“What made you think I could act, Mr. Dysart?” she said, looking at him a little self-consciously; “do you think I look like an actress?”
The question was interrupted by a cry from the chestnut tree, and Miss Hope-Drummond’s voice was heard appealing to someone to come and help her out of the hammock.
“She can get out jolly well by herself,” remarked Garry, but Christopher got up and lounged across the grass in response to the summons, and Francie’s question remained unanswered. Lady Dysart rose too, and watched her son helping Miss Hope-Drummond on to her feet, and strolling away with her in the direction of the shrubbery. Then she turned to Francie.
“Now, Miss Fitzpatrick, you shall come and explain that Dorcas Society sleeve to me, and I should not be surprised if you could help me with the acrostic.”
Lady Dysart considered herself to be, before all things, a diplomatist.
* * *
CHAPTER XIX.
Dinner was over. Gorman was regaling his fellows in the servants’ hall with an account of how Miss Fitzpatrick had eaten her curry with a knife and fork, and her Scotch woodcock with a spoon, and how she had accepted every variety of wine that he had offered her, and taken only a mouthful of each, an eccentricity of which William was even now reaping the benefit in the pantry. Mrs. Brady, the cook, dared say that by all accounts it was the first time the poor child had seen a bit served the way it would be fit to put into a Christian’s mouth, and, indeed, it was little she’d learn of behaviour or dinners from Miss Mullen, except to make up messes for them dirty cats—a remark which obtained great acceptance from her audience. Mr. Gorman then gave it as his opinion that Miss Fitzpatrick was as fine a girl as you’d meet between this and Dublin, and if he was Mr. Christopher, he’d prefer her to Miss Hope-Drummond, even though the latter might be hung down with diamonds.
The object of this criticism was meantime congratulating herself that she had accomplished the last and most dreaded of the day’s ceremonies, and, so far as she knew, had won through it without disaster. She certainly felt as if she never had eaten so much in her life, and she thought to herself that, taking into consideration the mental anxiety and the loss of time involved in the consumption of one of these grand dinners, she infinitely preferred the tea and poached eggs which formed her ordinary repast. Pamela was at the piano, looking a long way off in the dim pink light of the shaded room, and was playing such strange music as Francie had never heard before, and secretly hoped never to hear again. She had always believed herself to be extremely fond of music, and was wont to feel very sentimental when she and one of that tribe, whom it is to be feared she spoke of as her “fellows,” sat on the rocks at the back of Kingstown pier and listened to the band playing “Dorothy,” or “The Lost Chord,” in the dark of the summer evening; but these minor murmurings, that seemed to pass by steep and painful chromatic paths from one woe to another, were to her merely exercises of varying difficulty and ugliness, in which Miss Dysart never seemed to get the chords quite right. She was too shy to get up and search for amusement among the books and papers upon a remote table, and accordingly she lay back in her chair and regarded Lady Dysart and Miss Hope-Drummond, both comfortably absorbed in conversation, and wondered whether she should ever have money enough to buy herself a tea-gown.
The door opened, and Christopher sauntered in; he looked round the room through his eye-glass, and then wandered towards the piano, where he sat down beside Pamela. Francie viewed this proceeding with less resentment than if he had been any other man in the world; she did not so much mind a neglect in which Miss Hope-Drummond was equally involved, and she was rather frightened than otherwise, when soon afterwards she saw him, in evident obedience to a hint from his sister, get up and come towards her with a large photograph-book under his arm. He sat down beside her, and, with what Pamela, watching from the distant piano, felt to be touching docility, began to expound its contents to her. He had done this thing so often before, and he knew, or thought he knew so well what people were going to say, that nothing but the unfailing proprietary interest in his own handiwork supported him on these occasions. He had not, however, turned many pages before he found that Francie’s comments were by no means of the ordinary tepid and perfunctory sort. The Oxford chapels were, it is true, surveyed by her in anxious silence; but a crowd of undergraduates leaning over a bridge to look at an eight—an instantaneous photograph of a bump-race, with its running accompaniment of maniacs on the bank—Christopher’s room, with Dinah sitting in his armchair with a pipe in her mouth—were all examined and discussed with fervid interest, and a cry of unfeigned excitement greeted the page on which his own photography made its début with a deep-brown portrait of Pamela.
