The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “Yes. I’ll tell him. I’m going to meet him. I must start now,” she answered, scarcely seeming to notice what he said, and withdrawing her hand from his, she began hurriedly to button on her gloves.

  Christopher did not wait for further dismissal, but when his hand was on the door, her old self suddenly woke.

  “Look at me letting you go away without telling you a bit how grateful I am to you!” she said, with a lift of her tear-disfigured eyes that was like a changeling of the look he used to know; “but don’t you remember what Mrs. Baker said about me, that ‘you couldn’t expect any manners from a Dublin Jackeen.’”

  She laughed weakly, and Christopher stammering more than ever in an attempt to say that there was nothing to be grateful for, got himself out of the room.

  After he had gone, Francie gave herself no time to think. Everything was reeling round her as she went out on to the steps, and even Michael, the groom, thought to himself that if he hadn’t the trap to wash, he’d put the saddle on the chestnut and folly the misthress, she had that thrimulous way with her when he put the reins into her hands, and only for it was the mare she was riding he wouldn’t see her go out by herself. It was the first of June, and the gaiety of the spring was nearly gone. The flowers had fallen from the hawthorn, the bluebells and primroses were vanishing as quietly as they came, the meadows were already swarthy, and the breaths of air that sent pale shimmers across them, were full of the unspeakable fragrance of the ripening grass. Under the trees, near Rosemount, the shadowing greenness had saturated the daylight with its gloom, but out among the open pastures and meadows the large grey sky seemed almost bright, and, in the rich sobriety of tone, the red cattle were brilliant spots of colour.

  The black mare and her rider were now on thoroughly confidential terms, and, so humiliatingly interwoven are soul and body, as the exercise quickened the blood in her veins, Francie’s incorrigible youth rose up, and while it brightened her eyes and drove colour to her cheeks, it whispered that somehow or other happiness might come to her. She rode fast till she reached the turn to Gurthnamuckla, and there, mindful of her husband’s injunctions that she was not to ride up to the house, but to wait for him on the road, she relapsed into a walk.

  As she slackened her pace, all the thoughts that she had been riding away from came up with her again. What claim had Roddy on her now? She had got him out of his trouble, and that was the most he could expect her to do for him. He hadn’t thought much about the trouble he was bringing on her; he never as much as said he was sorry for the disgrace it would be to her. Why should she break her heart for him, and Gerald’s heart too?—as she said Hawkins’ name to herself, her hands fell into her lap, and she moaned aloud. Every step the mare was taking was carrying her farther from him, but yet she could not turn back. She was changed since yesterday; she had seen her husband’s soul laid bare, and it had shown her how tremendous were sin and duty; it had touched her slumbering moral sense as well as her kindness, and though she rebelled she did not dare to turn back.

  It was not till she heard a pony’s quick gallop behind her, and, looking back, saw Hawkins riding after her at full speed, that she knew how soon she was to be tested. She had scarcely time to collect herself before he was pulling up the pony beside her, and had turned a flushed and angry face towards her.

  “Didn’t you get my note? Didn’t you know I was coming?” he began in hot remonstrance. Then, seeing in a moment how ill and strange she looked, “What’s the matter? Has anything happened?”

  “Roddy came home yesterday evening,” she said, with her eyes fixed on the mare’s mane.

  “Well, I know that,” interrupted Hawkins. “Do you mean that he was angry? Did he find out anything about me? If he did see the note I wrote you, there was nothing in that.” Francie shook her head. “Then it’s nothing? It’s only that you’ve been frightened by that brute,” he said, kicking his pony up beside the mare, and trying to look into Francie’s downcast eyes. “Don’t mind him. It won’t be for long.”

  “You mustn’t say that,” she said hurriedly. “I was very wrong yesterday, and I’m sorry for it now.”

  “I know you’re not!” he burst out, with all the conviction that he felt. “You can’t unsay what you said to me yesterday. I sat up the whole night thinking the thing over and thinking of you, and at last I thought of a fellow I know out in New Zealand, who told me last year I ought to chuck the army and go out there.” He dropped his reins on the pony’s neck, and took Francie’s hand. “Why shouldn’t we go there together, Francie? I’ll give up everything for you, my darling!”

