The real Charlotte had seldom been nearer the surface than at this moment; and Mrs. Lambert cowered before the manifestation.
“You’re very unkind to me, Charlotte,” she said in a voice that was tremulous with fright and anger; “I wonder at you, that you could say such things to me about my own husband.”
“Well, perhaps you’d rather I said it to you now in confidence than that every soul in Lismoyle should be prating and talking about it, as they will be if ye don’t put down yer foot, and tell Roddy he’s making a fool of himself!”
Mrs. Lambert remained stunned for a few seconds at the bare idea of putting down her foot where Roderick was concerned, or of even insinuating that that supreme being could make a fool of himself, and then her eyes filled with tears of mortification.
“He is not making a fool of himself, Charlotte,” she said, endeavouring to pluck up spirit, “and you’ve no right to say anything of the kind. You might have more respect for your family than to be trying to raise scandal this way, and upsetting me, and I not able for it!”
Charlotte looked at her, and kept back with an effort the torrent of bullying fury that was seething in her. She had no objection to upsetting Mrs. Lambert, but she preferred that hysterics should be deferred until she had established her point. Why she wished to establish it she did not explain to herself, but her restless jealousy, combined with her intolerance of the Fool’s Paradise in which Mrs. Lambert had entrenched herself, made it impossible for her to leave the subject alone.
“I think ye know it’s not my habit to raise scandal, Lucy, and I’m not one to make an assertion without adequate grounds for it,” she said in her strong, acrid voice; “as I said before, this flirtation is an old story. I have my own reasons for knowing that there was more going on than anyone suspected, from the time she was in short frocks till she came down here, and now, if she hadn’t another affair on hand, she’d have the whole country in a blaze about it. Why, d’ye know that habit she wears? It was your husband paid for that!”
She emphasised each word between her closed teeth, and her large face was so close to Mrs. Lambert’s, by the time she had finished speaking, that the latter shrank back.
“I don’t believe you, Charlotte,” she said with trembling lips; how do you know it?”
Charlotte had no intention of telling that her source of information had been the contents of a writingcase of Francie’s, an absurd receptacle for photographs and letters that bore the word “Papeterie” on its greasy covers, and had a lock bearing a family resemblance to the lock of Miss Mullen’s work-box. But a cross-examination by the turkey-hen was easily evaded.
“Never you mind how I know it. It’s true.” Then, with a connection of ideas that she would have taken more pains to conceal in dealing with anyone else, “Did ye ever see any of the letters she wrote to him when she was in Dublin?”
“No, Charlotte; I’m not in the habit of looking at my husband’s letters. I think the tea is drawn,” she continued, making a last struggle to maintain her position, “and I’d be glad to hear no more on the subject.” She took the cosy off the tea-pot, and began to pour out the tea, but her hands were shaking, and Charlotte’s eye made her nervous. “Oh, I’m very tired—I’m too long without my tea. Oh, Charlotte, why do you annoy me this way when you know it’s so bad for me!” She put down the teapot, and covered her face with her hands. “Is it me own dear husband that you say such things of? Oh, it couldn’t be true, and he always so kind to me, indeed, it isn’t true, Charlotte,” she protested piteously between her sobs.
“Me dear Lucy,” said Charlotte, laying her broad hand on Mrs. Lambert’s knee, “I wish I could say it wasn’t, though of course the wisest of us is liable to error. Come now!” she said, as if struck by a new idea. “I’ll tell ye how we could settle the matter! It’s a way you won’t like, and it’s a way I don’t like either, but I solemnly think you owe it to yourself, and to your position as a wife. Will you let me say it to you?”
“Oh, you may, Charlotte, you may,” said Mrs. Lambert tearfully.
“Well, my advice to you is this, to see what old letters of hers he has, and ye’ll be able to judge for yourself what the truth of the case is. If there’s no harm in them I’ll be only too ready to congratulate ye on proving me in the wrong, and if there is, why, ye’ll know what course to pursue.”
“Is it look at Roddy’s letters?” cried Mrs. Lambert, emerging from her handkerchief with a stare of horror; “he’d kill me if he thought I looked at them!”
