The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  Lambert thought in a moment of those hundreds that had been lent to him, and stirred uneasily in his chair. “By the way Charlotte,” he said, trying to speak like a man to whom such things were trifles, “about that money you lent me—I’m afraid I can’t let you have it back for a couple of months or so. Of course, I needn’t tell you, poor Lucy’s money was only settled on me for my life, and now there’s some infernal delay before they can hand even the interest over to me; but, if you don’t mind waiting a bit, I can make it all square for you about the farm I know.”

  He inwardly used a stronger word than infernal as he reflected that if Charlotte had not got that promise about the farm out of him when he was in a hole about money, he might have been able, somehow, to get it himself now.

  “Don’t mention that—don’t mention that,” said Charlotte, absolutely blushing a little, “it was a pleasure to me to lend it to you, Roddy; if I never saw it again I’d rather that than that you should put yourself out to pay me before it was convenient to you.” She caught up a dress and shook its folds out with unnecessary vehemence. “I won’t be done all night if I delay this way. Ah! how well I remember this dress! Poor dear Lucy got it for Fanny Waller’s wedding. Who’d ever think she’d have kept it for all those years! Roddy, what stock would you put on Gurthnamuckla?”

  “Dry stock,” answered Lambert briefly.

  “And how about the young horses? You don’t forget the plan we had about them? You don’t mean to give it up I hope?”

  “Oh, that’s as you please,” replied Lambert. He was very much interested in the project, but he had no intention of letting Charlotte think so.

  She looked at him, reading his thoughts more clearly than he would have liked, and they made her the more resolved upon her own line of action. She saw herself settled at Gurthnamuckla, with Roddy riding over three or four times a week to see his young horses, that should graze her grass and fill her renovated stables, while she, the bland lady of the manor, should show what a really intelligent woman could do at the head of affairs; and the three hundred pound debt should never be spoken of, but should remain, like a brake, in readiness to descend and grip at the discretion of the driver. There was no fear of his paying it of his own accord. He was not the man she took him for if he paid a debt without due provocation; he had a fine crop of them to be settled as it was, and that would take the edge off his punctilious scruples with regard to keeping her out of her money.

  The different heaps on the floor increased materially while these reflections passed through Miss Mullen’s brain. It was characteristic of her that a distinct section of it had never ceased from appraising and apportioning dresses, dolmans and bonnets, with a nice regard to the rival claims of herself, Eliza Hackett the cook, and the rest of the establishment, and still deeper in its busy convolutions—though this simile is probably unscientific—lurked and grew the consciousness that Francie’s name had not yet been mentioned. The wardrobe was cleared at last, a scarlet flannel dressing-gown topping the heap that was destined for Tally Ho, and Charlotte had already settled the question as to whether she should bestow her old one upon Norry or make it into a bed for a cat. Lambert finished his second pipe, and stretching himself, yawned drearily, as though, which was indeed the case, the solemnity of the occasion had worn off and its tediousness had become pronounced. He looked at his watch.

  “Half-past twelve, by Jove! Look here, Charlotte, let’s come down and have a glass of sherry.”

  Charlotte got up from her knees with alacrity, though the tone in which she accepted the invitation was fittingly lugubrious. She was just as glad to leave something unfinished for the afternoon, and there was something very intimate and confidential about a friendly glass of sherry in the middle of a joint day’s work. It was not until Lambert had helped himself a second time from the decanter of brown sherry that Miss Mullen saw her opportunity to approach a subject that was becoming conspicuous by its absence. She had seated herself, not without consciousness, in what had been Mrs. Lambert’s chair; she was feeling happier than she had been since the time when Lambert was a lanky young clerk in her father’s office, with a precocious moustache and an affectionately free-and-easy manner, before Rosemount had been built, or Lucy Galvin thought of. She could think of Lucy now without resentment, even with equanimity, and that last interview, when her friend had died on the very spot where the sunlight was now resting at her feet, recurred to her without any unpleasantness. She had fought a losing battle against fate all her life, and she could not be expected to regret having accepted its first overture of friendship, any more than she need be expected to refuse another half glass of that excellent brown sherry that Lambert had just poured out for her. “Charlotte could take her whack,” he was wont to say to their mutual friends in that tone of humorous appreciation that is used in connection with a gentlemanlike capacity for liquor.

