The Real Charlotte

by Edith Somerville

  “Nice!” returned her companion with enthusiasm, I should think it was! I’d make that one of the sweetest little places in the country if I had it. There’s no better grass for young horses anywhere, and there’s first-class stabling. I can tell you you’re not the only one that thinks it’s a nice place, he continued, “but this old devil that has it won’t give it up; she’d rather let the house rot to pieces over her head than go out of it.”

  They rode past the barricaded hall door, and round the corner of the house into the yard, and Lambert called for Miss Duffy for some time in vain. Nothing responded except the turkey cock, who answered each call with an infuriated gobble, and a donkey, who, in the dark recesses of a cow-house, lifted up his voice in heartrending rejoinder. At last a window fell down with a bang in the upper story, and the mistress of the house put out her head. Francie had only time to catch a glimpse of a thin, dirty face, a hooked nose, and unkempt black hair, before the vision was withdrawn, and a slipshod step was heard coming downstairs.

  When Miss Duffy appeared at her kitchen door she had flung a shawl round her head, possibly to conceal the fact that her crinkled mat of hair held thick in it, like powder, the turf ashes of many sluttish days. Her stained and torn black skirt had evidently just been unpinned from about her waist, and was hitched up at one side, showing a frayed red Galway petticoat, and that her feet had recently been thrust into her boots was attested by the fact that their laces trailed on the ground beside her. In spite of these disadvantages, however, it was with a manner of the utmost patronage that she greeted Mr. Lambert.

  “I would ask you and the young leedy to dismount,” she continued in the carefully genteel voice that she clung to in the wreck of her fortunes, “but I am, as you will see,” she made a gesture with a dingy hand, “quite ‘in dishabilly’ as they say; I’ve been a little indisposed, and—”

  “Oh, no matter, Miss Duffy,” interrupted Lambert, “I only wanted to say a few words to you on business, and Miss Fitzpatrick will ride about the place till we’re done.”

  Miss Duffy’s small black eyes turned quickly to Francie.

  “Oh, indeed, is that Miss Fitzpatrick? My fawther knew her grandfawther. I am much pleased to make her acquaintance.”

  She inclined her head as she spoke, and Francie, with much disposition to laugh, bowed hers in return; each instant Miss Duffy’s resemblance, both in feature and costume, to a beggar woman who frequented the corner of Sackville Street, was becoming harder to bear with fortitude, and she was delighted to leave Lambert to his tête-à-tête and ride out into the lawn, among the sycamores and hawthorns, where the black mare immediately fell to devouring grass with a resolve that was quite beyond Francie’s power to combat.

  She broke a little branch off a low-growing ash tree, to keep away the flies that were doing their best to spoil the pleasure of a perfect afternoon, and sat there, fanning herself lazily, while the mare, with occasional impatient tugs at the reins and stampings at the flies, cropped her way onwards from one luscious tuft to another. The Lismoyle grazier’s cattle had collected themselves under the trees at the farther end of the lawn where a swampy pool still remained of the winter encroachments of the lake. In the sunshine at the other side of the wall a chain of such pools stretched to the broad blue water, and grey limestone rocks showed above the tangle of hemlock and tall spikes of magenta foxgloves. A white sail stood dazzlingly out in the turquoise blue of a band of calm, and the mountains on the farther side of the lake were palely clothed in thinnest lavender and most ethereal green.