“Ah, nonsense, woman, he’ll never know you looked at them,” said Charlotte, scanning the room quickly; “is it in his study he keeps his private letters?”
“No, I think it’s in his old despatch-box up on the shelf there,” answered Mrs. Lambert, a little taken with the idea, in spite of her scruples.
“Then ye’re done,” said Charlotte, looking up at the despatch-box in its absolute security of Bramah lock; “of course he has his keys with him always.”
“Well then, d’ye know,” said Mrs. Lambert hesitatingly, “I think I heard his keys jingling in the pocket of the coat he took off him before he went out, and I didn’t notice him taking them out of it—but, oh, my dear, I wouldn’t dare to open any of his things. I might as well quit the house if he found it out.”
“I tell you it’s your privilege as a wife, and your plain duty besides, to see those letters,” urged Charlotte, “I’d recommend you to go up and get those keys now, this minute; it’s like the hand of Providence that he should leave them behind him.”
The force of her will had its effect. Mrs. Lambert got up, and, after another declaration that Roderick would kill her, went out of the room and up the stairs at a pace that Charlotte did not think her capable of. She heard her step hurrying into the room overhead, and in a surprisingly short time she was back again, uttering pants of exhaustion and alarm, but holding the keys in her hand.
“Oh,” she said, “I thought every minute I heard him coming to the door! Here they are for you, Charlotte, take them! I’ll not have anything more to say to them.”
She flung the keys into Miss Mullen’s lap, and prepared to sink into her chair again. Charlotte jumped up, and the keys rattled on to the floor.
“And d’ye think I’d lay a finger on them?” she said, in such a voice that Mrs. Lambert checked herself in the action of sitting down, and Muffy fled under his mistress’s chair and barked in angry alarm. “Pick them up yourself! It’s no affair of mine!” She pointed with a fateful finger at the keys, and Mrs. Lambert obediently stooped for them. “Now, there’s the desk, ye’d better not lose any more time, but get it down.”
The shelf on which the desk stood was the highest one of a small book-case, and was just above the level of Mrs. Lambert’s head, so that when, after many a frightened look out of the window, she stretched up her short arms to take it down, she found the task almost beyond her.
“Come and help me, Charlotte,” she cried; “I’m afraid it’ll fall on me!”
“I’ll not put a hand to it,” said Charlotte, without moving, while her ugly, mobile face twitched with excitement; “it’s you have the right and no one else, and I’d recommend ye to hurry!”
The word hurry acted electrically on Mrs. Lambert; she put forth all her feeble strength, and lifting the heavy despatch-box from the shelf, she staggered with it to the dinner-table.
“Oh, it’s the weight of the house!” she gasped, collapsing on to a chair beside it.
“Here, open it now quickly, and we’ll talk about the weight of it afterwards,” said Charlotte so imperiously that Mrs. Lambert, moved by a power that was scarcely her own, fumbled through the bunch for the key.
“There it is! Don’t you see the Brahmah key?” exclaimed Charlotte, hardly repressing the inclination to call her friend a fool and to snatch the bunch from her; “press it in hard now, or ye’ll not get it to turn.”
If the lock had not been an easy one, it is probable that Mrs. Lambert’s helple
ss fingers would never have turned the key, but it yielded to the first touch, and she lifted the lid. Charlotte craned over her shoulder with eyes that ravened on the contents of the box.
“No, there’s nothing there,” she said, taking in with one look the papers that lay in the tray; “lift up the tray!”
Mrs. Lambert, now past remonstrance, did as she was bid, and some bundles of letters and a few photographs were brought to light.
“Show the photographs!” said Charlotte in one fierce breath.
But here Mrs. Lambert’s courage failed. “Oh, I can’t, don’t ask me!” she wailed, clasping her hands on her bosom, with a terror of some irrevocable truth that might await her adding itself to the fear of discovery.
Charlotte caught one of her hands, and, with a guttural sound of contempt, forced it down on to the photograph.
“Show it to me!”
Her victim took up the photographs, and, turning them round, revealed two old pictures of Lambert in riding clothes, with Francie beside him in a very badly made habit and with her hair down her back.
