The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  The path wound temptingly on into the wood, with primroses and celandine growing cool and fresh in the young grass on either side of it; the shady greenness was like the music of stringed instruments after the brazen heroics of a military band. They loitered along, and Francie slipped her hand into Lambert’s arm, feeling, unconsciously, a little more in sympathy with him, and more at ease with life. She had never pretended either to him or to herself that she was in love with him; her engagement had been the inevitable result of poverty, and aimlessness, and bitterness of soul, but her instinctive leniency towards any man who liked her, joined with her old friendliness for Mr. Lambert, made it as easy a way out of her difficulties as any she could have chosen. There was something flattering in the knowledge of her power over a man whom she had been accustomed to look up to, and something, too, that appealed incessantly to her good nature; besides which there is to nearly every human being some comfort in being the first object of another creature’s life. She was almost fond of him as she walked beside him, glad to rest her weight on his arm, and to feel how big and reliable he was. There was nothing in the least romantic about having married him, but it was eminently creditable. Her friends in the north side of Dublin had been immensely impressed by it, and she knew enough of Lismoyle society to be aware that there also she would be regarded with gratifying envy. She quite looked forward to meeting Hawkins again, that she might treat him with the cool and assured patronage proper to the heights of her new position; he had himself seared the wound that he had given her, and now she felt that she was thankful to him.

  “Hang this path! it has as many turns as a corkscrew,” remarked Mr. Lambert, bending his head to avoid a downstretched branch of hawthorn, covered with baby leaves and giant thorns. “I thought we’d have come to a seat long before this; if it was Stephen’s Green there’d have been twenty by this time.”

  “There would, and twenty old men sitting on each of them!” retorted Francie. “Mercy! who’s that hiding behind the tree? Oh, I declare, it’s only one of those everlasting old statues, and look at a lot more of them! I wonder if it was that they hadn’t room enough for them up in the house that they put them out here in the woods?”

  They had come to an enclosed green space in the wood, a daisy-starred oval of grass, holding the spring sunshine in serene remoteness from all the outer world of terraces and gardens, and made mysterious and poetical as a vale in Ida by the strange pale presences that peopled every nook of an ivy-grown crag at its further side. A clear pool reflected them, but waveringly, because of the ripples caused by a light drip from the overhanging rock; the trees towered on the encircling high ground and made a wall of silence round the intenser silences of the statues as they leaned and postured in a trance of suspended activity; the only sound was the monotone of the falling water, dropping with a cloistered gravity in the melodious hollow of the cave.

  “I’m not going to walk another foot,” said Francie, sitting down on the grass by the water’s edge; “here, give me the oranges, Roddy, no one’ll catch us eating them here, and we can peg the skins at that old thing with its clothes dropping off and the harp in its hand.”

  It was thus that Mrs. Lambert described an Apollo with a lyre who was regarding them from the opposite rock with classic preoccupation. Lambert lighted a cigar, and leaning back on his elbow in the grass, watched Francie’s progress through her inelegant meal with the pride of the provider. He looked at her half wonderingly, she was so lovely in his eyes, and she was so incredibly his own; he felt a sudden insanity of tenderness for her that made his heart throb and his cheek redden and would have ennobled him to the pitch of dying for her on the spot, had such an extravagance been demanded of him. He longed to put his arms round her, and tell her how dear, how adorable, how entirely delightful she was, but he knew that she would probably only laugh at him in that maddening way of hers, or at all events, make him feel that she was far less interested in the declaration than he was. He gave a quick sigh, and stretching out his hand laid it on her shoulder as if to assure himself of his ownership of her.

  “That dress fits you awfully well. I like you better in that than in anything.”

  “Then I’d better take care and not get the juice on it,” Francie replied, with her mouth full of orange; “lend me a loan of your handkerchief.”

  Lambert removed a bundle of letters and a guide-book from his pocket, and finally produced the handkerchief.

  “Why, you’ve a letter there from Charlotte, haven’t you?” said Francie, with more interest than she had yet shown, “I didn’t know you had heard again from her.”

