The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  Few people would think it worth their while to dispute the wandering futilities of an old dying woman, but even at this eleventh hour Charlotte could not brook the revolt of a slave.

  “Good little thing!” she exclaimed, pushing the brandy bottle noisily in among a crowd of glasses and medicine bottles, “a strapping big woman of nineteen! You didn’t think her so good the time you had her here, and she put Susan’s father and mother in the well!”

  The old lady did not seem to understand what she had said.

  “Susan, Susan!” she called quaveringly, and feebly patted the crochet quilt.

  As if in answer, a hand fumbled at the door and opened it softly. Norry was standing there, tall and gaunt, holding in her apron, with both hands, something that looked like an enormous football.

  “Miss Charlotte!” she whispered hoarsely, “here’s Susan for ye. He was out in the ashpit, an’ I was hard set to get him, he was that wild.”

  Even as she spoke there was a furious struggle in the blue apron.

  “God in Heaven! ye fool!” ejaculated Charlotte. “Don’t let him go!” She shut the door behind Norry. “Now, give him to me.”

  Norry opened her apron cautiously, and Miss Charlotte lifted out of it a large grey tom-cat.

  “Be quiet, my heart’s love,” she said, “be quiet.”

  The cat stopped kicking and writhing, and, sprawling up on to the shoulder of the magenta dressing-gown, turned a fierce grey face upon his late captor. Norry crept over to the bed, and put back the dirty chintz curtain that had been drawn forward to keep out the draught of the door. Mrs. Mullen was lying very still; she had drawn her knees up in front of her, and the bedclothes hung sharply from the small point that they made. The big living old woman took the hand of the other old woman who was so nearly dead, and pressed her lips to it.

  “Ma’am, d’ye know me?”

  Her mistress opened her eyes.

  “Norry,” she whispered, “give Miss Francie some jam for her tea to-night, but don’t tell Miss Charlotte.”

  “What’s that she’s saying?” said Charlotte, going to the other side of the bed. “Is she asking for me?”

  “No, but for Miss Francie,” Norry answered.

  “She knows as well as I do that Miss Francie’s in Dublin,” said Charlotte roughly; “‘twas Susan she was asking for last. Here, a’nt, here’s Susan for you.”

  She pulled the cat down from her shoulder, and put him on the bed, where he crouched with a twitching tail, prepared for flight at a moment’s notice.

  He was within reach of the old lady’s hand, but she did not seem to know that he was there. She opened her eyes and looked vacantly round.

  “Where’s little Francie? You mustn’t send her away, Charlotte; you promised you’d take care of her; didn’t you, Charlotte?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Charlotte quickly, pushing the cat towards the old lady; “never fear, I’ll see after her.”

  Old Mrs. Mullen’s eyes, that had rested with a filmy stare on her niece’s face, closed again, and her head began to move a little from one side to the other, a low monotonous moan coming from her lips with each turn. Charlotte took her right hand and laid it on the cat’s brindled back. It rested there, unconscious, for some seconds, while the two women looked on in silence, and then the fingers drooped and contracted like a bird’s claw, and the moaning ceased. There was at the same time a spasmodic movement of the gathered-up knees, and a sudden rigidity fell upon the small insignificant face.

  Norry the Boat threw herself upon her knees with a howl, and began to pray loudly. At the sound the cat leaped to the floor, and the hand that had been placed upon him in the only farewell his mistress was to take, dropped stiffly on the bed. Miss Charlotte snatched up the candle, and held it close to her aunt’s face. There was no mistaking what she saw there, and, putting down the candle again, she plucked a large silk handkerchief from her pocket, and, with some hideous preliminary heavings of her shoulders, burst into transports of noisy grief.

  * * *

  CHAPTER III.

  A Damp winter and a chilly spring had passed in their usual mildly disagreeable manner over that small Irish country town which was alluded to in the beginning of the last chapter. The shop windows had exhibited their usual zodiacal succession, and had progressed through red comforters and woollen gloves to straw hats, tennis shoes, and coloured Summer Numbers. The residents of Lismoyle were already congratulating each other on having “set” their lodgings to the summer visitors; the steamer was plying on the lake, the militia was under canvas, and on this very fifteenth of June, Lady Dysart of Bruff was giving her first lawn-tennis party.