“What d’ye think of that?” said Charlotte. She was gripping Mrs. Lambert’s sloping shoulder, and her breath was coming hard and short. “Now, get out her letters. There they are in the corner!”
“Ah, she’s only a child in that picture,” said Mrs. Lambert in a tone of relief, as she hurriedly put the photographs back.
“Open the letters and ye’ll see what sort of a child she was.”
Mrs. Lambert made no further demur. She took out the bundle that Charlotte pointed to, and drew the top one from its retaining india-rubber strap. Even in affairs of the heart Mr. Lambert was a tidy man.
“My dear Mr. Lambert,” she read aloud, in a deprecating, tearful voice that was more than ever like the quivering chirrup of a turkey-hen, “the cake was scrumptious, all the girls were after me for a bit of it, and asking where I got it, but I wouldn’t tell. I put it under my pillow three nights, but all I dreamt of was Uncle Robert walking round and round Stephen’s Green in his night-cap. You must have had a grand wedding. Why didn’t you ask me there to dance at it? So now no more from your affectionate friend, F. Fitzpatrick.”
Mrs. Lambert leaned back, and her hands fell into her lap.
“Well, thank God there’s no harm in that, Charlotte,” she said, closing her eyes with a sigh that might have been relief, though her voice sounded a little dreamy and bewildered.
“Ah, you began at the wrong end,” said Charlotte, little attentive to either sigh or tone, “that was written five years ago. Here, what’s in this?” She indicated the one lowest in the packet.
Mrs. Lambert opened her eyes.
“The drops!” she said with sudden energy, “on the side-board—oh, save me—!”
Her voice fainted away, her eyes closed, and her head fell limply on to her shoulder. Charlotte sprang instinctively towards the side-board, but suddenly stopped and looked from Mrs. Lambert to the bundle of letters. She caught it up, and plucking out a couple of the most recent, read them through with astonishing speed. She was going to take out another when a slight movement from her companion made her throw them down.
Mrs. Lambert was slipping off the high dining-room chair on which she was sitting, and there was a look about her mouth that Charlotte had never seen there before. Charlotte had her arm under her in a moment, and, letting her slip quietly down, laid her flat on the floor. Through the keen and crowding contingencies of the moment came a sound from outside, a well-known voice calling and whistling to a dog, and in the same instant Charlotte had left Mrs. Lambert and was deftly and swiftly replacing letters and photographs in the despatch-box. She closed the lid noiselessly, put it back on its shelf with scarcely an effort, and after a second of uncertainty, slipped the keys into Mrs. Lambert’s pocket. She knew that Lambert would never guess at his wife’s one breach of faith. Then, with a quickness almost incredible in a woman of her build, she got the drops from the sideboard, poured them out, and, on her way back to the inert figure on the floor, rang the bell violently. Muffy had crept from under the table to snuff with uncanny curiosity at his mistress’s livid face, and as Charlotte approached, he put his tail between his legs and yapped shrilly at her.
“Get out, ye damned cur!” she exclaimed, the coarse, superstitious side of her nature coming uppermost now that the absorbing stress of those acts of self-preservation was over. Her big foot lifted the dog and sent him flying across the room, and she dropped on her knees beside the motionless, tumbled figure on the floor. “She’s dead! she’s dead!” she cried out, and as if in protest against her own words she flung water upon the unresisting face, and tried to force the drops between the closed teeth. But the face never altered; it only acquired momentarily the immovable placidity of death, that asserted itself in silence, and gave the feeble features a supreme dignity, in spite of the thin dabbled fringe and the gold ear-rings and brooch, that were instinct with the vulgarities of life.
* * *
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Few possessed of any degree of imagination can turn their backs on a churchyard, after having witnessed there the shovelling upon and stamping down of the last poor refuge of that which all feel to be superfluous, a mere fragment of the inevitable débris of life, without a clinging hope that in some way or other the process may be avoided for themselves. In spite of philosophy, the body will not picture its surrender to the sordid thraldom of the undertaker and the mastery of the spade, and preferably sees itself falling through cold miles of water to some vague resting-place below the tides, or wedged beyond search in the grip of an ice crack, or swept as grey ash into a cinerary urn; anything rather than the prisoning coffin and blind weight of earth. So Christopher thought impatiently, as he drove back to Bruff from Mrs. Lambert’s funeral, in the dismal solemnity of black clothes and a brougham, while the distant rattle of a reaping-machine was like a voice full of the health and energy of life, that talked on of harvest, and would not hear of graves.