  “Well, how are you all getting on at Tally Ho?” he said presently, and not all the self-confidence induced by the sherry could make his voice as easy as he wished it to be; “I hear you’ve lost your young lady?”

  Charlotte was provoked to feel the blood mount slowly to her face and remain like a hot straddle across her cheeks and nose.

  “Oh yes,” she said carelessly, inwardly cursing the strength of Lambert’s liquor, “she took herself off in a huff, and I only hope she’s not repenting of it now.”

  “What was the row about? Did you smack her for pulling the cats’ tails?” Lambert had risen from the table and was trimming his nails with a pocketknife, but out of the tail of his eye he was observing his visitor very closely.

  “I gave her some good advice, and I got the usual amount of gratitude for it,” said Charlotte, in the voice of a person who has been deeply wounded, but is not going to make a fuss about it. She had no idea how much Lambert knew, but she had, at all events, one line of defence that was obvious and secure.

  Lambert, as it happened, knew nothing except that there had been what the letter in his pocket described as “a real awful row,” and his mordant curiosity forced him to the question that he knew Charlotte was longing for him to ask.

  “What did you give her advice about?”

  “I may have been wrong,” replied Miss Mullen. with the liberality that implies the certainty of having been right, “but when I found that she was carrying on with that good-for-nothing Hawkins, I thought it my duty to give her my opinion, and upon me word, as long as he’s here she’s well out of the place.”

  “How did you find out she was carrying on with Hawkins?” asked Lambert, with a hoarseness in his voice that belied its indifference.

  “I knew that they were corresponding, and when I taxed her with carrying on with him she didn’t attempt to deny it, and told me up to my face that she could mind her own affairs without my interference. ‘Very well, miss,’ says I, ‘you’ll march out of my house!’ and off she took herself next morning, and has never had the decency to send me a line since.”

  “Is she in Dublin now?” asked Lambert with the carelessness that was so much more remarkable than an avowed interest.

  “No; she’s with those starving rats of Fitzpatricks; they were glad enough to get hold of her to squeeze what they could out of her twenty-five pounds a year, and I wish them joy of their bargain!”

  Charlotte pushed back her chair violently, and her hot face looked its ugliest as some of the hidden hatred showed itself. But Lambert felt that she did well to be angry. In the greater affairs of life he believed in Charlotte, and he admitted to himself that she had done especially well in sending Francie to Bray.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXXVI.

  The house that the Fitzpatricks had taken in Bray for the winter was not situated in what is known as the fashionable part of the town. It commanded no view either of the Esplanade or of Bray Head; it had, in fact, little view of any kind except the backs of other people’s houses, and an oblique glimpse of a railway bridge at the end of the road. It was just saved
from the artisan level by a tiny bow window on either side of the hall door, and the name, Albatross Villa, painted on the gate posts; and its crowning claim to distinction was the fact that by standing just outside the gate it was possible to descry, under the railway bridge, a small square of esplanade and sea that was Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s justification when she said gallantly to her Dublin friends that she’d never have come to Bray for the winter only for being able to look out at the waves all day long.

  Poor Mrs. Fitzpatrick did not tell her friends that she had, nowadays, things to occupy herself with that scarcely left her time for taking full advantage of this privilege. From the hour of the awakening of her brood to that midnight moment when, with fingers roughened and face flushed from the darning of stockings, she toiled up to bed, she was scarcely conscious that the sea existed, except when Dottie came in with her boots worn into holes by the pebbles of the beach, or Georgie’s Sunday trousers were found to be smeared with tar from riding astride the upturned boats. There were no longer for her the afternoon naps that were so pleasantly composing after four o’clock dinner; it was now her part to clear away and wash the dishes and plates, so as to leave Bridget, the “general,” free to affair herself with the clothes-lines in the back garden, whereon the family linen streamed and ballooned in the east wind that is the winter prerogative of Bray. She had grown perceptibly thinner under this discipline, and her eyes had dark swellings beneath them that seemed pathetically unbecoming to anyone who, like Francie, had last seen her when the rubicund prosperity of Mountjoy Square had not yet worn away. Probably an Englishwoman of her class would have kept her household in comparative comfort with less effort and more success, but Aunt Tish was very far from being an Englishwoman; her eyes were not formed to perceive dirt, not her nose to apprehend smells, and her idea of domestic economy was to indulge in no extras of soap or scrubbing brushes, and to feed her family on strong tea and indifferent bread and butter, in order that Ida’s and Mabel’s hats might be no whit less ornate than those of their neighbours.