  Miss Charlotte Mullen had taken advantage of the occasion to emerge from the mourning attire that since her aunt’s death had so misbecome her sallow face, and was driving herself to Bruff in the phæton that had been Mrs. Mullen’s, and a gown chosen with rather more view to effect than was customary with her. She was under no delusion as to her appearance, and, early recognising its hopeless character, she had abandoned all superfluities of decoration. A habit of costume so defiantly simple as to border on eccentricity had at least two advantages; it freed her from the absurdity of seeming to admire herself, and it was cheap. During the late Mrs. Mullen’s lifetime Charlotte had studied economy. The most reliable old persons had, she was wont to reflect, a slippery turn in them where their wills were concerned, and it was well to be ready for any contingency of fortune. Things had turned out very well after all; there had been one inconvenient legacy—that “Little Francie” to whom the old lady’s thoughts had turned, happily too late for her to give any practical emphasis to them—but that bequest was of the kind that may be repudiated if desirable. The rest of the disposition had been admirably convenient, and, in skilled hands, something might even be made of that legacy. Miss Mullen thought a great deal about her legacy and the steps she had taken with regard to it as she drove to Bruff. The horse that drew her ancient phæton moved with a dignity befitting his eight and twenty years; the three miles of level lake-side road between Lismoyle and Bruff were to him a serious undertaking, and by the time he had arrived at his destination, his mistress’s active mind had pursued many pleasant mental paths to their utmost limit.

  This was the first of the two catholic and comprehensive entertainments that Lady Dysart’s sense of her duty towards her neighbours yearly impelled her to give, and when Charlotte, wearing her company smile, came down the steps of the terrace to meet her hostess, the difficult revelry was at its height. Lady Dysart had cast her nets over a wide expanse, and the result was not encouraging. She stood, tall, dark, and majestic, on the terrace, surveying the impracticable row of women that stretched, forlorn of men, along one side of the tennis grounds, much as Cassandra might have scanned the beleaguering hosts from the ramparts of Troy; and as she advanced to meet her latest guest, her strong clear-eyed face was perplexed and almost tragic.

  “How do you do, Miss Mullen?” she said in tones of unconcealed gloom. “Have you ever seen so few men in your life? and there are five and forty women! I cannot imagine where they have all come from, but I know where I wish they would take themselves to, and that is to the bottom of the lake!”

  The large intensity of Lady Dysart’s manner gave unintended weight to her most trivial utterance, and had she reflected very deeply before she spoke, it might have occurred to her that this was not a specially fortunate manner of greeting a female guest. But Charlotte understood that nothing personal was intended; she knew that the freedom of Bruff had been given to her, and that she could afford to listen to abuse of the outer world with the composure of one of the inner circle.

  “Well, your ladyship,” she said, in the bluff, hearty voice which she felt accorded best with the theory of herself that she had built up in Lady Dysart’s mind, “I’ll head a forlorn hope to the bottom of the lake for you, and welcome, but for the honour of the house you might give me a cup o’ tay first!”

  Charlotte had man
y tones of voice, according with the many facets of her character, and when she wished to be playful she affected a vigorous brogue, not perhaps being aware that her own accent scarcely admitted of being strengthened.

  This refinement of humour was probably wasted on Lady Dysart. She was an Englishwoman, and, as such, was constitutionally unable to discern perfectly the subtle grades of Irish vulgarity. She was aware that many of the ladies on her visiting list were vulgar, but it was their subjects of conversation and their opinions that chiefly brought the fact home to her. Miss Mullen, au fond, was probably no less vulgar than they, but she was never dull, and Lady Dysart would suffer anything rather than dulness. It was less than nothing to her that Charlotte’s mother was reported to have been in her youth a national schoolmistress, and her grandmother a bare-footed country girl. These facts of Miss Mullen’s pedigree were valued topics in Lismoyle, but Lady Dysart’s serene radicalism ignored the inequalities of a lower class, and she welcomed a woman who could talk to her on spiritualism, or books, or indeed on any current topic, with a point and agreeability that made her accent, to English ears, merely the expression of a vigorous individuality. She now laughed in response to her visitor’s jest, but her eye did not cease from roving over the gathering, and her broad brow was still contracted in calculation.