“Mercy on us! That’s not Miss Dysart! What has she her face blackened for?”
“Oh, I did that when I did’nt know much about it last winter, and it’s rather over-exposed,” answered Christopher, regarding his work of art with a lenient parental eye.
“The poor thing! And was it the cold turned her black that way?”
Christopher glanced at his companion’s face to see whether this ignorance was genuine, but before he had time to offer the scientific explanation, she had pounced on a group below.
“Why, isn’t that the butler? Goodness! he’s the dead image of the Roman Emperors in Mangnall’s questions! And who are all the other people? I declare, one of them’s that queer man I saw in the hall with the old gentleman—” she stopped and stammered as she realised that she had touched on what must necessarily be a difficult subject.
“Yes, this is a photograph of the servants,” said Christopher, filling the pause with compassionate speed, “and that’s James Canavan. You’ll see him to-morrow night taking a leading part in Garry’s theatricals.”
“Why, d’ye tell me that man can act?”
“Act? I should think so!” he laughed as if at some recollection or other. “He can do anything he tries, or thinks he can. He began by being a sort of hedge-schoolmaster, but he was too mad to stick to it. Anyhow, my father took him up, and put him into the agency office, and now he’s his valet, and teaches Garry arithmetic when he’s at home, and writes poems and plays. I envy you your first sight of James Canavan on the boards,” he ended, laughing again.
“The boards!” Francie thought to herself; “I wonder is it like a circus?”
The photographs progressed serenely after this. Francie began to learn something of the discreetness that must be observed in inspecting amateur portrait photography, and Christopher, on his side, found he was being better entertained by Miss Mullen’s cousin than he could have believed possible. They turned page after page steadily and conversationally, until Christopher made a pause of unconscious pride and affection at a group of photographs of yachts in different positions.
“These are some of the best I have,” he said; “that’s my boat, and that is Mr. Lambert’s.”
“Oh, the nasty thing! I’m sure I don’t want to see her again! and I shouldn’t think you did either!” with an uncertain glance at him. It had seemed to her when, once or twice before, she had spoken of the accident to him, that it was a subject he did not care about. “Mr. Lambert says that the upsetting wasn’t her fault a bit, and he likes going out in her just the same. I think he’s a very brave man, don’t you?”
“Oh, very,” replied Christopher perfunctorily; “but he rather overdoes it, I think, sometimes, and you know you got the worst of that business.”
“I think you must have had the worst of it,” she said timidly. “I never was able to half thank you—” Even the equalising glow from the pink lampshades could not conceal the deepening of the colour in her cheeks.
“Oh, please don’t try,” interrupted Christopher, surprised into a fellow-feeling of shyness, and hastily turning over the yachting page; “it was nothing at all.”
“Indeed, I wanted to say it to you before,” persevered Francie, “that time at the bazaar, but there always were people there. Charlo
tte told me that only for you the pike would be eating me at the bottom of the lake!” she ended with a nervous laugh.
“What a very unpleasant thing to say, and not strictly true,” said Christopher lightly. “Do you recognise Miss Mullen in this?” he went on, hurrying from the subject.
“Oh, how pretty!” cried Francie, peering into a small and dark picture; “but I don’t see Charlotte. It’s the waterfall in the grounds, isn’t it?”
Pamela looked over from the piano again, amazed to hear her brother’s voice raised in loud laughter. There was no denying that the picture was like a water-fall, and Francie at first rejected with scorn the explanation that it represented a Sunday-school feast.
“Ah, go on, Mr. Dysart Why, I see the white water, and the black rocks, and all!”
