroom.”

  The person mentioned ceased from a game of fives with a tennis-ball that threatened momentarily to break the windows, and said indignantly, “Oh, I say, mother, that was only the men in the yard pumping. That old pump makes a row just like whooping-cough.”

  Lady Dysart faltered for a moment before this ingenious falsehood, but soon recovered herself.

  “I don’t care whether it was you or the pump that whooped, it does not alter the fact of your superfluity at a picnic.”

  “I think Captain Cursiter and Mr. Hawkins wanted him to stoke,” said Pamela from the luncheon basket.

  “I have no doubt they do, but they shall not have him,” said Lady Dysart with the blandness of entire decision, though her eyes wavered from her daughter’s face to her son’s; “they’re very glad indeed to save their own clothes and spoil his.”

  “Well, then, I’ll go with Lambert,” said Garry rebelliously.

  “You will do nothing of the sort!” exclaimed Lady Dysart, “Whatever I may do about allowing you to go with Captain Cursiter, nothing shall induce me to sanction any plan that involves your going in that most dangerous yacht. Christopher himself says she is over-sparred.” Lady Dysart had no idea of the meaning of the accusation, but she felt the term to be good and telling. “Now, Pamela, will you promise me to stay with Captain Cursiter all the time?”

  “Oh, yes, I will,” said Pamela laughing; “but you know in your heart that he would much rather have Garry.”

  “I don’t care what my heart knows,” replied Lady Dysart magnificently, “I know what my mouth says, and that is that you must neither of you stir out of the steam-launch.”

  At this descent of his mother into the pit so artfully digged for her, Garry withdrew to attire himself for the position of stoker, and Pamela discreetly changed the conversation.

  It seemed a long time to Max and Dinah before their fate was decided, but after some last moments of anguish on the pier they found themselves, the one coiled determinedly on Pamela’s lap, and the other smirking in the bow in Garry’s arms, as Mr. Hawkins sculled the second relay of the Bruff party out to the launch. The first relay, consisting of Christopher and Miss Hope-Drummond, was already on its way down the lake in Mr. Lambert’s 5-ton boat, with every inch of canvas set to catch the light and shifty breeze that blew petulantly down from the mountains, and ruffled the glitter of the lake with dark blue smears. The air quivered hotly over the great stones on the shore, drawing out the strong aromatic smell of the damp weeds and the bog-myrtle, and Lady Dysart stood on the end of the pier, and wrung her hands as she thought of Pamela’s complexion.

  Captain Cursiter was one of the anomalous soldiers whose happiness it is to spend as much time as possible in a boat, dressed in disreputable clothes, with hands begrimed and blistered with oil or ropes as the case may be, and steaming or sailing to nowhere and back again with undying enthusiasm. He was a thin, brown man, with a moustache rather lighter in colour than the tan of his face, and his beaky nose, combined with his disposition to flee from the haunts of men, had inspired his friends to bestow on him the pet name of “Snipey.” The festivity on which he was at present embarked was none of his seeking, and it had been only by strenuous argument, fortified by the artful suggestion that no one else was really competent to work the boat, that Mr. Hawkins had got him into clean fla
nnels and the conduct of the expedition. He knew neither Miss Mullen nor Francie, and his acquaintance with the Dysarts, as with other dwellers in the neighbourhood, was of a slight and unprogressive character, and in strong contrast to the manner in which Mr. Hawkins had become at Bruff and elsewhere what that young gentleman was pleased to term “the gated infant.” During the run from Lismoyle to Bruff he had been able to occupy himself with the affairs of the steam-launch; but when Hawkins, his prop and stay, had rowed ashore for the Dysart party, the iron had entered into his soul.