That the commonplace gloom of a funeral should have plunged his general ideas into despondency is, however, too much to believe of even such a supersensitive mind as Christopher’s. It gave a darker wash of colour to what was already clouded, and probably it was its trite, terrific sneer at human desire and human convention that deadened his heart from time to time with fatalistic suggestion; but it was with lesser facts than these that he strove. Miss Mullen depositing hysterically a wreath upon her friend’s coffin, in the acute moment of lowering it into the grave; Miss Mullen sitting hysterically beside him in the carriage as he drove her back to Tally Ho in the eyes of all men; Miss Mullen lying, still hysterical, on her drawing-room sofa, holding in her black-gloved hand a tumbler of sal volatile and water, and eventually commanding her emotion sufficiently to ask him to bring her, that afternoon, a few books and papers, to quiet her nerves, and to rob of its weariness the bad night that would inevitably be her portion.
It was opposite these views, which, as far as tears went, might well be called dissolving, that his mind chiefly took its stand, in unutterable repugnance, and faint endeavour to be blind to his own convictions. He was being chased. Now that he knew it he wondered how he could ever have been unaware of it; it was palpable to anyone, and he felt in advance what it would be like to hear the exultant winding of the huntsman’s horn, if the quarry were overtaken. The position was intolerable from every rational point of view; Christopher with his lethargic scorn of social tyrannies and stale maxims of class, could hardly have believed that he was sensible of so many of these points, and despised himself accordingly. Julia Duffy’s hoarse voice still tormented his ear in involuntary spasms of recollection, keeping constantly before him the thought of the afternoon of four days ago, when he and Francie had been informed of the destiny allotted to them. The formless and unquestioned dream through which he had glided had then been broken up, like some sleeping stretch of river when the jaws of the dredger are dashed into it, and the mud is dragged to light, and the soi
led waves carry the outrage onward in ceaseless escape. Nothing now could place him where he had been before, nor could he wish to regain that purposeless content. It was better to look things in the face at last, and see where they were going to end. It was better to know himself to be Charlotte’s prize than to give up Francie.
This was what it meant, he said to himself, while he changed his funereal garb, and tried to get into step with the interrupted march of the morning. The alternative had been with him for four days, and now, while he wrote his letters, and sat at luncheon, and collected the books that were to interpose between Miss Mullen and her grief, the choice became more despotic than ever, in spite of the antagonism that met it in every surrounding. All the chivalry that smouldered under the modern malady of exhausted enthusiasm ranged itself on Francie’s side; all the poetry in which he had steeped his mind, all his own poetic fancy, combined to blind him to many things that he would otherwise have seen. He acquited her of any share in her cousin’s coarse scheming with a passionateness that in itself testified to the terror lest it might be true. He had idealised her to the pitch that might have been expected, and clothed her with his own refinement, as with a garment, so that it was her position that hurt him most, her embarrassment that shamed him beyond his own.
Christopher’s character is easier to feel than to describe; so conscious of its own weakness as to be almost incapable of confident effort, and with a soul so humble and straightforward that it did know its own strength and simplicity. Some dim understanding of him must have reached Francie, with her ignorant sentimentalities and her Dublin brogue; and as a sea-weed stretches vague arms up towards the light through the conflict of the tides, her pliant soul rose through its inherited vulgarities, and gained some vision of higher things. Christopher could not know how unparalleled a person he was in her existence, of how wholly unknown a type. Hawkins and he had been stars of unimagined magnitude; but though she had attained to the former’s sphere with scarcely an effort, Christopher remained infinitely remote. She could scarcely have believed that as he drove from Bruff in the quiet sunshine of the afternoon, and surmounted the hill near its gate, the magic that she herself had newly learned about was working its will with him.
The Real Charlotte Page 27