  “I never knew the country so bereft of men or so peopled with girls! Even the little Barrington boys are off with the militia, and everyone about has conspired to fill their houses with women, and not only women but dummies!” Her glance lighted on the long bench where sat the more honourable women in midge-bitten dulness. “And there is Kate Gascogne in one of her reveries, not hearing a word that Mrs. Waller is saying to her—”

  With Lady Dysart intention was accomplishment as nearly as might be. She had scarcely finished speaking before she began a headlong advance upon the objects of her diatribe, making a short cut across the corner of a lawn-tennis court, and scarcely observing the havoc that her transit wrought in the game. Charlotte was less rash. She steered her course clear of the tennis grounds, and of the bench of matrons, passed the six Miss Beatties with a comprehensive “How are ye, girls?” and took up her position under one of the tall elm trees.

  Under the next tree a few men were assembled, herding together for mutual protection after the manner of men, and laying down the law to each other about road sessions, the grand jury, and Irish politics generally. They were a fairly representative trio; a country gentleman with a grey moustache and a loud voice in which he was announcing that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to pull the rope at the execution of a certain English statesman; a slight, dejected-looking clergyman, who vied with Major Waller in his denunciations, but chastenedly, like an echo in a cathedral aisle; and a smartly dressed man of about thirty-five, of whom a more detailed description need not be given, as he has been met with in the first chapter, and the six years after nine-and-twenty do little more than mellow a man’s taste in checks, and sprinkle a grey hair or two on his temples.

  Miss Mullen listened for a few minutes to the melancholy pessimisms of the archdeacon, and then, interrupting Major Waller in a fine outburst on the advisability of martial law, she thrust herself and her attendant cloud of midges into the charmed circle of the smoke of Mr. Lambert’s cigarette.

  “Ho! do I hear me old friend the Major at politics?” she said, shaking hands effusively with the three men. “I declare I’m a better politician than any one of you! D’ye know how I served Tom Casey, the land-leaguing plumber, yesterday? I had him mending my tank, and when I got him into it I whipped the ladder away, and told him not a step should he budge till he sang ‘God save the Queen!’ I was arguing there half an hour with him in water up to his middle before I converted him, and then it wasn’t so much the warmth of his convictions as the cold of his legs made him tune up. I call that practical politics!”

  The speed and vigour with which this story was told would have astounded anyone who did not know Miss Mullen’s powers of narration, but Mr. Lambert, to whom it seemed specially addressed, merely took his cigarette out of his mouth, and said, with a familiar laugh:

  “Practical politics, by Jove! I call it a cold water cure. Kill or cure like the rest of your doctoring, eh! Charlotte?”

  Miss Mullen joined with entire good-humour in the laugh that followed.

  “Oh, th’ ingratitude of man!” she exclaimed. “Archdeacon, you’ve seen his bald scalp from the pulpit, and I ask you, now, isn’t that a fresh crop he has on it? I leave it to his conscience, if he has one, to say if it wasn’t my doctoring gave him that fine black thatch he has now!”

  The archdeacon fixed his eyes seriously upon her; Charlotte’s playfulness always alarmed and confused him.

  “Do not appeal to me, Miss Mullen,” he answered, in his refined, desponding voice; “my unfortunate sight makes my evidence in such a matter worth nothing; and, by the way, I meant to ask you if your niece would be good enough to help us in the choir? I understand she sings.”

  Charlotte interrupted him.

  “There’s another of you at it!” she exclaimed. “I think I’ll have to advertiss it in the Irish Times that, whereas my first cousin, Isabella Mullen, married Johnny Fitzpatrick, who was no relation of mine, good, bad, or indifferent, their child is my first cousin once removed, and not my niece!”