  She feebly tried to take her hand away, but did not reply.

  “I’ve got three hundred a year of my own, and we can do ourselves awfully well on that out there. We’ll always have lots of horses, and it’s a ripping climate—and—and I love you, and I’ll always love you!”

  He was carried away by his own words, and, stooping his head, he kissed her hand again and again.

  Every pulse in her body answered to his touch, and when she drew her hand away, it was with an effort that was more than physical.

  “Ah! stop, stop,” she cried. “I’ve changed—I didn’t mean it.”

  “Didn’t mean what?” demanded Hawkins, with his light eyes on fire.

  “Oh, leave me alone,” she said, turning her distracted face towards him. “I’m nearly out of my mind as it is. What made you follow me out here? I came out so as I wouldn’t see you, and I’m going to meet Roddy now.”

  Hawkins’ colour died slowly down to a patchy white. “What do you think it was that made me follow you? Do you want to make me tell you over again what you know already?” She did not answer, and he went on, trying to fight against his own fears by speaking very quietly and rationally. “I don’t know what you’re at, Francie. I don’t believe you know what you’re saying. Something must have happened, and it would be fairer to tell me what it is, than to drive me distracted in this sort of way.”

  There was a pause of several seconds, and he was framing a fresh remonstrance when she spoke.

  “Roddy’s in great trouble. I wouldn’t leave him,” she said, taking refuge in a prevarication of the exact truth.

  Something about her told Hawkins that things were likely to go hard with him, and there was something, too, that melted his anger as it rose; but her pale face drew him to a height of passion that he had not known before.

  “And don’t you think anything about me?” he said with a breaking voice. “Are you ready to throw me overboard just because he’s in trouble, when you know he doesn’t care for you a tenth part as much as I do? Do you mean to tell me that you want me to go away, and say good-bye to you for ever? If you do, I’ll go, and if you hear I’ve gone to the devil, you’ll know who sent me.”

  The naïve selfishness of this argument was not perceived by either. Hawkins felt his position to be almost noble, and did not in the least realise what he was asking Francie to sacrifice for him. He had even forgotten the idea that had occurred to him last night, that to go to New Zealand would be a pleasanter way of escaping from his creditors than marrying Miss Coppard. Certainly Francie had no thought of his selfishness or of her own sacrifice. She was giddy with struggle; right and wrong had lost their meaning and changed places elusively; the only things that she saw clearly were the beautiful future that had been offered to her, and the look in Roddy’s face when she had told him that wherever he had to go she would go with him.

  The horses had moved staidly on, while these two lives stood still and wrestled with their fate, and the summit was slowly reached of the long hill on which Lambert had once pointed out to her the hoof-prints of Hawkins’ pony. The white road and the grey rock country stretched out before them, colourless and discouraging under the colourless sky, and Hawkins still waited for his answer. Coming towards them up the tedious slope was a string of half-a-dozen carts, with a few people walking on either side; an unremarkable procession, that might have meant a wedding, or merel
y a neighbourly return from market, but for a long, yellow coffin that lay, hemmed in between old women, in the midmost cart. Francie felt a superstitious thrill as she saw it; a country funeral, with its barbarous and yet fitting crudity, always seemed to bring death nearer to her than the plumed conventionalities of the hearses and mourning coaches that she was accustomed to. She had once been to the funeral of a fellow Sunday-school child in Dublin, and the first verse of the hymn that they had sung then, came back, and began to weave itself in with the beat of the mare’s hoofs.

  “Brief life is here our portion,

  Brief sorrow, short-lived care,

  The life that knows no ending,

  The tearless life is there.”

  “Francie, are you ever going to answer me? Come away with me this very day. We could catch the six o’clock train before any one knew—dearest, if you love me—” His roughened, unsteady voice seemed to come to her from a distance, and yet was like a whisper in her own heart.