  As the punt neared the launch, Mr. Hawkins looked round to take his distance in bringing her alongside, and recognised with one delighted glance the set smile of suffering politeness that denoted that Captain Cursiter was making himself agreeable to the ladies. Charlotte was sitting in the stern with a depressing air of Sunday-outness about her, and a stout umbrella over her head. It was not in her nature to feel shy; the grain of it was too coarse and strong to harbour such a thing as diffidence, but she knew well enough when she was socially unsuccessful, and she was already aware that she was going to be out of her element on this expedition. Lambert, who would have been a kind of connecting link, was already far in the offing. Captain Cursiter she mentally characterised as a poor stick. Hawkins, whom she had begun by liking, was daily—almost hourly—gaining in her disfavour, and from neither Pamela, Francie, or Garry did she expect much entertainment. Charlotte had a vigorous taste in conversation, and her idea of a pleasure party was not to talk to Pamela Dysart about the choir and the machinery of a school feast for an hour and a half, and from time to time to repulse with ill-assumed politeness the bird-like flights of Dinah on to her lap. Francie and Mr. Hawkins sat forward on the roof of the little cabin, and apparently entertained one another vastly, judging by their appearance and the fragments of conversation that from time to time made their way aft in the environment of a cloud of smuts. Captain Cursiter, revelling in the well-known restrictions that encompass the man at the wheel, stood serenely aloof, steering among the hump-backed green islands and treacherous shallows, and thinking to himself that Hawkins was going ahead pretty fast with that Dublin girl.

  Mr. Hawkins had been for some time a source of anxiety to his brother officers, who disapproved of matrimony for the young of their regiment. Things had looked so serious when he was quartered at Limerick that he had been hurriedly sent on detachment to Lismoyle before he had time to “make an example of himself,” as one of the most unmarried of the majors observed, and into Captain Cursiter’s trusted hands he had been committed, with urgent instructions to keep an eye on him. Cursiter’s eye was renowned for its blighting qualities on occasions such as these, and his jibes at matrimony were looked on by his brother officers as the most finished and scathing expressions of proper feeling on the subject that could be desired; but it was agreed that he would have his hands full.

  The launch slid smoothly along with a low clicking of the machinery, cutting her way across the reflections of the mountains in pursuit of the tall, white sail of the Daphne, that seemed each moment to grow taller, as the yacht was steadily overhauled by her more practical comrade. The lake was narrower here, where it neared the end of its twenty-mile span, and so calm that the sheep and cattle grazing on the brown mountains were reflected in its depths, and the yacht seemed as incongruous in the midst of them as the ark on Mount Ararat. The last bend of the lake was before them; the Daphne crept round it, moved mysteriously by a wind that was imperceptible to the baking company on the steam-launch, and by the time the latter had churned her way round the fir-clad point, the yacht was letting go her anchor near the landing-place of a large wooded island.

  At a picnic nothing is of much account before luncheon, and the gloom of hunger hung like a pall over the party that took ashore luncheon baskets, unpacked knives and forks, and gathered stones to put on the corners of the table-cloth. But such a hunger is Nature’s salve for the inadequacy of human beings to amuse themselves; the body comes to the relief of the mind with the compassionate superiority of a good servant, and confers inward festivity upon many a dull dinner party. Max and Dinah were quite of this opinion. They had behaved with commendable fortitude during the voyage, though in the earlier part of it a shuddering dejection on Max’s part had seemed to Pamela’s trained eye to forbode sea-sickness, but at the lifting of the luncheon basket into the punt their self-control deserted them. The succulent trail left upon the air, palpable to the dognose as the smoke of the steam-launch to the human eye, beguiled them into efforts to follow, which were only suppressed by their being secretly immured in the cabin by Garry. No one but he saw the two wan faces that yearned at the tiny cabin windows, as the last punt load left for the land, and when at last the wails of the captives streamed across the water, anyone but Garry would have repented of the cruelty. The dogs will never forget it to Captain Cursiter that it was he who rowed out to the launch and brought them ashore to enjoy their fair share of the picnic, and their gratitude will never be tempered by the knowledge that he had caught at the excuse to escape from the conversation which Miss Hope-Drummond, notwithstanding even the pangs of hunger, was proffering to him.

