The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “So you wouldn’t dance with me last night,” he said, as if he were speaking to a child; “wasn’t that very unkind of you?”

  “No it was not,” she replied, without looking at him.

  “Well, I think it was,” he said, lightly touching the hand that held the novel.

  Francie took her hand sharply away.

  “I think you are being very unkind now,” he continued; “aren’t you even going to look at me?”

  “Oh yes, I’ll look at you if you like,” she said, turning upon him in a kind of desperation; “it doesn’t do me much harm, and I don’t suppose it does you much good.”

  The cool, indifferent manner that she had intended to assume was already too difficult for her, and she sought a momentary refuge in rudeness. He showed all the white teeth, that were his best point, in a smile that was patronisingly free from resentment.

  “Why, what’s the matter with her?” he said caressingly. “I believe I know what it’s all about. She’s been catching it about that day in the launch! Isn’t that it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Hawkins,” said Francie, with an indifferent attempt at hauteur; “but since you’re so clever at guessing things I suppose there’s no need of me telling you.”

  Hawkins came closer to her, and forcibly took possession of her hands. “What’s the matter with you?” he said in a low voice; “why are you angry with me? Don’t you know I love you?” The unexpected element of uncertainty sharpened the edge of his feelings and gave his voice an earnestness that was foreign to it.

  Francie started visibly; “No, I know you don’t,” she said, facing him suddenly, like some trapped creature; “I know you’re in love with somebody else!”

  His eyes flinched as though a light had been flashed in them. “What do you mean?” he said quickly, while a rush of blood darkened his face to the roots of his yellow hair, and made the veins stand out on his forehead; “who told you that?”

  “It doesn’t matter who told me,” she said, with a miserable satisfaction that her bolt had sped home; “but I know it’s true.”

  “I give you my honour it’s not!” he said passionately; “you might have known better than to believe it.”

  “Oh yes, I might,” she said with all the scorn she was master of; “but I think it ‘twas as good for me I didn’t.” Her voice collapsed at the end of the sentence, and the dry sob that rose in her throat almost choked her. She stood up and turned her face away to hide the angry tears that in spite of herself had sprung to her eyes.

  Hawkins caught her hand again and held it tightly. “I know what it is. I suppose they’ve been telling you of that time I was in Limerick; and that was all rot from beginning to end; anyone could tell you that.”

  “It’s not that; I heard all about that—”

  Hawkins jumped up. “I don’t care what you heard,” he said violently. “Don’t turn your head away from me like that, I won’t have it—I know that you care about me, and I know that I shouldn’t care if everyone in the world was dead, so long as you were here.” His arm was round her, but she shook herself free.

  “What about Miss Coppard?” she said; “what about being married before Christmas?”

  For a moment Hawkins could find no words to say, “So you’ve got hold of that, have you?” he said, after some seconds of silence that seemed endless to Francie. “And do you think that will come between us?”

  “Of course it must come between us,” she said in a stifled voice; “and you knew that all through.”

  Mr. Hawkins’ engagement was a painful necessity about which he affaired himself as little as possible. He recognised it as a certain and not disagreeable road to paying his debts, which might with good luck be prolonged till he got his company, and, latterly, it had fallen more than ever into the background. That it should interfere with his amusements in any way made it an impertinence of a wholly intolerable kind.

  “It shall not come between us!” he burst out; “I don’t care what happens, I won’t give you up! I give you my honour I never cared twopence about her—I’ve never thought of her since I first saw you— I’ve thought of no one but you.”

  His hot, stammering words were like music to her; but that staunchness of soul that was her redeeming quality still urged her to opposition.

  “It’s no good your going on like this. You know you’re going to marry her. Let me go.”

  But Mr. Hawkins was not in the habit of being baulked of anything on which he had set his heart.

  “No, I will not let you go,” he said, drawing her towards him with bullying tenderness. “In the first place, you’re not able to stand, and in the second place, I’m not going to marry anybody but you.”

