The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “Mrs. Lambert,” he said, with a gravity and deference which he had never shown to her before, “is it any use to beg your pardon? I didn’t know what I was saying—I hardly know now what I did say— but if it made you angry or—or offended you, I can only say I’m awfully sorry.”

  “Thank you, I don’t want you to say anything,” she answered, still walking stiffly on.

  “If it would give you any pleasure, I swear I’ll promise never to speak to you again!” Hawkins continued; “shall I go away now?” His instinct told him to risk the question.

  “Please yourself. It’s nothing to me what you do.”

  “Then I’ll stay—”

  Following on what he said, like an eldritch note of exclamation, there broke in the shrill whistle of the Serpolette as she turned into the bay of Bruff, and an answering hail from Christopher rose to them, apparently from the lower path by the shore of the lake.

  “That’s Cursiter,” said Hawkins irritably; “I suppose we shall have to go back now.”

  She turned, as if mechanically accepting the suggestion, and, in the action, her eyes passed by him with a look that was intended to have as little reference to him as the gaze of a planet in its orbit, but which, even in that instant, was humanised by avoidance. In the space of that glance, he knew that his pardon was attainable, if not attained, but he had cleverness enough to retain his expression of gloomy compunction.

  It was quite true that Fracie’s anger, always pitiably short-lived, had yielded to the flattery of his respect. Every inner, unformed impulse was urging her to accept his apology, when three impatient notes from the whistle of the steam-launch came up through the trees, and seemed to open a way for her to outside matters from the narrow stress of the moment.

  “Captain Cursiter seems in a great hurry about something,” she said, her voice and manner conveying sufficiently well that she intended to pass on with dignity from the late dispute. “I wonder what he wants.”

  “Perhaps we’ve got the route,” said Hawkins, not sorry to be able to remind her of the impending calamity of his departure; “I shouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  They walked down the flight of stone steps, and reached the gate of the wood in silence. Hawkins paused with his hand on the latch.

  “Look here, when am I going to see you again?” he said.

  “I really don’t know,” said Francie, with recovered ease. She felt the wind blowing in on her across the silver scales of the lake, and saw the sunshine flashing on Captain Cursiter’s oars as he paddled himself ashore from the launch, and her spirits leaped up in “the inescapable joy of spring.” “I should think anyone that goes to church to-morrow will see me there.”

  Her glance veered towards his cloudy, downcast face, and an undignified desire to laugh came suddenly upon her. He had always looked so babyish when he was cross, and it had always made her feel inclined to laugh. Now that she was palpably and entirely the conqueror, the wish for further severity had died out, and the spark of amusement in her eye was recklessly apparent when Hawkins looked at her.

  His whole expression changed in a moment. “Then we’re friends?” he said eagerly.

  Before any answer could be given, Christopher and Charlotte came round a bend in the lower path, and even in this moment Francie wondered what it was that should cause Charlotte to drop her voice cautiously as she neared them.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XLVII.

  It was very still inside the shelter of the old turf quay at Bruff. The stems of the lilies that curved up through its brown-golden depths were visible almost down to the black mud out of which their mystery of silver and gold was born; and, while the water outside moved piquantly to the breeze, nothing stirred it within except the water spiders, who were darting about, pushing a little ripple in front of them, and finding themselves seriously inconvenienced by the pieces of broken rush and the sodden fragments of turf that perpetually stopped their way. It had rained and blown very hard all the day before, and the innermost corners of the tiny harbour held a motionless curve of foam, yellowish brown, and flecked with the feathers of a desolated moorhen’s nest.