  There is something unavoidably vulgar in the aspect of a picnic party when engaged in the culminating rite of eating on the grass. They may feel themselves to be picturesque, gipsy-like, even romantic, but to the unparticipating looker-on, not even the gilded dignity of champagne can redeem them from being a mere group of greedy, huddled backs, with ugly trimmings of paper, dirty plates, and empty bottles. But at Innishochery the only passers-by were straight-flying wild-duck or wood-pigeons, or an occasional sea-gull lounging up from the distant Atlantic, all observant enough in their way, but not critical. It is probable they did not notice even the singular ungracefulness of Miss Mullen’s attitude, as she sat with her short legs uncomfortably tucked away, and her large jaws moving steadily as she indemnified herself for the stupidity of the recent trip. The champagne at length had its usual beneficent effect upon the conversation. Charlotte began to tell stories about her cats and her servants to Christopher and Pamela, with admirable dramatic effect and a sense of humour that made her almost attractive. Miss Hope-Drummond had discovered that Cursiter was one of the Lincolnshire Cursiters, and, with mutual friends as stepping-stones, was working her way on with much ability; and Francie was sitting on a mossy rock, a little away from the table-cloth, with a plate of cherry-pie on her lap, Mr. Hawkins at her feet, and unlimited opportunities for practical jestings with the cherry-stones. Garry and the dogs were engaged in scraping out dishes and polishing plates in a silence more eloquent than words; Lambert alone, of all the party, remained impervious to the influences of luncheon, and lay on his side with his eyes moodily fixed upon his plate, only responding to Miss Mullen’s frequent references to him by a sarcastic grunt.

  “Now I assure you, Miss Dysart, it’s perfectly true,” said Charlotte, after one of these polite rejoinders. “He’s too lazy to say so, but he knows right well that when I complained of my kitchen-maid to her mother, all the good I got from her was that she said, ‘Would ye be agin havin’ a switch and to be switchin’ her!’ That was a pretty way for me to spend my valuable time.” Her audience laughed; and inspired by another half glass of champagne, Miss Mullen continued, “But big a fool as Bid Sal is, she’s a Solon beside Donovan. He came to me th’ other day and said he wanted ‘little Johanna for the garden.’ ‘Little who?’ says I; ‘Little Johanna,’ says he. ‘Ye great, lazy fool,’ says I, ‘aren’t ye big enough and ugly enough to do that little pick of work by yerself without wanting a girl to help ye?’ And after all,” said Charlotte, dropping from the tones of fury in which she had rendered her own part in the interview, “all he wanted was some guano for my early potatoes!”

  Lambert got up without a smile, and sauntering down to the lake, sat down on a rock and began to smoke a cigar. He could not laugh as Christopher and even Captain Cursiter did, at Charlotte’s dramatisation of her scene with her gardener
. At an earlier period of his career he had found her conversation amusing, and he had not thought her vulgar. Since then he had raised himself just high enough from the sloughs of Irish middle-class society to see its vulgarity, but he did not stand sufficiently apart from it to be able to appreciate its humorous side, and in any case he was at present little disposed to laugh at anything. He sat and smoked morosely for some time, feeling that he was making his dissatisfaction with the entertainment imposingly conspicuous; but his cigar was a failure, the rock was far from comfortable, and his bereaved friends seemed to be enjoying themselves rather more than when he left them. He threw the cigar into the water in front of him, to the consternation of a number of minnows, who had hung in the warm shallow as if listening, and now vanished in a twinkling to spread among the dark resorts of the elder fishes the tale of the thunderbolt that fell in their midst, while Lambert stalked back to the party under the trees.

  Its component parts were little altered, saving that Miss Hope-Drummond had, by the ingenious erection of a parasol, isolated herself and Christopher from the others, and that Garry had joined himself to Francie and Hawkins, and was, in company with the latter, engaged in weaving stalks of grass across the insteps of Miss Fitzpatrick’s open-worked stockings.