The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  The corn that had stood high between him and Francie that day when he had ridden back to look after her, was bound in sheaves on the yellow upland, and the foolish omen set his pulses going. If she were now passing along that other road there would be nothing between him and her. He had got past the stage of reason, even his power of mocking at himself was dead, or perhaps it was that there seemed no longer anything that could be mocked at. In spite of his knowledge of the world the position had an aspect that was so serious and beautiful as to overpower the others, and to become one of the mysteries of life into which he had thought himself too cheap and shallow to enter. A few weeks ago a visit to Tally Ho would have been a penance and a weariness of the flesh, a thing to be groaned over with Pamela, and endured only for the sake of collecting some new pearl of rhetoric from Miss Mullen. Now each thought of it brought again the enervating thrill, the almost sickening feeling of subdued excitement and expectation.

  It was the Lismoyle market-day, and Christopher made his way slowly along the street, squeezing between carts and barrels, separating groups locked together in the extremity of bargaining, and doing what in him lay to avoid running over the old women, who, blinded by their overhanging hoods and deaf by nature, paraded the centre of the thoroughfare with a fine obliviousness of dog-carts and their drivers. Most of the better class of shops had their shutters up in recognition of the fact that Mrs. Lambert, a customer whom neither co-operative stores or eighteenpenny teas had been able to turn from her allegiance, had this morning passed their doors for the last time, in slow incongruous pomp, her silver-mounted coffin commanding all eyes as the glass-sided hearse moved along with its quivering bunches of black plumes. The funeral was still a succulent topic in the gabble of the market; Christopher heard here and there such snatches of it as:

  “Rest her sowl, the crayture! ‘Tis she was the good wife, and more than all, she was the beautiful housekeeper!”

  “Is it he lonesome afther her? No, nor if he berrid ten like her.”

  “She was a spent little woman always, and ‘tis she that doted down on him.”

  “And ne’er a child left afther her! Well, she must be exshcused.”

  “Musha, I’d love her bones!” shouted Nance the Fool, well aware of the auditor in the dog-cart, “there wasn’t one like her in the nation, nor in the world, no, nor in the town o’ Galway!”

  Towards the end of the street, at the corner of a lane leading to the quay, something like a fight was going on, and, as he approached, Christopher saw, over the heads of an admiring audience, the infuriated countenance of a Lismoyle beggar-woman, one of the many who occasionally legalised their existence by selling fish, between long bouts of mendicancy and drunkenness. Mary Norris was apparently giving what she would call the length and breadth of her tongue to some customer who had cast doubts upon the character of her fish, a customer who was for the moment quiescent, and hidden behind the tall figure of her adversary.

  “Whoever says thim throuts isn’t leppin’ fresh out o’the lake he’s a dom liar, and it’s little I think of tellin’ it t’ye up to yer nose! There’s not one in the counthry but knows yer thricks and yer chat, and ye may go home out o’ that, with yer bag sthrapped round ye, and ye can take the tay-laves and the dhrippin’ from the servants, and huxther thim to feed yer cats, but thanks be to God ye’ll take nothing out o’my basket this day!”

  There was a titter of horrified delight from the crowd.

  “Ye never spoke a truer word than that, Mary Norris,” replied a voice that sent a chill down Christopher’s back; “when I come into Lismoyle, it’s not to buy rotten fish from a drunken fish-fag, that’ll be begging for crusts at my hall-door to-morrow. If I hear another word out of yer mouth I’ll give you and your fish to the police, and the streets’ll be rid of you and yer infernal tongue for a week, at all events, and the prison’ll have a treat that it’s pretty well used to!”

  Another titter rewarded this sally, and Charlotte, well pleased, turned to walk away. As she did so, she caught sight of Christopher, looking at her with an expression from which he had not time to remove his emotions, and for a moment she wished that the earth would open and swallow her up. She reddened visibly, but recovered herself, and at once made her way out into the street towards him.

