How remote she felt from it all! How stale appeared these cherished amusements! Most people would think the Lismoyle choir a poor substitute for the ranks of white surplices in the chancel of St. Patrick’s, with the banners of the knights hanging above them, but Francie thought it much better fun to look down over the edge of the Lismoyle gallery at the red coats of Captain Cursiter’s detachment, than to stand crushed in the nave of the cathedral, even though the most popular treble was to sing a solo, and though Mr. Thomas Whitty might be waiting on the steps to disentangle her from the crowd that would slowly surge up them into the street. A heavy-booted foot came along the passage, and the door was opened by Norry, holding in her grimy hand a tumbler containing a nauseous-looking yellow mixture.
“Miss Charlotte bid me give ye a bate egg with a half glass of whisky in it whenever ye’d come downstairs.” She stirred it with a black kitchen fork, and proffered the sticky tumbler to Francie, who took it, and swallowed the thin, flat liquid which it contained with a shudder of loathing. “How bad y’are! Dhrink every dhrop of it now! An empty sack won’t stand, and ye’re as white as a masheroon this minute. God knows it’s in yer bed ye should be, and not shtuck out in a chair in the middle of the flure readin’ the paper!” Her eye fell on the apparently unconscious Mrs. and Miss Bruff. “Ha, ha! thin! how cozy the two of yez is on yer sofa! Walk out, me Lady Ann!”
This courtesy-title, the expression of Norry’s supremest contempt and triumph, was accompanied by a sudden onslaught with the hearth-brush, but long before it could reach them, the ladies referred to had left the room by the open window.
The room was very quiet after Norry had gone away. Francie took the evicted holding of the cats, and fell speedily into a doze induced by the unwonted half glass of whisky. Her early dinner, an unappetising meal of boiled mutton and rice pudding, was but a short interlude in the dullness of the morning; and after it was eaten, a burning tract of afternoon extended itself between her and Mr. Dysart’s promised visit. She looked out of the window at the sailing shreds of white cloud high up in the deep blue of the sky, at the fat bees swinging and droning in the purple blossoms of the columbine border, at two kittens playing furiously in the depths of the mignonette bed; and regardless of Charlotte’s injunctions about the heat of the sun, she said to herself that she would go out into the garden for a little. It was three o’clock, and her room was as hot as an oven when she went up to get her hat; her head ached as she stood before the glass and arranged the wide brim to her satisfaction, and stuck her best paste pin into the sailor’s knot of her tie. Suddenly the door burst unceremoniously open, and Norry’s grey head and filthy face were thrust round the edge of it.
“Come down, Miss Francie!” she said in a fierce whisper; “give over making shnouts at yerself in the glass and hurry on down! Louisa isn’t in, and sure I can’t open the doore the figure I am.”
“Who’s there?” asked Francie, with flushing cheeks.
“How would I know? I’d say ‘twas Misther Lambert’s knock whatever. Sich galloppin’ in and out of the house as there is these two days! Ye may let in this one yerself!”
When Francie opened the hall-door she was both relieved and disappointed to find that Norry had been right in the matter of the knock. Mr. Lambert was apparently more taken by surprise than she was. He did not speak at once, but, taking her hand, pressed it very hard, and when Francie, finding the silence slightly embarrassing, looked up at him with a laugh that was intended to simplify the situation, she was both amazed and frightened to see a moisture suspiciously like tears in his eyes.
“You—you look rather washed out,” he stammered.
“You’re very polite! Is that all you have to say to me?” she said, slipping her hand out of his, and gaily ignoring his tragic tone. “You and your old yacht nearly washed me out altogether! At all events, you washed the colour out of me pretty well.” She put up her hands and rubbed her cheeks. “Are you coming in or going out? Charlotte’s lunching at the Bakers’, and I’m going into the garden till tea-time, so now you can do as you like.”
“I’ll come into the garden with you,” he said stepping aside to let her pass out. “But are you sure your head is well enough for you to go out in this sun?”