  He spoke with a certainty that convinced himself; the certainty of a character that does not count the cost either for itself or for others; and, in the space of a kiss, her distrust was left far behind her as a despicable thing.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  Nearly three weeks had gone by since Mrs. Beattie’s party, and as Charlotte Mullen walked slowly along the road towards Rosemount one afternoon, her eyes fixed on the square toes of her boots, and her hands, as was her custom, in the pockets of her black jacket, she meditated agreeably upon recent events. Of these perhaps the pleasantest was Mr. Hawkins’ departure to Hythe, for a musketry course, which had taken place somewhat unexpectedly a fortnight ago. He was a good-for-nothing young limb, and engagement or no engagement it was a good job he was out of the place; and, after all, Francie had not seemed to mind. Almost equally satisfactory was the recollection of that facetious letter to Christopher Dysart, in which she had so playfully reminded him of the ancient promise to photograph the Tally Ho cats, and hoped that she and her cousin would not come under that category. Its success had even been surprising, for not only had Christopher come and spent a long afternoon in that difficult enterprise, but had come again more than once, on pretexts that had appeared to Charlotte satisfactorily flimsy, and had apparently set aside what she knew to be his repugnance to herself. That he should lend Francie “John Inglesant” and Rosetti’s Poems, made Charlotte laugh in her sleeve. She had her own very sound opinion of her cousin’s literary capacity, and had no sympathy for the scientific interest felt by a philosopher in the evolution of a nascent soul. Christopher’s manner did not, it is true, coincide with her theory of a lover, which was crude, and founded on taste rather than experience, but she had imagination enough to recognise that Christopher, in love-making, as in most other things, would pursue methods unknown to her.

  At this point in her reflections, congratulation began to wane. She thought she knew every twist and turn in Roddy Lambert, but lately she had not been able to explain him at all to her satisfaction. He was always coming to Tally Ho, and he always seemed in a bad temper when he was there; in fact she had never known him as ill-mannered as he was last week, one day when he and Christopher were there together, and she had tried, for various excellent reasons, to get him off into the dining-room to talk business. She couldn’t honestly say that Francie was running after him, though of course she had that nasty flirty way with every man, old or young, married or single; but all the same, there was something in it she didn’t like. The girl was more trouble than she was worth; and if it wasn’t for Christopher Dysart she’d have sent her packing back to Letitia Fitzpatrick, and told her that whether she could manage it or not she must keep her. But of course to have Sir Christopher Dysart of Bruff—she rolled the title on her tongue—as a cousin was worthy of patience.

  As she walked up the trim Rosemount avenue she spied the owner of the house lying in a basket-chair in the shade, with a pipe in his mouth, and in his hand that journal politely described by Mrs. Rattray as “the pink one.”

  “Hallo, Charlotte!” he said lazily, glancing up at her from under the peak of his cap, “you look warm.”

  “And you look what you are, and that’s cool, in manners and body,” retorted M
iss Mullen, coming and standing beside him, “and if you had tramped on your four bones through the dust, maybe you’d be as hot as I am.”

  “What do you wear that thick coat for?” he said, looking at it with a disfavour that he took no trouble to hide.

  Charlotte became rather red. She had the Irish peasant-woman’s love of heavy clothing and dislike of abating any item of it in summer.

  “If you had my tendency to bronchitis, me fine fellow,” she said, seating herself on the uncomfortable garden bench beside which his chair had been placed, “you’d think more of your health than your appearance.”

  “Very likely,” said Mr. Lambert, yawning and relapsing into silence.

  “Well, Roddy,” resumed Charlotte more amicably, “I didn’t walk all the way here to discuss the fashions with you. Have y’any more news from the seat of war?”

  “No; confound her, she won’t stir, and I don’t see what’s going to make her unless I evict her.”

  “Why don’t ye writ her for the money?” said Charlotte, the spirit of her attorney grandfather gleaming in her eyes; “that’d frighten her!”