  It might have been the unexpected likeness that she had found in Julia Duffy to her old friend the beggar woman that took Francie’s thoughts away from this idyll of perfected summer to the dry, grey Dublin streets that had been her uttermost horizon a week ago. The milkman generally called at the Fitzpatricks’ house at about this hour; the clank of his pint measure against the area railings, even his pleasantries with Maggie the cook, relative to his bestowing an extra “sup for the cat,” were suddenly and sharply present with her. The younger Fitzpatrick children would be home from school, and would be raging through the kitchen seeking what they might devour in the interval before the six o’clock dinner, and she herself would probably have been engaged in a baking game of tennis in the square outside her uncle’s house. She felt very sorry for Aunt Tish when she thought of that hungry gang of sons and daughters and of the evil days that had come upon the excellent and respectable Uncle Robert, and the still more evil days that would come in another fortnight or so, when the whole bursting party had squeezed themselves into a little house at Bray, there to exist for an indefinite period on Irish stew, strong tea, and a diminished income. There was a kind of understanding that when they were “settled” she was to go back to them, and blend once more her five and twenty pounds a year with the Fitzpatrick funds; but this afternoon, with the rich summer stillness and the blaze of buttercups all about her, and the unfamiliar feeling of the mare’s restless shoulder under her knee, she was exceedingly glad that the settling process would take some months at least. She was not given to introspection, and could not have said anything in the least interesting about her mental or moral atmosphere: she was too uneducated and too practical for any self-communings of this kind; but she was quite certain of two things, that in spite of her affection for the Fitzpatricks she was very glad she was not going to spend the summer in Dublin or Bray, and also, that in spite of certain bewildering aspects of her cousin Charlotte, she was beginning to have what she defined to herself as “a high old time.”

  It was somewhere about this period in her meditations that she became aware of a slight swishing and puffing sound from the direction of the lake, and a steam-launch came swiftly along close under the shore. She was a smart-looking boat, spick and span as white paint and a white funnel with a brass band could make her, and in her were seated two men, one, radiant in a red and white blazer, was steering, while the other, in clothes to which even distance failed to lend enchantment, was menially engaged in breaking coals with a hammer. The boughs of the trees intervened exasperatingly between Francie and this glittering vision, and the resolve to see it fully lent her the power to drag the black mare from her repast, and urge her forward to an opening where she could see and be seen, two equally important objects.

  She had instantly realised that these were those heroes of romance, “the Lismoyle officers,” the probabilities of her alliance with one of whom had been the subject of some elegant farewell badinage on the part of her bosom friend, Miss Fanny Hemphill. Francie’s acquaintance with the British army had hitherto been limited to one occasion when, at a Sandymount evening band, “one of the officers from Beggars’ Bush Barracks”—so she had confided to Miss Hemphill—had taken off his hat to her, and been very polite until Aunt Tish had severely told him that no true gentleman would converse with a lady without she was presented to him, and had incontinently swept her home. She could see them quite plainly now, and from the fact that the man who had been rooting among the coals was now sitting up, evidently at the behest of the steersman, and looking at her, it was clear that she had attracted attention too. Even the black mare pricked her ears, and stared at this new kind of dragon-fly creature that went noisily by, leaving a feathery smear on the air behind it, and just then Mr. Lambert rode out of the stableyard, and looked about him for his charge.

  “Francie!” he called with perceptible impatience; “what are you at down there?”

  The steam-launch had by this time passed the opening, and Francie turned and rode towards him. Her hat was a good deal on the back of her head, and her brilliant hair caught the sunshine; the charm of her supple figure atoned for the crookedness of her seat, and her eyes shone with an excitement born of the delightful sight of soldiery.

  “Oh, Mr. Lambert, weren’t those the officers?” she cried, as he rode up to her; “which was which? Haven’t they a grand little steamer?”

  Lambert’s temper had apparently not been improved by his
conversation with Julia Duffy; instead of answering Miss Fitzpatrick he looked at her with a clouded brow, and in his heart he said, “Damn the officers!”

  “I wondered which of them was the captain,” continued Francie; “I suppose it was the little fair one; he was much the best dressed, and he was making the other one do all the work.”

  Lambert gave a scornful laugh.

  “I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself. I’ll engage it won’t be long before you know all about them. You’ve made a good start already.”

  “Oh, very well,” replied Francie, letting fall both her reins in order to settle her hat; “some day you’ll be asking me something, and I won’t tell you, and then you’ll be sorry.”

  “Some day you’ll be breaking your neck, and then you’ll be sorry,” retorted Lambert, taking up the fallen reins.

  They rode out to the gate of Gurthnamuckla in silence, and after a mile of trotting, which was to Francie a period of mingled pain and anxiety, the horses slackened of their own accord, and began to pick their way gingerly over the smooth sheets of rock that marked the entry of the road into the stony tract mentioned in the last chapter. Francie took the opportunity for a propitiatory question.