  “How are you again, Mr. Dysart? You just came in time to get a specimen of the res angusta domi,” she said, in a voice that contrasted almost ludicrously with her last utterances. “People like David, who talk about the advantages of poverty, have probably never tried buying fish in Lismoyle. It’s always the way with these drunken old hags. They repay your charity by impudence and bad language, and one has to speak pretty strongly to them to make one’s meaning penetrate to their minds.”

  Her eyes were still red and swollen from her violent crying at the funeral. But for them, Christopher could hardly have believed that this was the same being whom he had last seen on the sofa at Tally Ho, with the black gloves and the sal volatile.

  “Oh yes, of course,” he said vaguely; “everyone has to undergo Mary Norris some time or other. If you are going back to Tally Ho now, I can drive you there.”

  The invitation was lukewarm as it well could be, but had it been the most fervent in the world Charlotte had no intention of accepting it.

  “No thank you, Mr. Dysart. I’m not done my marketing yet, but Francie’s at home and she’ll give you tea. Don’t wait for me. I’ve no appetite for anything to-day. I only came out to get a mouthful of fresh air, in hopes it might give me a better night, though, indeed, I’ve small chance of it after what I’ve gone through.”

  Christopher drove on, and tried not to think of Miss Mullen or of his mother or Pamela, while his too palpably discreet hostess elbowed her way through the crowd in the opposite direction.

  Francie was sitting in the drawing-room awaiting her visitor. She had been up very early making the wreath of white asters that Charlotte had laid on Mrs. Lambert’s coffin, and had shed some tears over the making of it, for the sake of the kindly little woman who had never been anything but good to her. She had spent a trying morning in ministering to Charlotte; after her early dinner she had dusted the drawing-room, and refilled the vases in a manner copied as nearly as possible from Pamela’s arrangement of flowers; and she was now feeling as tired as might reasonably have been expected. About Christopher she felt thoroughly disconcerted and out of conceit with herself. It was strange that she, like him, should least consider her own position when she thought about the things that Julia Duffy had said to them; her motive was very different, but it touched the same point. It was the effect upon Christopher that she ceaselessly pictured, that she longed to understand; whether or not he believed what he had heard, and whether, if he believed, he would ever be the same to her. His desertion would have been much less surprising than his allegiance, but she would have felt it very keenly, with the same aching resignation with which we bear one of nature’s acts of violence. When she met him this morning her embarrassment had taken the simple form of distance and avoidance, and a feeling that she could never show him plainly enough that she, at least, had no designs upon him; yet, through it all, she clung to the belief that he would not change towards her. It was burning humiliation to see Charlotte spread her nets in the sight of the bird, but it did not prevent her from dressing herself as becomingly as she could when the afternoon came, nor, so ample are the domains of sentiment, did some nervous expectancy in the spare minutes before Christopher arrived deter her from taking out of her pocket a letter worn by long sojourn there, and reading it with delaying and softened eyes.

  Her correspondence with Hawkins had been fraught with difficulties; in fact, it had been only by the aid of a judicious shilling and an old pair of boots bestowed on Louisa, that she had ensured to herself a first sight of the contents of the post-bag, before it was conveyed, according to custom, to Miss Mullen’s bedroom. Somehow since Mr. Hawkins had left Hythe and gone to Yorkshire the quantity and quality of his letters ha
d dwindled surprisingly. The three thick weekly budgets of sanguine anticipation and profuse endearments had languished into a sheet or two every ten days of affectionate retrospect in which less and less reference was made to breaking off his engagement with Miss Coppard, that trifling and summary act which was his ostensible mission in going to his fiancée’s house; and this, the last letter from him, had been merely a few lines of excuse for not having written before, ending with regret that his leave would be up in a fortnight, as he had had a ripping time on old Coppard’s moor, and the cubbing was just beginning, a remark which puzzled Francie a good deal, though its application was possibly clearer to her than the writer had meant it to be. Inside the letter was a photograph of himself, that had been done at Hythe, and was transferred by Francie from letter to letter, in order that it might never leave her personal keeping; and, turning from the barren trivialities over which she had been poring, Francie fell to studying the cheerful, unintellectual face therein portrayed above the trim glories of a mess jacket.