“Sun your granny!” responded Francie, walking gingerly across the gravel in her high-heeled house shoes, “I’m as well as ever I was.”
“Well, you don’t look it,” he said with a concerned glance at the faint colour in her cheeks and the violet shadows under her eyes. “Come and sit down in the shade; it’s about all you’re good for.”
A path skirted the flower-beds and bent round the evergreen-covered slope that rose between the house and the road, and at the bend a lime-tree spread its flat, green boughs lavishly over the path, shading a seat made of half-rotten larch poles that extended its dilapidated arms to the passer-by.
“Well now tell me all about it,” began Lambert as soon as they had sat down. “What did you feel like when you began to remember it all? Were you very angry with me?”
“Yes, of course, I was angry with you, and I am now this minute, and haven’t I a good right, with my new hat at the bottom of the lake?”
“I can tell you we were both pretty nearly at the bottom of the lake along with it,” said Lambert, who disapproved of this frivolous way of treating the affair. “I don’t suppose I ever was nearer death than I was when the sail was on top of me.”
Francie looked at him for one instant with awestruck eyes, and Lambert was congratulating himself on having made her realise the seriousness of the situation, when she suddenly burst out laughing.
“Oh!” she apologised, “the thought just came into my head of the look of Mrs. Lambert in a widow’s cap, and how she’d adore to wear one! You know she would, now don’t you?”
“And I suppose you’d adore to see her in one?”
“Of course I would!” She gave him a look that was equivalent to the wag of the tail with which a dog assures the obtuse human being that its worrying and growling are only play. “You might know that without being told. And now perhaps you’ll tell me how poor Mrs. Lambert is? I hear she was greatly upset by the fright she got about you, and indeed you’re not worthy of it.”
“She’s much better, thank you.”
He looked at Francie under his lowered lids, and tried to find it in his heart to wish that she could sometimes be a little more grown up and serious. She was leaning back with her hat crushed against a trunk of the tree, so that its brim made a halo round her face, and the golden green light that filtered through the leaves of the lime moved like water over her white dress. If he had ever heard the story of “Undine” it might have afforded him the comforting hypothesis that this delicate, cool, youthful creature, with her provoking charm, could not possibly be weighted with the responsibility of a soul; but an unfortunate lack of early culture denied to Mr. Lambert this excuse for the levity with which she always treated him—a man sixteen years older than she was, her oldest friend, as he might say, who had always been kind to her ever since she was a scut of a child. Her eyes were closed; but an occasional quiver of the long lashes told him that she had no intention of sleeping; she was only pretending to be tired, “out of tricks,” he thought angrily. He waited for a moment or two, and then he spoke her name. The corners of her mouth curved a little, but the eyelashes were not raised.
“Are you tired, or are you shamming?”
“Shamming,” was the answer, still with closed eyes.
“Don’t you think you could open your eyes?”
“No.”
Another short period of silence ensued, and the sound of summer in the air round them strengthened and deepened, as the colour strengthens and deepens in a blush. A wasp strayed in under the canopy of the lime and idled inquisitively about Francie’s hat and the bunch of mignonette in her belt, but she lay so still under this supreme test that Lambert thought she must be really asleep, and taking out his handkerchief prepared to rout the
invader. At the same moment there came a sound of wheels and a fast-trotting horse on the road; it neared them rapidly, and Miss Fitzpatrick leaped to her feet and put aside the leaves of the lime just in time to see the back of Mr. Hawkins’ head as his polo-cart spun past the Tally Ho gate.
“I declare I thought it was Mr. Dysart,” she said, looking a little ashamed of herself; “I wonder where in the name of fortune is Mr. Hawkins going!”
“I thought you were so dead asleep you couldn’t hear anything,” said Lambert, with a black look; “he’s not coming here, anyhow.”
She dropped back into the corner of the seat again as if the start forward had tired her.
“Oh! I was so frightened at the wasp, and I wouldn’t let on!”