  “What were you and the old woman talking about all that time? I thought you were never coming.”

  “Business,” said Lambert shortly; then viciously, “if any conversation with a woman can ever be called business.”

  “Oho! then you couldn’t get her to do what you wanted!” laughed Francie; “very good for you too! I think you always get your own way.”

  “Is that your opinion?” said Lambert, turning his dark eyes upon her; “I’m sorry I can’t agree with you.”

  The fierce heat had gone out of the afternoon as they passed along the lonely road, through the country of rocks and hazel bushes; the sun was sending low flashes into their eyes from the bright mirror of the lake; the goats that hopped uncomfortably about in the enforced and detested tête-à-tête caused by a wooden yoke across their necks, cast blue shadows of many-legged absurdity on the warm slabs of stone; a carrion crow, swaying on the thin topmost bough of a thorn-bush, a blot in the mellow afternoon sky, was looking about him if haply he could see a wandering kid whose eyes would serve him for his supper; and a couple of miles away, at Rosemount, Mrs. Lambert was sending down to be kept hot what she and Charlotte had left of the Sally Lunn.

  Francie was not sorry when she found herself again under the trees of the Lismoyle highroad, and in spite of the injuries which the pommels of the saddle were inflicting upon her, and the growing stiffness of all her muscles, she held gallantly on at a sharp trot, till her hair-pins and her hat were loosed from their foundations, and her green habit rose in ungainly folds. They were nearing Rosemount when they heard wheels behind them; Lambert took the left side of the road, and the black mare followed his example with such suddenness, that Francie, when she had recovered her equilibrium, could only be thankful that nothing more than her hat had come off. With the first instinct of woman she snatched at the coils of hair that fell down her back and hung enragingly over her eyes, and tried to wind them on to her head again; she became horribly aware that a waggonette with several people in it had pulled up beside her, and, finally, that a young man with a clean-shaved face and an eyeglass was handing her her hat and taking off his own.

  Holding in her teeth the few hair-pins that she had been able to save from the wreck, she stammered a gratitude that she was far from feeling; and when she heard Lambert say, “Oh, thank you, Dysart, you just saved me getting off,” she felt that her discomfiture was complete.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII.

  Christopher Dysart was a person about whom Lismoyle and its neighbourhood had not been able to come to a satisfactory conclusion, unless indeed, that conclusion can be called satisfactory which admitted him to be a disappointment. From the time that, as a shy, plain, little boy he first went to a school, and, after the habit of boys, ceased to exist except in theory and holidays, a steady undercurrent of interest had always set about him. His mother was so charming, and his father so delicate, and he himself so conveniently contemporary with so many daughters, that although the occasional glimpses vouchsafed of him during his Winchester and Oxford career were as discouraging as they were brief, it was confidently expected that he would emerge from his boyish shyness when he came to take his proper place in the county and settle down at Bruff. Thus Lady Eyrefield, and Mrs. Waller, and their like, the careful mothers of those contemporaneous daughters, and thus also, after their kind, the lesser ladies of Lismoyle.

  But though Christopher was now seven and twenty he seemed as far from “taking his place in the county” as he had ever been. His mother’s friends had no particular fault to find with him; that was a prominent feature in their dissatisfaction. He was quite good-looking enough for an eldest son, and his politeness to their daughters left them nothing to complain of except the discouraging fact that it was exceeded by his politeness to themselves. His readiness to talk when occasion demanded was undisputed, but his real or pretended dulness in those matters of local interest, which no one except an outsider calls gossip, made conversation with him a hollow and heartless affair. One of his most exasperating points was that he could not be referred to any known type. He was “between the sizes,” as shopmen say of gloves. He was not smart and aggressive enough for the soldiering type, nor sporting enough for the country gentleman, but neither had he the docility and attentiveness of the ideal curate; he could not even be lightly disposed of as an eccentricity, which would have been some sort of consolation.