  “I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I spoke o her about the lodge that Lady Dysart said she could have, and the old devil was fit to be tied; but we might get her to it before we’ve done with her.”

  “If it was me I’d writ her now,” repeated Charlotte venomously; “you’ll find you’ll have to come to it in the end.”

  “It’s a sin to see that lovely pasture going to waste,” said Lambert, leaning back and puffing at his pipe. “Peter Joyce hasn’t six head of cattle on it this minute.”

  “If you and I had it, Roddy,” said Charlotte, eyeing him with a curious, guarded tenderness, “it wouldn’t be that way.”

  Some vibration of the strong, incongruous tremor that passed through her as she spoke, reached Lambert’s indolent perception and startled it. It reminded him of the nebulous understanding that taking her money seemed to have involved him in; he believed he knew why she had given it to him, and though he knew also that he held his advantage upon precarious terms, even his coarse-fibred nature found something repellent in the thought of having to diplomatise with such affections as Charlotte’s.

  “I was up at Murphy’s yesterday,” he said, as if his train of ideas had not been interrupted. “He has a grand filly there that I’d buy to-morrow if I had the money, or any place to put her. There’s a pot of money in her.”

  “Well, if you’ll get me Gurthnamuckla,” said Charlotte with a laugh, in which nervousness was strangely apparent, “you may buy up every young horse in the country and stable them in the parlour, so long as you’ll leave the attics for me and the cats.”

  Lambert turned his head upon its cushion, and looked at her.

  “I think I’ll leave you a little more space than that, Charlotte, if ever we stable our horses together.”

  She glanced at him, as aware of the double entendre, and as stirred by it as he had intended her to be. Perhaps a little more than he had intended; at all events, he jerked himself into a sitting position, and, getting on to his feet, stretched himself with almost ostentatious ease.

  “Where’s Francie?” he asked, yawning.

  “At home, dressmaking,” replied Miss Mullen. She was a little paler than usual. “I think I’ll go in now and have a cup of tea with Lucy,” she said, rising from the garden bench with something like an effort.

  “Well, I daresay I’ll take the mare down to Tally Ho, and make Francie go for a ride,” said Lambert; “it’s a pity for anyone to be stewing in the house on a day like this.”

  “I wanted her to come here with me, but she wouldn’t,” Charlotte called after him as he turned towards the path that led to the stables. “Maybe she thought there might be metal more attractive for her at home!”

  She grinned to herself as she went up the steps. “Me gentleman may put that in his pipe and smoke it!” she thought; “that little hussy would let him think it was for him she was sitting at home!”

  Ever since Mrs. Lambert’s first entrance into Lismoyle society, she had found in Charlotte her most intimate and reliable ally. If Mr. Lambert had been at all uneasy as to his bride’s reception by Miss Mullen, he must have been agreeably surprised to find that after a month or so Charlotte had become as useful and pleasant to Mrs. Lambert as in older days she had been to him. That Charlotte should have recognised the paramount necessity of his marrying money, had been to Lambert a proof of her eminent common sense. He had always been careful to impress his obvious destiny upon her, and he had always been grateful to that destiny for having harmlessly fulfilled itself, while yet old Mrs. Mullen’s money was in her own keeping, and her niece was, beyond all question, ineligible. That was Mr. Lambert’s view of the situation; whatever Charlotte’s opinion was, she kept it to herself.

  Mrs. Lambert was more than usually delighted to see her ever-sympathising friend on this hot afternoon. One of her chiefest merits in the turkey-hen’s eyes was that she “was as good as any doctor, and twice better than Dr. Rattray, who would never believe the half she went through with palpitations, and buzzings in her ears and roarings in her head,” and the first half hour or so of her visit was consumed in minute detail of her more recent symptoms. The fact that large numbers of women entertain their visitors with biographies, mainly abusive, of their servants, has been dwelt on to weariness by many writers; but, nevertheless, in no history of Mrs. Lambert could this characteristic be conscientiously omitted.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said, as her second cup of sweet weak tea was entered upon, “you know that Eliza Hackett, that I got with the highest recommendations from the Honourable Miss Carrick, and thinking she’d be so steady, being a Protestant? Well, last Sunday she went to mass!” She paused, and Charlotte, one of whose most genuine feelings was a detestation of Roman Catholics, exclaimed:

  “Goodness alive! what did you let her do that for?”