  Civilisation at Bruff had marched away from the turf quay. The ruts of the cart-track were green from long disuse, and the willows had been allowed to grow across it, as a last sign of superannuation. In old days every fire at Bruff had been landed at the turf quay from the bogs at the other side of the lake; but now, since the railway had come to Lismoyle, coal had taken its place. It was in vain that Thady, the turf-cutter, had urged that turf was a far handsomer thing about a gentleman’s place than coal. The last voyage of the turf boat had been made, and she now lay, grey from rottenness and want of paint, in the corner of the miniature dock that had once been roofed over and formed a boat-house. Tall, jointed reeds, with their spiky leaves and stiff stems, stood out in the shallow water, leaning aslant over their own reflections, and, further outside, green rushes grew thickly in long beds, the homes of dabchicks, coots, and such like water people. Standing on the brown rock that formed the end of the quay, the spacious sky was so utterly reproduced in the lake, cloud for cloud, deep for deep, that it only required a little imagination to believe oneself floating high between two atmospheres. The young herons, in the fir trees on Curragh Point, were giving utterance to their meditations on things in general in raucous monosyllables, and Charlotte Mullen, her feet planted firmly on. two of the least rickety stones of the quay, was continuing a conversation that had gone on onesidedly for some time.

  “Yes, Sir Christopher, my feeling for your estate is like the feeling of a child for the place where he was reared; it is the affection of a woman whose happiest days were passed with her father in your estate office!”

  The accurate balance of the sentence and its nasal cadence showed that Charlotte was delivering herself of a well-studied peroration. Her voice clashed with the stillness as dissonantly as the clamour of the young herons. Her face was warm and shiny, and Christopher looked away from it, and said to himself that she was intolerable.

  “Of course—yes—I understand—” he answered stammeringly, her pause compelling him to speak; “but these are very serious things to say—”

  “Serious!” Charlotte dived her hand into her pocket to make sure that her handkerchief was within hail. “D’ye think, Sir Christopher, I don’t know that well! I that have lain awake crying every night since I heard of it, not knowing how to decide between me affection for me friend and my duty to the son of my dear father’s old employer!”

  “I think anyone who makes charges of this kind,” interrupted Christopher coldly, “is bound to bring forward something more definite than mere suspicion.”

  Charlotte took her hand out of her pocket without the handkerchief, and laid it for a moment on Christopher’s arm.

  “My dear Sir Christopher, I entirely agree with you,” she said in her most temperate, gentlemanlike manner, “and I am prepared to place certain facts before you, on whose accuracy you may perfectly rely, although circumstances prevent my telling you how I learned them.”

  The whole situation was infinitely repugnant to Christopher. He would himself have said that he had not nerve enough to deal with Miss Mullen; and joined with this, and his innate and overstrained dislike of having his affairs discussed, was the unendurable position of conniving with her at a treachery. Little as he liked Lambert, he sided with him now with something more than a man’s ordinary resentment against feminine espionage upon another man. He was quite aware of the subdued eagerness in Charlotte’s manner, and it mystified while it disgusted him; but he was also aware that nothing short of absolute flight would check her disclosures. He could do nothing now but permit himself the single pleasure of staring over her head with a countenance barren of response to her histrionic display of expression.

  “You ask me for something more definite than mere suspicion,” continued Charlotte, approaching one of the supremest gratifications of her life with full and luxurious recognitio
n. “I can give you two facts, and if, on investigation, you find they are not correct, you may go to Roderick Lambert, and tell him to take an action for libel against me! I daresay you know that a tenant of yours, named James M’Donagh—commonly called Shamus Bawn—recently got the goodwill of Knocklara, and now holds it in addition to his father’s farm, which he came in for last month.” Christopher assented. “Jim M’Donagh paid one hundred and eighty pounds fine on getting Knocklara. I ask you to examine your estate account, and you will see that the sum credited to you on that transaction is no more than seventy.”

  “May I ask how you know this?” Christopher turned his face towards her for a moment as he asked the question, and encountered, with even more aversion than he had expected, her triumphing eyes.

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you. All I say is, go to Jim M’Donagh, and ask him the amount of his fine, and see if he won’t tell you just the same sum that I’m telling you now.”