  She was still looking at it when she heard the expected wheels; she stuffed the letter back into her pocket, then, remembering the photograph, pulled the letter out again and put it into it. She was putting the letter away for the second time when Christopher came in, and in her guilty self-consciousness she felt that he must have noticed the action.

  “How did you get in so quickly?” she said, with a confusion that heightened the general effect of discovery.

  “Donovan was there and took the trap,” said Christopher, “and the hall door was open, so I came in.”

  He sat down, and neither seemed certain for a moment as to what to say next.

  “I didn’t really expect you to come, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie, the colour that the difficulty with the photograph had given her ebbing slowly away; “you have a right to be tired as well as us, and Charlotte being upset that way and all, made it awfully late before you got home I’m afraid.”

  “I met her a few minutes ago, and was glad to see that she was all right again,” said Christopher perfunctorily; “but certainly if I had been she, and had had any option in the matter, I should have stayed at home this morning.”

  Both felt the awkwardness of discussing Miss Mullen, but it seemed a shade less than the awkwardness of ignoring her.

  “She was such a friend of poor Mrs. Lambert’s,” said Francie; “and I declare,” she added, glad of even this trivial chance of showing herself antagonistic to Charlotte, “I think she delights in funerals.”

  “She has a peculiar way of showing her delight,” replied Christopher, with just enough ill-nature to make Francie feel that her antagonism was understood and sympathised with.

  Francie gave an irrepressible laugh. “I don’t think she minds crying before people. I wish everyone minded crying as little as she does.”

  Christopher looked at her, and thought he saw something about her eyes that told of tears.

  “Do you mind crying?” he said, lowering his voice, while more feeling escaped into his glance than he had intended; “it doesn’t seem natural that you should ever cry.”

  “You’re very inquisitive!” said Francie, the sparkle coming back to her eye in a moment; “why shouldn’t I cry if I choose?”

  “I should not like to think that you had anything to make you cry.”

  She looked quickly at him to see if his face were as sincere as his voice; her perceptions were fine enough to suggest that it would be typical of Christopher to show her by a special deference and friendliness that he was sorry for her, but now, as ever, she was unable to classify those delicate shades of manner and meaning that might have told her where his liking melted into love. She had been accustomed to see men as trees, walking beings about whose individuality of character she did not trouble herself; generally they made love to her, and, if they did not, she presumed that they did not care about her, and gave them no further attention. But this test did not seem satisfactory in Christopher’s case.

  “I know what everyone thinks of me,” she said, a heart truth welling to the surface as she felt herself pitied and comprehended; “no one believes I ever have any trouble about anything.”

  Christopher’s heart throbbed at the bitterness in a voice that he had always known so wholly careless and undisturbed; it increased his pity for her a thousandfold, but it stirred him with a strange and selfish pleasure to think that she had suffered. Whatever it was that was in her mind, it had given him a glimpse of that deeper part of her nature, so passionately guessed at, so long unfindable. He did not for an instant think of Hawkins, having explained away that episode to himself some time before in the light of his new reading of Francie’s character; it was Charlotte’s face as she confronted Mary Norris in the market that came to him, and the thought of what it must be to be under her roof and dependent on her. He saw now the full pain that Francie bore in hearing herself proclaimed as the lure by which he was to be captured, and that he should have brought her thus low roused a tenderness in him that would not be gainsaid.