  Francie had plunged into the heart of this squalor with characteristic recklessness; and the effusion of welcome with which she had been received, and the comprehensive abuse lavished by Aunt Tish upon Charlotte, were at first sufficient to make her forget the frouziness of the dining-room, and the fact that she had to share a bedroom with her cousins, the two Misses Fitzpatrick. Francie had kept the particulars of her fight with Charlotte to herself. Perhaps she felt that it would not be easy to make the position clear to Aunt Tish’s comprehension, which was of a rudimentary sort in such matters, and apt to jump to crude conclusions. Perhaps she had become aware that even the ordinary atmosphere of her three months at Lismoyle was as far beyond Aunt Tish’s imagination as the air of Paradise, but she certainly was not inclined to enlarge on her sentimental experiences to her aunt and cousins; all that they knew was, that she had “moved in high society,” and that she had fought with Charlotte Mullen on general and laudable grounds. It was difficult at times to parry the direct questions of Ida, who, at sixteen, had already, with the horrible precocity prevalent in her grade of society, passed through several flirtations of an out-door and illicit kind; but if Ida’s curiosity could not be parried it could be easily misled, and the family belief in Francie’s power of breaking, impartially, the hearts of all the young men whom she met, was a shield to her when she was pressed too nearly about “young Mr. Dysart,” or “th’ officers.” Loud, of course, and facetious were the lamentations that Francie had not returned “promised” to one or other of these heroes of romance, but not even Ida’s cultured capacity could determine which had been the more probable victim. The family said to each other in private that Francie had “got very close”; even the boys were conscious of a certain strangeness about her, and did not feel inclined to show her, as of yore, the newest subtlety in catapults, or the latest holes in their coats.

  She herself was far more conscious of strangeness and remoteness; though, when she had first arrived at Albatross Villa, the crowded, carpetless house, and the hourly conflict of living were reviving and almost amusing after the thunderous gloom of her exit from Tally Ho. Almost the first thing she had done had been to write to Hawkins to tell him of what had happened; a letter that her tears had dropped on, and that her pen had flown in the writing of, telling how she had been turned out because she had refused—or as good as refused—Mr. Dysart for his—Gerald’s— sake, and how she hoped he hadn’t written to Tally Ho, for it’s little chance there’d be Charlotte would send on the letter. Francie had intended to break off at this point, and leave to Gerald’s own conscience the application of the hint; but an unused half sheet at the end of her letter tempted her on, and before she well knew what she was saying, all the jealousy and hurt tenderness and helpless craving of the past month were uttered without a thought of diplomacy or pride. Then a long time had gone by, and there had been no answer from Hawkins. The outflung emotion that had left her spent and humbled, came back in bitterness to her, as the tide gives back in a salt flood the fresh waters of a river, and her heart closed upon it, and bore the pain as best it might.

  It was not till the middle of October that Hawkins answered her letter. She knew before she opened the envelope that she was going to be disappointed; how could anyone explain away a silence of two months on one sheet of small note-paper, one side of which, as she well knew, was mainly occupied by the regimental crest, much less reply in the smallest degree to that letter that had cost so much in the writing, and so much more in the repenting of its length and abandonment? Mr. Hawkins had wisely steered clear of both difficulties by saying no more than that he had been awfully glad to hear from her, and he would have written before if he could, but somehow he never could find a minute to do so. He would have given a good deal to have seen that row with Miss Mullen, and as far as Dysart was concerned, he thought Miss Mullen had the rights of it; he was going away on first leave now, and wouldn’t be back at Lismoyle till the end of the year, when he hoped he would find her and old Charlotte as good friends as ever. He, Mr. Hawkins, was really not worth fighting about; he was stonier broke than he had ever been, and, in conclusion, he was hers (with an illegible hieroglyphic to express the exact amount), Gerald Hawkins.