  “Yes, I did,” said Lambert, putting the letters back in his pocket, “I wish to goodness we hadn’t left our address at the Charing Cross Hotel. People might let a man alone when he’s on his honeymoon.”

  “What did she say?” inquired Francie lightly. “Is she cross? The other one she wrote was as sweet as syrup, and ‘Love to dear Francie’ and all.”

  “Oh, no, not a bit,” said Mr. Lambert, who had been secretly surprised and even slightly wounded by the fortitude with which Miss Mullen had borne the intelligence of his second marriage, “but she’s complaining that my colts have eaten her best white petticoat.”

  “You may give her one of my new ones,” suggested Francie.

  “Oh yes, she’d like that, wouldn’t she?” said Lambert with a chuckle; “she’s so fond of you, y’know!”

  “Oh, she’s quite friendly with me now, though I know you’re dying to make out that she’ll not forgive me for marrying you,” said Francie, flinging her last bit of orange-peel at the Apollo; “you’re as proud as Punch about it. I believe you’d have married her, only she wouldn’t take you!”

  “Is that your opinion?” said Mr. Lambert with a smile that conveyed a magnanimous reticence as to the facts of the case; “you’re beginning to be jealous, are you? I think I’d better leave you at home the day I go over to talk the old girl into good humour about her petticoat!”

  In his heart Mr. Lambert was less comfortable than the tone of his voice might have implied; there had been in the letter, in spite of its friendliness and singular absence of feminine pique, an allusion to that three hundred pounds that circumstances had forced him to accept from her. His honeymoon, and those new clothes that Francie had bought in London, had run away with no end of money, and it would be infernally inconvenient if Charlotte was going, just at this time of all others, to come down on him for money that he had never asked her for. He turned these things over uncomfortably in his mind as he lay back on the grass, looking up at Francie’s profile, dark against the soft blue of the sky; and even while he took one of her hands and drew it down to his lips he was saying to himself that he had never yet failed to come round Charlotte when he tried, and it would not be for want of trying if he failed now.

  The shadows of the trees began to stretch long fingers across the grass of the Bosquet d’Apollon, and Lambert looked at his watch and began to think of table d’hôte at the Louvre Hotel. Pleasant, paradisaically pleasant as it was here in the sun, with Francie’s hand in his, and one of his best cigars in his mouth, he had come to the age at which not even Paradise would be enjoyable without a regular dinner hour.

  Francie felt chilly and exhausted as they walked back and climbed the innumberable flights of steps that lay between them and the Palace; she privately thought that Versailles would be a horrile place to live in, and not to be compared in any way to Bruff, but, at all events, it would be a great thing to say she had been there, and she could read up all the history part of it in the guide book when she got back to the hotel. They were to go up the Eiffel tower the next day; that would be some fun, anyhow, and to the Hippodrome in the evening, and, though that wouldn’t be as good as Hengler’s circus, the elephants and horses and things wouldn’t be talking French and expecting her to answer them, like the housemaids and shipmen. It was a rest to lean back in the narrow carriage, with the pair of starveling ponies, that rattled along with
as much whip-cracking and general pomp as if it were doing ten miles an hour instead of four, and to watch the poplars and villas pass by in placid succession, delightfully devoid of historical interest.