  “I don’t think it,” he said, stammering; “you might believe that I think more about you than other people do. I know you feel things more than you let anyone see, and that makes it all the worse for anyone who—who is sorry for you, and wants to tell you so—”

  This halting statement, so remarkably different in diction from the leisurely sentences in which Christopher usually expressed himself, did not tend to put Francie more at her ease. She reddened slowly and painfully as his short-sighted, grey eyes rested upon her. Hawkins filled so prominent a place in her mind that Christopher’s ambiguous allusions seemed to be directed absolutely at him, and her hand instinctively slipped into her pocket and clasped the letter that was there, as if in that way she could hold her secret fast.

  “Ah, well,”—she tried to say it lightly—”I don’t want so very much pity yet awhile; when I do, I’ll ask you for it!”

  She disarmed the words of their flippancy by the look with which she lifted her dark-lashed eyes to him, and Christopher’s last shred of common sense sank in their tender depths and was lost there.

  “Is that true?” he said, without taking his eyes from her face. “Do you really trust me? would you promise always to trust me?”

  “Yes, I’m sure I’d always trust you,” answered Francie, beginning in some inexplicable way to feel frightened; “I think you’re awfully kind.”

  “No, I am not kind,” he said, turning suddenly very white, and feeling his blood beating down to his finger-tips; “you must not say that when you know it’s—” Something seemed to catch in his throat and take his voice away. “It gives me the greatest pleasure to do anything for you,” he ended lamely.

  The clear crimson deepened in Francie’s checks. She knew in one startling instant what Christopher meant, and her fingers twined and untwined themselves in the crochet sofa-cover as she sat, not daring to look at him, and not knowing in the least what to say.

  “How can I be kind to you?” went on Christopher, his vacillation swept away by the look in her downcast face that told him she understood him; “it’s just the other way, it’s you who are kind to me. If you only knew what happiness it is to me—to—to be with you—to do anything on earth for you—you know what I mean—I see you know what I mean.”

  A vision rose up before Francie of her past self, loitering about the Dublin streets, and another of an incredible and yet possible future self, dwelling at Bruff in purple and fine linen, and then she looked up and met Christopher’s eyes. She saw the look of tortured uncertainty and avowed purpose that there was no mistaking; Bruff and its glories melted away before it, and in their stead came Hawkins’ laughing face, his voice, his touch, his kiss, in overpowering contrast to the face opposite to her, with its uncomprehended intellect and refinement, and its pale anxiety.

  “Don’t say things like that to me, Mr. Dysart,” she said tremulously; “I know how good you are to me, twice, twice too good, and if I was in trouble, you’d be the f
irst I’d come to. But I’m all right,” with an attempted gaiety and unconcern that went near bringing the tears to her eyes; “I can paddle my own canoe for a while yet!”

  Her instinct told her that Christopher would be quicker than most men to understand that she was putting up a line of defence, and to respect it; and with the unfailing recoil of her mind upon Hawkins, she thought how little such a method would have prevailed with him.

  “Then you don’t want me?” said Christopher, almost in a whisper.

  “Why should I want you or anybody?” she answered, determined to misunderstand him, and to be like her usual self in spite of the distress and excitement that she felt; “I’m well able to look after myself, though you mightn’t think it, and I don’t want anything this minute, only my tea, and Norry’s as cross as the cats, and I know she won’t have the cake made!” She tried to laugh, but the laugh faltered away into tears. She turned her head aside, and putting one hand to her eyes, felt with the other in her pocket for her handkerchief. It was underneath Hawkins’ letter, and as she snatched it out, it carried the letter along with it.

  Christopher had started up, unable to bear the sight of her tears, and as he stood there, hesitating on the verge of catching her in his arms, he saw the envelope slip down on to the floor. As it fell, the photograph slid out of its worn covering, and lay face uppermost at his feet. He picked it up, and having placed it with the letter on the sofa beside Francie, he walked to the window and looked sightlessly out into the garden. A heavily-laden tray bumped against the door, the handle turned, and Louisa, having pushed the door open with her knee, staggered in with the tea-tray. She had placed it on the table and was back again in the kitchen, talking over the situation with Bid Sal, before Christopher spoke.