“I wonder why you’re always so unfriendly with me now,” began Lambert suddenly, fixing his eyes upon her; “there was once on a time when we were great friends, and you used to write to me, and you’d say you were glad to see me when I went up to town, but now you’re so set up with your Dysarts and your officers that you don’t think your old friends worth talking to.”
“Oh!” Francie sat up and faced her accuser valiantly, but with an inwardly-stricken conscience. “You know that’s a dirty, black lie!”
“I came over here this afternoon,” pursued Lambert, “very anxious about you, and wanting to tell you how sorry I was, and how I accused myself for what had happened—and how am I treated? You won’t so much as take the trouble to speak to me. I suppose if I was one of your swell new friends—Christopher Dysart, for instance, who you are looking out for so hard—it would be a very different story.”
By the time this indictment was delivered, Francie’s face had more colour in it than it had known for some days; she kept her eyes on the ground and said nothing.
“I knew it was the way of the world to kick a fellow out of the way when you had got as much as you wanted out of him, and I suppose as I am an old married man I have no right to expect anything better, but I did think you’d have treated me better than this!”
“Don’t,” she said brokenly, looking up at him with her eyes full of tears; “I’m too tired to fight you.”
Lambert took her hand quickly. “My child,” he said, in a voice rough with contrition and pity, “I didn’t mean to hurt you; I didn’t know what I was saying.” He tenderly stroked the hand that lay limply in his. “Tell me you’re not vexed with me.”
“No,” said Francie, with a childish sob; “but you said horrid things to me—”
“Well, I never will again,” he said soothingly. “We’ll always be friends, won’t we?” with an interrogatory pressure of the hand. He had never seen her in such a mood as this; he forgot the inevitable effect on her nerves of what she had gone through, and his egotism made him believe that this collapse of her usual supple hardihood was due to the power of his reproaches.
“Yes,” she answered, with the dawn of a smile.
“Till the next time, anyhow,” continued Lambert, still holding her hand in one of his, and fumbling in his breast pocket with the other. “And, now, look here what I brought you to try and make up to you for nearly drowning you.” He gently pulled her hand down from her eyes, and held up a small gold bangle, with a horse-shoe in pearls on it. “Isn’t that a pretty thing?”
Francie looked at it incredulously, with the tears still shining on her eyelashes.
“Oh, Mr. Lambert, you don’t mean you got that for me? I couldn’t take it. Why, it’s real gold!”
“Well, you’ve got to take it. Look what’s written on it.”
She took it from him, and saw engraved inside the narrow band of gold, her own name and the date of the accident.
“Now, you see it’s yours already,” he said. “No, you mustn’t refuse it,” as she tried to put it back into his hand again. “There,” snapping it quickly on to her wrist, “you must keep it as a sign you’re not angry with me.”
“It’s like a policeman putting on a handcuff,” said Francie, with a quivering laugh. “I’ve often seen them putting them on the drunken men in Dublin.”
“And you’ll promise not to chuck over your old friends?” said Lambert urgently.
“No, I won’t chuck them over,” she replied, looking confidingly at him.
“Not for anybody?” He weighted the question with all the expression he was capable of.
“No, not for anybody,” she repeated, rather more readily than he could have wished.
“And you’re sure you’re not angry with me?” he persisted, “and you like the bangle?”
She had taken it off to re-examine it, and she held it up to him.
“Here, put it on me again, and don’t be silly,” she said, the old spirit beginning to wake in her eyes.
“Do you remember when you were a child the way you used to thank me when I gave you anything?” he asked, pressing her hand hard.
“But I’m not a child now!”
Lambert, looking in her face, saw the provoking smile spread like sunshine from her eyes to her lips, and, intoxicated by it, he stooped his head and kissed her.
Steps came running along the walk towards them, and the fat face and red head of the Protestant orphan appeared under the boughs of the lime-tree.