  It was getting dark when they reached Paris, and the breeze had become rough and cold. The lamps were shining among the trees on the Boulevards, and the red and green eyes of the cabs and trams crossed and recrossed each other like a tangle of fire-flies. The electric lights of the Place du Louvre were at length in sight, lofty and pale, like globes of imprisoned daylight above the mundane flare of the gas, and Francie’s eyes turned towards them with a languid relief. Her old gift of living every moment of her day seemed gone, and here, in this wonderful Paris, that had so suddenly acquired a real instead of a merely geographical existence for her, the stream of foreign life was passing by her, and leaving her face as uniterested and wearied as it ever had been when she looked out of the window at Albatros Villa at the messenger boys and bakers’ carts. The street was crowded, and the carriage made slower and slower way through it, till it became finally wedged in the centre of a block. Lambert stood up, and entered upon a one-sided argument with the driver as to how to get out, while Francie remained silent, and indifferent to the situation. A piano-organ at a little distance from them was playing the Boulanger March, with the brilliancy of its tribe, its unfaltering vigour dominating all other sounds. It was a piece of music in which Francie had herself a certain proficiency, and, shutting her eyes with a pang of remembrance, she was back in the Tally Ho drawing-room, strumming it on Charlotte’s piano, while Mr. Hawkins, holding the indignant Mrs. Bruff on his lap, forced her unwilling paws to thump a bass. Now the difficult part, in which she always broke down, was being played; he had petended there that he was her music teacher, and had counted out loud, and rapped her over the knuckles with a tea-spoon, and gone on with all knds of nonsense. The carriage started forward again with a jerk, and Lambert dropped back into his place beside her.

  “Of all the asses unhung these French fellows are the biggest.” he said fervently, “and that infernal organ banging away the whole time till I couldn’t her my own voice, much less his jabber. Here we are at last, anyhow, and you’ve got to get out before me.”

  The tears had sprung overwhelmingly to her eyes, and she could not answer a word. She turned her back on her husband, and stepping our of the carriage she walked unsteadily across the countryard in the white glare of the electric light, leaving the hotel servant, who had offered his arm at the carriage door, to draw what conclusions seemed good to him from the spectacle of her wet checks and trembling lips. She made for the broad flight of steps, and went blindly up them under the drooping fans of the palms, into the reading-room on the first floor. The piano-organ was still audible outside, reiterating to madness the tune that had turn open her past, and she made a hard effort to forget its associations and recover herself, catching up an illustrated paper to hide her face from the people in the room. It was a minute or two before Lambert followed her.

  “Here’s a go!” he said, coming towards her with a green envelope in his hand, “here’s a wire to say that Sir Benjamin’s dead, and they want me back at once.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XLI.

  The morning after Lambert received the telegram announcing Sir Benjamin’s death, he despatched one to Miss Charlotte Mullen at Gurthnamuckla in which he asked her to notify his immediate return to his household at Rosemount. He had always been in the hahit of relying on her help in small as well as great occasions, and now that he had had that unexpectedly civil letter from her, he had turned to her at once without giving the matter much consideration. It was never safe to trust to a servant’s interpretation of the cramped language of a telegram, and moreover, in his self-sufficient belief in his own knowledge of women, he thought that it would flatter her and keep her in good humour if he asked her to give directions to his household. He would have been less confident of his own sagacity had he seen the set of Miss Mullen’s jaw as she read the message, and heard the laugh which she permitted to herself as soon as Louisa had left the room.

  “It’s a pity he didn’t hire me to be his major-domo as well as his steward and stud-groom!” she said to herself, “and his financier into the bargain! I declare I don’t know what he’d do without me”

  The higher and more subtle side of Miss Mullen’s nature had exacted of the quivering savage that had been awakened by Lambert’s second marriage that the answer to his letter should be of a conventional and non-committing kind; and so, when her brain was still on fire with hatred and invective, her facile pen glided pleasantly over the paper in stale felicitations and stereotyped badinage. It is hard to ask pity for Charlotte, whose many evil qualities have without pity been set down, but the seal of ignoble tragedy had been set on her life; she had not asked for love, but it had come to her, twisted to burlesque by the malign hand of fate. There is pathos as well as humiliation in the thought that such a thing as a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, and it is a fact not beyond the reach of sympathy that each time Charlotte stood before her glass her ugliness spoke to her of failure, and goaded her to revenge.

  It was a wet morning, but at half-past eleven o’clock the black horse was put into the phaeton, and Miss Mullen, attired in a shabby mackintosh, set out on her mission to Rosemount. A cold north wind drove the rain in her face as she flogged the old horse along through the shelterless desolation of rock and scrub, and in spite of her mackintosh she felt wet and chilled by the time she reached the Rosemount yard. She went into the kitchen by the back door, and delivered her message to Eliza Hackett, whom she found sitting in elegant leisure, retrimming a bonnet that had belonged to the late Mrs. Lambert.