“That’s the table-cloth, and the black rocks are the children’s faces, and that’s Miss Mullen.”
“Well, I’m very glad you never took any Sunday-school feast ever I was at, if that’s what you make them look like.”
“You don’t mean to say you go to Sunday-school feasts?”
Yes, why wouldn’t I? I never missed one till this year; they’re the grandest fun out!”
Christopher stared at her. He was not prepared for a religious aspect in Miss Mullen’s remarkable young cousin.
“Do you teach in Sunday-schools?” He tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice, but Francie caught the tone.
“You’re very polite! I suppose you think I know nothing at all, but I can tell you I could say down all the judges of Israel, or the journeyings of St. Paul this minute, and that’s more than you could do!”
“By Jove, it is!” answered Christopher, with another laugh. “And is that what you talk about at school feasts?”
Francie laid her head back on the cushion of her chair, and looked at him from under her lowered eyelashes. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she said. She suddenly found that this evening she was not in the least afraid of Mr. Dysart. There were some, notably Roddy Lambert, who called him a prig, but she said to herself that she’d tell him as soon as she saw him that Mr. Dysart was a very nice young man, and not a bit stuck-up.
“Very much,” Christopher replied, sticking his eye-glass into his eye, “that was why I asked.” He really felt curious to know more of this unwonted young creature, with her ingenuous impudence and her lovely face. If anyone else had said the things that she had said, he would have been either bored or revolted, and it is possibly worth noting that, concurrently with a nascent interest in Francie, he was consciously surprised that he was neither bored nor revolted. Perhaps it was the influence of the half-civilised northern music that Pamela was playing, with its blood-stirring freshness, like the whistling wind of dawn, and its strange snatches of winding sweetness, that woke some slumbering part of him to a sense of her charm and youth. But Pamela guessed nothing of what Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” was doing for her brother, and only thought how gallantly he was fulfilling her behest.
Before he said good-night to Francie, Christopher had learned a good deal that he did not know before. He had heard how she and Mr. Whitty, paraphrased as “a friend of mine,” had got left behind on Bray Head, while the rest of the Sunday-school excursion was being bundled into the train, and how she and the friend had missed three trains, from causes not thoroughly explained, and how Mr. Lambert, who had gone there with her, just for the fun of the thing, had come back to look for them, and had found them having tea in the station refreshment room, and had been mad. He had heard also of her stay at Kingstown, and of how a certain Miss Carrie Jemmison—sister, as was explained, of another “friend”—was wont to wake her up early to go out bathing, by the simple expedient of pulling a string which hung out of the bedroom window over the hall door, and led thence to Miss Fitzpatrick’s couch, where it was fastened to her foot; in fact, by half-past ten o’clock, he had gathered a surprisingly accurate idea of Miss Fitzpatrick’s manner of life, and had secretly been a good deal taken aback by it.
He said to himself, as he smoked a final cigarette, that she must be a nice girl somehow not to have been more vulgar than she was, and she really must have a soul to be saved. There was something about her—some limpid quality—that kept her transparent and fresh like a running stream, and cool, too, he thought, with a grin and with a great deal of reflective stroking of Dinah’s apathetic head, as she lay on his uncomfortable lap trying to make the best of a bad business. He had not failed to notice the recurrence of Mr. Lambert’s name in these recitals, and was faintly surprised that he could not call to mind having heard Miss Fitzpatrick mentioned by that gentleman until just before her arrival in Lismoyle. Lambert was not usually reticent about the young ladies of his acquaintance, and from Francie’s own showing he must have known her very well indeed. He wondered how she came to be such a friend of his; Lambert was a first-rate man of business and all that, but there was nothing else first-rate about him that he could see. It showed the social poverty of the land that she should speak of him with confidence and even admiration; it was almost pathetic that she should know no better than to think Roddy Lambert a fine fellow. His thoughts wandered to the upset of the Daphne; what an ass Lambert had made of himself then. If she could know how remarkably near her friend, Mr. Lambert, had come to drowning her on that occasion, she would not, perhaps, have quoted him so largely as a final opinion upon all matters. No one blamed a man for not being able to swim, but the fact that he was a bad swimmer was no excuse for his losing his head and coming cursing and swearing and doing his best to drown everyone else.