  “Wait till we are past the funeral,” she said, catching, in her agony, at the chance of a minute’s respite.

  At the same moment an old man, who had been standing by the side of the road, leaning on his stick, turned towards the riders, and Francie recognised in him Charlotte’s retainer, Billy Grainy. His always bloodshot eyes were redder than ever, his mouth dribbled like a baby’s, and the smell of whisky poisoned the air all round him.

  “I’m waitin’ on thim here this half-hour,” he began, in a loud drunken mumble, hobbling to Francie’s side, and moving along beside the mare, “as long as they were taking her back the road to cry her at her own gate. Owld bones is wake, asthore, owld bones is wake!” He caught at the hem of Francie’s habit to steady himself; “be cripes! Miss Duffy was a fine woman, Lord ha’ maircy on her. And a great woman! And divil blasht thim that threw her out of her farm to die in the Union—the dom ruffins.”

  As on the day, now very long ago, when she had first ridden to Gurthnamuckla, Francie tried to shake his hand off her habit; he released it stupidly and staggering to the side of the road, went on grumbling and cursing. The first cart, creaking and rattling under its load of mourners, was beside them by this time, and Billy, for the benefit of its occupants, broke into a howl of lamentation.

  “Thanks be to God Almighty, and thanks be to His Mother, the crayture had thim belonging to her that would bury her like a Christian.” He shook his fist at Francie. “Ah—ha! go home to himself and owld Charlotte, though it’s little thim regards you—” He burst into drunken laughter, bending and tottering over his stick.

  Francie, heedless of the etiquette that required that she and Hawkins should stop their horses till the funeral passed, struck the mare, and passed by him at a quickened pace. The faces in the carts were all turned upon her, and she felt as if she were enduring, in a dream, the eyes of an implacable tribunal; even the mare seemed to share in her agitation, and sidled and fidgeted on the narrow strip of road, that was all the space left to her by the carts. The coffin was almost abreast of Francie now, and her eyes rested with a kind of fascination on its bare, yellow surface. She became dimly aware that Norry the Boat was squatted beside it on the straw, when one of the other women began suddenly to groan and thump on the coffin-lid with her fists, in preparation for a burst of the Irish Cry, and at the signal Norry fell upon her knees, and flung out her arms inside her cloak, with a gesture that made her look like a great vulture opening its wings for flight. The cloak flapped right across the mare’s face, and she swerved from the cart with a buck that loosened her rider in the saddle, and shook her hat off. There was a screech of alarm from all the women, the frightened mare gave a second and a third buck, and at the third Francie was shot into the air, and fell, head first, on the road.

  * * *

  CHAPTER LI.

  The floor of the potato loft at Gurthnamuckla had for a long time needed repairs, a circumstance not in itself distressing to Miss Mullen, who held that effort after mere theoretical symmetry was unjustifiable waste of time in either housekeeping or farming. On this first of June, however, an intimation from Norry that “there’s ne’er a pratie ye have that isn’t ate with the rats,” given with the thinly-veiled triumph of servants in such announcements, caused a truculent visit of inspection to the potato loft; and in her first spare moment of the afternoon, Miss Mullen set forth with her tool-basket, and some boards from a packing-case, to make good the breaches with her own hands. Doing it herself saved the necessity of taking the men from their work, and moreover ensured its being properly done.

  So she thought, as, having climbed the ladder that led from the cowhouse to the loft, she put her tools on the ground, and surveyed with a workman’s eye the job she had set herself. The loft was hot and airless, redolent of the cowhouse below, as well as of the clayey mustiness of the potatoes that were sprouting in the dirt on the floor, and even sending pallid, worm-like roots down into space through the cracks in the boards. Miss Mullen propped the window-shutter open with the largest potato, and, pinning up her skirt, fell to work.

  She had been hammering and sawing for a quarter of an hour when she heard the clatter of a horse’s hoofs on the cobble-stones of the yard, and, getting up from her knees, advanced to the window with caution and looked out. It was Mr. Lambert, in the act of pulling up his awkward young horse, and she stood looking down at him in silence while he dismounted, with a remarkable expression on her face, one in which some acute mental process was mixed with the half-unconscious and yet all-observant recognition of an intensely familiar object.