  “If I ever could have imagined that Isabel Dysart’s son would have turned out like this,” said the Dowager Lady Eyrefield in a moment of bitterness, “I should not have given myself the trouble of writing to Castlemore about taking him out as his secretary. I thought all those functions and dinner parties would have done something for him, but though they polished up his manners, and improved that most painful and unfortunate stutter, he’s at heart just as much a stick as ever.”

  Lismoyle was, according to its lights, equally nonplussed. Mrs. Baker had indeed suggested that it was sending him to these grand English universities, instead of to Trinity College, Dublin, that had taken the fun out of him in the first going off, and what finished him was going out to those Barbadoes, with all the blacks bowing down to him, and his liver growing the size of I don’t know what with the heat. Mrs. Corkran, the widow of the late rector of Lismoyle, had, however, rejoined that she had always found Mr. Dysart a most humble-minded young man on the occasions when she had met him at his cousin Mrs. Gascogne’s, and by no means puffed up with his rank or learning. This proposition Mrs. Baker had not attempted to dispute, but none the less she had felt it to be beside the point. She had not found that Christopher’s learning had disposed him to come to her tennis parties, and she did not feel humility to be a virtue that graced a young man of property. Certainly, in spite of his humility, she could not venture to take him to task for his neglect of her entertainments as she could Mr. Hawkins; but then it is still more certain that Christopher would not, as Mr. Hawkins had often done, sit down before her, as before a walled town, and so skilfully entreat her that in five minutes all would have been forgiven and forgotten.

  It was perhaps an additional point of aggravation that, dull and unprofitable though he was considered to be, Christopher had amusements of his own in which the neighbourhood had no part. Since he had returned from the West Indies, his three-ton cutter with the big Una sail had become one of the features of the lake, but though a red parasol was often picturesquely visible above the gunwale, the knowledge that it sheltered his sister deprived it of the almost painful interest that it might otherwise have had, and at the same time gave point to a snub that was unintentionally effective and comprehensive. There were many sunny mornings on which Mr. Dysart’s camera occupied commanding positions in the town, or its outskirts, while its owner photographed groups
of old women and donkeys, regardless of the fact that Miss Kathleen Baker, in her most becoming hat, had taken her younger sister from the schoolroom to play a showy game of lawn-tennis in the garden in front of her father’s villa, or was, with Arcadian industry, cutting buds off the roses that dropped their pink petals over the low wall on to the road. It was quite inexplicable that the photographer should pack up his camera and walk home without taking advantage of this artistic opportunity beyond a civil lift of his cap; and at such times Miss Baker would re-enter the villa with a feeling of contempt for Mr. Dysart that was almost too deep for words.

  She might have been partially consoled had she known that on a June morning not long after the latest of these repulses, her feelings were fully shared by the person whom, for the last two Sundays, she had looked at in the Dysart pew with a respectful dislike that implied the highest compliment in her power. Miss Evelyn Hope-Drummond stood at the bow-window of the Bruff drawing-room and looked out over the gravelled terrace, across the flower-garden and the sunk fence, to the clump of horse chestnuts by the lake-side. Beyond these the cattle were standing knee-deep in the water, and on the flat margin a pair of legs in white flannel trousers was all that the guest, whom his mother delighted to honour, could see of Christopher Dysart. The remainder of im wrestled beneath a black velvet pall with the helplessly wilful legs of his camera, and all his mind, as Miss Hope-Drummond well knew, was concentrated upon cows. Her first visit to Ireland was proving less amusing than she had expected, she thought, and as she watched Christopher she wished fervently that she had not offered to carry any of his horrid things across the park for him. In the flower-garden below the terrace she could see Lady Dysart and Pamela in deep consultation over an infirm rose-tree; a wheelbarrow full of pans of seedlings sufficiently indicated what their occupation would be for the rest of the morning, and she felt it was of a piece with the absurdities of Irish life that the ladies of the house should enjoy doing the gardener’s work for him. The strong scent of heated Gloire de Dijon roses came through the window, and suggested to her how well one of them would suit with her fawn-coloured Redfern gown, and she leaned out to pick a beautiful bud that was swaying in the sun just within reach.