Christopher let Dinah slip on to the floor, and threw the end of his cigarette out of the open window of his room. He listened to the sleepy quacking of a wildduck, and the far-away barking of the gate-house dog. The trees loomed darkly at the end of the garden; between them glimmered the pale ghost of the lake, streaked here and there with the long quivering reflections of the stars, and in and through the warm summer night, the darting flight of the bats wove a phantom net before his eyes. The Grieg music still throbbed an untiring measure in his head, and the thought of Lambert gave way to more accustomed meditations. He had leaned his elbows on the sill, and did not move till some time afterwards, when a bat brushed his face with her wings in an attempt to get into the lighted room. Then he got up and yawned a rather dreary yawn.
“Well, the world’s a very pretty place,” he said to himself; “it’s a pity it doesn’t seem to meet all the requirements of the situation.”
He was still young enough to forget at times the conventionality of cynicism.
* * *
CHAPTER XX.
Lieutenant Gerald Hawkins surveyed his pink and newly shaven face above his white tie and glistening shirt-front with a smile of commendation. His moustache was looking its best, and showing most conspicuously. There was, at least, that advantage in a complexion that burned red, he thought to himself, that it made a fair moustache tell. In his button-hole was a yellow rose, given him by Mrs. Gascogne on condition, as she said (metaphorically it is to be presumed), that he “rubbed it well into Lady Dysart” that she had no blossom to equal it in shape and beauty. A gorgeous red silk sachet with his initials embroidered in gold upon it lay on the table, and as he took a handkerchief out of it his eye fell on an open letter that had lain partially hidden beneath one side of the sachet. His face fell perceptibly; taking it up he looked through it quickly, a petulant wrinkle appearing between his light eyebrows.
“Hang it! She ought to know I can’t get any leave now before the Twelfth, and then I’m booked to Glencairn. It’s all rot going on like this—” He took the letter in both hands as if to tear it up, but changing his mind, stuffed it in among the pocket handkerchiefs, and hurried downstairs in response to a shout from below. His polo-cart was at the door, and in it sat Captain Cursiter, wearing an expression of dismal patience that scarcely warranted Mr. Hawkins’ first remark.
“Well, you seem to be in a good deal of a hurry, old chap. Is it y
our dinner or is it Hope-Drummond?”
“When I’m asked to dinner at eight, I like to get there before half-past,” replied Cursiter sourly; “and when you’re old enough to have sense you will too.”
Mr. Hawkins drove at full pace out of the barrack gates before he replied, “It’s all very fine for you to talk as if you were a thousand, Snipey, but, by George! we’re all getting on a bit.” His ingenuous brow clouded under the peak of his cap, and his thoughts reverted to the letter that he had thrust into the sachet. “I’ve been pretty young at times, I admit, but that’s the sort of thing that makes you a lot older afterwards.”
“Good thing, too,” put in Cursiter unsympathetically.
“Yes, by Jove!” continued Mr. Hawkins; “I’ve often said I’d take a pull, and somehow it never came off, but I’m dashed if I’m not going to do it this time.”
Captain Cursiter held his peace, and waited for the confidence that experience had told him would inevitably follow. It did not come quite in the shape in which he had expected it.
“I suppose there isn’t the remotest chance of my getting any leave now, is there?”
“No, not the faintest; especially as you want to go away for the Twelfth.”
“Yes, I’m bound to go then,” acknowledged Mr. Hawkins with a sigh not unmixed with relief; “I suppose I’ve just got to stay here.”
The Real Charlotte Page 17