“A messenger from Bruff’s afther bringing this here, Miss Francie,” she panted, tendering a letter in her fingers, “an’ Miss Charlotte lef’ me word I should get tea when ye’d want it, an’ will I wet it now?”
Christopher had shirked the expression of Miss Fitzpatrick’s gratitude.
* * *
CHAPTER XVII.
“Tally Ho Lodge.
“My Dearest Fanny,
“Although I’m nearly dead after the bazaar I must write you a line or two to tell you what it was like. It was scrumshous. I wore my white dress with the embroidery the first day and the pink dress that you and I bought together the second day and everybody liked me best in the white one. It was fearful hot and it was great luck it was at the flower stall Mrs. Gascogne asked me to sell. Kathleen Baker and the Beatties had the refreshments and if you saw the colour of their faces with the heat at tea-time I declare you’d have to laugh. The Dysarts brought in a lovely lot of flowers and Mr. Dysart was very nice helping me to tie them up. You needn’t get on with any of your nonsence about him, he’d never think of flirting with me or anyone though he’s fearfully polite and you’d be in fits if you saw the way Miss Hopedrummond the girl I told you about was running after him and anyone could see he’d sooner talk to his sister or his mother and I don’t wonder for their both very nice which is more than she is. Roddy Lambert was there of course and poor Mrs. L. in a puce dress and everybody from the whole country round. Mr. Hawkins was grand fun. Nothing would do him but to come behind the counter with me and Mrs. Gascogne and go on with the greatest nonsence selling buttonholes to the old ladies and making them buy a lot of old rotten jeranium cuttings that was all Charlotte would give to the stall. The second day it was only just the townspeople that were there and I couldn’t be bothered selling to them all day and little thanks you get from them. The half of them came thinking they’d get everything for nothing because it was the last day and you’d hear them fighting Mrs. Gascogne as if she was a shopwoman. I sat up in the gallery with Hawkins most of the evening and he brought up tea there and strawberries and Charlotte was shouting and roaring round the place looking for me and nobody knew where we were. ‘Twas lovely—”
At this point Miss Fitzpatrick became absorbed in meditation, and the portrayal on the blotting-paper of a profile of a conventionally classic type, which, by virtue of a moustache and a cigarette, might be supposed to represent Mr. Hawkins. She did not feel inclined to give further details of her evening, even to Fanny Hemphill. As a matter of fact she had in her own mind pressed the possibilities of her acquaintance with Mr. Hawkins to their utmost limit, and it seemed to her not impossible that soon she might have a good deal more to say on the subject; but, nevertheless, she could not stifle a certain anxi
ety as to whether, after all, there would ever be anything definite to tell. Hawkins was more or less an unknown quantity; his mere idioms and slang were the language of another world. It was easy to diagnose Tommy Whitty or Jimmy Jemmison and their fellows, but this was a totally new experience, and the light of previous flirtations had no illuminating power. She had, at all events, the satisfaction of being sure that on Fanny Hemphill not even the remotest shadow of an allusion would be lost, and that, whatever the future might bring forth, she would be eternally credited with the subjugation of an English officer.
The profile with the moustache and the cigarette was repeated several times on the blotting-paper during this interval, but not to her satisfaction; her new bangle pressed its pearly horse-shoes into the whiteness of her wrist and hurt her, and she took it off and laid it on the table. It also, and the circumstances of its bestowal, were among the things that she had not seen fit to mention to the friend of her bosom. It was nothing of course; of no more significance than the kiss that had accompanied it, except that she had been glad to have the bangle, and had cared nothing for the kiss; but that was just what she would never be able to get Fanny Hemphill to believe.
The soft, clinging tread of bare feet became audible in the hall, and a crack of the dining-room door was opened.
“Miss Francie,” said a voice through the crack, “th’ oven’s hot.”
“Have you the eggs and everything ready, Bid?” asked Francie, who was adding a blotted smoke-wreath to the cigarette of the twentieth profile.
The Real Charlotte Page 14