  Mr. Lambert blew a cloud of smoke through his nose.

  “You’re a nailer at pedigrees, Charlotte,” he said with a patronage that he knew was provoking; “but as far as I can make out the position, it comes to mighty near the same thing; you’re what they call her Welsh aunt, anyhow.”

  Charlotte’s face reddened, and she opened her wide mouth for a retort, but before she had time for more than the champings as of a horse with a heavy bit, which preceded her more incisive repartees, another person joined the group.

  “Mr. Lambert,” said Pamela Dysart, in her pleasant, anxious voice, “I am going to ask you if you will play in the next set, or if you would rather help the Miss Beatties to get up a round of golf? How do you do, Miss Mullen? I have not seen you before; why did you not bring your niece with you?”

  Charlotte showed all her teeth in a forced smile as she replied, “I suppose you mean my cousin, Miss Dysart? she won’t be with me till the day after to-morrow.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” replied Pamela, with the sympathetic politeness that made strangers think her manner too good to be true; “and Mr. Lambert tells me she plays tennis so well.”

  “Why, what does he know about her tennis playing?” said Charlotte, turning sharply towards Lambert.

  The set on the nearer court was over, and the two young men who had played in it strolled up to the group as she spoke. Mr. Lambert expanded his broad chest, gave his hat an extra tilt over his nose, and looked rather more self-complacent than usual as he replied:

  “Well, I ought to know something about it, seeing I took her in hand when she was in short petticoats—taught her her paces myself, in fact.”

  Mr. Hawkins, the shorter of the two players who had just come up, ceased from mopping his scarlet face, and glanced from Mr. Lambert to Pamela with a countenance devoid of expression, save that conferred by the elevation of one eyebrow almost to the roots of his yellow hair. Pamela’s eyes remained unresponsive, but the precipitancy with which she again addressed herself to Mr. Lambert showed that a disposition to laugh had been near.

  Charlotte turned away with an expression that was the reverse of attractive. When her servants saw that look they abandoned excuse or discussion; when the Lismoyle beggars saw it they checked the flow of benediction and fled. Even the archdeacon, through the religious halo that habitually intervened between him and society, became aware that the moment was not propitious for speaking to Miss Mullen about his proposed changes in the choir, and he drifted away to think of diocesan matters, and to forget as far as possible that he was at a lawn-tennis party.

  Outside the group stood the young man who had been playing in
the set with Mr. Hawkins. He was watching through an eyeglass the limp progress of the game in the other court, and was even making praiseworthy attempts to applaud the very feeble efforts of the players. He was tall and slight, with a near-sighted stoop, and something of an old-fashioned, eighteenth century look about him that was accentuated by his not wearing a moustache, and was out of keeping with the flannels and brilliant blazer that are the revolutionary protest of this age against its orthodox clothing. It did not seem to occur to him that he was doing anything unusual in occupying himself, as he was now doing, in picking up balls for the Lismoyle curate and his partner; he would have thought it much more remarkable had he found in himself a preference for doing anything else. This was an occupation that demanded neither interest nor conversation, and of a number of disagreeable duties he did not think that he had chosen the worst.

  Charlotte walked up to him as he stood leaning against a tree, and held out her hand.

  “How d’ye do, Mr. Dysart?” she said with marked politeness. All trace of combat had left her manner, and the smile with which she greeted him was sweet and capacious. “We haven’t seen you in Lismoyle since you came back from the West Indies.”

  Christopher Dysart let his eyeglass fall, and looked apologetic as he enclosed her well-filled glove in his long hand, and made what excuses he could for not having called upon Miss Mullen.

  “Since Captain Thesiger has got this new steam-launch I can’t call my soul my own; I’m out on the lake with him half the day, and the other half I spend with a nail-brush trying to get the blacks off.”

  He spoke with a hesitation that could hardly be called a stammer, but was rather a delaying before his sentences, a mental rather than a physical uncertainty.