  “Hullo, Roddy!” she called out at last, “is that you? What brings you over so early?”

  Mr. Lambert started with more violence than the occasion seemed to demand.

  “Hullo!” he replied, in a voice not like his own, “is that where you are?”

  “Yes, and it’s where I’m going to stay. This is the kind of fancy work I’m at,” brandishing her saw; “so if you want to talk to me you must come up here.”

  “All right,” said Lambert, gloomily, “I’ll come up as soon as I put the colt in the stable.”

  It is a fact so improbable as to be worth noting, that before Lambert found his way up the ladder, Miss Mullen had unpinned her skirt and fastened up the end of a plait that had escaped from the massive coils at the back of her head.

  “Well, and where’s the woman that owns you?” she asked, beginning to work again, while her visitor stood in obvious discomfort, with his head touching the rafters, and the light from the low window striking sharply up against his red and heavy eyes.

  “At home,” he replied, almost vacantly. “I’d have been here half an hour ago or more,” he went on after a moment or two, “but the colt cast a shoe, and I had to go on to the forge beyond the cross to get it put on.”

  Charlotte, with a flat pencil in her mouth, grunted responsively, while she measured off a piece of board, and, holding it with her knee on the body of a legless wheelbarrow, began to saw it across. Lambert looked on, provoked and disconcerted by this engrossing industry. With his brimming sense of collapse and crisis, he felt that even this temporary delay of sympathy was an unkindness.

  “That colt must be sold this week, so I couldn’t afford to knock his hoof to bits on the hard road.” His manner was so portentous that Charlotte looked up again, and permitted herself to remark on what had been apparent to her the moment she saw him.

  “Why, what’s the matter with you, Roddy? Now I come to see you, you look as if you’d been at your own funeral.”

  “I wish to God I had! It would be the best thing could happen me.”

  He found pleasure in saying something to startle her, and in seeing that her face became a shade hotter than the stifling air and the stooping over her work had made it.

  “What makes you talk like that?” she said, a little strangely, as it seemed to him.

  He thought she was moved, and he immediately felt his position to be more pathetic than he had believed. It would be much easi
er to explain the matter to Charlotte than to Francie, he felt at once; Charlotte understood business matters, a formula which conveyed to his mind much comfortable flexibility in money affairs.

  “Charlotte,” he said, looking down at her with eyes that self-pity and shaken self-control were moistening again, “I’m in most terrible trouble. Will you help me?”

  “Wait till I hear what it is and I’ll tell you that,” replied Charlotte, with the same peculiar, flushed look on her face, and suggestion in her voice of strong and latent feeling. He could not tell how it was, but he felt as if she knew what he was going to say.

  “I’m four hundred pounds in debt to the estate, and Dysart has found it out,” he said lowering his voice as if afraid that the spiders and wood-lice might repeat his secret.

  “Four hundred,” thought Charlotte, “that’s more than I reckoned;” but she said aloud, “My God! Roddy, how did that happen?”

  “I declare to you I don’t know how it happened. One thing and another came against me, and I had to borrow this money, and before I could pay it he found out.”

  Lambert was a pitiable figure as he made his confession, his head, his shoulders, and even his moustache drooping limply, and his hands nervously twisting his ash plant.

  “That’s a bad business,” said Charlotte reflectively, and was silent for a moment, while Lambert realised the satisfaction of dealing with an intelligence that could take in such a situation instantaneously, without alarm or even surprise.

  “Is he going to give you the sack?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet. He didn’t say anything definite.”

  Lambert found the question hard to bear, but he endured it for the sake of the chance it gave him to lead up to the main point of the interview. “If I could have that four hundred placed to his credit before I see him next, I believe there’d be an end of it. Not that I’d stay with him,” he went on, trying to bluster, “or with any man that treated me this kind of way, going behind my back to look at the accounts.”