  Captain Cursiter, at this moment steering the Serpolette daintily among the shadows of Bruff Bay, saw the two incongruous figures on the turf-quay, one short, black, and powerful, the other tall, white, and passive, and wondered, through the preoccupation of crawling to his anchorage, what it was that Miss Mullen was holding forth to Dysart about, in a voice that came to him across the water like the gruff barking of a dog. He thought, too, that there was an almost ship-wrecked welcome in the shout with which Christopher answered his whistle, and was therefore surprised to see him remain where he was, apparently enthralled by Miss Mullen’s conversation, instead of walking round to meet him at the boathouse pier.

  Charlotte had, in fact, by this time, compelled Christopher to give her his whole attention. As he turned towards her again, he admitted to himself that the thing looked rather serious, though he determined, with the assistance of a good deal of antagonistic irritability, to keep his opinion to himself. This feeling was uppermost as he said: “I have never had the least reason to feel a want of confidence in Mr. Lambert, Miss Mullen, and I certainly could not discredit him by going privately to M’Donagh to ask him about the fine.”

  “It’s a pity all unfaithful stewards haven’t as confiding a master as you, Sir Christopher,” said Charlotte, with a laugh. She felt Christopher’s attitude towards her, as a man in armour may have felt the arrows strike him, and no more, and it came easily to her to laugh. “However,” she went on, correcting her manner quickly, as she saw a very slight increase of colour in Christopher’s face, “the burden of proof does not lie with James M’Donagh. Last November, as you may possibly remember, my name made its first appearance on your rent-roll, as the tenant of Gurthnamuckla, and in recognition of that honour,”— Charlotte felt that there was an academic polish about her sentences that must appeal to a University man— “I wrote your agent a cheque for one hundred pounds, which was duly cashed some days afterwards.” She altered her position, so that she could see his face better, and said deliberately: “Not one penny of that has been credited to the estate! This I know for a fact.”

  “Yes,” said Christopher, after an uncomfortable pause, “that’s very—very curious, but, of course— until I know a little more, I can’t give any opinion on the matter. I think, perhaps, we had better go round to meet Captain Cursiter—”

  Charlotte interrupted him with more violence than she had as yet permitted to escape.

  “If you want to know more, I can tell you more, and plenty more! For the last year and more, Roddy Lambert’s been lashing out large sums of ready money beyond his income, and I know his income to the penny and the farthing! Where did he get that money from? I ask you. What paid for his young horses, and his new dog-cart, and his new carpets, yes! and his honeymoon trip to Paris? I ask you what paid for all that? It wasn’t his first wife’s money paid for it, I know that for a fact, and it certainly wasn’t the second wife’s!”

  She was losing hold of herself; her gestures were of the sort that she usually reserved for her inferiors, and the corners of her mouth bubbled like a snail. Christopher looked at her, and began to walk away. Charlotte followed him, walking unsteadily on the loose stones, and inwardly cursing his insolence as well as her own forgetfulness of the method she had laid down for the interview. He turned and waited for her when he reached the path, and had time to despise himself for not being able to conceal his feelings from a woman so abhorrent and so contemptible.

  “I am—er—obliged for your information,” he said stiffly. In spite of his scorn for his own prejudice, he would not gratify her by saying more.

  “You will forgive me, Sir Christopher,” replied Charlotte with an astonishing resumption of dignity, “if I say that that is a point that is quite immaterial to me. I require no thanks. I felt it to be my duty to tell you these painful facts, and what I suffer in doing it concerns only myself.”

  They walked on in silence between the lake and the wood, with the bluebells creeping outwards to their feet through the white beech stems, and as the last turn of the path brought them in sight of Francie and Hawkins, Charlotte spoke again:

  “You’ll remember that all this is in strict confidence, Sir Christopher.”

  “I shall remember,” said Christopher curtly.