  Like the last letter she had had from him, this had come early in the morning, but on this occasion she could not go up to her room to read it in peace. The apartment that she shared with Ida and Mabel offered few facilities for repose, and none for seclusion, and, besides, there was too much to be done in the way of helping to lay the table and get the breakfast. She hurried about the kitchen in her shabby gown, putting the kettle on to a hotter corner of the range, pouring treacle into a jampot, and filling the sugar-basin from a paper bag with quick, trembling fingers; her breath came pantingly, and the letter that she had hidden inside the front of her dress crackled with the angry rise and fall of her breast. That he should advise her to go and make friends with Charlotte, and tell her she had made a mistake in refusing Mr. Dysart, and never say a word about all that she had said to him in her letter—!

  “Francie’s got a letter from her sweetheart!” said Mabel, skipping round the kitchen, and singing the words in a kind of chant. “Ask her for the lovely crest for your album, Bobby!”

  Evidently the ubiquitous Mabel had studied the contents of the letter-box.

  “Ah, it’s well to be her,” said Bridget, joining in the conversation with her accustomed ease; “it’s long before my fella would write me a letter!”

  “And it’s little you want letters from him,” remarked Bobby, in his slow, hideous, Dublin brogue, “when you’re out in the lane talking to another fella every night.”

  “Ye lie!” said Bridget, with a flattered giggle, while Bobby ran up the kitchen stairs after Francie, and took advantage of her having the teapot in one hand and the milk-jug in the other to thrust his treacley fingers into her pocket in search of the letter.

  “Ah, have done!” said Francie angrily; “lo
ok, you’re after making me spill the milk!”

  But Bobby, who had been joined by Mabel, continued his persecutions, till his cousin, freeing herself of her burdens, turned upon him and boxed his ears with a vigour that sent him howling upstairs to complain to his mother.

  After this incident, Francie’s life at Albatross Villa went on, as it seemed to her, in a squalid monotony of hopelessness. The days became darker and colder, and the food and firing more perceptibly insufficient, and strong tea a more prominent feature of each meal, and even Aunt Tish lifted her head from the round of unending, dingy cares, and saw some change in Francie. She said to Uncle Robert, with an excusable thought of Francie’s ungrudging help in the household, and her contribution to it of five shillings a week, that it would be a pity if the sea air didn’t suit the girl; and Uncle Robert, arranging a greasy satin tie under his beard at the looking-glass, preparatory to catching the 8.30 train for Dublin, had replied that it wasn’t his fault if it didn’t, and if she chose to be fool enough to fight with Charlotte Mullen she’d have to put up with it. Uncle Robert was a saturnine little man of small abilities, whose reverses had not improved his temper, and he felt that things were coming to a pretty pass if his wife was going to make him responsible for the sea air, as well as the smoky kitchen chimney, and the scullery sink that Bobby had choked with a dead jelly fish, and everything else.

  The only events that Francie felt to be at all noteworthy were her letters from Mr. Lambert. He was not a brilliant letter writer, having neither originality, nor the gift which is sometimes bestowed on unoriginal people, of conveying news in a simple and satisfying manner; but his awkward and sterile sentences were as cold waters to the thirsty soul that was always straining back towards its time of abundance. She could scarcely say the word Lismoyle now without a hesitation, it was so shrined in dear and miserable remembrance, with all the fragrance of the summer embalming it in her mind, that, unselfconscious as she was, the word seemed sometimes too difficult to pronounce. Lambert himself had become a personage of a greater world, and had acquired an importance that he would have resented had he known how wholly impersonal it was. In some ways she did not like him quite as much as in the Dublin days, when he had had the advantage of being the nearest thing to a gentleman that she had met with; perhaps her glimpses of his home life and the fact of his friendship with Charlotte had been disillusioning, or perhaps the comparison of him with other and newer figures upon her horizon had not been to his advantage; certainly it was more by virtue of his position in that other world that he was great.