  “And is it the day after to-morrow, miss, please?” demanded Eliza Hackett with cold resignation.

  “It is, me poor woman, it is,” replied Charlotte, in the tone of facetious intimacy that she reserved for other people’s servants. “You’ll have to stir your stumps to get the house ready for them.”

  “The house is cleaned down and ready for them as soon as they like to walk into it,” replied Eliza Hackett with dignity, “and if the new lady faults the drawing-room chimbley for not being swep, the master will know it’s not me that’s to blame for it, but the sweep that’s gone dhrilling with the Mileetia.”

  “Oh, she’s not the one to find fault with a man for being a soldier any more than yourself, Eliza!” said Charlotte, who had pulled off her wet gloves and was warming her hands. “Ugh! How cold it is! Is there any place upstairs where I could sit while you were drying my things for me?”

  The thought had occurred to her that it would not be uniteresting to look round the house, and as it transpired that fires were burning in the dining-room and in Mr. Lambert’s study she left her wet cloak and hat in the kitchen and ascended to the upper regions. She glanced into the drawing-room as she passed its open door, and saw the blue rep chairs ranged in a solemn circle, gazing with all their button eyes at a tree-legged table in the centre of the room; the blinds were drawn down, and the piano was covered with a sheet; it was altogether as inexpressive of everything, except bad taste as was possible. Charlotte passed on to the dining-room and stationed herself in front on an indifferent fire there, standing with her back to the chimney-piece and her eyes roving about in search of entertainment. Nothing was changed, except that the poor turkey-hen’s medicine bottles and pill boxes no longer lurked behind the chimney-piece ornaments; the bare dinner-table suggested only how soon Francie would be seatead at its head, and Charlotte presently prowled on to Mr. Lambert’s study at the end of the passage, to look for a better fire, and a room less barren of incident.

  The study grate did not fail of its reputation of being the best in the house, and Mr. Lambert’s chair stood by the hearthrug in wide-armed invitation to the visitor. Charlotte sat down in it and slowly warmed one foot after the other, while the pain rose hot and unconquerable in her heart. The whole room was s
o gallingly familiar, so inseparably connected with the time when she had still a future, vague and improbable as it was, and could live in sufficient content on its slight sustenance. Another future had now to be constructed, she had already traced out some lines of it, and in the perfecting of these she would henceforward find the cure for what she was now suffering. She roused herself, and glancing towards the table saw that on it lay a heap of unopened newspapers and letters; she got up with alacrity, and addressed herself to the congenial task of examining each letter in succession.

  “H’m! They’re of a very bilious complexion,” she said to herself. “There’s one from Langford,” turning it over and looking at the name on the back. “I wonder if he’s ordering a Victoria for her ladyship. I wouldn’t put it past him. Perhaps he’d like me to tell her whose money it was paid Langford’s bill last year!”

  She fingered the letter longingly, then, taking a hair-pin from the heavy coils of her hair, she inserted it under the flap of the envelope. Under her skilful manipulation it opened easily, and without tearing, and she took out its contents. They consisted of a short but severe letter from the head of the firm, asking for “a speedy settlement of this account, now so long overdue,” and of the account in question. It was a bill of formidable amount, from which Charlotte soon gathered the fact that twenty pounds only of the money she had lent Lambert last May had found its way into the pockets of the coachbuilder. She replaced the bill and letter in the envelope, and, after a minute of consideration, took up for the second time two large and heavy letters that she had thrown aside when first looking through the heap. They had the stamp of the Lismoyle bank upon them, and obviously contained bank books. Charlotte saw at a glance that the hair-pin would be of no avail with these envelopes, and after another pause for deliberation she replaced all the letters in their original position, and went down the passage to the top of the kitchen stairs.