  An hour later, Pamela, driving home with her mother, congratulated herself, as even the best people are prone to do, when she saw on the gravel-sweep the fresh double wheel tracks that indicated that visitors had come and gone. She felt that she had talked enough for one afternoon during the visit to old Lady Eyrecourt, whose deaf sister had fallen to her share, and she did not echo her mother’s regret at missing Miss Mullen and her cousin. She threw down the handful of cards on the hall table again, and went with a tired step to look for Christopher in the smoking-room, where she found him with Captain Cursiter, the latter in the act of taking his departure. The manner of her greeting showed that he was an accustomed sight there, and, as a matter of fact, since Christopher’s return Captain Cursiter had found himself at Bruff very often. He had discovered that it was, as he expressed it, the only house in the country where the women let him alone. Lady Dysart had expressed the position from another point of view, when she had deplored to Mrs. Gascogne Pamela’s “hopeless friendliness” towards men, and Mrs. Gascogne had admitted that there might be something discouraging to a man in being treated as if he were a younger sister.

  This unsuitable friendliness was candidly apparent in Pamela’s regret when she heard that Cursiter had come to Bruff with the news that his regiment was to leave Ireland for Aldershot in a fortnight.

  “Here’s Captain Cursiter trying to stick me with the launch at an alarming reduction, as the property of an officer going abroad,” said Christopher. “He wants to take advantage of my grief, and he won’t stay and dine here and let me haggle the thing out comfortably.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t time to stay,” said Cursiter rather cheerlessly. “I’ve got to go up to Dublin tomorrow, and I’m very busy. I’ll come over again—if I may—when I get back.” He felt all the awkwardness of a self-conscious man in the prominence of making a farewell that he is beginning to find more unpleasant than he had expected.

  “Oh, yes! indeed, you must come over again,” said Pamela, in the soft voice that was just Irish enough for Saxons of the more ignorant sort to fail to distinguish, save in degree, between it and Mrs. Lambert’s Dublin brogue.

  It remained on Captain Cursiter’s ear as he stalked down through the shrubberies to the boat-house, and, as he steamed round Curragh Point, and caught the sweet, turfy whiff of the Irish air, he thought drearily of the arid glare of Aldershot, and, without any apparent connection of ideas, he wondered if the Dysarts were really coming to town next month.

  Not long after his departure Lady Dysart rustled into the smoking-room in her solemnly sumptuous widow’s dress.

  “Is he gone?” she breathed in a stage whisper, pausing on the threshold for a reply.

  “No; he’s hiding behind the door,” answered Christopher; “he always does th
at when he hears you coming.” When Christopher was irritated, his method of showing it was generally so subtle as only to satisfy himself; it slipped through the wide and generous mesh of his mother’s understanding without the smallest friction.

  “Nonsense, Christopher!” she said, not without a furtive glance behind the door. “What a visitation you have had from the whole set! Had they anything interesting to say for themselves? Charlotte Mullen generally is a great alleviation.”

  “Oh yes,” replied her son, examining the end of his cigarette with a peculiar expression, “she—she alleviated about as much as usual; but it was Cursiter who brought the news.”

  “I can’t imagine Captain Cursiter so far forgetting himself as to tell any news,” said Lady Dysart; “but perhaps he makes an exception in your favour.”

  “They’re to go to Aldershot in a fortnight,” said Christopher.

  “You don’t say so!” exclaimed his mother, with an irrepressible look at Pamela, who was sitting on the floor in the window, taking a thorn out of Max’s spatulate paw. “In a fortnight? I wonder how Mr. Hawkins will like that? Evelyn said that Miss Coppard told her the marriage was to come off when the regiment went back to England.”

  Christopher grunted unsympathetically, and Pamela continued her researches for the thorn.

  “Well,” resumed Lady Dysart, “I, for one, shall not regret them. Selfish and second-rate!”

  “Which is which?” asked Christopher, eliminating any tinge of interest or encouragement from his voice. He was quite aware that his mother was in this fashion avenging the slaughter of the hope that she had secretly nourished about Captain Cursiter, and, being in a perturbed frame of mind, it annoyed him.

  “I think your friend is the most self-centred, ungenial man I have ever known,” replied Lady Dysart, in sonorous denunciation, “and if Mr. Hawkins is not second-rate, his friends are, which comes to the same thing! And, by the by, how was it that he went away before Captain Cursiter? Did not they come together?”