  “How could I stop her?” answered Mrs. Lambert plaintively, “she never told one in the house she was going, and this morning, when I was looking at the meat with her in the larder, I took the opportunity to speak to her about it. ‘Oh,’ says she, turning round as cool as you please, ‘I consider the Irish Church hasn’t the Apostolic succession!’”

  “You don’t tell me that fat-faced Eliza Hackett said that?” ejaculated Charlotte.

  “She did, indeed,” replied Mrs. Lambert deplorably; “I was quite upset. ‘Eliza,’ says I, ‘I wonder you have the impudence to talk to me like that. You that was taught better by the Honourable Miss Carrick.’ ‘Ma’am,’ says she, up to my face, ‘Moses and Aaron was two holy Roman Catholic priests, and that’s more than you can say of the archdeacon!’ ‘Indeed, no,’ says I, ‘thank God he’s not!’ but I ask you, Charlotte, what could I say to a woman like that, that would wrest the Scriptures to her own purposes?”

  Even Charlotte’s strong brain reeled in the attempt to follow the arguments of Eliza the cook and Mrs. Lambert,

  “Well, upon my word, Lucy, it’s little I’d have argued with her. I’d have just said to her, ‘Out of my house you march, if you don’t go to your church!’ I think that would have composed her religious scruples.”

  “Oh! but, Charlotte,” pleaded the turkey-hen, “I couldn’t part her; she knows just what gentlemen like, and Roderick’s so particular about savouries. When I told him about her, he said he wouldn’t care if she was a Mormon and had a dozen husbands, so long as she made good soup.”

  Charlotte laughed out loud. Mr. Lambert’s turn of humour had a robustness about it that always roused a sympathetic chord in her.

  “Well, that’s a man all over! His stomach before anyone else’s soul!”

  “Oh, Charlotte, you shouldn’t say such things! Indeed, Roderick will often take only the one cut of meat at his dinner these times, and if it isn’t to his liking he’ll take nothing; he’s a great epicure. I don’t know what’s over him those last few weeks,” continued Mrs. Lambert gloomily,
“unless it’s the hot weather, and all the exercise he’s taking that’s making him cross.”

  “Well, from all I’ve ever seen of men,” said Charlotte, with a laugh, “the hotter they get the better pleased they are. Take my word for it, there’s no time a man’s so proud of himself as when he’s ‘larding the lean earth!’”

  Mrs. Lambert looked bewildered, but was too much affaired with her own thoughts to ask for an explanation of what seemed to her a strange term in cookery.

  “Did he know Francie Fitzpatrick much in Dublin?” she said after a pause, in which she had given a saucerful of cream and sopped cake to her dog.

  Charlotte looked at her hostess suddenly and searchingly as she stooped with difficulty to take up the saucer.

  “He’s known her since she was a child,” she replied, and waited for further developments.

  “I thought it must be that way,” said Mrs. Lambert, with a dissatisfied sound in her voice; “they’re so very familiar-like talking to each other.”

  Charlotte’s heart paused for an instant in its strong, regular course. Was it possible, she thought, that wisdom was being perfected in the mouth of Lucy Lambert?

  “I never noticed anything so wonderfully familiar,” she said, in a tone meant to provoke further confidence; “I never knew Roddy yet that he wasn’t civil to a pretty girl; and as for Francie, any man comes handy to her! Upon my word, she’d dote on a tongs, as they say!”

  Mrs. Lambert fidgeted nervously with her long gold watch chain. “Well, Charlotte,” she said, a little defiantly, “I’ve been married to him five years now, and I’ve never known him particular with any girl.”